The St. Louis Incident – Page 41 – immigrationcourtside.com

PROFILE IN COURAGE: DHS ASYLUM OFFICERS ASK COURT TO HALT TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALIST, SCOFFLAW, HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES — As Civil Servants Speak Out Against Anti-American Administration, Why Are Some Life Tenured Article III Judges & Immigration Judges Failing In Their Constitutional Duties & As Human Beings?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/u-s-asylum-officers-say-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-is-threatening-migrants-lives-ask-federal-court-to-end-it/2019/06/26/863e9e9e-9852-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html

Maria Sacchetti reports for WashPost:

U.S. asylum officers slammed President Trump’s policy of forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while they await immigration hearings in the United States, urging a federal appeals court Wednesday to block the administration from continuing the program. The officers, who are directed to implement the policy, said it is threatening migrants’ lives and is “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation.”

The labor union representing asylum officers filed a friend-of-the-court brief that sided with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups challenging Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has sent 12,000 asylum-seeking migrants to Mexico since January. The policy aims to deter migrants from coming to the United States and to keep them out of the country while courts weigh their claims.

[Read the U.S. asylum officers’ federal court filing]

The union argued that the policy goes against the nation’s long-standing view that asylum seekers and refugees should have a way to escape persecution in their homelands, with the United States embracing its status as a safe haven since even before it was founded — with the arrival of the Pilgrims in the 17th century. The union said in court papers that the policy is compelling sworn officers to participate in the “widespread violation” of international and federal law — “something that they did not sign up to do when they decided to become asylum and refugee officers for the United States government.”

“Asylum officers are duty bound to protect vulnerable asylum seekers from persecution,” the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1924, which represents 2,500 federal workers, including asylum officers, said in a 37-page court filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California. “They should not be forced to honor departmental directives that are fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”

The legal filing is an unusual public rebuke of a sitting president by his own employees, and it plunges a highly trained officer corps that typically operates under secrecy into a public legal battle over one of Trump’s most prized immigration policies.

Under Trump, the asylum division has become a target of internal ire, often assailed for approving most initial asylum screenings and sending migrants to immigration court for a full hearing. Trump administration officials say most cases are denied. Last week, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, outraged some asylum officers by sending the staff an email they thought criticized them for approving so many initial screenings.

Trump placed Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Virginia attorney general, in the position ostensibly as part of his move to get tough on immigration policy, and the union’s legal filing appears to be directly at odds with that approach.

The policy has been challenged in federal court, with a lower-court judge temporarily halting MPP in April, saying it probably violates federal law. A three-judge appellate panel allowed the program to resume in May while the court considers the policy.

Justice Department lawyers have said in court filings that migrants are filing thousands of sham claims because they virtually guarantee their release into the United States pending a hearing in the backlogged immigration courts. The U.S. government cannot process the migrants’ cases quickly or detain children for long periods, which means some migrants can stay in the country for months or years while waiting for their cases to play out.

[In test of a deterrent, Juarez scrambles before U.S. dumps thousands of migrants]

Three migrants wait near the border shortly after being returned to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on June 13. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Ending the program, the government lawyers have said, “would impose immediate, substantial harm on the government’s ability to manage the crisis on our southern border.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on the filing Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program, did not respond to a request for comment.

The influx of Central American migrants at the southern border has overwhelmed the U.S. immigration system. It also has led to a political fight between congressional Democrats and the White House regarding crowded and unsanitary conditions in border holding facilities amid Trump’s push for heightened enforcement. More than 144,000 migrants were taken into custody in May after crossing the southern border, the largest monthly total in more than a decade, and asylum filings have soared.

Trump administration officials this week have been pleading with Congress to approve emergency funding for the humanitarian crisis at the border. The Senate on Wednesday responded, passing a $4.6 billion emergency spending measure amid debates about treatment of migrants and the risks they face as they try to enter the United States, with a graphic photo of a migrant and his young daughter having drowned in the Rio Grande as the backdrop.

In the federal court filing, the asylum officers say they are enforcing the laws as Congress intended, based on approaches and international treaties shaped after World War II and atrocities connected with the Holocaust. Federal laws hinge on the principle of “non-refoulement” — which means people should not be sent back to countries where they could be harmed or killed. To qualify for asylum, migrants must show that they face harm based on their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

The asylum officers say Mexico is too dangerous for Central American asylum seekers, particularly women, people who are gay, lesbian or transgender, and indigenous minority groups. They cited State Department reports showing that gang violence and activity is widespread and that crimes are rarely solved.

“Mexico is simply not safe for Central American asylum seekers,” the filing said, noting that gangs that terrorized migrants in their home countries might easily follow them into Mexico. “And despite professing a commitment to protecting the rights of people seeking asylum, the Mexican government has proven unable to provide this protection.”

Asylum officers say the U.S. asylum system is “not, as the Administration has claimed, fundamentally broken,” and that they could handle more cases quickly without sending people back to Mexico.

ADVERTISEMENT

MPP is “entirely unnecessary, as our immigration system has the foundation and agility necessary to deal with the flow of migrants through our Southern Border,” the officers wrote.

The officers said they fear that MPP is sending asylum seekers back to a country where they are in danger, a violation of federal and international law. The said immigration agents do not ask migrants if they fear persecution or torture in Mexico, and that they only send migrants to asylum officers for screenings if the migrants independently express fear of return.

[Why migrant families are seeking asylum at the border in record numbers]

The latter are granted an initial asylum screening, often by phone or video. But they must prove that they are “more likely than not” going to face persecution in Mexico, a higher bar than in the immigration courts, where migrants are offered safeguards such as access to lawyers, a reading of their rights, and the right to appeal.

“The MPP, however, provides none of these safeguards,” the officers said.

Officials are attempting to extend the program along the nearly 2,000-mile border and are giving Mexico time to expand its shelter capacity, a top official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said.

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

So why do Asylum Officers have the courage and integrity to stand up to what is essentially fraud, abuse, and murder of asylum seekers by the Trump Administration when Article III Judges won’t? U.S. Immigration Judges have so spoken out against
Administration abuses through the National Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”), although a minority of Immigration Judges have contributed to the problem by engaging in unlawful and unconstitutional bias against asylum seekers.

Obviously, we have the wrong type of individuals holding judicial positions in the U.S., something that the next competent and honest Administration should consider before appointing more complicit “go alongs to get alongs” to any type of bench.

It started with the Supreme’s atrocious and cowardly cop out on the Travel Ban case and has continued. Courage and the willingness to stand up against Government abuses are the primary qualifications for judges.

Other than some U.S. District Court Judges, too few Article IIIs have measured up to the task, and innocent people are being harmed, abused, and killed by Trump and his enablers as a result. The Courts of Appeals who have ignored the glaring Constitutional defects and clearly substandard justice in the Immigration Court system for more than a decade are particularly complicit in this unfolding disaster.

Moreover, as I have pointed out before, the lack of understanding of asylum law and unwillingness to stand up for the legal rights of asylum seekers among some Immigration Judges and too many Article III Judges is simply appalling!

To date, the performance of the Article III Judges on the 9th Circuit on the “Remain in Mexico”/“Die in Mexico” atrocity has been so disastrously deficient and incompetent as to make the wheels come off of the entire Government. This is a “rebellion” that should never have been necessary had the irresponsible, incoherent, and clueless three-“judge” panel that let “Die in Mexico” proceed done their jobs.

Hurrah for the Asylum Corps! Boo to the cowardly and unqualified judges who continue to enable Trump’s destruction of America and of human rights! And “double boo” to the career lawyers at the DOJ defending the Administration’s dishonest and illegal policies with lies and false narratives! Whatever happened to ethical standards for Federal Employees? Why do they apply to Asylum Officers, but not to DOJ “judges” and attorneys?

PWS

06-27-19

FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-severely-ill-migrant-babies-hospitalized-after-lawyers-visited-border-patrol-facility_n_5d0d3bbce4b07ae90d9cfe4f

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.

The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.

She described seeing terror in the children’s eyes.

“It’s just a cold, fearful look that you should never see in a child of that age,” Gialluca said. “You look at them and you think, ‘What have you seen?’”

Another mother at the same facility had a premature baby, who was “listless” and wrapped in a dirty towel, as HuffPost previously reported.

The lawyers feared that if they had not shown up at the facility, the sick kids would have received zero medical attention and potentially died. The Trump administration has come under fire for its treatment ― and its alleged neglect ― of migrants who have been crossing the southern border in record numbers. The result is overcrowded facilities, slow medical care and in some instances, deaths.

Immigration authorities say they’re overwhelmed; activists say they’re not trying hard enough.

“It’s intentional disregard for the well-being of children,” Gialluca said. “The guards continue to dehumanize these people and treat them worse than we would treat animals.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

The Associated Press reported this week that children in border facilities don’t have adequate access to food, water, soap or showers. On Tuesday, a Justice Department attorney argued in court that the government should not have to provide detained children with soap, toothbrushes or beds.

The AP report is based on interviews a group of lawyers conducted with hundreds of children in three Texas-based Border Patrol stations last week as part of the Flores settlement ― an agreement that outlines conditions for detained children. The lawyers say children are also being held in these facilities for longer than the 72-hour limit the settlement specifies, and in some cases up to three weeks.

Lawyers are particularly concerned about the spread of illness inside Border Patrol facilities, which can sometimes turn fatal. Five children have died in Border Patrol custody since December, some of whom were initially diagnosed with a common cold or the flu. The processing center in McAllen, known as Ursula, recently quarantined three dozen migrants who were sick after a 16-year-old died of the flu at the same facility.

Children and their parents told lawyers that in some cases they didn’t have any access to medical treatment in Border Patrol facilities despite being visibly ill. Gialluca spoke with one 16-year-old mother whose toddler had the flu, but was told by a guard the child “wasn’t sick enough to see a doctor.” She said others also reported being denied medical attention despite having critically sick babies.

Medical experts say that because children have less developed immune and respiratory systems, their symptoms can escalate quickly if they aren’t properly treated.

Dr. Julie Linton, the co-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics, previously told HuffPost that children can’t recover from illnesses in Border Patrol facilities. These centers are described as “hieleras” ― Spanish for iceboxes ― because of their freezing temperatures, and migrants describe sleeping on floors under bright lights that shine 24/7, with nothing but Mylar blankets to keep warm.

Gialluca met one 16-year-old mother whose 8-month-old baby was sick with the flu and forced to sleep outside for four days at the McAllen Border Patrol station. The mother said the guards took the clothing off the baby’s back, leaving her in a diaper, and forced them to sleep on concrete without a blanket.

A sick 2-year-old girl was shivering in a T-shirt and had shallow breathing, according to Mike Fassio, a Seattle-based immigration attorney who visited Ursula.

“I was very, very concerned,” he said, adding lawyers spoke with immigrants in a room outside of the facility. “When she left us, I knew she was going back to a place that was cold, crowded and unsanitary.” Fassio noted that guards referred to the children as “bodies.”

Some children were so exhausted they fell asleep during the interviews, said Clara Long, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who spoke with kids at a facility in Clint, Texas. Long met a 3-year-old boy who was dirty with matted hair and was being taken care of by his 11-year-old brother. She said that more than 10 sick children were being quarantined in cells.

While the group of roughly eight lawyers and interpreters at Ursula were supposed to be interviewing children about conditions in the facilities, they also ended up asking guards and government officials to bring kids to the hospital because they were so worried about their state. Gialluca added that she and her colleagues interviewed only a small portion of migrants in the facility, which is the largest processing center in the U.S. and can hold up to 1,000 people. She believes the number of migrants in need of hospitalization is likely much higher.

Government officials have blamed horrific conditions at detention facilities on the fact that Congress has not yet passed an emergency funding package that would include almost $3 billion to help care for unaccompanied migrant children. But Gialluca says border officials shouldn’t need more resources to treat immigrants like human beings.

“Money isn’t keeping guards from allowing people to access toilets,” she said. “Money isn’t causing guards to take clothing and medicine away from children.”

