Adolf Hitler – Page 10 – immigrationcourtside.com

🏴‍☠️”FAMILY SEPARATION 2.0″ — NEW REPORT FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: 200+ Years of American Democracy No Match For Trump Regime’s Blackshirts! — “One officer told several mothers that “‘it doesn’t matter what you sign because we will do what we want.’”

Amnesty International USA-Family Separation 2.0_May 21, 2020

Family Separation 2.0: “You aren’t going to separate me from my only child.”

On April 7, 2020, Amnesty International issued a report, ‘We are adrift, about to sink’: The looming COVID-19 disaster in US immigration detention facilities, documenting how the Trump administration was failing to adequately protect tens of thousands of immigrants and asylum- seekers whom the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (“DHS”) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agency was detaining in over 200 detention centers across the United States.1

Three of these facilities detain families, including infants as young as 1-year-old who are still breast-feeding. Deceptively named “family residential centers” (FRC), these detention facilities are: the Berks County Residential Center (“Berks”) in Leesport, Pennsylvania; the South Texas Family Residential Center (“Dilley”) in Dilley, Texas; and the Karnes County Residential Center (“Karnes”) in Karnes City, Texas.

While the dangerous conditions in immigration detention remain little changed since Amnesty International published its April report, ICE has now introduced a new element of harm: family separation. Once again, this administration is weaponizing its public health response to COVID- 19 to punish and deter people seeking safety.

. . . .

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

Read the complete report at the above link.

The regime’s “Dred Scottification” — dehumanization of “the other” before the law — continues unabated as those institutions charged with preventing such abuses tank.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

O5-22-20

CHILD ABUSE BY COWARDLY REGIME OFFICIALS RAMPS UP AS COURTS TANK IN FACE OF LATEST ASSAULT ON RULE OF LAW & HUMANITY ☠️ — “This incredibly callous treatment of young migrants as well as their families is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to erase any vestige of due process at the border with Mexico.“

https://apple.news/AfPeFLsDGQTyTuvEeyuQsIg

Esther Wang writes in Jezebel:

Another day, another extreme cruelty: according to a report in the New York Times, the Trump administration has deported almost 1,000 migrant children and teens during the past two months of the covid-19 pandemic, sending them out of the United States alone and at times putting them on a flight without even telling their family members. Stephen Miller, who is unfortunately still alive, must be thrilled.

Trump’s latest tactic in the service of slashing immigration is, as the New York Times points out, a complete 180 from past policy:

The deportations represent an extraordinary shift in policy that has been unfolding in recent weeks on the southwestern border, under which safeguards that have for decades been granted to migrant children by both Democratic and Republican administrations appear to have been abandoned.

Historically, young migrants who showed up at the border without adult guardians were provided with shelter, education, medical care and a lengthy administrative process that allowed them to make a case for staying in the United States. Those who were eventually deported were sent home only after arrangements had been made to assure they had a safe place to return to.

But now, not even children who are already in the United States with pending asylum cases are safe from deportation. As the Times reported, in addition to the more than 900 children and teens who were deported in March and April shortly after arriving at the border, 60 young people who were already being held in government shelters were also abruptly sent out of the United States, at times “rousted from their beds in the middle of the night.”

According to the Times, even young children have been put on flights by themselves. Take the case of Sandra Rodríguez and her 10-year-old son Gerson, whom she sent across the southern border with the expectation that once Gerson arrived in the United States, he would be able to eventually live with Rodríguez’s brother in Houston. But instead, shortly after entering the U.S., Gerson was sent to Honduras alone.

This incredibly callous treatment of young migrants as well as their families is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to erase any vestige of due process at the border with Mexico. Citing the pandemic, immigration officials have used provisions in the 1944 Public Health Act as justification to essentially close the United States to all asylum seekers who cross the border. The impact has been severe: In an almost two-month period from mid-March to May, only two people seeking protection on humanitarian grounds at the border were allowed to stay within the United States.

“What is happening at the border right now is a tragedy. We are abandoning our legal commitment to provide asylum to people whose lives are in danger in other countries,” Kari Hong, an immigration attorney and Boston College law school professor, told the Washington Post. “By invoking these emergency orders, the Trump administration is simply doing what it’s wanted to do all along, which is to end asylum law in its entirety,” she said.

While Trump administration officials have justified their likely illegal use of emergency orders in the name of public health, the fact that officials have also deported children and teens who were already in the care of the federal government sure indicates that something else is going on here. I wonder what that could be.

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

Who would have thought that America would become a nation of child abusers and that Federal Courts would be so feckless and complicit in the face of such clear abuses? Three years of concerted failure, led by John Roberts and the Supremes, to give meaning to Due Process and Equal Protection in the face of the “New Jim Crow” have emboldened the regime’s White Nationalist, anti-American abusers while kneecapping democratic and constitutional institutions.

Then, there’s the extreme, wanton cruelty and dehumanization inflicted on the mostly vulnerable among us that has come to symbolize our nation in the Age of Trump. Like all the other abuses by the regime, it’s been “normalized” by feckless legislators and judges: “Another day, another extreme cruelty!” ☠️⚰️🤮🏴‍☠️

Somewhere down there in the fires of the underworld, Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous “Dred Scott Decision” must be feeling totally vindicated by Roberts and his gang!

Is this really how we want to be remembered by future generations? If not, vote ‘em out this November!

PWS

05-21-20

THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

From The Guardian:

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.

Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.

“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life

The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

People gather to protest the stay-at-home orders outside the state capitol building in Sacramento, California, this month. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.

“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”

Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.

‘It will disappear’: the disinformation Trump spread about the coronavirus – timeline

“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”

In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the above link.

Are we still “to be feared,” even if no longer admired or respected? Good question!

Probably, insofar as our collapse would take down a chunk of the world’s economy with it, leave a leadership vacuum, and change the balance of power, perhaps in favor of China, Russia, South Korea, Canada, and India. We also still have a big military and lots of sophisticated weapons, although modern terrorism has shown that sophistication in expensive weaponry is not always the “be all and end all” either for winning wars or causing mass disorder, death, and mayhem.

Still, as our civil governance and international influence disintegrates, what happens with and to our military is a huge concern and a “big X factor.” Will the tradition of “civilian control over the military” also fall victim to the kakistocracy and the failure of civilian governing institutions? What’s happened to our intelligence community under the Trump kakistocracy is likely a bad omen.

Who would have thought that Trump could do so much permanent or at least long-term damage in such a short period of time? And who would have believed that our centuries-old constitutional and democratic institutions, meant to protect individual rights, enforce the rule of law, and check unrestrained abuses of power by a megalomaniac, yet highly incompetent, dishonest, dangerous, and evil Executive would have crumbled so quickly and performed so haplessly when confronted by a President and an unscrupulous, corrupt, authoritarian regime and party of toadies perfectly willing to press aggressively inane and illegal policies and false narratives to destroy the nation and everyone in it as a means of pillaging and enhancing their own power?