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

Here’s Another report from Nicole Goodkind at Newsweek on the “malicious incompetence” and intentional misallocation of resources by Trump and his DHS sycophants that is willfully endangering kids’ lives as part of a cheap White Nationalist political stunt:

8-YEAR-OLD MIGRANTS BEING FORCED TO CARE FOR TODDLERS IN DETENTION CAMPS

A team of lawyers conducted 60 interviews with migrant children being held in an El Paso, Texas, detention camp and found conditions to be dismal.

Fifteen of those in the holding center had the flu and 10 more are quarantined with illness, according to the lawyers, who first gave the data to the Associated Press. Three infants are being detained alongside their teenage mothers, and many children are under the age of 12.

“A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one teenaged girl told the lawyers in an interview. The boy was not wearing a diaper and his shirt was covered in mucus, she said.

Law professor Warren Binford, who aided in the interviews, said she witnessed an 8-year-old girl caring for a 4-year-old child who was very dirty, the girl was unable to get the boy to take a shower. She also described the children she interviewed as sleep-deprived, often falling asleep while speaking with her.

“In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” said Holly Cooper, co-director of the University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, to the AP.

The lawyers were inspecting the facility as part of the Flores agreement, which resulted from a landmark 1985 case that established that facilities where minor migrants are held must be kept “safe and sanitary.”

A representative of the Trump administration, the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian, argued Tuesday that safe and sanitary conditions don’t necessarily have to include toothbrushes, soap or towels for children.

Nicole Goodkind is a political reporter at Newsweek. You can reach her on Twitter @NicoleGoodkind or by email, N.Goodkind@newsweek.com.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS MAJOR ICE RAIDS FOR SUNDAY

U.S. immigration authorities plan to raid Miami, Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles and other cities. They intend to arrest up to 2,000 families, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans told The Washington Post. The orders reportedly come directly from President Donald Trump.

On Monday, the president tweeted: “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

Officials told The Washington Post that the Department of Homeland Security agency plans to hold families in hotel rooms until they are deported. Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan is allegedly targeting families that have completely dropped out of the court process, but has warned that the operation could lead to further cases of families being separated.

Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore confirmed the raids on Friday, saying that about 140 families in southern California will be targeted in pre-dawn raids early next week. The chief also made clear that the raids are done on a federal level and that the police department will not be involved.

On Thursday, Carla Provost, chief of the United States Border Patrol argued that the Department of Homeland Security was not receiving enough money to properly care for migrants on the southern border, and that was leading to terrible conditions in detention centers. On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to $4.6 billion in emergency funds for what the Trump administration has referred to as a “border crisis.”

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro questioned how the agency could afford mass raids while asking for more money Friday. “The Trump Administration says it needs more money (supplemental bill) for the situation at the border yet they may be starting massive immigration raids next week. So how do you have the money for that if you’re running out of money ICE?” he tweeted.

“These potential raids are a disgusting political ploy to stoke fear and rile up Trump’s base for 2020,” wrote Sandra Cordero, Director of Families Belong Together, an immigration advocacy group, in a statement. “Past raids have left children alone and afraid in empty homes, praying they won’t be left to care for younger siblings by themselves, with no idea if they’ll see their parents again. This is yet another flagrant disregard for the welfare of children on behalf of a cruel administration bent on fomenting fear and creating chaos.”

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

Come on, Carla, cut the BS and butt covering. The “mix” of arrivals at the Southern Border began to shift to refugee families from the Northern Triangle back in the summer of 2014. So, CBP and DHS have had five years to prepare for this “change” which is actually “old news.”

More “old news” is the increased flow of asylum seekers with kids which began back before Thanksgiving. Plenty of time for CBP and DHS to bring back retired asylum officers and adjudicators and reassign other adjudicative personnel to the border to insure prompt, orderly, safe, and efficient processing of asylum applicants at ports of entry, thus eliminating the incentive (or necessity) for folks to turn themselves in after crossing the border between ports.

Also, plenty of time to work with NGOs, pro bono groups, states, and communities to insure representation and proper placement of family groups in various locations throughout the country without panic or “dumping.”

Another bogus claim spread by Trump, Provost, and the rest of the sycophants: that the prevalence of kids among new asylum arrivals is somehow totally a response to the Flores settlement (which actually has been in effect for decades).

Undoubtedly, with the Trump Administration’s active assistance, unscrupulous smugglers and coyotes are encouraging some folks to bring children as the only way to have a shot at fair processing under the tilted U.S. asylum system promoted by Trump. Indeed, as I have observed before, the Trump Administrations has consistently been a “best friend” to gangs, smugglers, traffickers, cartels, and druggies seeking to “jack up” profits by further exploiting the human misery caused by the Trump Administration’s “maliciously incompetent “ approach to immigration, effective law enforcement, and humanity generally. https://apple.news/AFQw_eqcHSZCYxUznmP0wpQ

Undoubtedly, some of these unscrupulous individuals are telling families to travel with kids. But, the truth is that according to the UNHCR, over one-half of today’s refugees are children. https://www.unhcr.org/children-49c3646c1e8.html.

So, the prevalence of children among new arrivals should properly been seen as part of a sad worldwide trend that Trump and his cronies disgustingly have done everything possible to encourage, exploit, and aggravate. It most certainly is not primarily caused by the Flores settlement or by giving soap, toothbrushes, blankets, or medical care to children being abused in the “DHS Gulag” administered in part by disingenuous folks like Provost.

Any honest observer of what’s going on knows that the majority of the asylum applications that passed credible fear probably could have been granted (or given protection under the Convention Against Torture — “CAT”) by the Asylum Office without even going to Immigration Court under the proper generous interpretation of our asylum laws, an honest interpretation of CAT that reflects the true conditions in the Northern Triangle, and a very “doable” change in procedures.

Only dishonest fools in the Trump Administration (and a few from the Obama Administration) would maintain that gender isn’t a social group subject to widespread persecution in the Northern Triangle, deny that gangs have assumed the role of quasi-governmental entities thus making most of the harm they inflict on resisters “political persecution,” and make the beyond ludicrous claim that the corrupt failed states of the Northern Triangle have either the ability or much real interest in protecting those subject to persecution.

And, Carla, why aren’t you out there today registering a public protest of the waste of time and funds in ICE going after families with ridiculously inappropriate “raids” when every resource could and should be focused instead on providing humanitarian assistance to asylum seekers arriving at the Southern Border?

This racist-inspired “Sunday Morning Reign of Terror” directed at U.S. ethnic communities is specifically designed to return helpless families to the very dangerous countries from which they originally fled! Thus, Trump and his phony DHS are intentionally feeding “fresh meat” to gangs and cartels and insuring that the cycle of northward migration, no matter how dangerous, will continue until everyone who needs to leave its either gone or dead (the latter apparently the “solution” favored by Provost, Trump, Morgan, McAleenan, Miller, and others).

Provost, McAleenan, Morgan, and their co-conspirators are all participants in a cynical scheme to intentionally “crash” the asylum system, rather than competently administering it. They are intentionally endangering the lives of children and other vulnerable asylum seekers, many entitled to legal protections, to promote, along with GOP restrictionists, totally bogus, dishonest, and completely unnecessary and unwarranted restrictions of the precious, life-saving right of refugees to seek asylum in the U.S.

It’s an unbelievably dishonest and cowardly scheme, and a complete breach of both oaths of office and public trust. It might be that those who long ago abandoned American values will lap up this insult to human values and human dignity.

But, there are plenty of us out here who know and understand exactly what you are doing. We will not only resist it, but will be historical witnesses to your cruel, inhuman, and unlawful schemes and gimmicks to “abuse and kill the innocent.” And, we’ll be keeping count.

PWS

06-22-19

DON’S KILLER DEAL: Salvadoran Teenage Girl First Casualty Of Trump’s “Make ‘Em Die In Mexico” Deal — As Investigation Continues, One Thing Is Clear: This Is Just The First Of Many Deaths & Human Tragedies That Will Result From Trump’s “Malicious Incompetence” & Unwillingness To Comply With Asylum Laws!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/world/americas/mexico-migrant-death.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

By Kirk Semple and Paulina Villegas

June 21, 2019

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican authorities are investigating the death of a teenage migrant from El Salvador who was shot and killed after the truck she was in ran a government checkpoint.

Witnesses have told investigators in the state of Veracruz, where the shooting happened last Friday, that a truck carrying the 19-year-old woman and other migrants bound for the United States border passed through a government checkpoint and that people wearing police uniforms gave chase in a police car and shot at the truck, said Jorge Winckler Ortiz, the attorney general of Veracruz.

Two other migrants in the truck were wounded in the shooting, officials said.

The incident occurred amid a Mexican government deployment of security forces to assert greater control of migration toward the United States, part of a dealthat President Andrés Manuel López Obrador struck with President Trump earlier this month to fend off a threat of tariffs.

The possibility that the Mexican police may have killed the teenager has reaffirmed the fears of migrants’ advocates and human rights experts, who worry that the security forces, being rushed into migration control, are ill-prepared for the task.

“To give a green light to any police force to detain or chase migrants opens up many more dangers and increases the risks migrants face, like grave human rights violations, horrible accidents or crimes like this,” said Ruben Figueroa, an activist with the migrant rights’ group Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, in an interview Friday.

Mexico’s security secretary, Alfonso Durazo, has also confirmed that his ministry was investigating the shooting.

In a news conference this week, Mr. Winckler said that according to testimony from witnesses, 17 migrants from El Salvador were traveling in a four-door pickup truck through the state of Veracruz when they encountered the checkpoint.

The driver slowed down as he passed through the checkpoint, but hearing sirens, he sped away. A high-speed chase ensued, lasting 20 minutes, Mr. Winckler said, according to the preliminary investigation based on interviews with witnesses.

After shots were fired from the police vehicle, the truck pulled to a stop and three men “dressed as police” stepped out of the police vehicle, Mr. Winckler recounted.

His language allowed for the possibility that the assailants were not legitimate police officers. In Mexico, criminals have been known to disguise themselves in the uniforms of the nation’s security forces to conduct crimes, though corruption also permeates Mexico’s police forces, and some police personnel have developed close ties with organized crime.

As the three men beat up the driver of the truck, the other migrants ran away, Mr. Winckler said. The men in police uniforms hauled the driver away, leaving behind the dead migrant and her two wounded companions, one of whom had been shot in a hand and the other in his leg, Mr. Winckler said, citing witness testimony.

One of the wounded migrants told The Washington Post that the occupants of the patrol car had first shot at the migrants’ vehicle from behind, before pulling ahead and shooting through the windshield. The wounded migrant, who was recovering in a hospital in Veracruz, said he saw all three men wielding weapons.

The deployment of security forces by the Mexican government, after the deal announced on June 7 with the Trump administration, was supposed to be concentrated in Mexico’s southern states. Officials initially promised to send 6,000 members of the newly formed National Guard to the southern border region to help migration officials intercept undocumented migrants entering from Guatemala.

But the mobilization has been halting at best. In recent days, officials said that only a portion of those 6,000 would be members of the National Guard, with the rest drawn from other security forces, and that only about 40 percent of them would be sent to the southern region.

Still, the deal has already resulted in more government checkpoints along major roadways leading from the border with Guatemala into the interior of the country, and more aggressive patrols.

Human rights experts, migrants’ advocates and security analysts have warned about possible hazards, such as human rights violations, that could be caused by the quick deployment of the security forces, which may not have received proper training in migration enforcement.

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

Trump likely figures that the dead bodies he is responsible for will stay in Mexico (or Guatemala) and thus below the radar screen. So, it’s important for reporters to keep focusing on the body count so that he can be held accountable for the deaths and tragedies he is causing with his incompetent, racist, anti-refugee policies.