Yet, here we are! Much of the rest of the world appears to “get” it. Yet tens of millions of Americans who continue to support and enable the kakistocracy don’t, or they simply don’t care about our nation and the common good.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

05-15-20

🏴‍☠️NEW JIM CROW: Miller Uses Pandemic To Revive Racist Myths & Stereotypes About Dangers Of Immigrants! — A White Nationalist’s Dream Comes True!

James “Jim” Crow
Symbol of American Racism

Stephen Miller Cartoon — Stephen Miller & Count Olaf
Evil Twins, Notorious Child Abusers

Caitlin Dickerson and Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:

From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.
The question was, which disease?
Mr. Miller pushed for invoking the president’s broad public health powers in 2019, when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu.
When vast caravans of migrants surged toward the border in 2018, Mr. Miller looked for evidence that they carried illnesses. He asked for updates on American communities that received migrants to see if new disease was spreading there.
In 2018, dozens of migrants became seriously ill in federal custody, and two under the age of 10 died within three weeks of each other. While many viewed the incidents as resulting from negligence on the part of the border authorities, Mr. Miller instead argued that they supported his argument that President Trump should use his public health powers to justify sealing the borders.
On some occasions, Mr. Miller and the president, who also embraced these ideas, were talked down by cabinet secretaries and lawyers who argued that the public health situation at the time did not provide sufficient legal basis for such a proclamation.
That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.
Within days of the confirmation of the first case in the United States, the White House shut American land borders to nonessential travel, closing the door to almost all migrants, including children and teenagers who arrived at the border with no parent or other adult guardian. Other international travel restrictions were introduced, as well as a pause on green card processing at American consular offices, which Mr. Miller told conservative allies in a recent private phone call was only the first step in a broader plan to restrict legal immigration.
But what has been billed by the White House as an urgent response to the coronavirus pandemic was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Mr. Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy, three former officials who were involved in the earlier deliberations said.
One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a “wish list” of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.
Latest Updates: Coronavirus Outbreak in the U.S.
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Updated 48m ago
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He had come up with the proposals, the official said, by poring through not just existing immigration laws, but the entire federal code to look for provisions that would allow the president to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.
Administration officials have repeatedly said the latest measures are needed to prevent new cases of infection from entering the country.
“This is a public health order that we’re operating under right now,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters earlier this month. “This is not about immigration. What’s transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health.”
The White House declined to comment on the matter, but a senior administration official confirmed details of the past discussions.
The architect of the president’s assault on immigration and one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers inside the White House, Mr. Miller has relentlessly pushed for tough restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, including policies that sought to separate families crossing the southwest border, force migrants seeking asylum to wait in squalid camps in Mexico and deny green cards to poor immigrants.
Mr. Miller argues that reducing immigration will protect jobs for American workers and keep communities safe from criminals. But critics accuse him of targeting nonwhite immigrants, pointing in part to leaked emails from his time before entering the White House in which he cited white nationalist websites and magazines and promoted theories popular with white nationalist groups.

. . . .

**********************
Read the full article at the link.

As America suffers, immigrants, both legal and “undocumented,” are on the front lines of those “essential workers” risking their lives to keep us healthy, safe, fed, and clothed.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazi Miller remains “on the dole” — publicly funded for putting out a steady stream of discredited and xenophobic actions designed to exploit, dehumanize, and demean many of the most courageous and necessary among us.

Can it get any more vile and disgusting?

Nearly 55 years after the end of WWII, Trump & Miller are reviving many aspects of the racist ideology and actions that we supposedly fought to end forever. Raises the question of who really won the war.

Always the opportunists, Trump and Miller now see the crisis that their “malicious incompetence” helped to aggravate as a chance to target both “Optional Practical Training” (“OPT”) for foreign students and Chinese students, one of the largest groups of those studying in the U.S. You can read about it in this article by Stuart Anderson in Forbes.https://apple.news/ADkCNTe_gTje__BlQ8c-8pg

Stuart Anderson
Executive Director
National Foundation for American Policy

OPT unquestionably benefits our country as well as the students, many of whom remain and become important parts of our society. The targeting of Chinese students certainly fits with the far right’s Anti-Asian movement that has helped spike a notable increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans during the pandemic. Could the revival of the Chinese Exclusion Act be far beyond on the Trump/Miller Jim Crow agenda?

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-04-20

LAW YOU CAN USE: Denise Hammond, Esquire, @ Grossman Young & Hammond With All You Really Need To Know About Trump’s Bogus Executive Order “Banning” Immigration! — It’s A Racist Diversion, But Still Another Blow To Democracy!

BLY EO MH dch FINAL

By Denise Hammond, Senior Counsel, Grossman Young, and Hammond:

4922 Fairmont Avenue, Suite 200 Bethesda, MD 20814 240.403.0913

8737 Colesville Road, Suite 500 Silver Spring, MD 20910 301.917.6900

THE EXECUTIVE ORDER SUSPENDING IMMIGRATION:

WHAT IT COVERS AND HOW IT DISTRACTS FROM EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

On Monday, April 20, 2020, Donald Trump tweeted that he would be “

Who is Barred by the Order?

The Order is relatively short and bars the following foreign nationals from immigrating permanently to the United States:

• Foreign Nationals Overseas Who Lack an Immigrant Visa or Green Card. With the exceptions discussed below, the Order applies to foreign nationals who do not have an immigrant visa or green card. Unless you are covered by an exception, you are barred from entering the United States as an immigrant even if you are processing, or planning to process, an immigrant visa at a US consul abroad. These visas could be through employment sponsorship, family sponsorship, or the Diversity Visa (DV) green card lottery as discussed below.

• Foreign nationals outside the United States. The Order only applies to individuals who were outside the US on April 23d, the date of issuance. Presumably, someone in the United States on that day could go home today, apply for an immigrant visa at the US Consulate there, and not be barred by the Order.

Who is Not Barred by the Order?

• Anyone in the United States on April 23. This bears repeating. If you are in the United States, you remain eligible to adjust your status to lawful permanent residence or, presumably, to apply for an immigrant visa abroad (discussed below).

1 The Order is entitled

signing an Executive Order

to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” This caused great consternation and

confusion among immigrants and their families, US businesses, and the immigration bar. On April

23d, Mr. Trump issued his Order.1 Now that we’ve had a chance to review it, we want to break it

down and explain who it does and does not cover, how it does nothing to make us safer or

strengthen the economy, and how it is another log on the anti-immigrant fire and a thinly-veiled

distraction from the lack of effective leadership to actually combat the Coronavirus.

“Proclamation Suspending Entry of Immigrants Who Present Risk to the U.S. Labor Market

During the Economic Recovery Following the Covid-19 Outbreak

• Nonimmigrants. It is very important to note that the Order does not prevent nonimmigrants from entering the United States. As explained below, nonimmigrants are foreign nationals who enter the United States on a temporary basis and lack intent and permission to remain permanently.

• Anyone with an Immigrant Visa. You can immigrate if you already have an immigrant visa. An explanation of the green card process is helpful to understand this exception.

The Immigrant Visa (Green Card) Process. The process typically begins when the sponsor (e.g. an employer or US Citizen spouse) files an immigrant visa petition in the United States asking the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to find that the foreign national beneficiary satisfies the requirements for classification in a certain immigrant category, such as an outstanding researcher or the spouse of a US Citizen. On approval, when the beneficiary reaches the front of the visa waiting line (or if there is no line), he or she applies for permission to immigrate either through “adjustment of status” or “consular processing.” If the beneficiary is in the United States, in H-1B visa status for instance, s/he can apply to USCIS to “adjust” his or her status to lawful permanent residence. On approval, s/he will receive a green card. If the beneficiary is overseas, however, s/he must apply to the US Consulate in his or her home country for an immigrant visa. On approval, s/he will be granted an immigrant visa, can be physically admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident and will soon get a green card in the mail.

Anyone who is overseas and already has received an immigrant visa is exempt from the Order and can immigrate. (But keep in mind that the immigrant visa must be used within 6 months of issuance, which can be a problem given current global travel restrictions).

• Lawful Permanent Residents. The Order also does not apply to you if you already have a green card, lawful permanent residence or, as noted, an immigrant visa.

• US Military Members. If you are a member of the US military (or the spouse or child of a servicemember), the Order doesn’t apply to you.

• Healthcare Workers. The Order doesn’t apply to anyone overseas (and most immediate family members) who seeks an immigrant visa:

 as a doctor, nurse or other healthcare professional

 to perform COVID19 research

 to perform work essential to combating or helping patients with COVID19.

• Job Creation Investors. The Order does not apply to anyone who has an approved “EB-5” petition. This visa category if for foreign nationals who invest $1 million (or less in economically depressed areas) in projects that will create jobs for US workers.

• Special Immigrants. The Order does not apply to anyone certain individuals who see to immigrate under USCIS “Special Immigrant” programs, and their spouses and children:

 Afghanistan or Iraq nationals who supported the US Armed Forces as translators  Iraq nationals who worked for or on behalf of the US Government in Iraq2

• Law Enforcement Aid. The Order does not apply to you if you can satisfy the US Government that your immigration will advance important law enforcement objectives.

• National Interest. The Order doesn’t apply to you if you can show that your entry would be in the national interest.

• Holders of Advance Parole or other Travel Document. The Order does not apply to any foreign national who is overseas but who has Advance Parole or other official travel document.

• Asylees and Refugees. By its terms, nothing in the Order can limit the rights of asylees, refugees and foreign nationals that seek other forms of humanitarian relief. The Trump Administration’s assault on these forms of relief makes this suspect.

• Spouse and Children of US Citizens. The Order does not apply to a spouse, minor child or prospective adoptee of a US Citizen. In an especially harsh stroke, the Order bars from entry the parents of US Citizens and all family members of Lawful Permanent Residents (discussed below).

The Order gives the US Consul the authority to decide if any of the above exemptions applies.

ANALYSIS

The Order is a Harsh and Illusory Distraction from Failed Leadership and Does not Advance its Stated Purpose

A close look at the Order reveals the actual limits of its reach and shows that it fails to promote its stated purpose. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the Order is primarily a distraction from a failure of leadership in the war on Covid-19 and yet another log on the anti-immigrant fires.

The Order’s Limited Reach. The Trump Administration effectively gutted overseas visa processing more than one month ago when, on March 20, it suspended routine visa services at US Consulates around the world in response to the pandemic.3 Since then, absent an emergency, immigrant visa

2 https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/special-immigrants

3 https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/ea/routine-visa-services-suspended-worldwide.html

applicants have been practically prevented from processing their cases and immigrating to the United States. Thus, although it is not readily apparent, the Order does little if anything to further curtail immigration.

The number of foreign nationals who are NOT affected by the Order also suggests that its surrounding fanfare is a lot of white noise. This is because it only bars “immigrants” but not “nonimmigrants” who comprise the vast majority of foreign nationals who enter the United States. Immigrants, a/k/a lawful permanent residents or green card holders, are those admitted to the United States on a permanent basis. To be eligible, they must meet the highly demanding requirements of a legal visa category. These can be based on a hard-to-fill job offer, extraordinary contributions, a close family relationship to a US Citizen or lawful permanent resident, a US investment that will create jobs, humanitarian considerations or a few other grounds. Nonimmigrants, on the other hand, enter the United States temporarily for a specific purpose. These include highly skilled H-1B professionals, certain investors, business visitors and tourists, and students, and their family members, to name a few.

The number of immigrants to the United States is dwarfed by the number of nonimmigrants who enter temporarily and are allowed to remain for various periods. Just over 1 million immigrants are admitted to the United States annually; more than 186 million nonimmigrants are admitted in a typical year. During the most recent year for which data is available, 90% of nonimmigrants were visitors for business or pleasure, and a small handful were temporary high-skilled workers, some agricultural workers and students, with their families. Currently, about 2.3 million nonimmigrants reside in the United States. i Thus, the exemption of nonimmigrants from the Order underscores its limited reach and its true purpose of distracting from failed leadership and appealing to anti- immigrant sentiment during an election cycle.

The Order is Temporary. Additionally, the Order is limited to 60 days, although it could be extended. By its terms, it was designed to protect job opportunities for marginalized US workers during record unemployment. Whether it will be extended most likely will depend on the state of the US economy, although we fear that political considerations will come into play.

The Order Fails to Promote its Stated Purpose. As its title shows, the Order is designed to protect jobs for US workers. The preamble states that the Order was designed to protect unemployed marginalized Americans, from competing for jobs during high unemployment. However, the Order fails to accomplish this end.

First, the Order shuts the door to the best and the brightest and the most highly educated from around the world and a host of others who will not compete for jobs with marginalized US workers. These include foreign nationals with demonstrated “extraordinary ability,” outstanding researchers, multi-national managers, advanced degree workers and those with exceptional ability and a college- education, all of whom are barred from entering in what are known as the “EB” or employment- based immigrant visa categories. While these workers could boost the economy, they clearly will not take jobs from the marginalized American worker.

Second, the Order assumes that immigrants will seek to work once they get here. While some will, the Trump Administration’s exceedingly onerous “public charge” requirements make this a disingenuous basis for banning their immigration. As a general rule, an immigrant visa applicant must show that s/he will not become a “public charge.” This now requires voluminous evidence that the intending immigrant can support himself or herself and his or her household with an unprecedented degree of assets and income or that the sponsor can provide this level of support. Immigrants who are in a position to meet this high threshold are unlikely to compete with marginalized workers for low-skilled jobs. Accordingly, it is dishonest and cruel to close the doors to all immigrants, including family-based immigrants, based on an outcry for marginalized worker job protection. Rather, in barring all family-based immigrants other than the spouses and children of US Citizens, the Order accomplishes one of Mr. Trump’s long-stated goals of ending what he calls “chain migration.” Parents of US citizens, who have long been a preferred category under US immigration law, are barred by the Order. So are adult children of US Citizens, siblings of US citizens, as well as spouses and children of permanent residents. Congress has passed laws allowing these parents, children, husbands and wives to immigrate to join their families in the United States. The Order eviscerates this law and policy without reason.