READ ERIC POSNER: The Right’s “New Human Rights” Incorporates Hate, Intolerance, Fear Of Others!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-administrations-plan-to-redefine-human-rights-along-conservative-lines/2019/06/14/5e456caa-8def-11e9-b162-8f6f41ec3c04_story.html

Posner writes in the WashPost:

The State Department recently published a brief, enigmatic notice announcing the formation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights. With a modest budget of $385,074 and merely advisory powers, the commission received little attention beyond head-scratching over its strange name. Yet the significance of the endeavor should not be overlooked. It puts the government’s imprimatur on an assault upon one of the cornerstones of modern liberalism: international human rights.

According to the commission’s draft charter, its job will be to explore “reforms of human rights discourse where it has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” — rights of the sort that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. upheld as ideals, the charter says.

This language may sound unusual to a modern ear, but it is easily translated. Start with that ungainly name of the commission. If “unalienable” sounds anachronistic, that’s because it is. Today, we normally use the word “inalienable.” But in the 18th century, the more common term was “unalienable.” The Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights,” and there is little doubt the commission’s name is meant to recall that, in the words of the Declaration, the people are endowed with those rights “by their Creator.”

The State Department recently published a brief, enigmatic notice announcing the formation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights. With a modest budget of $385,074 and merely advisory powers, the commission received little attention beyond head-scratching over its strange name. Yet the significance of the endeavor should not be overlooked. It puts the government’s imprimatur on an assault upon one of the cornerstones of modern liberalism: international human rights.

According to the commission’s draft charter, its job will be to explore “reforms of human rights discourse where it has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” — rights of the sort that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. upheld as ideals, the charter says.

This language may sound unusual to a modern ear, but it is easily translated. Start with that ungainly name of the commission. If “unalienable” sounds anachronistic, that’s because it is. Today, we normally use the word “inalienable.” But in the 18th century, the more common term was “unalienable.” The Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights,” and there is little doubt the commission’s name is meant to recall that, in the words of the Declaration, the people are endowed with those rights “by their Creator.”

This supposition is reinforced by the references to “natural law” and “natural rights,” terms that have also fallen out of fashion. In the 18th century, educated people used the phrases to refer to universal moral laws that transcended national boundaries and that generally (though not always) were thought to reflect God’s will. With the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, these abstractions lost much of their grip on people’s loyalties.

Finally, there is “human rights discourse.” Normally, we refer to “human rights law,” embodied in numerous treaties that were negotiated and (mostly) ratified after World War II. With names like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, these treaties purport to bar governments from mistreating their citizens. Yet “discourse” means “talk.” The implication here is that the human rights that people talk about are not, despite the treaties, actually law. They’re something else — advocacy. And this advocacy is wrong: It has “departed from . . . natural law and natural rights.”

The protections offered by modern “human rights law” differ from those of the “natural rights” regime of the 18th century. Those were (more or less) embodied in the British constitutional tradition, the common law, and the U.S. Bill of Rights: rights to political participation — freedom of speech, for example — and protection of person and property. Modern human rights are both broader and narrower, encompassing “economic rights” (for example, rights to work, to health care and to education), rights to not be discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity, and, according to some interpreters, expansive rights to reproductive freedom. Modern human rights law de-emphasizes property rights and, to some extent, speech rights. In a word, it’s lefty.

Modern human rights have also morphed into something like a system of universal moral values that transcends specific treaties. The United States, virtually alone among nations, has refused to ratify most of these treaties and accordingly is technically not bound by them. But much “human rights discourse” rejects the notion that countries can opt out of the rights system. Quite a few scholars and an occasional U.S. Supreme Court justice believe, to the intense irritation of conservatives, that left-leaning human rights treaties that the United States has never ratified nonetheless override American law. The influence of “foreign law” — including “human rights discourse” — has been apparent in Supreme Court opinions limiting the death penalty and striking down the criminalization of same-sex “sodomy.” Most of the offending decisions were written by the court’s most enthusiastic proponent of foreign law, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy. As the late justice Antonin Scalia put it : “The Framers would, I am confident, be appalled by the proposition that, for example, the American peoples’ democratic adoption of the death penalty . . . could be judicially nullified because of the disapproving views of foreigners.”

But today, other conservatives see an opportunity, and the Commission on Unalienable Rights is their declaration of intent. Its plainly stated goal is not just to wipe away the baleful foreign influence of human rights “discourse” but to revive (conservative) 18th-century natural law.

What does natural law require? Liberals, already dimly perceiving that they are about to be hoisted with their own petard, worry that natural law, in the hands of conservatives — specifically, Catholic conservative intellectuals, who kept alive the academic tradition of natural law long after mainstream secular intellectuals forgot what it was — means goodbye to reproductive rights and protections for sexual minorities. (ABC News reported that the Princeton professor Robert George, a prominent Catholic intellectual, natural-law theorist, and opponent of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, played a role in the creation of the commission; George did not respond to requests for comment from ABC or from The Washington Post.) The Commission on Unalienable Rights will, in other words, provide the ideological justification for the antiabortion foreign policy that the Trump administration has undertaken.

Natural law can also be used by conservatives to argue for expanded religious freedoms that override statutes with secular goals, and to push back against progressive government programs like universal health care. The “right to health,” a centerpiece of “human rights law,” is firmly rejected by natural-law theorists like George.

But the mission of the commission may be even bolder. If we take the idea of natural law seriously, it not only overrides statutes in foreign countries that protect abortion rights and respect same-sex marriage. It also overrides American laws that protect abortion rights and respect same-sex marriage. One can imagine a day when a Supreme Court justice, taking a page from Kennedy, invokes natural law — supposedly endorsed by the founders, after all, and embodied in the sacred Declaration — to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and to prepare the path for an even holier grail, the abolition of state laws that grant abortion rights.

Liberals hoped that human rights, sanctified by the sacrifices of the victims of totalitarianism, would provide common ground in a world of competing ideologies. But what human rights actually helped produce was a liberal international order that has offended a great many people who do not share liberal values. The backlash began years ago in authoritarian countries, in developing countries that saw human rights as an affront to their traditions and as a mask for imperialist goals, and in highly religious countries. These countries advanced interpretations of human rights law that conform with their values or interests but made little headway against dominant elite opinion. What is new is that the government of the world’s most powerful nation, long acknowledged (if grudgingly) as the leader of the international human rights regime, has officially signed on to that backlash. Most of the offending decisions were written by the court’s most enthusiastic proponent of foreign law, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy. As the late justice Antonin Scalia put it : “The Framers would, I am confident, be appalled by the proposition that, for example, the American peoples’ democratic adoption of the death penalty . . . could be judicially nullified because of the disapproving views of foreigners.”

But today, other conservatives see an opportunity, and the Commission on Unalienable Rights is their declaration of intent. Its plainly stated goal is not just to wipe away the baleful foreign influence of human rights “discourse” but to revive (conservative) 18th-century natural law.

But the mission of the commission may be even bolder. If we take the idea of natural law seriously, it not only overrides statutes in foreign countries that protect abortion rights and respect same-sex marriage. It also overrides American laws that protect abortion rights and respect same-sex marriage. One can imagine a day when a Supreme Court justice, taking a page from Kennedy, invokes natural law — supposedly endorsed by the founders, after all, and embodied in the sacred Declaration — to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and to prepare the path for an even holier grail, the abolition of state laws that grant abortion rights.

Liberals hoped that human rights, sanctified by the sacrifices of the victims of totalitarianism, would provide common ground in a world of competing ideologies. But what human rights actually helped produce was a liberal international order that has offended a great many people who do not share liberal values. The backlash began years ago in authoritarian countries, in developing countries that saw human rights as an affront to their traditions and as a mask for imperialist goals, and in highly religious countries. These countries advanced interpretations of human rights law that conform with their values or interests but made little headway against dominant elite opinion. What is new is that the government of the world’s most powerful nation, long acknowledged (if grudgingly) as the leader of the international human rights regime, has officially signed on to that backlash.

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

Professor Posner confirms what folks like me have been saying for some time now: under Trump and his version of the GOP, America aspires to go from being a defender of human rights to being a leading abuser of those rights.

Forget the attempted “slight of hand” redefinition of human rights by a White Nationalist minority who has seized control of our Government. Kids in cages, abusing women, enabling gangs and cartels, suspending due process, blocking access to voting, dehumanizing the Hispanic and LGBTQ communities, greed, selfishness, grift, undermining the hard earned rights of African Americans, and promoting and protecting religious bigotry, among other disreputable developments, neither conforms to any version of human rights nor represents the views of the majority of Americans.

Make no mistake about it. No matter how flawed , the human rights instruments crafted as a result of “liberal Western democracy” in the post-World War II era have saved millions of human lives and prevented unfathomable additional human carnage. Undoubtedly, that makes Trump and some of his supporters supremely unhappy.

Those of us who continue to maintain the “quaint” view that all persons are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (no matter how imperfectly conceived and disingenuously implemented by our Founding Fathers) had better wake up and join the battle! For, Trump and his far right minority zealots have every intention of reversing the results of World War II and making the hate, bias, disregard for truth, toxic nationalism, and contempt for the majority of the world’s humans exhibited by the “the then losers” the new international norm.

Don’t let them turn back the clock to 1939 in 2019!

PWS

06-18-19

CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!

https://apple.news/Au_bQMKN3QxmsBKokkqyP3w

Sarah Ruiz’s-Grossman reports for HuffPost:

U.S. NEWS

06/12/2019 05:25 PM EDT

Cages With ‘Kids’ Pop Up Around NYC To Protest Immigrant Detention

The art installations were meant to bring awareness to the horrific conditions children and other migrants face at the southern U.S. border.

Some people in New York City were confronted with an alarming image as they walked down the street on Wednesday morning: a chain-link cage on the sidewalk containing a child-size mannequin wrapped in a foil blanket, with audio playing of migrant children crying.

More than 20 cages were placed around Manhattan and Brooklyn ― from Union Square to the Barclays Center sports arena ― as part of a campaign called #NoKidsInCages by immigration nonprofit RAICES and ad agency Badger & Winters.

It was meant to draw Americans’ attention to the children and other migrants being held in alarming conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Speakers in the cages played the viral recording released by ProPublica last summer of kids wailing for their “mamá” and “papá” after having been separated from them at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

“We want to bring this back to the consciousness of the American people,” RAICES CEO Jonathan Ryan told HuffPost. “One of the many unfortunate consequences of the repeated traumatic stories coming from the border is that, as horrified and angry as people have been, we also become desensitized. It’s important for people … to be confronted with the reality that this is about children, human beings, whose lives are forever affected.”

“This is being done in our name by people who we elected,” he added. “And if we don’t do something to stop this, this will become who we are.”

About two dozen cages were dropped around the city from about 4 a.m. to 5 a.m., Ryan said. By midafternoon most of them had been taken down by police or city employees, with three remaining around 2 p.m., per Ryan. The New York Police Department confirmed to HuffPost that more than half a dozen cages had been removed around Manhattan, but did not respond to questions as to why.

The online campaign associated with the installations recalls the family separations under President Donald Trump’s hard-line zero-tolerance policy, which led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents last year. The policy sparked protests nationwide and was reversed by executive order in late June. But a January report from the Department of Health and Human Services found the administration may have separated thousands more kids from their families than was previously known, and it did not know how many or whether they were reunited.

RAICES also wants people to become aware of other issues migrants face, Ryan said.

He noted undocumented immigrant families are still separated “routinely” at the border, including when migrant kids are split from other guardians like uncles and aunts or older siblings. Separations occur inside the country too, he said, when a child’s undocumented mom or dad is arrested by immigration agents, for instance in a workplace raid.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended over 109,000 people at the border in April ― more than double the number of migrants detained during that month last year. A majority of the migrants apprehended were either families traveling together or unaccompanied kids.

A Department of Homeland Security watchdog, reporting on Border Patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, found last month that detained migrants were kept in dirty and extremely crowded conditions, forcing some people to stand on toilets to get some breathing room.

Last week, Trump said he reached an agreement with Mexico that includes “rapidly” returning to Mexico anyone who crosses the border seeking asylum in the U.S. Advocates are concerned about the dangerous conditions in cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, where more migrants will now be forced to wait as their claims are processed.