Conclusion

Mr. Trump’s Order suspending immigration to protect the US labor market during the coronavirus pandemic is the legal equivalent of ear candling to treat liver disease. Neither works, and both are dangerous.

Fans of ear candling use a hollow candle to drip hot wax in the ear. They claim it creates negative pressure and funnels out unwanted ear wax. But there’s no evidence that it works. Additionally, the FDA warns that it can block the ear canal, puncture the eardrum and cause other injuries. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with liver disease.

Mr. Trump’s new Order, likewise, is unhealthy for us as a nation and economically toxic. It does nothing to protect job opportunities for marginalized Americans, which is its stated purpose. Instead, it closes our borders to the best and the brightest whose very help we need to wrestle the virus to the mat. It also cruelly separates families.

The corona virus does not discriminate on the basis of immigration status. Mr. Trump should behave accordingly.

i https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Nonimmigrant_Population%20Estimates_2016_0.pdf

*********

Here’s a copy of the order:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspending-entry-immigrants-present-risk-u-s-labor-market-economic-recovery-following-covid-19-outbreak/

Thanks, Denise!

What we really have here is an “Eternal Reichstag Fire.” 🔥 The Clown in Chief 🤡 continues to use bogus “emergencies,” as “greenlighted” by the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes, to suspend the rule of law and “govern” by Executive decree.

This looks less like the “immigration bar” tweeted by Trump for the benefit of his “base” and more like “Phase I” of Stephen Miller’s draft White Nationalist rewrite of the permanent immigration system. It’s basically a way of reducing permanent immigration by “picking on” relatives of U.S. green card holders, adult relatives (other than spouses) of US citizens, DV Lottery winners, and limiting “employment-based” permanent immigration to certain medical professionals, researchers, and “big investors.”

The attack on family immigration, at the core of our traditional immigration system and a source of both economic strength and diversity, is basically what has become the racist trope of “eliminating chain migration.” What it really means is attempting to restrict migrants of color for a “whiter, more Christian” America, long a dream of Miller and the White Nationalist hate groups he has been associated with.

Miller’s nativist program was resoundingly rejected by a bipartisan majority of Congress. But now, with the “J.R. Five” firmly in their pocket, and Congress largely in a state of permanent suspension when it comes to anything other than handing out money, Trump and Miller plan to rewrite the legal immigration system, piece by piece, using Executive decrees propped up by a bogus, but never ending, “employment national emergency.”

On the other hand, by allowing the admission of “non- immigrants” the order recognizes that we will continue to need migrants and their industry and skills at all levels of our economy as we recover. But, they will be relegated to a more subservient status where they are beholden to employers and can’t qualify to become permanent members of our society and eventually citizens. In other words, insuring that migrants coming to America will remain exploitable and disenfranchised. This fits right in with Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist playbook.

Once the bogus declaration of “immigration emergency” has been invoked as “temporary,” it never ends. But, with Roberts and his gang of right wing authoritarian enablers determined to “look the other way,” don’t expect any loosening until we stand up and rid ourselves of the Trump kakistocracy at the ballot box (unless Trump gets away with burning that too).

A corrupt and cowardly Supremes’ majority and a feckless Congress led by “Moscow Mitch” are allowing Trump’s “misrule by decree” similar to the Third Reich. And of course “the other” — immigrants — are the primary target.

But, this is also by implication directed at drumming up hate and resentment against Hispanic Americans, all Americans of color, and Muslims, etc. In other words, the “usual suspects” for the White Nationalists. This “Eternal Reichstag Fire” 🔥of hate, lies, scapegoating, and authoritarianism will continue burning and consuming our democracy and its institutions unless and until we get “regime change.”

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

0-24-20

TRUMP’S AUTHORITY OVER IMMIGRATION HAS LIMITS — SADLY, THE “J.R. FIVE’S” WILLFUL BLINDNESS APPEARS TO HAVE NONE! — Failing Partisan High Court Threatens American Democracy! — PLUS, BONUS COVERAGE: My “Mid-Week Mini Essay”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/trump-immigration-executive-order.html

Jennifer M. Chacon and Ervin Chemerinsky in The New York Times:

A president has broad powers over immigration under the Constitution and federal laws, but they are not unlimited. At the very least, there must be a reasonable basis for restrictions on immigration. None exists for President Trump’s threat to temporarily ban all immigrant visa admissions to the United States.

As with earlier, problematic immigration policies like the entry ban aimed at several predominantly Muslim countries, this proposal started out with a remarkably broad promise by the president: a ban on all immigration. That sweeping rhetoric has a cost of its own. Among other things, it may discourage international students from enrolling in American universities this fall, and otherwise signal “keep out” to visitors who would actually boost the economy. But beyond the rhetorical overkill, there are other problems with this ban. The actual policy proposal is much less than promised by tweet, but even in its whittled down form, it is still unlawful.

A ban on the entry of individuals who have been granted immigrant visas would not affect as many people as you might think. Although there are usually more than 180 million entries into the United States every year, most of that traffic is by people holding temporary visas. This policy would affect only those immigrants who have been authorized for permanent residency. That involves less than a million people — a number that has declined in recent years because of other entry bans, new requirements on immigrants and slow visa processing. The answer to the crushing domestic unemployment crisis caused by the coronavirus outbreak is clearly not going to be found in a ban on these immigrants.

On the other hand, the ban would cause enormous hardships for those who have been granted immigrant visas. Denial of green cards could keep parents and children and other family members from being together. Critical industries — including the overwhelmed medical industry — will lose out on vitally needed expertise just when it is needed most.

More on the Trump administration immigration policy.

Opinion | The Editorial Board

Coronavirus Doesn’t Care Where You Come From. Trump Still Does.March 31, 2020

One would think that such a draconian measure would have a strong justification. If nothing else, under the law, there has to be a legitimate basis for such an order. In upholding President Trump’s travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court stressed that it was based on a “DHS and other agencies … conduct[ing] a comprehensive evaluation” and “extensive findings.” The court found it constitutional because it served the legitimate purpose of national security.

In other words, even the court’s very deferential approach to presidential decisions concerning immigration in Trump v. Hawaii demanded that the actions be reasonable. The proposed ban on immigration cannot meet that test.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.

WISHIN’ & HOPIN’ WON’T MAKE IT SO: THE LAW IS NO LONGER SUPREME IN AMERICA — Obviously, Trump Has Placed Himself Above It, With Little Pushback From Congress Or A Compromised Supremes

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

April 22, 2020

I’m not going to argue with the scholarship of two distinguished academics like Dean Chemerinsky and Professor Chacón in today’s NY Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/trump-immigration-executive-order.html

But, I take issue with their characterization of Trump v. Hawaii, the so-called “Travel Ban Case,” as requiring a “reasonable justification” for Executive action in the area of immigration.