“When the American people hear stories of this problem being fixed by the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, it hasn’t been fixed, it’s just further from their view,” Ryan said. “The suffering will only increase.”

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

Ah, life in the ivory tower of the Article III Federal Judiciary, where you seldom are confronted with the human faces or ugly reality of your abuses and failures to protect the human rights of others.

The “Remain in Mexico” Program is an ongoing affront to our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency for which the judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who are enabling this ongoing humanitarian outrage and giving it “legal cover” should be held fully morally and historically accountable!

PWS

06-13-19

ANALYSIS: Trump Lays Another Egg On Immigration — Everybody Loses, But It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse

By Paul Wickham Schmidt for immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandria, VA, June 9, 2019. After a week of petulance, threats, and self-created drama, Trump produced a resounding trade and immigration dud. Faced with advisors telling him that he was endangering the economy, the only thing propping up his sagging popularity, a potential rebellion among GOP legislators, and an unexpectedly tough and resolute Mexico, Trump backed off of his insane and blatantly illegal plan to ignore U.S. asylum obligations and thereby rocket the U.S. to the upper echelons of international scofflaws and human rights violators.

The latter scheme, known as “safe third country,” would have mis-designated Mexico and, incredibly, Guatemala, two clearly “unsafe” countries to do the U.S.’s job by processing tens of thousands of asylum applications from those fleeing the Northern Triangle. Neither of the two countries has a viable, fair, and effective asylum adjudication system and both have major safety and human rights issues.

Instead, Trump accepted a vague compact by which Mexico and the U.S. basically agreed to do what they had already been doing without taking any decisive or effective action to address the actual humanitarian crisis in the Northern Triangle that Trump and his flunkies have consistently mischaracterized as a “law enforcement emergency.” Indeed, the New York Times reported that most of Mexico’s “unprecedented steps” had already been worked out in secret with deposed DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen months ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/us/politics/trump-mexico-deal-tariffs.html. Those interested can read the summary of the agreement prepared by Trump’s own State Department here. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-us-mexico-tariffs-declaration-20190607-story.html.

To be sure, desperate and vulnerable asylum seekers, particularly women and children, will continue to abused, raped, beaten, extorted, obscenely tortured, and killed with impunity and little if any recourse as a result of this week’s actions. But, at least for now, the U.S. and Mexico are maintaining much of the basic framework of domestic and international protection laws.

Contrary to the lies and false narratives spread by Trump and his DHS cronies, U.S. law is not filled with “loopholes.” Rather, it is a fairly straightforward implementation of the international protection regime and treaties that have been in effect since World War II to prevent another holocaust from occurring on our watch.

If anything, since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has watered down its asylum commitment somewhat by adding a legally tenuous “credible fear” process to “pre-screen” arriving asylum applicants in mass migration situations. However, to date, the DHS under Trump has been too incompetent, misdirected, and frankly downright stupid to utilize this streamlined screening process fairly and efficiently.

By treating a somewhat predictable humanitarian refugee flow as a bogus “law enforcement problem” and mindlessly shoving cases into a “captive” court system that they already had abused, mismanaged, and destroyed, the Administration lost effective control. In panic, they have tried to blame the refugees, Democrats, Mexico, Obama, judges, the media, and even the truly hapless failed states of the Northern Triangle for their largely self-created human and operational disaster.

The first of the “unprecedented steps,” involves Mexico sending approximately 6,000 National Guard troops to the Guatemalan border to control illegal crossings. Never mind that the Mexican National Guard is a recent creation that exists largely on paper. Also, forget that Mexico has a questionable record of controlling corruption and systematic human rights abuses among its existing police and military forces.

The U.S., a much larger, better organized, and more prosperous country than Mexico, has resorted to militarizing the border, mass incarceration, family concentration camps, kids in cages, malicious criminal prosecutions, family separations, walls, fences, overt political interference in the asylum adjudication system, and violating international protection norms. These “gonzo” enforcement efforts not only failed to stem the tide, but have actually aided smugglers and traffickers and increased the flow of migrants.

Will newly minted, untrained Mexican troops succeed where the might of the U.S. has failed miserably? Don’t count on it.

Also, the last time I checked, it appeared that most of the Mexican coast and some parts of the U.S. are reasonably accessible by boat from the Northern Triangle. So, assuming that the Mexicans could “shut down” their land border with Guatemala, why wouldn’t smugglers “take to the sea?” How’s that Mexican Navy?

The second “unprecedented step,” is a continuation and expansion of the existing “Remain in Mexico Program.” This toxic gimmick punishes those who have been legally determined to have a “credible fear” of persecution by making them remain in some of the most dangerous locations in the world where they are intentionally and illegally impeded in many ways from pursuing their U.S. asylum claims from Mexico. To date, this program has only been implemented in a few locations, like San Diego where it has been an unmitigated failure according to a report from Kate Morrissey of the San Diego Union-Tribune. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/06/06/cruel-yet-really-stupid-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-denies-due-process-while-creating-court-chaos-enfeebled-judges-fume-as-aimless-docket-reshufflin/.

The results of this ill-advised effort by Trump to circumvent U.S. asylum laws reads like a “legal toxicology report:” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” mass confusion, lack of information, insufficient and deficient hearing notices, massive violations of the statutory right to be represented by counsel, no opportunity to fairly prepare, document, and present asylum claims, interference with the attorney-client relationship by DHS, and few actual case completions to name just a few of the many abuses. And, how will an already dysfunctional EOIR deal with yet another round of “new priorities” and more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling?”

A Federal District Judge actually enjoined this circus before it could get rolling. But, a “tone-deaf panel” of the Ninth Circuit allowed Trump’s assault on the rule of law to go forward, at least for now.

Nevertheless, the case remains pending with the Ninth Circuit. As EOIR’s rushed and sloppy work product starts to accumulate on their docket and the bodies and horror stories start to pile up in Mexico, more responsible Circuit Judges might actually force the Administration to comply with the law and the Constitution, not to mention simple human decency.

Mexico has pledged to “accept and protect” those sentenced to remain there. But, the Mexican border locations to which individuals are forced to return are dangerous for a reason. Presumably, if Mexican can’t maintain safety and order for its own citizens, it won’t do any better for vulnerable asylum seekers.

Finally, in third “unprecedented step,” Mexico and the U.S. agreed to promote the “Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the government of Mexico in concert with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” to create “prosperity, good governance and security in Central America.” This part of the agreement makes the most sense. But “promoting” in this case appears limited to using development funds that were “already in the pipeline” in both countries. In other words, nothing really new here.

This was a golden opportunity for the U.S. to show real leadership by dramatically increasing its investment in bringing stability and prosperity to Mexico and Central America. Additionally, we could have created incentives (rather than threats) and benchmarks for Mexico to improve its asylum adjudication system and human rights performance. Partnering with non-governmental-organizations and legal assistance groups on both sides of the border also would bring much needed expertise in resolving asylum issues to the table.

But, that would have taken a President with vision, empathy, compassion, courage, competency, intelligence, and creative problem solving ability. Trump is the exact antithesis of all of these qualities.

Consequently, sooner or later we can expect Trump’s “latest egg” to fail, like all of his other gimmicks and maliciously incompetent schemes on immigration. Our “child president” will undoubtedly then embark on a new barrage of lies, false narratives, idiotic tweets, idle threats, blame shifting, insults, racist dog whistles, and general nonsense aimed at diverting attention from his own failures as a leader and more critically, as a human being.

Innocent people will be harmed and die, America and Mexico will be embarrassed and diminished, and the world will be a worse place. But, until America figures out how to use its democratic institutions to remove the kakistocracy, the disaster will continue. That it could have been worse, is only small consolation.

Why not strive to be the “best that we can be,” rather than just “not as bad as we might have been?”

COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/sunday/anti-immigrant-hatred-1920s.html

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.

Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

Image

Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.

What was different about the new, putatively scientific campaign was that even whiteness was no ticket to entry.

Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”

The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.”

The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new controls on open immigration.

At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

First published in 1916 and reissued in a series of revisions over the next eight years — all of them brought into print by Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — “The Passing of the Great Race” savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern and southern Europe while exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe. With the presumed authority of scholarship, he summarized the essential argument of racial eugenics.

“Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was “cold-blooded” science.

Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”

At the same time, Perkins and his colleagues at Charles Scribner’s Sons published a raft of books promoting racialized eugenics. Scribner publicists wrote in one promotion piece: “The inrush of lower races is threatening the very blood of our country.” Perkins’s authors were echoed in the country’s leading magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. “Race character is as fixed a fact as race color,” the Post declared. “Thirty years ago,” the magazine insisted in another article, “science had not perhaps sufficiently advanced to make us fully aware” of the danger of open immigration. Now it had.

Read more

Opinion articles about immigration.

Opinion | Janet Murguía

The American Family Makes This Country Great, and It’s in Danger

May 2, 2019

Opinion | Alan Cross

Alabama Is More Pro-Immigrant Than You Think

April 30, 2019

When the 1924 Immigration Act reached the floor of Congress, passage was assured. Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, declared that “the fundamental reason” for immigration restriction was “biological.” During the floor debate, one congressman said the law was provoked by “the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” Given the arguments presented by so many of the nation’s leading scientific figures, who could disagree?

The resulting law established quotas by nation; they cut like a scythe. In the last year before their introduction, more than 220,000 Italians entered the United States. The quota slashed that number to less than 4,000. Reductions nearly as harsh were imposed on other eastern and southern European groups, while tens of thousands of slots reserved for Britons, Scandinavians and other “Nordics” went unfilled.

The 1924 quotas remained in force for more than 40 years — while the economic devastation of a worldwide depression hit southern Europe especially hard; while a 1939 measure that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States died in Congress, and the savagery of the Holocaust began; while the Nazis and their allies starved 350,000 Greeks and slaughtered 200,000 Serbs; and while displaced-persons camps stretched across the ruins of postwar Europe.

In 1920, Charles Davenport had asked Madison Grant, “Can we build a wall high enough around this country” to keep out the unwanted? They could, and they did.

Daniel Okrent is the author of “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.”

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

The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.

Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.

At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.

Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?

How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

TRUMP TAKES “LIEFEST” TO EL PASO BORDER — Many Protest Against His White Nationalist Baloney!

TRUMP TAKES “LIEFEST” TO EL PASO BORDER — Many Protest Against His White Nationalist Baloney!

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-beto-border-rallies-20190211-story.html

Eli Stokols & Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

President Trump falsely told a raucous rally in El Paso on Monday night that he is already building a wall on the adjacent border with Mexico, as a potential Democratic challenger assailed him at a large protest nearby and, in Washington, congressional negotiators announced a tentative funding deal without the billions he demanded for a wall.

Beneath banners reading “Finish the Wall,” Trump hailed what he called a “big, beautiful wall right on the Rio Grande,” though no such construction is known to be underway. When supporters launched into a chant of “Build the wall!” — standard at his rallies for years — Trump corrected them: “You mean finish the wall.”

The president alluded to lawmakers’ announcement of a deal, which came moments before he took the stage, but did not give it his blessing. Nor did he disparage it though one of his foremost confidants, Fox News host Sean Hannity, came on the air midway through the president’s rally and condemned the reported agreement as “this garbage compromise.”

Without the president and Congress agreeing to a border security funding bill by midnight Friday, the government could be partially shuttered again, just three weeks after a shutdown that at 35 days was the longest ever. The “agreement in principle” called for $1.375 billion for 55 miles of new barrier on the 2,000-mile border — less than a quarter of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded.

He told the crowd that he hadn’t bothered to find out the particulars of the agreement because he was eager to take the stage. “I could have stayed in there and listened, or I could have come out to the people of El Paso, Texas,” he said. “I chose you.”

Outside the El Paso County Coliseum, thousands of protesters, bundled against the evening chill, marched along the Rio Grande to a nearby park. There, El Paso’s former congressman and a possible Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, joined other locals who spoke of El Paso and neighboring Juarez, Mexico, as one community and expressed indignation over Trump’s false characterization of their city as a violent one in last week’s State of the Union address.

“With the eyes of the entire country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand. Here in one of the safest cities in the United States of America — safe, not because of walls but in spite of walls,” O’Rourke said, in the sort of rousing speech that brought nationwide attention to his Senate race last year, though he lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Let’s own this moment and the future and show this country there’s nothing to be afraid of when it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border,” O’Rourke said to cheers. “Let’s make sure our laws, our leaders and our language reflect our values.”

Late Monday, the House-Senate committee bargaining over border security funding and trying to avert another shutdown reached an “agreement in principle,” according to Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Talks had stalled on the weekend, Republicans said, over Democrats’ demands to limit the detention of undocumented immigrants, many of them seeking asylum.

Should Congress pass a compromise, the onus would be on the president to accept it, or risk taking blame again for a partial federal shutdown. Before arriving in El Paso, Trump sought to preemptively shift blame to Democrats should the legislative effort ultimately fail. After the recent shutdown, polls showed the public put the blame squarely on him, and his approval rating slid.

With both his rally and the protest featuring O’Rourke receiving national coverage, the split-screen moment promised something of an audition of a hypothetical 2020 matchup, effectively creating a live debate between the president and a charismatic potential challenger on the issue that most animated Trump’s followers in 2016 and probably will again in his reelection bid.

Before leaving the White House, the president signaled that he too saw the dueling rallies as an early competition, with his familiar emphasis on crowd sizes. “We have a line that’s very long already,” Trump told reporters at the White House, referring to people waiting to enter his El Paso venue. He added, “I understand our competitor’s got a line too, but it’s a tiny little line.”

At his rally, Trump bragged that 10,000 supporters were inside the arena and 25,000 more were standing outside. According to the El Paso Fire Department, 6,500 people — the building’s capacity — were allowed inside, while at least 10,000 attended the protest rally. Organizers, however, had a slightly lower estimate.

“We have 35,000 people tonight and he has 200 people, 300 people,” Trump said. “Not too good. That may be the end of his presidential bid.”

While the border visit was intended as an opportunity for Trump to promote his signature issue, he wandered widely in his remarks — attacking Democrats repeatedly, including on abortion and on a so-called Green New Deal environmental platform that some are advocating, and mocking Virginia Democrats for controversies that have roiled the state’s government.

Trump’s drumbeat on immigration has yet to pay political dividends beyond his own supporters, and it has further galvanized his opponents. His fear-mongering during campaign rallies last fall over caravans of immigrants failed to prevent a Democratic wave that cost Republicans a net 40 seats and their majority in the House.

And during his State of the Union address, his incorrect portrayal of El Paso — he said it had “extremely high rates of violent crime” and was “one of our nation’s most dangerous cities” until the government built a “powerful barrier” there — touched a nerve among civic leaders and citizens.

The El Paso County Commissioners Court on Monday approved a resolution assailing the president and his administration for misinformation and lies about a “crisis situation” on the U.S.-Mexico border, and noting that the federal government said “no crisis exists” and that “fiscal year 2017 was the lowest year of illegal cross-border migration on record.”

Yet Trump, at the rally, denounced his critics and media fact-checkers who disputed his claims that existing border fencing had slashed crime rates in El Paso. “They’re full of crap when they say it doesn’t make a difference,” he said, suggesting that local officials tried to “pull the wool over everybody’s eyes” by reporting low crime rates.

Lyda Ness-Garcia, a lawyer and founder of the Women’s March of El Paso, said organizers of Monday night’s protest were motivated to counteract Trump’s “lies” about their city.

“There was a deep sense of anger in our community, from the left and the right. It’s the demonization of our border. It’s the misrepresentation that the wall made us safe when we were safe long before,” she said.

Referring to the Mexican city just over the border, Garcia added: “We’re connected to Juarez. People forget. We’re not separate. We’re one culture.”

In truth, violent crime dropped in El Paso after a peak in 1993. It was at historic lows before Congress authorized a fence along the Rio Grande in 2006. Crime began to rise again over the next four years, after the fencing went up.

The city’s Republican mayor, Dee Margo, admonished Trump after the State of the Union speech, saying during an appearance on CNN that the president’s depiction of El Paso is “not factually correct.”

Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, said organizers intended the march as a community celebration rather than an anti-Trump or pro-O’Rourke political event. “The administration, they didn’t believe our community would react, that people would get upset about the lies,” he said. “Our community spoke in numbers.”

Garcia noted that residents had seen the fallout from the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies firsthand, both in family separations and in asylum-seekers being turned away from border bridges and required to remain in Mexico while they await hearings.

In December, two Guatemalan migrant children died in Border Patrol custody in the El Paso area after seeking asylum.

“Trump has created policies and strategies that have created deep wounds in our region,” Garcia said. “We are not a violent city. We are not criminals. We are part of America and we deserve respect from this president.”

Although the protest event brought together roughly 50 local groups, O’Rourke’s political star power generated significant media coverage.

“If you’re Beto, there couldn’t be a better, more visual contrast,” said Jen Psaki, a former communications director to President Obama. “By leading a march, he gets back to his grass-roots origins and it allows him to stand toe to toe with the president of the United States and to echo a message that even local Republicans agree with. It gives him a platform and a megaphone at a beneficial time.”

Not willing to cede the moment completely to O’Rourke, Julian Castro — a former mayor of San Antonio, an Obama Cabinet member and already a declared presidential candidate — went Monday to the border checkpoint where his grandmother entered the United States as a young girl. He filmed a video denouncing the president and calling Trump’s visit to El Paso an effort “to create a circus of fear and paranoia” and “to tell lies about the border and about immigration.”

Speaking directly into the camera, Castro added, “Don’t take the bait.”

Politics Newsletter

Twice-weekly

Analysis and breaking news from our award-winning journalists in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Eli Stokols

CONTACT

Eli Stokols is a White House reporter based in the Los Angeles Times Washington, D.C., bureau. He is a veteran of Politico and the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the 2016 presidential campaign and then the Trump White House. A native of Irvine, Stokols grew up in a Times household and is thrilled to report for what is still his family’s hometown paper. He is also a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske

CONTACT

Molly Hennessy-Fiske has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times since 2006. She won a 2018 APME International Perspective Award;2015 Overseas Press Club award; 2014 Dart award from ColumbiaUniversity; and was a finalist for the Livingston Awards and Casey Medal. She completed a Thomson Reuters fellowship in Lebanon in 2006 and a Pew fellowship in Mexico in 2004. Hennessy-Fiske grew up in Upstate New York and graduated from Harvard College. She spent last year as Middle East bureau chief before returning to cover foreign/national news as Houston bureau chief.

COMMENTS (41)

Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href=”http://solidopinion.com/”>comments powered by SolidOpinion.</a>

MOST READ

ADVERTISEMENT

LATEST POLITICS

Gavin Newsom has been more antagonistic to Trump than Jerry Brown was. And he’s just getting started
5h

Border showdown: Trump and Beto O’Rourke hold dueling rallies on immigration in El Paso
FEB 11, 2019

Lawmakers announce a deal to prevent another government shutdown, but prospects remain uncertain
FEB 11, 2019

Border funding fight bogs down over detention beds. Here’s why
FEB 11, 2019

Slamming Trump’s ‘political theater,’ California Gov. Gavin Newsom pulls National Guard from border
FEB 11, 2019

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

The racist lies about immigration just keep spewing forth from Trump and his White Nationalist support groups, including the “right wingnut” media.

We’re not being invaded by foreign criminals. Actually, we’re experiencing a quite predictable and potentially manageable influx of refugees seeking to exercise their legal rights to lawfully apply for asylum in the US. Not surprising, given that we have no viable refugee program in or near the Northern Triangle and have undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown of the rule of law and society in those “failed states.”

The idea that real criminals, terrorists, drug smugglers, or human traffickers will be stopped or even materially deterred by a Wall is beyond absurd. Walls generally “reroute migration” and kill more innocent people. Real threats to our security are laughing at Trump and his base while they view the diversion, wasted time and money, and the failure to beef up intelligence, undercover, and anti-smuggling operations as a free gift.

And, I’m sure they cheer the focus on “rounding up” and detaining asylum applicants who turn themselves in to apply for asylum (because Trump has intentionally disabled reasonable processing through legal ports of entry) instead of doing the real law enforcement work of breaking up criminal enterprises.

“Numbers” aren’t everything, particularly when the majority of the apprehensions have little to do with criminals or other “bad guys. But, it’s easier to “chalk up big numbers” and support a bogus White Nationalist narrative about “loss of border security” by apprehending asylum applicants who are in search of ever more elusive justice in the U.S.

Unfortunately, outright fibs and bogus racist narratives seem to work for our “Lier-in-Chief!” Here is an article from today’s NY Times by native Texan Richard Parker actually suggesting that Trump succeeds because Texans are as addicted to “Tall Tales” as Trump is to “Big Lies!” In other words, a “match made in Heaven.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/el-paso-trump-beto.html

Rather an unhappy commentary, if true. Who am I as a “mere Badger” to say, but I would suspect that these tall tales of fake invasions and bogus fear mongering directed mostly at the growing Latino community appeal more to some Texans than to others.

Just shows the importance of the work of the New Due Process Army (“NDPA”) in defending our laws and Constitution! Also illustrates the importance of committing ourselves to “regime change” in 2020. The immigration nonsense from Trump and his supporters and the intentional divisiveness, chaos, and anarchy that flow from it is an existential threat to our national existence — much greater than his mostly fake “border emergency.”

PWS

02-12-19

BOGO FROM THE GITGO?: Did Nielsen Fabricate “Agreement” With Mexico On “Historic Return To Mexico Policy?” — Nobody On Either Side Of The Border Appears To Know What’s Happening!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/05/mexico-us-immigration-policy-overhaul?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sarah Kinosian reports for The Guardian:

When she announced last month that tens of thousands of asylum seekers would be returned to Mexico while their cases are considered, the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, described the move as a “historic” overhaul of US immigration policy.

But more than two weeks later, the new strategy has yet to begin and it remains unclear how the plan would work – or even if Mexico is willing to enforce it.

Trump’s invisible wall: how his 2018 immigration policies built a barrier

The measure would be the Trump administration’s most significant move so far to dissuade people from seeking asylum. It would relieve pressure on US immigration authorities – and transfer it to Mexico.

But Mexican officials who would in theory implement the policy say they have been kept in the dark over the change – and some have explicitly opposed it.

“I had heard rumors, but I was not consulted,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, head of Mexico’s national immigration authority, told the Guardian.

“The US can’t just dump people into Mexico – they have to knock. We’ve asked for more answers, but the US government is shut down, so I guess they’ll answer when they figure that out. It’s all up in the air,” he said.

The number of people – mostly Central Americans – who would be parked in Mexico as a result of the move could be enormous.

In 2018, 93,000 people were given credible fear interviews – the first step in the asylum process. While overall immigration levels are at historic lows, the number of families and children crossing is at an all-time high. And a backlog of nearly 1m cases in the US means asylum seekers could remain in Mexico for years.

The US can’t just dump people into Mexico – they have to knock. We’ve asked for more answers, but the US government is shut down

Tonatiuh Guillén

“It’s not some small detail. The numbers just aren’t manageable. It will have far-reaching effects on services, employment, everything – the social and political fabric of Tijuana and other border cities,” said Guillén

Confusion over the current state of the plan reigns on both sides of the border: when Nielsen announced the move on 20 December, Mexico’s foreign ministry reluctantly accepted, although within days the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, said he would need more information from US authorities. Guillén said Mexico had not formally accepted the plan.

Meanwhile, US Congress members wrote to the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on 2 January requesting the text and details of any agreement.

Hopes for clarity have been further complicated by the shutdown of the US federal government triggered by a funding row over Donald Trump’s demands for a $5bn wall on the southern border.

US border officials are already limiting the number of people who can apply for asylum at a port of entry, creating delays of several months for migrants hoping to get into the US – and overwhelming public services in Mexican border cities.