That’s what the rule should be; but, it isn’t. And, that’s unlikely to change as long as the “J.R. Five” rule the Supremes.

Even some of their “Brethren,” on the left side of the Court but the right side of history, gamely but vainly plugging away for our Constitution and some intellectual honesty from their righty colleagues, are struggling to process the obvious tilt taking place on what should be a “level plaything field.”

On the record in Hawaii, there was nothing approaching “reasonable” about the bogus “national security” grounds for the ban. The record made it clear that the real reason was invidious discrimination against Muslims to fulfill a vile White Nationalist driven campaign promise.

Almost every lower Federal Court to consider the issue realized and articulated this obvious controlling fact. It wasn’t “rocket science.” Just the courage, integrity, and decency to speak truth to power — what life tenure is supposed to be all about.

The “national security” ground was pure pretext that contravened the consensus of the Government’s own internal professional experts, as shown by the record. The “after the fact,” obviously contrived “letter” from Sessions and Kelly asking the President to act was as phony as a three-dollar bill. Indeed, the idea that either of these hacks was acting out of some genuine expertise and legitimate concern for the national security rather than just following “orders from on high” (Sessions also out of a lifelong embrace of racism and xenophobia) is preposterous.

The real message of Hawaii is that Trump can throw up any old fabricated or fraudulent rationale for xenophobia, racism, and religious bigotry designed purely for improper political purposes and the GOP Supremes’ majority will happily look the other way.

That’s apparently because the ideologues who control the Supremes truly believe the GOP far right dogma that some people are more equal than others and that only the rich and powerful truly deserve the protections of the law. That’s why corporations, guns, and Trump generally win before today’s Supremes while voters, African Americans, Hispanics, Democrats, immigrants, and unions generally lose. And, Trump “got” the “encouraging permissive message” of the “J.R. Five” (with Kavanaugh now substituting for Kennedy) loud and clear. He’s acted accordingly.

Trump is no legal scholar. But, he has spent a career using the courts as a battering ram to smash the rule of law to smithereens. This allows him to punish his enemies, reward his cronies, line his pockets, welch on his debts, stiff his creditors, and otherwise lie, cheat, and steal all the while escaping both legal and moral accountability.

If there is one thing that he can smell a mile away, it’s a toady judge. And, in Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, & Kavanaugh, the stench of cowardly complicity with tyranny is overwhelming.

To borrow from one of yesterday’s Courtside posts, the Constitution now appears to be essentially the “Maginot Line” of our democracy. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/04/21/failed-state-americas-clown-prince-%f0%9f%a4%a1-more-like-infamous-marshal-petain-than-leader-ofthe-free-world-but-the-leader-he-brings-to-mind-is/

Trump and his “Blitzkrieg” have simply outflanked and overwhelmed it. They have pushed decades of refugee, asylum, human rights, and immigration laws into a “mass grave” without any Congressional approval and, when expedient, have just ignored or directly contravened the clear intent of Congress. Any judge worth his or her salt would see this as an obvious existential assault on our Constitution and our fundamental values and act accordingly. But, not this Supremes’ majority. Certainly, the “J.R. Five” would have been right at home serving Henri Petain and the Vichy regime.

The “J.R. Five” employs all sorts of obtuse legal jargon and gobbledygook to cover up their immorality and intellectual dishonesty. It would be a mistake, however, to expect them to stand up for the Constitution, the rule of law, and human decency where immigration policy is concerned.

Expect them instead to buy Trump’s bogus public safety and economic emergency rationales hook, line, and sinker. Heck, this might even be a great opportunity for them to intervene at the U.S. District Court level to facilitate the abuse, further demoralize District Court Judges, reinforce xenophobia, suck up to Trump, and do away with nationwide injunctions except where the regime requests them. The lives of the vulnerable are dispensable to this group of privileged ivory tower jurists.

Trump and the GOP can eventually be voted out of power. But, the problems of a Supremes’ majority that has life-tenure and has lost its way, legally, intellectually, and morally, will be with us for the indefinite future.

Until that’s changed, expecting help from the Supremes in protecting democracy from tyranny is like expecting honesty, reasonableness, and leadership from Trump. Not likely!

Academic analyses, no matter how brilliant or cogent, that fail to account for the partisan bias and political realities at work at the Supremes’ today won’t help us much in predicting the bleak future of the rule of law and individual rights in America if change and reform doesn’t come to all levels of our Federal Judiciary. Sadly, what’s happening today has little to do with what we all learned in law school.

We need to be prepared to meet and deal with today’s reality, no matter how unpalatable it might be. More important, once we retake control of our country and our destiny, we need vastly improved Federal Judges at all levels, particularly the Supremes. The “J.R. Five” are the anthesis of what we should be seeking and demanding in a future, better Federal Judiciary. Never again!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

04-22-20

FAILED STATE: America’s “Clown Prince” 🤡 More Like Infamous Marshal Petain Than Leader Of The Free World — “But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader,” Says George Packer @ The Atlantic!🆘😰👨🏻‍⚖️

Henri Petain
Famous French Collaborator/Traitor

George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

This article appears in the Special Preview: June 2020 issue.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Adam Chilton, Kevin Cope, Charles Crabtree, and Mila Versteeg: Red and blue America agree that now is the time to violate the Constitution

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

David Frum: Americans are paying the price for Trump’s failures

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Packer’s article at the link.

Very discouraging. But, it’s not too late, yet. We have a chance in November to throw out the Trump/GOP Kakistocracy and start rebuilding America with a vision of the common good, common sense, and human dignity! Be the best, rather than running a “race to the bottom.”

Let’s consign Trump and his toadies to the same “dustbin of history” as Pétain and his collaborators!

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

04-21-20

TWILIGHT ZONE: ABSURDITY, CRUELTY, INJUSTICE ARE THE ORDERS OF THE DAY IN “AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS” (A/K/A IMMIGRATION “COURTS’) — Podcaster Sam Graber Takes You Inside The Mind Numbing Reality Of A “Third-World Court System” Operating Right Under Our Noses!

Listen to Sam on “American Refugee” here:

LISTEN on the Web – https://odaction.com/americanrefugee-ep03/
LISTEN on Apple devices (Apple Podcasts) – https://pcr.apple.com/id1494027429
LISTEN on Android devices (Spotify) – https://spoti.fi/30r4Efi

In the days leading up to the coronavirus shutdown I journeyed into a shadow part of our justice system, a courtroom rarely seen by the public.

Detained immigration court is a place where lawyers aren’t provided for the defense, where judges and prosecutors are on the same team, where guilty is presumed and the all-too-often verdict a different kind of death.

Who are these immigration judges? What exactly is detained court? And how is it able to get away with operating outside of what we might call normal law?

Get ready because you’re about to go there, to see the injustice that isn’t being shut down.

This is American Refugee.

Written, Engineered & Produced: Sam Graber
Music: Rare Medium, Punk Funk Metropolis, New Sound Underground
Recorded: Minneapolis, MN
Original Release: March 2020

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

Disturbing and infuriating as Sam’s podcast is, I urge everyone to listen, even if you think you know what “really happens” in this godforsaken and deadly “darkest corner of the American ‘justice’ system.” Is this really the way we want to be remembered by generations that follow? As a country with so little collective courage and integrity that we allowed our fellow human beings to be treated this way? Think about it!

Even in this grimmest of worlds, their are true heroes. First and foremost, of course, are the dedicated attorneys of the New Due Process Army (“NDPA”), many working pro bono or “low bono” to vindicate essential legal, constitutional, and human rights in a system designed to grind them into dust and “dehumanize and demonize the other.”

Sound familiar? It should to anyone who studied Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. By and large, it wasn’t the “Brown Shirts” and the party faithful who enabled his rule. It was judges, lawyers, ministers, priests, businessmen, doctors, corporate moguls, and the average German who “facilitated” his annihilation of millions.

And, it started gradually, with laws stripping Jews of citizenship, property, and all legal rights and judges who enthusiastically enforced them, even against their own former judicial colleagues. Once people aren’t “humans” any more (Hitler liked the term “subhumans”) or “persons” before the law, there is no limit to what can be done, particularly when complicit judges join in the “fun and games.”

Among the other heroes are two “Courtside regulars:” Round Table Member Judge (Ret.) Ilyce Shugall and NAIJ President Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor.

Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Director, Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.

Hon. A. Ashlley Tabaddor — Hon. A. Ashley Tabaddor
President, National
Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”)

At a time when too many with knowledge of the travesty of what’s going on in our “Star Chambers” have chosen to look the other way or “go along to get along,” Ilyce and Ashley have consistently “spoken truth to power” in the face of a regime that often abuses its authority by punishing truth, honesty, and decency. Indeed, Billy Barr’s highly unethical move to “decertify” the NAIJ is a blatant attempt to punish and silence Ashley for revealing the truth.

One minor correction. Sam says that the Immigration Judges and the prosecutors both work for the DOJ. Actually, the prosecutors work for DHS. But, it’s largely a “distinction without difference” because the agenda at both DOJ and DHS is set by Trump, Miller, and the rest of the White Nationalist nativist cabal.

Indeed, former AG Sessions told Immigration Judges they were “partners” with the DHS prosecutors in enforcing immigration laws. So, the observation that in many Immigration Courtrooms migrants, including the unrepresented and children, face “two prosecutors” — the “judge” and the DHS Assistant Chief Counsel is accurate. The podcast relates how in some courts the “judge speaks for the prosecution,” the Assistant Chief Counsel is a “potted plant,” and nobody speaks for justice or the rights of the migrants. What’s missing: The impartial “neutral decisionmaker” required by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Thanks Ashley and Ilyce for all you do! You are true superstars!

As my friend, Professor Ayo Gansallo says on her e-mail profile:

Vote like your rights depend upon it!

“A country is not only what it does…it is also what it tolerates.”

Kurt Tucholsky

Due Process Forever! Star Chambers Never!

PWS

03-29-20

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

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

Dahlia writes in the WashPost:

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How soon we forget!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-22-20

BEWARE AMERICA: TRUMP IS USING HIS STUPID & BUNGLED CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE AS THE “REICHSTAG FIRE” THAT WILL BURN UP OUR CONSTITUTION!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5e6a530ec5b6dda30fc4be6e

Jessica Schulberg reports for HuffPost:

During his first address to the nation on the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump characterized COVID-19 as a “foreign virus” while touting his decision to institute travel restrictions with China and announcing plans to close the U.S. to visitors from most of Europe.

Meanwhile, he has been raked by critics — and the markets — for failing to thoroughly explain how the government plans to address the lack of tests and spiking number of cases across the U.S. His administration has for weeks downplayed the threat of the virus, even as experts warned it is on track to spread exponentially.

Trump clearly sees the novel coronavirus as just another foreign invader to keep out — a viewpoint reflected both in his policy proposals and the way he and his administration talk about the virus. This approach is in line with his overarching political strategy of exploiting Americans’ fears to justify racist, nativist policies.

“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” Trump said Wednesday about his administration’s response while blaming the European Union for failing to take steps to prevent contagion. Several European countries have fewer cases of coronavirus per capita than the U.S.

It’s not just Trump. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar repeatedly referred to the disease as the “China coronavirus” during a briefing last month. Anti-immigration zealot Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) — who is in self-quarantineafter being exposed to coronavirus at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland — has gone out of his way to describe the virus as the “Wuhan virus,” a reference to the location of the first outbreak.

When Gosar’s critics argued that the congressman shouldn’t spread racist stereotypes, Rich Lowry, the editor of the right-wing National Review, wrote an entire column insisting the illness be called the “Wuhan virus.” “China deserves to be connected to the virus that it loosed on the world,” he argued.

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

For those who don’t know the history, the “Reichstag Fire” in 1933 was a pivotal step in the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. At the time, Hitler blamed Communists. The actual cause of the fire has since been debated by historians: some say the Nazis started it themselves, while others say that it was an accident, or the act of a single arsonist.

Regardless of cause, all agree on the result. Hitler used it as a pretext to eradicate the constitution, punish the opposition, and place draconian authoritarian measures in place using the fiction of “national security.” This eventually led to the Holocaust and a World War that killed approximately 75 million.

Fact is that the coronavirus isn’t “foreign.” Viruses don’t possess or recognize nationality. Nor was it spread in the U.S. primarily by “foreigners.” Most cases initially reached the U.S. through U.S. citizens who took cruises or traveled abroad after the start of the virus abroad had been publicized.

Mexico, a frequent target of the Trump regime’s racism, has reported fewer than ten confirmed cases of coronavirus, as opposed to over 1,000 in the U.S. The Northern Triangle of Central America also appears to have avoided major outbreaks to date. On the other hand, the illegal and inhumane anti-asylum policies of the regime, as enabled by the Supremes and complicit Article III Courts, appear to present a realistic danger of spreading the virus to all of those countries which are ill-equipped to handle it.

The market as well as all medical experts recognized and reacted negatively to the idiocy of Trump’s Oval Office speech. The U.S. preparation, public education, and actual response to coronavirus has been one of the poorest and most inept in the world to date. To the extent that the U.S. has mitigated the disease, it has been largely the result of decisive actions by State Governors and local officials of both parties, although primarily Democrats, along with universities and sports leagues.

Expect Trump and his White Nationalists to use the danger to our public health that he didn’t cause, yet unnecessarily aggravated, as an excuse for more irrational, cruel, xenophobic, racist attacks on migrants. And, you can expect the “Chief of Complicity,” John Roberts, and his accomplices to continue to help promote Trump’s attack on human decency, truth, and our democratic institutions. John Roberts has never seen a transparently false “emergency” from Trump that he didn’t love or racism or religious bigotry so obvious that he would actually call it what it is.

Incompetent governance by a corrupt, selfish kakistocracy that promotes myths and conspiracy theories over truth, scientific knowledge, and the common good does not cause epidemics. But, it does unnecessarily aggravate them, hinder effective control, and gravely endanger the public health. It simple terms, it kills! Yet another reason why “regime change” in November might be America’s last chance for survival.

The coronavirus has surfaced perhaps the only competent high level official in the entire Trump Administration — Dr. Anthony Fauci. In case you haven’t noticed, there is no resemblance whatsoever between the scientific truth spoken by Dr. Fauci, who paints a honest but grim picture of the Administration’s half-assed efforts to date, and the unadulterated BS and party line spouted by Trump and the second most unqualified individual in the U.S. to handle a pandemic Mike “Super Sycophant” Pence. Talk about a “Confederacy of Dunces!” I’m just surprised that Trump hasn’t fired Fauci yet, given the well-known Trumpian aversion to all things true.

I’ve watched the smirking nitwit Rich Lowry of the National Review (too) many times on the “talking heads” where he is a favorite because he is one of the few Trump apologists who can put two consecutive sentences together in the English Language. Most of what he says is BS, but at least it’s comprehensible and reasonably articulate BS. And, despite the endless smirk, he isn’t as overtly rude and aggressively crude as most Trumpists. Jessica’s article confirmed my already low opinion of Rich. As Rome burns, by all means, let’s pontificate on what we should call the fire.

Still don’t believe we have “malicious incompetents” in charge? Check out the latest from the L.A. Times on how the regime is stiffing states, screwing the poor, and spreading disease and potential death by blocking states from using Medicaid to respond to the coronavirus. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-13/trump-administration-blocks-states-use-medicaid-respond-coronavirus-crisis

It’s never good to be governed by the malicious, stupid, and cruel in a time of crisis. Kakistocracy has consequences!

PWS

02-13-20

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

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

From the LA Times Editorial Board:

The U.S. betrays migrant kids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How soon we forget!

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

PWS

03-12-20

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

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

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . .

**********

Read the complete article at the link.

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

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

I also found this comment telling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How soon we forget!

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

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

03-11-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Feb. 24, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPLICITY HAS COSTS: Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/18/judges-meeting-trump/

Fred Barbash
Legal Reporter
Washington Post

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

By

Fred Barbash

Feb. 18, 2020 at 3:16 a.m. EST

The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.

Republicans defend Barr as Klobuchar looks forward to testimony

Lawmakers and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway commented Feb. 16 on President Trump’s tweets and the conduct of Attorney General William P. Barr. (The Washington Post)

On Sunday, more than 1,100 former Justice Department employees released a public letter calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case.

More than 1,100 ex-Justice Department officials call for Barr’s resignation

A search of news articles since the group’s creation revealed nothing like a meeting to deal with the conduct of a president or attorney general.

Rufe, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, could not be reached for comment late Monday.

The action follows a week of turmoil that included the president tweeting his outrage over the length of sentence recommended by career federal prosecutors for his friend Roger Stone and the decision by Barr to withdraw that recommendation.

In between, Trump singled out the judge in the Stone case, Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for personal attacks, accusing her of bias and spreading a falsehood about her record.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe said to USA Today. “We’ll talk all this through.”

Trump began disparaging federal judges who have ruled against his interests before he took office, starting with U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. After Curiel ruled against Trump in 2016 in a pair of lawsuits detailing predatory marketing practices at Trump University in San Diego, Trump described him as “a hater of Donald Trump,” adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.”

Trump keeps lashing out at judges

President Trump has a history of denouncing judges over rulings that have negatively affected him personally as well as his administration’s policies. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)

Faced with more than 100 adverse rulings in the federal courts, Trump has continued verbal attacks on judges.

Rufe’s comments gave no hint of what the association could or would do in response.

Some individual judges have already spoken out critically about Trump’s attacks generally, among them U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a colleague of Jackson’s in Washington, and most recently, the chief judge of the court in Washington, Beryl A. Howell.

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

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

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

How soon we forget!

Will Trump & Barr eventually separate Article III Judges’ families or send them to danger zones in Mexico or the Northern Triangle to “deter” rulings against the regime? Will Mark Morgan and Chad Wolf then declare “victory?” Will their families be scattered to various parts of the “New American Gulag” with no plans to reunite them? Will they be put on trial for their lives without access to lawyers? Are there costs for failing to take a “united stand” for the rule of law, Constitutional Due Process, human rights, and the human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

Why does it take the case of a lifetime sleaze-ball like Roger Stone to get the “life-tenured ones” to “wake up” to the attacks on humanity and the rule of law going on under noses for the past three years?

Complicity has costs!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-18-20

LINDA GREENHOUSE @ NYT: SUPREMELY COMPLICIT: Meanness Has Become A Means To The End Of Our Republic For J.R. & His GOP Judicial Activists On The Supremes! — What If They Had To Walk In The Shoes Of Those Whose Legal Rights & Humanity They Demean By Unleashing Trump’s Illegal & Immoral Cruelty On Migrants?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/supreme-court-immigration-trump.html

The Freudian concept of psychological projection refers to the behavior of people who, unable to acknowledge their own weaknesses, ascribe those same failings to others. President Trump provides a striking example in his multiple post-impeachment rants calling those who sought his removal “vicious” and “mean.” His choice of the word “mean” caught my attention, because I’ve been thinking for some time now that the United States has become a mean country.

There has been meanness, and worse, in the world, of course, long before there was a President Trump. But it doesn’t require suffering from the agitation of Trump derangement syndrome to observe that something toxic has been let loose during these past three years.

Much of it has to do with immigration: the separation of families at the border and the effort to terminate DACA, the program that protects from deportation undocumented young people brought to the United States as children. Removing this protection for hundreds of thousands of productive “Dreamers,” now pursuing higher education or holding jobs (or both), is an obvious lose-lose proposition for the country. It is also simply mean.

And the meanness radiates out from Washington. The mayor of Springfield, Mass., one of the biggest cities in one of the bluest states, has taken the president up on his offer to let local officials veto the resettlement of refugees in their communities. Tennessee enacted a law to cut off state money to cities that declare themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration enforcement. (At the same time more than a dozen counties in Tennessee have endorsed a growing “Second Amendment sanctuary” movement for gun rights.)

The meanness spreads to the lowest ranks of the country’s judiciary. USA Today reported two weeks ago that a common pleas judge in Hamilton County, Ohio, has adopted the practice of summoning ICE whenever he has a “hunch” that the defendant standing before him is an undocumented immigrant. “I’m batting a thousand. I haven’t got one wrong yet,” Judge Robert Ruehlman boasted.

In the Arizona desert, where thousands of border-crossing migrants have died from exposure and dehydration in the past decade, Border Patrol agents have been filmed kicking over and emptying bottles of water left for the migrants by volunteers. (This practice evidently preceded the Trump administration; the Border Patrol, in its union’s first-ever presidential endorsement, endorsed Mr. Trump’s candidacy in 2016, deeming him “the only candidate who actually threatens the established powers that have betrayed our country.” )

The United States attorney’s office in Tucson has been prosecuting people who enter the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge without a permit to leave lifesaving bottles of water and cans of food along common migratory routes. In 2018, a federal magistrate judge, in a nonjury trial, convicted four people for illegal entry and abandoning property in the desert wilderness. The four are volunteers for No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.

In their appeal before a federal district judge, Rosemary Márquez, the four invoked the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing that their actions were driven by their faith and their belief in the “sanctity of human life.” The government responded that the four had simply “recited” religious beliefs “for the purpose of draping religious garb over their political activity.” (I’m not holding my breath for the Trump administration to similarly ridicule the religious claims of employers who say they can’t possibly include the birth-control coverage in their employee health plans, as the Affordable Care Act requires, lest they become complicit in the sin of contraception.)

The administration met its match in Judge Márquez. On Jan. 31, finding that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act barred the prosecution, she overturned the convictions. Her 21-page opinion noted that human remains were regularly found in the area, and she had this to say about that fact:

“The government seems to rely on a deterrence theory, reasoning that preventing clean water and food from being placed on the refuge would increase the risk of death or extreme illness for those seeking to cross unlawfully, which in turn would discourage or deter people from attempting to enter without authorization. In other words, the government claims a compelling interest in preventing defendants from interfering with a border enforcement strategy of deterrence by death. This gruesome logic is profoundly disturbing.”

The headline on this column promises some thoughts about the Supreme Court, so I’ll now turn to the court. The country’s attention was focused elsewhere two weeks ago when five justices gave the Trump administration precisely what it needed to put into effect one of the most meanspirited and unjustified of all its recent immigration policies. This was the radical expansion of the “public charge” rule, which bars from admission or permanent residency an immigrant who is “likely at any time to become a public charge.”

The concept of “public charge” in itself is nothing new. It was part of the country’s early efforts to control immigration in the late 19th century, where it was used to exclude those likely to end up in the poor house or its equivalent. That historic definition — “primarily dependent on the government for cash assistance or on long-term institutionalization” — was codified in 1999 “field guidance” issued to federal immigration officers.

Last August, the administration put a new definition in place. Any immigrant who receives the equivalent of 12 months of federal benefits within a three-year period will be deemed a public charge, ineligible for permanent residency or a path to citizenship. The designated benefits include nutrition assistance for a child under the SNAP program; receipt of a Section 8 housing voucher or residence in public housing; and medical treatment under Medicaid. The new rule, titled Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds, aggregates the benefits — that is, three of the benefits received in a single month count as three months of the 12.

States, cities, and nonprofit organizations around the country promptly filed lawsuits, with varying preliminary outcomes. The plaintiffs argued that the drastic change in definition was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating the Administrative Procedure Act’s core requirement of “reasoned decision making.”

In October, a federal district judge in New York, George Daniels, ruled in favor of two sets of plaintiffs, one group headed by New York State and the other, a coalition of nonprofit organizations. Judge Daniels noted that the government was “afforded numerous opportunities to articulate a rational basis for equating public charge with receipt of benefits for 12 months within a 36-month period, particularly when this has never been the rule,” but that its lawyers “failed each and every time.” He explained that “where an agency action changes prior policy, the agency need not demonstrate that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one. It must, however, show that there are good reasons for the new policy.”

And Judge Daniels added: “The rule is simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification. It is repugnant to the American dream of the opportunity for prosperity and success through hard work and upward mobility.” Noting that the policy would immediately cause “significant hardship” to “hundreds of thousands of individuals who were previously eligible for admission and permanent residence in the United States,” he issued a nationwide injunction to block its implementation.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit put the government’s appeal on a fast track but refused, in the interim, to grant a stay of the injunction. So, predictably, the administration turned to its friends at the Supreme Court and, equally predictably, got what it wanted. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court granted a stay of the injunction to last through a future Supreme Court appeal.

Granting a stay at this point was a breathtaking display of judicial activism. The Second Circuit will hear the case promptly; briefs are due on Friday. More to the point, the court’s summary action, without full appellate review, changes the lives of untold numbers of people for the worse, people who immigrated legally to the United States and who have followed every rule. Being kicked off the path to citizenship puts them directly on the path to deportation, without any explanation from the highest court in the land of why this should be the case.

Of the five justices in the majority — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — only Justices Gorsuch and Thomas deigned to write anything. In a four-page concurring opinion, they made clear their determination to hold up this case, Department of Homeland Security v. New York, as an example of “the gamesmanship and chaos” that they said was attendant on “the rise of nationwide injunctions.”

I don’t remember such hand-wringing a few years back when anti-immigrant states found a friendly judge in South Texas to issue a nationwide injunction against President Barack Obama’s expansion of the DACA program to include parents of the “Dreamers.” The Supreme Court let that injunction stand.

Do the justices realize how they are being played? I started this column by mentioning psychological projection, a distorted view of others engendered by a distorted view of oneself. That’s Donald Trump, seeing himself the innocent victim of attacks from vicious and mean people. There’s another kind of projection, the image reflected when light strikes a mirror. Who do these five justices see when they look in their mental mirrors? Could it be Donald Trump?

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

Eventually, the New Due Process Army will win the war to restore justice, Due Process, and the rule of law to our Republic. And one of the lessons should be: Better Federal Judges driven by fairness, scholarship, practicality, compassion, kindness, respect for all persons, and the courage to speak out for the rights of the people against tyranny and corruption.

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

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

How soon we forget!

Yes, Linda, I think the Supremes’ Justices and other Article IIIs who aid the “dehumanization” and “Dred Scottification” of migrants, asylum seekers, and “the other” by the regime know full well that they are “being played.” They are willing, sometimes as in the case of the recent totally gratuitous nonsense about targeting nationwide injunctions flowing off the pens of Gorsuch and Thomas actually eager, to “go along to get along” — even when it often means hanging braver lower court colleagues who had the courage to speak truth to power and stand up to tyranny “out to dry.”

Like judges during the Jim Crow era and other disastrous episodes of legal history, they think they can hide out in their ivory towers behind legal gobbledygook that most first-years law students can recognize as the nonsense “cop out” that it is. They also knowingly and intentionally betray the legions of courageous, ethical lawyers, many working pro bono in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, to uphold the rule of law in America and to defend human rights and human decency.

Hopefully, our Republic will survive this dark time, and these folks “working at the retail level,” many “charter members” of the New Due Process Army, will form the core of a future, better judiciary that will put Due Process and humanity first, above party loyalty and bizarre, often nonsensical, right wing theories used to justify lawlessness, injustice, unfairness, and invidious discrimination.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-15-20

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By Paul Wickham Schmidt

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April 22, 2020

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