Activists in Mexico say the “catch and return” policy would push conditions past breaking point.

“Aside from this taking away people’s right to apply for asylum, it would cause Mexico’s northern border cities to nearly collapse,” said Esmeralda Siu Márquez, the executive coordinator of Coalición Pro Defensa Del Migrante, a network of local migrant support organizations.

“This would change Tijuana from being a transit point. Shelters, which are already at capacity, are temporary – we’d need housing, integration programs, school programs, etc. We don’t have the budget.”

Officials in Tijuana have already stretched thin resources, normally focused on Mexican deportees, to deal with the more than 5,000 members of the Central American migrant caravans which started arriving in November.

Cesar Palencia, who handles migrant affairs in Tijuana, says he only heard of the plan on the news. “The city isn’t prepared for this. The [Mexican] federal government does not really understand what this would mean – they have no strategy, no budget for it,” he said.

Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, cut the country’s migration and refugee budget after he took office 1 December 2018, and has not indicated whether or not that would change in light of the new plan. His administration has also pledged visas and work in Mexico for Central American migrants.

But for many, like Samuel Tabora, a 24-year-old construction worker, the kind of jobs available in Mexico – particularly low-skill factory positions in Tijuana – do not pay enough for them to send much back home to Honduras, where over two-thirds of the country lives in poverty.

Faced with the prospect of staying years in Mexico, he said he would consider jumping the border fence with his partner and four-year-old daughter. “If they deport me, we’ll just turn around and come back. I want to work and make money and to have something to send home to my family,” he said.

Fleeing home alone: the migrant children blocked at Mexican border

Since Nielsen’s announcement, US agents have twice fired teargas into Mexico to prevent some people, including families with young children, from attempting to breach the border fence.

Several of the asylum seekers who had heard of the potential policy said they would simply wait it out in Mexico. “Going back, I may as well just tie a noose for myself and hang it from a tree,” said Francisco M, who left Guatemala with his wife and three children due to extortion threats from gangs. “We are here alone and it hurt to leave our roots, but I’d have to have a death wish to go back there. No, we will stay as long as it takes.”

Meanwhile, human rights groups warn that Mexico, one of the most violent countries in the world, is not safe for asylum seeker. Last month two Honduran teenagers who had traveled with the caravan were murdered in Tijuana.

Advocates warn the plan would add formidable new challenges to the already-tortuous asylum process. “The policy essentially dispossesses people of their right to trial. It takes me months to prepare one asylum case. I’ll maybe meet with a person six times. People cannot build cases in the US if they can’t meet with their lawyers. How will they get to their hearings?” said Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado, a legal aid organization in Tijuana.

It would also encourage migrants seeking asylum to take more treacherous routes, she said. “By taking away legal avenues to asylum, you’re basically telling people to jump over the fence.”

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

It’s basically what I predicted: NQRFPT. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3sC

A dumb Trump policy followed by an idiotic Trump shutdown with an incompetent DHS thrown in the toxic mix. And the combination of an unhinged and unqualified President with lightweight sycophantic Cabinet Members is a much greater threat to our national security than asylum applicants seeking refuge have ever been or will ever be.

PWS

01-07-19

JIM WALLIS @ SOJOURNERS: Things Will Get Worse Under Trump; Moral Resistance Is Essential: “[Trump] almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.“

https://sojo.net/articles/its-going-get-worse-america-it-gets-better-2019-opportunity

Jim Wallis writes:

Most people have consistently underestimated Donald Trump. When he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy by attacking and demonizing non-white immigrants, people should have understood that Trump would likely win the Republican nomination and possibly the election.

Why? Because Donald Trump appeals to the worst of America. His promotion of fear, division, hate, racism, xenophobia, rallying of white nationalism, mistreatment of women, purposeful denial of truth, and consummate love of money, power, and fame are, of course, nothing new in America. Neither are his desire to destroy democracy, love for authoritarian rulers or desire to be one. Indeed, there is nothing new about Donald Trump, but he almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.

Now let’s move from the political and moral to the theological and spiritual: These traits and actions also represent the worst of humanity. To seek money and power over all else, to consistently put yourself over all others, to make private self-interest the only the goal of life and overturn any sense of the common good, to create conflict to win and make all others into losers, to constantly lie and try to kill the truth, to make exploitation and abuse the definition of sexuality, to be as violent in word and deed as you can get away with, to never answer to God or seek forgiveness — there are examples of these sins throughout the Bible and human history. They are also, unfortunately, what our country’s leader seems to stand for, what he promotes in our culture, and what he models for our children.

Given all of this, we are in great danger. Strongmen are rising all over the world, and Donald Trump supports them — and even wants to be one of them. Trump started out the New Year tweeting the country’s support to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new right-wing nationalist leader. Just this week, he articulated an ahistorical understanding of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that seemed to condone or even endorse the Soviet action. His version of that chapter in world history is one that sounds much closer to what Moscow propaganda might say rather than what an American president or relatively neutral historians would describe. Among the current global strongmen, Trump is certainly not the most intelligent, but he may be the most dangerous because of his political position.

READ: #EleNão Movement Confronts ‘Brazilian Trump’

Strongmen, autocrats, and dictators don’t all do the same things. They do whatever they can to maximize their own wealth, power, and fame. The only thing that prevents them from going as far as they can is the resiliency of a society’s institutions and social sectors — like the media, the judiciary, political parties, law enforcement, civil society, and places of vocational or historical moral authority like faith communities.

So how are we faring on those fronts?

Press: In our current political situation, a new generation of young reporters are showing great resiliency in the new Trump era, revealing the facts that undermine official lies and offering analysis that seeks to hold power accountable.

Judiciary: Trump appointments at the Supreme Court and Circuit Court levels are gradually politicizing the judiciary to rule in favor of his interests, white interests, and corporate interests.

Political Parties: After winning the midterm elections, the Democratic Party has retaken the House of Representatives. For the first time, we have 100 women in the Congress and the most diverse House in our history. With Speaker Nancy Pelosi retaking the gavel, we will now see what kind of checks and balances to the executive branch that can provide. But the Republican Party has been taken over by the president’s base and retained a Senate majority that has been unwilling to oppose him — or ever vote to remove him from office, which only the Senate can do with a 2/3 majority vote, even if the House were to impeach him.

Law Enforcement: Trump has continued to attack the Justice Department and relentlessly seeks to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation into his campaign’s involvement with Russia. Trump’s behavior in response to the investigation of him and his campaign puts the rule of law into jeopardy, depending on how his administration reacts to the results and reports of the Robert Mueller-led investigation.

Civil Society: Will the civil society seek to hold the government responsible for civility in the way that it governs? So far, nonprofit organizations focused on good government, exposing corruption, and protecting the vulnerable have done important work in galvanizing massive protests at key moments of danger or significance, as well as leading or joining key court cases that have sought to rein in some of the worst travesties of the administration, like the monstrous policy of family separation at the border.

Faith Communities: On the religion side, white evangelicals have been the most supportive of Trump as their Religious Right has entered a transactional, Faustian bargain with his administration, agreeing to look away from Trump’s immoral behavior and brutal treatment of those Jesus called “the least of these” in exchange for the judicial appointments and conservative economic policies they support. Others, like the Reclaiming Jesus movement, with Sojourners involvement, have proclaimed that the gospel itself is at stake in the faith community’s response to Trump. This year will be “an hour of decision,” to use Billy Graham’s old language, for the faith community’s testimony in the face of Donald Trump’s corrupt and cruel practices and policies, which are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

WATCH: Reclaiming Jesus in a Time of Crisis

In 2019, I believe things are going to get worse in America before they get better. We now face grave dangers to democracy itself, and to societal moral decency. But that danger also provides us an opportunity: to go deeper into our faith and into our relationships to each other, especially across racial lines, and into relationship with the most vulnerable people in our society — a practice our faith says will change us. If we do go deeper, this moment could become a movement for all the things that many of us have consistently lived and fought for all our lives. If we don’t go deeper, but just continue to react or ultimately retreat into frustration and cynicism, we will indeed be in great danger.

Many of us faith leaders believe a constitutional crisis is coming in 2019, which will also create a crisis of faith to which we will be called to respond. A dangerous overreach of presidential power could come in response to the ultimate results of the Special Counsel’s report and potential further indictments of Trump’s associates, potentially his family members, or even himself for criminal behavior. Attempts to cover up or obscure the results could be a serious obstruction of justice that undermines the very rule of law in this country. We could also see other executive overreaches like choosing to shut down the government over vanity projects, the prosecution of dangerous wars, the censorship of the press, attacks on opponents, more assaults on migrants and the most vulnerable, and, most frighteningly, the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

If we start to see that executive overreach as distraction, there must be a moral response. And the response of faith communities could be a game changer. I believe it is time to prepare for that response from the followers of Jesus. Stay tuned and prayerfully get ready.

Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His new Audible spoken-word series, Jim Wallis In Conversation, is available now, as is his book, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a

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

Amen! That’s why the efforts of the New Due Process Army are so important to the survival of our republic.

PWS

01-06-19

KAREN TUMULTY @ WASHPOST: Trump Is The Ugliest American – Amazingly, He Keeps Getting Uglier!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/29/with-trump-there-is-no-bottom/

Karen Tumulty writes in WashPost:

With President Trump, there is no bottom. Every time you think you have seen it, he manages to sink even lower.

It is not news that the president is indifferent to human suffering. His limp response to the devastation of the 2017 hurricane in Puerto Rico — which he claimed to have been a “fantastic job” on the part of his administration — stands out in that regard. But on Saturday, we saw yet another level of depravity when Trump made his first comments regarding the deaths in recent days of two migrant Guatemalan children after they were apprehended by federal authorities. It revealed not only callousness but also opportunism, as he sought to turn this tragedy into a partisan advantage in his current standoff with Democrats over the government shutdown.

His statements came, not unexpectedly, over Twitter. First this:

Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try! The two…..

116K

12:30 PM – Dec 29, 2018

And then, minutes later, this:

…children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol. The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn’t given her water in days. Border Patrol needs the Wall and it will all end. They are working so hard & getting so little credit!

114K

12:36 PM – Dec 29, 2018

Not a word of sympathy here — much less remorse on the part of the government over the deaths of a 7-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy while in its custody. Nor does Trump address questions that are being raised about whether the administration’s new policy seeking to limit the ability of immigrants to seek asylum protection might be a factor in putting more at risk. Under recent changes, migrants must remain in Mexico as their asylum cases are processed, possibly increasing their willingness to do something reckless to come across the border.

Then there was the dissonance: His blast came on a day that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was visiting Yuma, Ariz., after stopping in El Paso, Tex. Her department has promised more thorough medical screenings and is calling on other agencies to help. “The system is clearly overwhelmed and we must work together to address this humanitarian crisis and protect vulnerable populations,” Nielsen said in a statement.

Even if Trump were to get funding for the wall — and even if the wall were the deterrent he promises it would be, a more dubious proposition — that would be many months if not years in the future. This is an immediate crisis, for which the president seems to have no concern. Nor does Trump address the fact that what he claims are Democratic immigration policies have been in place for decades, and yet, until this month, it had been more than a decade since a child had died while in Customs and Border Protection custody.

It is true that greater numbers of vulnerable Central American children are being put into treacherous situations. My colleagues Joshua Partlow and Nick Miroff have done excellent reporting on how smugglers are gaming a dysfunctional immigration system:

This is happening because Central Americans know they will have a better chance of avoiding deportation, at least temporarily, if they are processed along with children.

The economics of the journey reinforces the decision to bring a child: Smugglers in Central America charge less than half the price if a minor is part of the cargo because less work is required of them.

Unlike single adult migrants, who would need to be guided on a dangerous march through the deserts of Texas or Arizona, smugglers deliver families only to the U.S. border crossing and the waiting arms of U.S. immigration authorities. The smuggler does not have to enter the United States and risk arrest.

The Trump administration tried to deter parents this spring when it imposed a “zero tolerance” family-separation policy at the border. But the controversy it generated and the president’s decision to halt the practice six weeks later cemented the widely held impression that parents who bring children can avoid deportation.

As Trump fulminates about the wall, he rarely brings up the idea of doing anything about the source of the problem: the desperation of people who are being driven from their native countries by poverty and violence. Until those forces are addressed, migrants will keep coming, even if it means taking greater risks to do so.

In the meantime, we have a president who is willing to politicize the deaths of two young children to score points against the opposition party. And the most shocking thing about seeing him scrape along a new moral bottom is this: It is no longer shocking at all.

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

Read the original article at the link.

The key:

As Trump fulminates about the wall, he rarely brings up the idea of doing anything about the source of the problem: the desperation of people who are being driven from their native countries by poverty and violence. Until those forces are addressed, migrants will keep coming, even if it means taking greater risks to do so.

Walls, detention centers, tent cities, and more Border Patrol Agents won’t solve this problem. Nor will proposed changes in the law and administrative actions aimed at further undermining our legal obligations toward refugees and asylum seekers. In fact, as we can see, the Administration’s approach is making things worse.

Establishing a fairer and appropriately more generous interpretation and application of our asylum and related protection laws, investing in addressing “push” conditions in Central America, establishing robust “in country” refugee programs in the Northern Triangle, cooperation with the UNHCR is seeking “regional solutions” closer to the Northern Triangle, more well-trained Asylum Officers, and more well-trained, fair and impartial U.S. Immigration Judges with a prior background in fair and humane treatment of asylum seekers would, over time, improve the situation. Perhaps in the long run, it would even solve the problems.

PWS

12-31-18

CHRISTMAS EVE @ COURTSIDE: A Muslim Gets The Message Of Christ Better Than Many Christians!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/muslim-christian-trump-supporters.html

By Wajahat Ali

NY Times Contributing Opinion Writer

Dec. 22, 2018

Image

A Christmas nativity scene.CreditCreditAmir Levy/Getty Images

At Bellarmine, an all-boys Catholic school in San Jose, Calif., I was often the token Muslim and probably the only person who began freshman year thinking the Eucharist sounded like the name of a comic book villain. I eventually learned it’s a ritual commemorating the Last Supper. At the monthly Masses that were part of the curriculum, that meant grape juice and stale wafers were offered to pimpled, dorky teenagers as the blood and body of Christ.

During my time there, I also read the King James Bible and stories about Jesus, learned about Christian morality, debated the Trinity with Jesuit priests and received an A every semester in religious studies class. Twenty years later, I can still recite the “Our Father” prayer from memory.

Growing up, I’d been taught that Jesus was a major prophet in Islam, known as “Isa” and also referred to as “ruh Allah,” the spirit of God born to the Virgin Mary and sent as a mercy to all people. Like Christians, we Muslims believe he will return to fight Dajjal, or the Antichrist, and establish peace and justice on earth. But it was everything I learned in high school that came together to make me love Jesus in a way that made me a better Muslim.

Even though I don’t personally celebrate Christmas, the season always makes me think of his legacy of radical love. This year, it’s especially hard to understand how Trump-supporting Christians have turned their back on that unconditional love and exchanged it for nativism, fear and fealty to a reality TV show host turned president.

According to a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted in January, 75 percent of white evangelicals in the United States — compared with 46 percent of American adults over all — said “the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” was a positive thing. Sixty-eight percent of them believe America has no responsibility to house refugees, according to a Pew Research poll conducted in April and May.

The numbers aren’t quite as jarring when we look at different slices of religious America. According to a PRRI poll conducted in late August and early September, 59 percent of Catholics and 75 percent of black Protestants view Trump negatively. Still, I can’t fathom how anyone who knows the Jesus I encountered at Bellarmine could be comfortable with this administration.

Jesus was a humble carpenter from Nazareth who miraculously fed 5,000 people but never humiliated them with condescending lectures about God favoring those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Mr. Trump has expressed enthusiasm for gutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, by adding unnecessary and cruel work requirements for food stamp recipients.

Mr. Trump also chose Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who admitted he isn’t qualified to run a federal agency, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Carson, who says his Christian faith helps him “serve the nation even better,” tweeted he’s “moving more people toward self-sufficiency” by advocating huge cuts to housing aid, increased rent and more stringent work requirements. In high school, I must have missed the sermon where Jesus told the poor, hungry and homeless to stop asking God for handouts.

President Trump and Republicans have also waged a nonstop war on Obamacare for nine years, allowing 14 states to opt out of Medicaid expansion, leaving four million eligible Americans unable to enroll. The Jesus I met in high school healed a blind man. Guess what he didn’t do? Rail against the socialist evils of taking care of people’s health.

The Jesus I know commanded, “You shall love your neighbors as yourself.” He didn’t add “unless they are undocumented immigrants or Muslim or gay.” He would welcome refugees from Central America, feed them, wash their feet. He would have been horrified at the conditions that led 7-year-old Jakelin Caal to die of dehydration and shock in Border Control custody after seeking refuge in this country with her father.

Christianity isn’t unique: Every religion is abused as such by some of its followers and manipulated to advance political agendas. But the hypocrisy of white Evangelical Christians’ support for Trump in light of his undeniable cruelty and apathy — toward refugees, Puerto Rican citizens recovering from a devastating hurricane, victims of California fires and a newspaper columnist killed by Saudi Arabia — is too much to bear. Despite this barrage of hate, Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham still support Mr. Trump because they believe he “defends the faith.” How?

Our school’s motto was “Men for others,” a reminder that the Christian faith should be lived through active selfless service. Judging from the type of Christianity that is practiced and preached by some Trump supporters, they must know a Jesus whose message is “Every man for himself.”

At Bellarmine, we had to perform 100 hours of community service before graduating. I volunteered at the senior center and the local homeless shelter, where my friends and I cleaned the kitchen and packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for struggling men and women, most of them eager for employment.

This Christmas, I hope Trump-supporting Christians try to find compassion for people who are similarly suffering. I hope they open their Bible and reflect on James 2:14: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?”

Thankfully, I know many Christians who resemble Jesus, investing their life to uplifting vulnerable people. Mr. Trump’s supporters should meet Sister Simone Campbell, who in 2012 organized Nuns on the Busto oppose the Paul Ryan-backed budget plan’s assault on social programs for the poor. They should join the Rev. William Barber II of North Carolina, who has revived the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign to fight racism and income inequality. They should donate to Sister Norma Pimental of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a “respite center” in McAllen, Tex.,offering food, clothes and shoes to people seeking asylum.

These are the kinds of Christians who I believe are following the lessons and footsteps of Jesus, the prophet I met and loved as a Muslim at a Catholic high school. This Christmas, I hope some of the Christians who support President Trump can meet him too.

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, lawyer and contributing opinion writer.

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

There’s no doubt that if Jesus were here today he’d be holed up with the migrants waiting on the Mexican side of our Southern Border for a chance at justice or whiling aways the hours in DHS detention. One place he’d never be found would be in the West Wing, Mar A Lago, or any far right Evangelical Church that preaches doctrines of exclusion, intolerance, and “beggar thy neighbor.”

And when his time came, Jesus, as a scruffy, unemployed, uneducated, single Palestinian male who led a ragtag band of similarly unemployed men and was considered to be a subversive by the authorities would be given short shrift by the U.S. system and returned to those who would torture and kill him.

Something to think about.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays

PWS

12-24-18

🎄👍😎

NQRFPT: I’M ALREADY PROVED RIGHT ON NIELSEN’S LATEST HAREBRAINED SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: Mexico is “Completely Unprepared,” DHS is Massively Incompetent, The “Real Experts” Among Advocacy Groups & NGOs Are Sharpening Their Litigation Knives, & The House Is Getting Ready To Hold Nielsen & Her Toadies Accountable For The Inevitable Deaths, Rapes, & Assaults On Asylum Seekers In Mexico!

https://apple.news/ABxGIu1zQSumaDYsJutu1uA

Scott Bixby reports for The Daily Beast:

Opponents of the Trump administration’s plan requiring all migrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings have vowed to challenge the policy, which they say—like nearly every other aspect of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—almost certainly violates constitutional protections, international treaties, and federal law.

The policy, dubbed the “Migration Protection Protocols” by the Department of Homeland Security, is “disgraceful and illegal” and “will result in the loss of life for vulnerable people seeking safety,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “This president has, again, chosen to exploit and endanger the lives of women and children to advance his own self-serving agenda.”

“Pushing asylum-seekers back into Mexico is absolutely illegal under U.S. immigration law,” Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at the nonprofit Human Rights First, told reporters on a conference call on Friday morning. “This scheme will increase, rather than decrease, the humanitarian debacle at the border.”

Under the proposed rule change, migrants who attempt to claim asylum in the United States at the southern border will almost universally be held in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings, a process that could take years.

Calling the move “a historic measure,” the Department of Homeland Security revealed the plan on Thursday, at the same time Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was being grilled by members of the House Judiciary Committee on the Trump administration’s numerous immigration controversies, including its family separation policy (the existence of which Nielsen denied) and the recent death of a 7-year-old migrant girl in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the announcement, Nielsen said that “aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, where many skip their court dates.” Instead, “they will wait for an immigration court decision while they are in Mexico. ‘Catch and release’ will be replaced with ‘catch and return.’ ”

Mexico’s foreign ministry, contradicting the foreign policy platform that helped sweep the country’s new president into power, said that it “will authorize, for humanitarian reasons and temporarily, the entry of certain foreign persons from the United States who have entered the country through a port of entry or who have been apprehended between ports of entry, have been interviewed by the authorities of migratory control of that country, and have received a summons to appear before an immigration judge.” (The country’s top immigration official now says that Mexico is completely unprepared to fulfill its end of the bargain.)

Organizations on the ground say that the policy is a clear violation of both federal and international law, as well as constitutional guarantees of due process—and plan to fight it in court.

“This administration knows that the border area is unsafe for women and children,” Brané said, “and still, this administration doubles down on policies that make everyone less safe.”

“The administration seems to have no plan for implementation,” said Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and refugee protection policy analyst at Human Rights First. “Will lawyers be able to visit their clients before hearings? Where will those hearings take place?… Access to counsel is one of the most important factors in whether or not an asylum seeker is able to live in safety in the United States.”

In addition to Article 33 of the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prevents the forcible return of asylum-seekers to countries where they face persecution, torture or death—dubbed the principle non-refoulement in international law—advocates pointed to laws passed by Congress that mandate the admission of unaccompanied children seeking asylum at the U.S. border as being blatantly violated by the president’s policy.

“Refusing to process children very clearly violates the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, written specifically to protect this vulnerable population,” said Lisa Frydman, vice president for regional policy and initiatives at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit that works on behalf of unaccompanied children who enter the U.S. immigration system alone. Speaking on a call with reporters, Frydman recounted interviews with unaccompanied children held in shelters in Tijuana, the conditions of which are “squalid,” Frydman said.

“Unaccompanied children are being systematically denied access to apply for protection in the United States” as they seek asylum protections, Frydman said, and their efforts to avoid both U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities are putting them in even more danger of exploitation.

Some of the children have even taken to living on the streets of Tijuana, Frydman said, where they have no access to medical treatment, food, or protection from those who might exploit them. The dangers are extreme: just this week, two Honduran children were murdered in Tijuana after being stopped by would-be robbers as they attempted to move from one shelter to another.

“All of our organizations have been on the ground in Tijuana recently and are united in our assessment that conditions there are very unstable and very unsafe,” said Wendy Young, president of KIND. Those conditions, Young continued, “are going to further deteriorate” as the number of asylum-seekers stuck at the border increases.

A 2017 study by Human Rights First documented 921 crimes against migrants committed by federal or state officials in Mexico, where nearly 70 percent of migrant children are held in “prison-like” immigration detention facilities, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, despite Mexican laws prohibiting children from being held in such facilities.

These unsafe conditions in Mexico make forcing asylum-seekers to remain their a blatant violation of the principle of non-refoulement, advocates said, and therefore a violation of international law.

“These migrant camps are not safe for children,” said Dr. Alan Shapiro, a pediatrician who co-founded Terra Firma, an organization that provides medical care to undocumented children. “They are not enclosed camps, they do not have roofs over their head.” On a recent visit to one camp in Tijuana, Dr. Shapiro said, he saw a two-year-old child who had recently suffered a seizure and had no access to medical care, or even proper food.

“This child was eating powdered baby formula out of the can—there was no water for them to mix it with,” Shapiro said.

“There are very real risks to unaccompanied children,” said Leah Chavla, a policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “This is a system that is ripe for exploitation… Mothers that we’ve spoken with have flagged that there are a lot of new faces around the camps and they don’t necessarily feel comfortable leaving their children with strangers.”

Advocates also pointed to serious logistical hurdles for asylum-seekers to receive proper legal counsel as they navigate the labyrinthine immigration system from outside the United States, pointing to those difficulties as potential violations of due process.

“It is unclear how attorneys in the United States would be able to work in and access their clients in Mexico—if at all,” said Jennifer Podkul, senior director for policy and advocacy at KIND. “Moreover, legal services capacity in Mexico would be insufficient to address these needs or to ensure the provision of accurate legal information and preparation of cases in accordance with U.S., rather than Mexican, law.”

Those difficulties are doubled for unaccompanied children, Podkul said, in light of their age and limited ability to testify in their own defense. “Without quality legal representation, unaccompanied children and other asylum seekers will be unable to fully present their cases for protection, and as a result, may be returned to harm, danger, or death.”

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

Imagine what it would be like to have a Government committed to following the law, including the generous humanitarian standards for asylum, rather than coming up with costly, impractical, and often illegal schemes to avoid the law.

Of course, following the law would likely result in many more asylum seekers being rapidly accepted after screening and settling down to lead peaceful, law-abiding, productive lives in the U.S. That would be good for the country, but bad for the racist White Nationalist agenda that this Administration peddles to its so-called “base” (which actually represents a minority of U.S. opinion, but a minority that strategically props up a minority government controlled by a minority party and an incompetent, out of control, would-be autocrat).

PWS

12-23-18

I WAS RIGHT (BARELY): CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS SAVES ASYLUM & RULE OF LAW — ADMINISTRATION’S REQUEST TO IMPLEMENT ORDER TRUNCATING ASYLUM LAW TURNED DOWN 5-4!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/us/politics/supreme-court-asylum-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fadam-liptak&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

By Adam Liptak @ N Tmes:

Dec. 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday refused to revive a Trump administration initiative barring migrants who enter the country illegally from seeking asylum.

The court was closely divided, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the four-member liberal wing in turning down the administration’s request for a stay of a trial judge’s order blocking the program.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons for its action. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh said they would have granted the stay.

In a proclamation issued on Nov. 9, President Trump barred migrants from applying for asylum unless they made the request at a legal checkpoint. Only those applying at a port of entry would be eligible, Mr. Trump said, invoking what he said were his national security powers to protect the nation’s borders.

Lower courts blocked the initiative, ruling that a federal law plainly allowed asylum applications from people who had entered the country unlawfully.

“Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States,” the relevant federal statute says, may apply for asylum — “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.”

Judge Jon S. Tigar of the United States District Court in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order blocking the initiative nationwide. “Whatever the scope of the president’s authority,” Judge Tigar wrote, “he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

Mr. Trump attacked Judge Tigar, calling him an “Obama judge.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took issue with the characterization, saying that federal judges apply the law without regard to the policies of the presidents who appointed them.

A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, refused to stay Judge Tigar’s order. The majority opinion was written by Judge Jay S. Bybee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

“We are acutely aware of the crisis in the enforcement of our immigration laws,” Judge Bybee wrote. “The burden of dealing with these issues has fallen disproportionately on the courts of our circuit. And as much as we might be tempted to revise the law as we think wise, revision of the laws is left with the branch that enacted the laws in the first place — Congress.”

The Trump administration then urged the Supreme Court to issue a stay of Judge Tigar’s ruling, saying the president was authorized to address border security by imposing the new policy.

“The United States has experienced a surge in the number of aliens who enter the country unlawfully from Mexico and, if apprehended, claim asylum and remain in the country while the claim is adjudicated, with little prospect of actually being granted that discretionary relief,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco told the justices.

“The president, finding that this development encourages dangerous and illegal border crossings and undermines the integrity of the nation’s borders, determined that a temporary suspension of entry by aliens who fail to present themselves for inspection at a port of entry along the southern border is in the nation’s interest,” Mr. Francisco wrote.

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing groups challenging the policy, said Congress had made a different determination, one that only Congress can alter.

“After World War II and the horrors experienced by refugees who were turned away by the United States and elsewhere, Congress joined the international community in adopting standards for the treatment of those fleeing persecution,” lawyers with the A.C.L.U. wrote. “A key safeguard is the assurance, explicitly and unambiguously codified, that one fleeing persecution can seek asylum regardless of where, or how, he or she enters the country.

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

I had observed that attacking Federal Judges and dissing the Supremes and the Federal Courts as an institution was unlikely to help win the heart and mind of Chief Justice Roberts. Disturbingly, however, four of his colleagues appear to be ready and willing to hand the country over to Trump and Putin.

Stay well, RBG! The future of our American Republic depends on you and the your four colleagues who were willing to stand up for the rule of law against tyranny.

PWS

12-21-18

HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”

WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES COULD BACKFIRE

“The Devil is in the Details.” Typical for this group of incompetents, nobody at DHS or in the Mexican Government actually appears to be ready to implement this “historic change.”
Expect chaos. After all, the ink wasn’t even dry on Judge Sullivan’s order in Grace v. Whitaker for USCIS to rewrite its credible fear “Policy Memorandum” to comply with law. Want to bet on whether the “credible fear” interviews in Mexico or at the border will be lawful? How about the reaction of Judge Sullivan if they ignore his order? (Nielsen and her fellow scofflaws might want to consult with Gen. Flynn on that one. This is one judge with limited patience for high level Government officials who run roughshod over the law, are in contempt of court, or perjure themselves.)
By screwing around with procedures, the Administration opens itself up for systemic challenges in more U.S. District Courts instead of being able to limit litigation to Courts of Appeals on petitions to review individual removal orders.
Every “panic attack” by this Administration on the rule of law and the most vulnerable energizes more legal opposition. And, it’s not just within the immigration bar and NGOs any more. “Big Law” and many of the brightest recent graduates of top law schools across the country are getting involved in the “New Due Process Army.”
By concentrating asylum applicants at a limited number of ports of entry, pro bono legal groups could actually find it easier to represent almost all applicants.
Representation of asylum seekers generally improves results, sometimes by as much as 5X.
It could be easier for individuals who are free and authorized to work in Mexico to obtain counsel and prepare their cases than it is for individuals detained in substandard conditions in obscure locations in the U.S.
Freed of the intentionally coercive and demoralizing effects of DHS detention, more applicants will be willing to fully litigate their claims, including taking available administrative and judicial appeals.
As more cases reach the Courts of Appeals (primarily in the 5th & 9th Circuits) more “real” Article III Judges will “have their eyes opened” to the absolute travesty that passes for “justice” and “due process” in the Immigration Courts under Trump.
Shoddily reasoned “precedents” from the BIA and the AG are already failing in the Article III Courts on a regular basis. Three “bit the dust” just within the last week. Expect this trend to accelerate.
The 5th and 9th Circuits will find their dockets overwhelmed with Not Quite Ready For Prime Time (“NQRFPT”) cases “dumped” on them by DOJ and EOIR and are likely to react accordingly.
The last massive assault on Due Process in Immigration Court by the DOJ under Ashcroft basically caused a “mini-rebellion” in the Article III Courts. There were numerous “remands for redos” and Circuit Court rulings harshly reversing and publicly criticizing overly restrictive treatment of asylum cases by Immigration Judges and the BIA, particularly in the area of credibility determinations. Expect the Circuit Courts to “reverse and revise” many of the current anti-asylum precedents from the BIA and the AG.
With almost universal representation, a level playing field supervised by Article III Courts, and all Immigration Judges actually forced to fairly apply the generous standards for asylum enunciated by the Supremes in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, and by the BIA in the (oft cited but seldom actually applied) Matter of Mogharrabi, I wouldn’t be surprised to see grant rates for Northern Triangle applicants exceed 50% (where most experts believe they belong).
Overall, there’s a respectable chance that the end result of this ill-conceived policy will be an exposure of the rampant fraud, intellectual dishonesty, and disregard for the true rule of law in this Administration’s treatment of bona fide asylum seekers.
Inevitably, however, asylum seekers will continue to die in Mexico while awaiting hearings. DHS politicos probably will find themselves on a regular basis before enraged House Committees attempting to justify their deadly, cruel, and incompetent policies. This will be a “culture shock” for those used to the “hear no evil, see no evil” attitude of the GOP House.
The Administration appears to have “designed” another of their “built to fail” systems. If they shift the necessary Immigration Judges to the border, the 1.1 million backlog elsewhere will continue to mushroom. If they work on the backlog, the “border waiting line” will grow, causing extreme pressure from the Mexican Government, Congress, and perhaps the Article III Courts. Every death of an asylum seeker (there were three just within the last week or so) will be laid at DHS’s feet.

NOTE TO THE NDPA:

The outstanding historical analysis by Judge Emmet Sullivan in Grace v. Whitaker illustrates what we already know: For years, the Executive Branch through EOIR has been intentionally applying “unduly restrictive standards” to asylum seekers to artificially reduce the number of grants in violation of both the Refugee Act of 1980 and our international obligations. This disingenuous treatment has particularly targeted bona fide asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle, those asserting claims based on a “particular social group,” unrepresented individuals, women, and children.

Worse yet, this totally cynical and disingenuous Administration is using the intentionally and unlawfully “skewed system” and “illegal denials” as well as just downright fabricated statistics and knowingly false narratives to paint a bogus picture of asylum seekers and their lawyers as the “abusers” and the Government as the “defenders of the rule of law.” What poppycock, when we all know the exact opposite is the real truth! Only courageous (mostly pro bono) lawyers and some conscientious judges at both the Immigration Court and Article III levels are standing up for the real rule of law against a scofflaw Administration and its outrageous plan to send genuine refugees back into harm’s way.

Nowhere in the racially charged xenophobic actions and rhetoric of Trump, Sessions, and Whitaker, nor in the intentionally derogatory and demonstrably dishonest rhetoric of Nielsen, nor in the crabbed, intentionally overly restrictive interpretations of asylum law by today’s BIA is there even a hint of the generous humanitarian letter and spirit of the Refugee Act of 1980 and the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees or the “non-narrow” interpretation of “particular social group” so well described and documented by Judge Sullivan. On the contrary, we can well imagine folks like this gleefully and self-righteously pushing the refugee vessel St. Louis out to sea or happily slamming the door in the face of desperate Jewish refugees from Europe who would later die in the Holocaust.

Now is the time to force the Article III Courts and Congress to confront this Administration’s daily violations of law and human rights. We can develop favorable case precedents in the Article III Courts, block unethical and intentionally illegal interference by the Attorney General with Due Process in Immigration Court, and advocate changes in the law and procedures that will finally require the Executive Branch and the Immigration Courts to live up to the abandoned but still valid promise of “becoming the world’s best tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all.” And, the “all” certainly includes the most vulnerable among us: refugees claiming asylum!

In the end, through a combination of the ballot box, Congress, the Article III Courts, and informed public opinion we will be able to thwart the rancid White Nationalist immigration agenda of this Administration and return honest, reasonable Government that works within the Constitution and governs in the overall best interests of our country to the United States.

Thanks for all you do! Keep fighting the “good fight!”

Go for it!

Due Process Forever! Scofflaw Administration Never!

PWS

12-21-18

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

ANALYSIS: Trump Lays Another Egg On Immigration — Everybody Loses, But It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: