ROQUE PLANAS @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP’S BOGUS CARAVAN THREAT MIGHT BE HIS MOST OUTRAGEOUS SCAM YET! — GOP’S Racist Commercial So Vile That Even Fox Pulls It!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fabricating-border-crisis-before-election_us_5be0a522e4b09d43e321d731

Roque Planas writes in HuffPost:

Almost every day last week, the White House thrust immigration to the center of national politics. The Pentagon announced plans to dispatch some 5,200 troops to the border with Mexico. Trump said he planned to eliminate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat. He announced a coming plan to bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and to detain them indefinitely in tent cities. To hear him speak at a press conference on Thursday, it would appear the United States faces an onslaught of illegal immigration.

None of this reflects reality. For the last eight years, arrests for illegal border crossing have been at their lowest levels since the 1970s.

But it does jibe with the strategy of a president who propelled himself to the White House by making specious immigration claims. Facing an election cycle that imperils the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the president’s message is clear: Voters should blame Democrats for a nonexistent catastrophe at the border.

The ad — which NBC abandoned, along with Fox and Facebook, after a major backlash — is part of Trump’s strategy to drum up fears of the caravan among his base. CNN declined to air it, calling it “racist.”

It’s also flatly false.

Luis Bracamontes, the unauthorized immigrant in Trump’s ad, was convicted in 2014 for killing two Sacramento police officers and has nothing to do with the caravan.

The original version of the ad that Trump posted to Twitter was even more blatantly dishonest. After showing clips of a deranged Bracamontes ranting in court about how he would escape and kill others, it claimed that Democrats let him into the country and that they let him stay. It then it cuts to video of the caravan, giving the impression that it’s composed of similar fiends.

In fact, no one let Bracamontes in. He was deported twice, once in 1997 and again in 2001.

Some critics of the ad have noted that the last time he entered the country illegally appears to have been during the presidency of George W. Bush. He didn’t let Bracamontes in either, though. The fact is that Bracamontes evaded law enforcement, which is not in itself noteworthy. The rate of success for people who attempt to enter the country illegally multiple times never dipped below 96 percent until 2008, according to the Mexico Migration Project, the most comprehensive sociological database to track migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Implying that the migrant caravan is consists of dangerous criminals like Bracamontes is just as untenable as the claim that Democrats let him in. Among the several thousand people traveling through Mexico in the main caravan are 2,300 kids, according to UNICEF USA. The migrants are banding together in caravans not as some kind of invading force but as a way to seek protection in numbers from human traffickers.

The major challenge that the U.S. faces at the border is how to process efficiently an uptick in the number of Central American families and children who make asylum claims or ask for other forms of humanitarian relief from deportation. But that trend dates from 2014, so it’s hardly new.

It won’t be clear until after the midterm elections whether Trump will follow through on his barrage of immigration promises. But with less than 24 hours to Election Day, the more immediate question is how voters will react to his statements.

Mass migration from Mexico had petered out seven years before Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and blaming “open border” Democrats for an immigration crisis that didn’t exist. The strategy helped get him elected in 2016. On Tuesday, we’ll see if it works for him again.

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Lies, knowingly false narratives, corruption, scams on the American people, racism, intolerance, disrespect for millions of Americans and our Constitution — that’s just business as usual for the Trump Administration.

Truth is, the “Caravans” are doing favors for the US Government in a number of ways:

Easy to track;
Plenty of advance notice;
Reduces danger and deaths along the way;
Takes business away from professional smugglers;
Almost all “Caravan” members who actually reach the border (only a fraction of those who begin the thousand mile plus journey) are processed in an orderly fashion, either waiting patiently at ports of entry or turning themselves in to the Border Patrol immediately upon entry;
There is no evidence of significant numbers of “Caravan” members disappearing into the interior of the US without some type of inspection and screening — almost all those who are not summarily returned have gone through credible fear screenings and are either detained or released on bond after the Government confirms their identity and reasons for coming, and determines that they have credible cases for protection under our laws;
There is no record that I’m aware of that any “Caravan” has attempted to “storm the border” or violently attacked US border authorities en masse — why would they, since their only chance for survival is to hope and pray that the US authorities will actually live up to our legal responsibilities and give them a chance to seek legal protection under our laws?

However, if the Trump Administration continues to ignore our laws and to mount bogus attacks on fleeing refugees, they probably will be able to convince many of those folks that our legal system is a fraud and they had best employ the services of a professional smuggler to get them into the interior of the US where they can lose themselves in the crowd and probably save their lives — a sort of “do it yourself asylum.” And, while wasting taxpayer money on the “border hoax,” this Administration is failing to fund and intentionally ignoring international efforts to address the dangerous and chaotic conditions in the Northern Triangle that causes these refugee flows in the first place — and will continue to cause them until we put wiser and more honest policies into effect.

The real threat to our country’s security and future is Trump and his willfully blind or in some cases outright White Nationalist, racist, or purposefully racially tone-deaf supporters and enablers.

If that’s not the America you want and want for future generations, get out the vote to start regaining control of our country from a misguided yet loud and active minority trying to shove their lack of values down the rest of our throats! America is for all Americans, not just the “Trump Base” and their fellow travelers!

PWS

11-06-18

THE UGLY SIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY: Trump’s Paranoid Racist Midterm Campaign Evokes Memories Of Andrew Johnson’s 1866 Racist Rant!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-midterm_us_5bdca52ee4b01ffb1d0228e1

Paul Blumenthal writes in HuffPost:

President Donald Trump has ramped up his inflammatory racist rhetoric in the final days before the pivotal midterm elections that will determine if his corrupt administration will face any oversight from Congress.

Betting that fears of racial minorities will drive Republican voters to the polls, he has centered his closing pitch on a caravan of Central American migrants fleeing violence and poor crop yields in their home countries. He said, without evidence, that the caravan is filled with “many gang members” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” dropping the previous pretense (“terrorists”) to reveal a fear of all members of a minority group. “Women don’t want them in our country,” he added, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the migrants are rapists (similar to a claim he made upon launching his presidential campaign).

Guests on Fox News have speculated that migrants are carrying diseases like leprosy and that the caravan is a plot conceived of by rootless Jewish financiers seeking global domination like George Soros — the latter a paranoid conspiracy the president has also entertained. The president followed this up with a blatantly racist advertisement blaming Democrats for murders committed by an undocumented immigrant.

This racist closing pitch is not just rhetorical. The president deployed thousands of U.S. troops to the country’s southern border to repel “an invasion.” He said that soldiers should shoot any migrant who throws rocks at them. He announced plans for indefinite detention of asylum-seekers. He expressed a desire to repeal the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Donald Trump rallies his fans in Columbia, Missouri, by blaming unknown forces for organizing the migrant caravan that he deems “an invasion.”

In all of this, Trump has emulated the outrageous, bigoted and violence-encouraging campaign waged by President Andrew Johnson in the 1866 midterms. In his “Swing Around the Circle,” the first time a sitting president campaigned around the country for candidates, Johnson made the election a referendum on himself, with unprecedented barnstorming speeches featuring paranoid conspiracy theories, racist demagoguery and incitement to violence.

Johnson, an accidental president who came to power after an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln and another failed to kill him, was a boorish drunk, a former slaveowner and a racist who held sympathies with the now-defeated Confederates. He vetoed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposed the 14th Amendment, opposed giving freed black people voting rights in the South and mass-pardoned most Confederate soldiers and officials and offered them property while denying it to freed black people. All of this brought the ire of the Republican Congress, which overrode his many vetoes and passed the 14th Amendment.

And so Johnson took to the campaign trail to defeat congressional Republicans and replace them with proponents of white supremacy. Johnson’s tour began on the East Coast. As he moved westward and faced Republican-heavy districts in the Midwest that opposed his policies, he became increasingly unhinged.

He began by comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery leader of the Republicans in Congress, to Judas Iscariot. He attacked Sen. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, two abolitionists turned advocates for black suffrage. Then, at a stop in Cleveland, a heckler yelled out, “Hang Jeff Davis!,” a call to execute the former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Johnson could not resist a reply, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips? … Having fought traitors at the South, I am prepared to fight traitors at the North.”

The “Swing Around the Circle” degenerated from there. Johnson continued to call for the execution of his political opponents Stevens, Phillips and Sumner. He defended recent riots in Memphis and New Orleans where white mobs killed dozens of black Americans in a racist fury by claiming that his political opponents had radicalized black Americans. They had it coming, essentially.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was a white supremacist drunk who called for the execution of his political enemies.

“If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and trace it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the riot at New Orleans was substantially planned,” Johnson said at a stop in St. Louis.

Johnson roped in the famed and beloved Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to support him on his “Swing Around the Circle.” Grant, disgusted by Johnson’s speeches, fell ill and excused himself from the tour. According to a biography of Grant written by his aide Adam Badeau, the general believed the president “fostered a spirit that engendered massacre, and afterward protected the evil-doers.”

President Johnson’s defense of white massacres of black people as the product of his opponents supporting black civil rights only encouraged more violence — violence that would ultimately overtake the country and re-establish official white supremacy over the former Confederate states until the 1960s.

Much as Johnson’s rhetorical leniency toward white mobs killing black Americans inspired further violence, Trump’s racist midterm campaign has done the same.

The constant drumbeat of fear-mongering news about the Central American migrant caravan from the president’s mouth and amplified by conservative media triggered a virulent anti-Semite, who believed that Jews like Soros and the refugee resettlement nonprofit HIAS were funding the caravan, to take up arms and attack a synagogue, killing 11 people. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States.

That same week, police arrested a Florida man for mailing bombs to a litany of political figures that Trump claims as his enemies and, in some cases, promised to jail, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and, of course, Soros.

The president and his supporters claim to be outraged by assertions that their rhetoric and policies have in any way incited violence from right-wing terrorists. That same week, the lawyers for a Trump-loving right-wing terrorist who planned to bomb mosques in 2016 filed a brief asking for leniency from the court because their client was seduced into terrorism by Trump’s bigoted rantings.

GUILLERMO ARIAS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two children who are part of the migrant caravan of Central American refugees that the president claims are attempting to invade the U.S. The caravan is currently stuck in southern Mexico.

“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions,” the lawyers wrote. “A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’ See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government’s case.”

None of this is pushing Republicans away from Trump. If anything, they are drawing closer to his brand of paranoid racist incitement. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared on Friday that his Democratic opponent Rep. Beto O’Rourke may be funding the caravan with his campaign funds. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is running campaign ads fear-mongering about the “invasion” of migrants in an election in Tennessee, which is further away from the U.S.-Mexico border than the migrant caravan is currently.

Johnson’s campaign of racist incitement didn’t work in 1866. Instead, it became a referendum on the president’s reactionary encouragement of white supremacists in the South and the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Republican Party increased its congressional majorities and, having seen the worst of the president, impeached him after further fights over the future of black civil rights in 1868.

But Johnson survived impeachment, and the white supremacist regimes he helped foster in the South ultimately won full control and acceptance from the national government after a wave of terrorism and murder. “You will not replace us!” the white supremacists promised. A century and a half later, they marched on Charlottesville chanting the same thing. The president of the United States must’ve thought it sounded nice and decided to run on it.

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Donald Trump, the ugliest of Americans, and the leader of the kakistocracy, has brought out all the worst in contemporary America. He diminishes each of us and our country every day he is in office.

Start the democratic process for regime change by voting the GOP out of every office on Tuesday!

PWS

11-03-18

WONG KIM ARK: The Case Where The Supremes Rebuffed The Racist Attack On Birthright Citizenship!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chinese-cook-case-birthright-citizenship_us_5bd9ecf5e4b0da7bfc1689d6

Kimberly Yam reports for HuffPost:

During a time of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment, the Supreme Court ruled anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen.

By Kimberly Yam

As immigrants and their families continue to grapple with Donald Trump’s intent to end birthright citizenship, one Chinese-American’s 1898 case makes the prospect of such a move not so simple.

Wong Kim Ark, a restaurant cook who was born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after a trip to visit his parents in China. Ark was arrested, and his case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, where judges ruled that under the 14th Amendment, anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen.

Though Trump claimed he could sign an executive order to revoke the current birthright citizenship policy, Ark’s case set a precedent that’s remained the law of the land for more than a century. In fact, the policy could likely only be changed through a constitutional amendment.

“The bigger issue for us as a country is how do we create more pathways to citizenship, not whether we should cut it off,” Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice ― Asian Law Caucus, told HuffPost. We have a lot of people who already call America home who should have the opportunity to become citizens.

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Wong Kim Ark, a cook born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after visiting his parents in China.

Ark’s parents had arrived in the U.S. from China during a time of fierce anti-Chinese sentiment. The era had birthed the Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. The act also barred courts from granting Chinese immigrants citizenship.

Ark’s parents came to the country seeking U.S. citizenship but eventually left after the act had cut off any pathway to citizenship status. They had also feared the vigilante violence that often targeted Chinese immigrants at the time. In fact, the largest lynching in American history occurred in 1871. Hundreds had descended upon Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and the mob lynched an estimated 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants.

But Ark himself had a life in the United States, and, though he had traveled to China before and had been readmitted into the U.S. without any issues, his 1895 trip presented a host of problems. Authorities ordered the Chinese-American to return to the ship.

Chinese immigrant aid organization Six Companies stepped in to provide Wong legal help. Wong’s lawyer, Thomas D. Riordan, argued that the cook’s reentry into the U.S. was protected under the 14th Amendment. As the case escalated to federal court, immigration hard-liners fought back, claiming Ark’s “accident of birth” didn’t mean citizenship.

In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ark.

“If the Trump administration issued an executive order, it would be immediately challenged in the courts, and judges would likely rely on Wong Kim Ark to find the executive order unconstitutional,” Kohli said.

Many conservatives and even officials appointed by Trump himself disagree with the president’s stance on birthright citizenship.

“The plain meaning of this language is clear,” James Ho, whom Trump appointed as a federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2011 of the 14th Amendment.

Ho, then a solicitor general of Texas, wrote that “a foreign national living in the United States is ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ because he is legally required to obey US law.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) addressed Trump’s comments, telling a Kentucky radio station earlier this week that “you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order” ― to which Trump responded that Ryan “knows nothing about” birthright citizenship.

Kohli pointed out that those who oppose birthright citizenship are in the minority.

“It’s clear that most Americans have embraced birthright citizenship and believe that anyone who is born here should have the right to be a citizen. A few political leaders are trying to further a white supremacist agenda and create a ‘fix’ to a problem that doesn’t exist,” she said.

What’s more, “Many scholars have noted that birthright citizenship has helped the U.S. integrate each new wave of immigrants as their children are recognized as U.S. citizens.”

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While some have made the specious argument that Wong Kim Ark didn’t resolve the question for all time because his Chinese parents were legally residing in the U.S. at the time of his birth, that particular fact was not found to be significant or determinative by the Court. The sole exception they carved out was for foreign diplomatic officials and occupying enemy aliens in time of war, neither of whom were subject to the jurisdiction of the US. But, as former DOJ immigration litigator Leon Fresco has pointed out elsewhere, undocumented residents of the U.S. are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system in the numerous ways — most notably, they can be arrested, detained, removed, convicted, imprisoned, and are required to comply with all other laws applicable to persons in America. Indeed, most of them pay taxes in some form or another. Moreover, the absurdist arguments advanced by Trump and his White Nationalist restrictionists would effectively deprive the U.S. of jurisdiction to enforce immigration and criminal laws against undocumented residents!

PWS

11-01-18

HUFFPOST: HOW THE TRUMP-FOX CYCLE OF LIES, HATE, BIGOTRY, & RACISM IS DESTROYING AMERICA!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-caravan-fox-and-friends_us_5bd768c4e4b017e5bfd4c948?p9

Matt Gertz writes in HuffPost:

The role of President Donald Trump’s ominous warnings about the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday highlights the destructive consequences of Fox News’ grip on the president.

While Robert D. Bowers, the man accused of carrying out the mass shooting, had criticized Trump for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, critics pointed out that president had “stoked the fears of the Bowerses among us,” deploying incendiary and false rhetoric about the migrant caravan in hopes of bolstering the Republican Party’s standing. “The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day,” Adam Serwer wrote for The Atlantic. “But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.”

Trump, in turn, came into contact with that fiction via Fox’s fearmongering. The president’s first public statements about the caravan came in response to a segment he watched on the Fox News morning show ”Fox & Friends,” and in the weeks that followed, his rhetoric and that of the conservative network escalated at pace.

For more than a year, I’ve been studying the Trump-Fox feedback loop, my term for the way Fox News at times is able to set the national media agenda because the president watches the network’s programming, tweets about it in real time and adopts its particular fixations. As the rest of the press scrambles to cover Trump’s comments, Fox’s right-wing obsessions consume the news cycle, whether or not they were originally newsworthy. In this case, Fox News urged him to whip his followers into a frenzy over the caravan, and he did it. There’s no indication that either Fox News or Donald Trump will cut off this campaign of fear.

The caravan formed in Honduras on Friday, Oct. 12. By Oct. 15, it was already receiving substantial coverage on Fox News. The next morning, in response to a report on ”Fox & Friends,” Trump issued his first public statement on the migrants, warning the Honduran government that he would cut its aid if the caravan was not stopped. Trump’s comment generated more coverage both on Fox News and at other media outlets. On Wednesday night, Oct. 17, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and urged Republicans to make the caravan a key voting issue, claiming that “the left is eager” for the caravan to enter the United States.

The next morning, “Fox & Friends” repeatedly aired Gingrich’s comments and suggested that Republicans should take his advice. In response, Trump issued a series of tweets using the caravan’s advance to attack Democrats, saying they had “led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws)” an “assault on our country.”

The network and its most powerful viewer spent the next week raising the temperature, stoking fears about whether the migrants were criminals or terrorists, calling the caravan an “invasion” and describing its approach as a national emergency. Escalation bred response bred further escalation, with no sign of a line beyond which the president and his propagandists wouldn’t go.

Trump’s Fox-fueled commentary turned the caravan story into a major national news story as reporters sought to explain and contextualize what he was talking about. But the situation does not, on its face, justify the coverage the caravan has received. The migrants are currently in southern Mexico, their numbers are dwindling and, depending on which route the caravan chooses, they face a journey of 1,000 to 2,000 miles to the U.S. border that will take weeks or months. Those who make it to the border have the right to seek asylum, and those whose claims are rejected will be turned away. That’s what happened when a similar caravan ― which also drew vitriol from Fox News and then from Trump ― reached the U.S. border in May. The caravans have been going on for roughly a decade without issue. There is no crisis except for the one that Fox News and Trump have sought to create in order to get GOP voters to the polls.

I’ve written before of the perils of having a president who relies on conservative cable news hosts to help him understand current events. When federal policy and personnel shifts can be driven by a Fox-inspired presidential whim, the network’s influence is staggering. The greatest risk is that Trump could use his unilateral control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to a Fox segment; Trump was reportedly unnerved by b-roll the network aired in March 2017 of a North Korean missile launch, convinced that it was happening live. But on a day-to-day basis, the major concern is that the president is a demagogue who constantly lashes out at his perceived enemies in order to secure his base’s support, and Fox News’ programming is providing him with targets for his ire, whether that’s protesting NFL players or recalcitrant Justice Department officials. That pattern has played out again and again since Trump ascended to the presidency.

“Ordinarily,” Serwer wrote, “a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower.” So, too, it usually doesn’t make sense to attribute a president’s actions to a news network. But Trump is suggestible, he watches Fox News constantly, and the network’s commentators are aware of that. In lighter moments, the “Fox & Friends” hosts joke about the president’s tendency to watch the programs. In heavier ones, the program’s commentators openly offer him advice, telling him not to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller or pull troops out of Syria.

But on the Monday after the synagogue murders, nothing had changed. The migrants were again drawing coverage on “Fox & Friends” (“Border Battle Rages as Caravan Heads to U.S.,” read one chyron). And hours later, Trump tweeted that the migrants were conducting “an invasion of our Country.”

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Thanks to Trump, the GOP, and their myriad of lies, distortions, false narratives, and hate rhetoric, our democracy is on the ropes. If we don’t start voting these misguided folks out of office, on all levels, we wont have any country left.

PWS

10-30-18

TRUMP’S WRONG-HEADED IMMIGRATION & CLIMATE POLICIES LIKELY TO CREATE “PERFECT STORM” THAT WILL HAUNT W. HEMISPHERE FOR GENERATIONS! — “You can only shut the border if you’re willing to kill people.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-migrant-caravan-climate-change_us_

Alexander C. Kaufman reports for HuffPost:

The Trump administration is preparing to dispatch 800 troops and has threatened to shut down all entry across the U.S.-Mexico border as a caravan of thousands of Central American migrants travels northward seeking asylum.

It’s a textbook show of Trumpian drama, a fiery response intended to bolster the Republican case for stronger border protections ahead of next month’s election and following days of conspiracy-mongering and wall-to-wall Fox News coverage.

But within the thunderous saber-rattling over would-be asylum seekers is the overtone of President Donald Trump’s apparent long-term policy to deal with the anticipated social and political upheaval of rapidly worsening climate change.

Now ― with the White House poised to gut the federal government’s only two major rules to reduce planet-warming emissions, and Trump threatening to cut aid to drought- and violence-afflicted Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador ― critics say the administration’s strategy to deal with climate change is taking shape, frustrating national security experts who say hunkering down and militarizing borders will do little to mitigate global warming’s threats.

“A quasi-fascist policy of fear-mongering about immigration and corresponding militarization of the border is clearly the major thrust of Trump’s response to the mounting impacts of climate chaos,” said Ashley Dawson, author of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.

Despite the repeated dismissals of climate science by the president and many of his top advisers, the Trump administration officially forecasts that the planet is expected to warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century ― a projection buried in a 500-page environmental impact statement in August.

That’s roughly double the temperature scientists say will cause cataclysmic drought, storms and sea level rise, and roughly four times the warming the planet has already experienced since the pre-industrial era. Under those conditions, more than 1 billion people globally could be forced to flee their homes by 2050, and 2 billion by 2100. Tropical regions ― where many of the roughly 20,000 to 40,000 migrants who crossed the U.S. southern border each month in the past year came from ― are expected to be hit the hardest.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment Friday.

Migration from the trio of Central American nations surged 25 percent between 2007 and 2015 following the worst drought in 30 years, which left more than 3 million people hungry.

“The main driver is, yes, desperation,” María Mendez Libby, the country director of Oxfam Guatemala, told Earther this week. “They have seen it’s not a seasonal desperation. It’s an ongoing continuous desperation for their entire life.”

It’s difficult to draw a direct line between climate change and a migrant’s decision to leave home, and neither the United Nations nor nearly any other major countries currently offer legal avenues for asylum seekers fleeing the effects of global warming. New Zealand became the first country late last year to create a special status for climate refugees with 100 annual visas as low-lying island nations in its corner of the Pacific face existential threat of sea-level rise. On the opposite side of the ocean, a hotter climate is expected to parch once fertile lands. In an email, Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher, said “it’s likely that increasing drought in Central America is making it more difficult for farmers there to make a living.”

Lina Pohl, El Salvador’s environment and natural resources minister, made a similar declaration at a press conference in Panama this week: “The next migrants are going to be climate migrants.”

To some, the decision to send troops to the border demonstrates the president’s affinity for a “general approach of throwing the military at the problem.”

“The President had willing partners in Congress and could have worked on immigration, border security, DREAMers and all that,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, said in an email. “But he didn’t take advantage of that opportunity. Having missed the chance to seek actual reforms, we now get a militaristic and hasty response to a predictable stress.”

Such a response will do little to quell the long-term national security concerns posed by climate change, said Francesco Femia, president of the Center for Climate and Security.

“Climate change [is] contributing to make nations unstable, both nations in our neighborhood and others abroad,” said Femia, whose Washington-based policy institute includes former top national security advisers. “The best way, from a security perspective, is to bolster the resilience of those countries so you reduce the likelihood of instability, reduce the likelihood of conflict and reduce the likelihood of displacement that might force outward migration.”

That doesn’t seem likely in the near term. The president attempted to cut funding for United States Agency for International Development by 33 percent this year, though bipartisan support for the federal government’s dedicated aid agency staved off the proposal.

By deporting hundreds of thousands of Central Americans from the United States, the administration, like the Obama administration before it, is bolstering gang recruitment in countries like El Salvador, according to a December report from the International Crisis Group. That worsens the violence that many cite as a main reason for fleeing northward.

Even if the White House backtracks on “substantially” cutting the combined $500 million in aid the United States gave to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador last year, Trump has halted payment of the $3 billion the nation pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement to help poorer countries adapt to climate change.

In December, the Trump administration broke with two decades of military planning and removed reference to climate change from the White House’s 56-page National Security Strategy report. But if militarizing the border becomes long-term climate policy, Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian military historian, has said enforcement will require bloodshed.

“Remember the Iron Curtain?” Dyer said in a lengthy 2010 lecture. “You can only shut the border if you’re willing to kill people.”

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Yup. My observation after decades of study and involvement is the only ways to close a border are: 1) put up machine gun turrets and shoot anyone who approaches; or 2) make your country so completely miserable and unattractive that nobody wants to go there.

For everyone else, the best you can do is control. And control requires a realistic approach to legal immigration.

The Trump Administration’s studied disdain for history, science, and facts of all types can’t help but be bad news for us and the world, particularly future generations. Policies based largely on White Nationalism, racism, xenophobia and other irrational biases seldom succeed in the long run.

PWS

10-27-18

TRUMP’S OUTLANDISHLY BOGUS CLAIMS LITERALLY MAKE AMERICA A LAUGHINGSTOCK BEFORE THE WORLD’S LEADERS – The “Descended From Immigrants” “Leader” Of Our “Nation Of Immigrants” Tells Immigrants To Stay Away – No Longer The “Beacon Of Hope & Freedom!”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-to-migrants-stay-home-united-nations_us_5baa5317e4b07dc0b87e3987

Sebastian Murdock reports @ HuffPost:

Trump To Migrants: Stay Home

“Make their countries great again,” Trump said during a United Nations address of those seeking safety in the U.S.

By Sebastian Murdock

President Donald Trump delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he touted nationalism, got laughed at by world leaders, and told migrants to stop coming to the United States.

Trump began his address to world leaders by boasting of his supposed accomplishments.

“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country … So true,” Trump said. Laughter could be heard from those in attendance.

“Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK,” Trump said.

Later in the speech, the president launched into his anti-immigration views, saying illegal immigration “has produced a vicious cycle of crime, violence and poverty.” He added that the United States will not participate in the U.N.’s new global compact on migration, which the world body said would “develop a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.”

“Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens,” Trump said. “Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home counties. Make their countries great again.”

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

Compare Trump’s dishonest, selfish, and downright cowardly views on immigration with those of President Ronald Reagan as quoted by Philip Klein in an article in the Washington Examiner:

Saying that the setting was fitting, Reagan spoke of the families that came through Ellis Island right by the Statue of Liberty. “These families came here to work,” he said. “They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions, but this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered.”

He went on to say that, “They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. They came from different lands but they shared the same values, the same dream.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/heres-how-ronald-reagan-spoke-of-immigrants-when-he-said-he-wanted-to-make-america-great-again

Selfish nationalism, ignoring international institutions, racism, and “I can do what I want because I’m bigger and have more guns” attitudes are what caused World War I and World War II. Yet, here is America’s so-called “leader” diminishing us in the world’s eyes and spouting exactly the same type of ignorant, discredited garbage that led to two disastrous World Wars.

No wonder we are losing respect and becoming a laughingstock among nations.

No we’re not “MAGA;’ we’re “MARA” — and we are appearing ridiculous and cowardly to boot. What kind of country elects an “Evil Clown” like Trump to represent them on the world stage.

Get out the vote in November. Decent Americans need to take our country back from Trump and his non-majority “base” before it’s too late — for us and for the world! America is better than this!

PWS

09-25-18

INSIDE THE TRUMP-SESSIONS “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — “It was a nun who best summed up the experience as we entered the facility one morning. ‘What is happening here,’ she said, ‘makes me question the existence of God.’”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/family-detention-center-border_us_5b7c2673e4b0a5b1febf3abf

Catherine Powers writes in HuffPost:

In July, I left my wife and two little girls and traveled from Denver to Dilley, Texas, to join a group of volunteers helping migrant women in detention file claims for asylum. I am not a lawyer, but I speak Spanish and have a background in social work. Our task was to help the women prepare for interviews with asylum officers or to prepare requests for new interviews.

The women I worked with at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley had been separated from their children for up to two and a half months because of a policy instituted by the Trump administration in April 2018, under which families were targeted for detention and separation in an attempt to dissuade others from embarking on similar journeys. Although the separations have stopped because of the resulting public outcry, hundreds of families have not been reunited (including more than 20 children under 5), families continue to be detained at higher rates than adults crossing the border alone, and the trauma inflicted on the women and children by our government will have lifelong consequences.

To be clear, this is a policy of deliberately tormenting women and children so that other women and children won’t try to escape life-threatening conditions by coming to the United States for asylum. I joined this effort because I felt compelled to do something to respond to the humanitarian crisis created by unjust policies that serve no purpose other than to punish people for being poor and female ― for having the audacity to be born in a “shithole country” and not stay there.

I traveled with a group of amazing women gathered by Carolina, a powerhouse immigration lawyer and artist from Brooklyn. My fellow volunteers were mostly Latinas or women whose histories connected them deeply to this work. Through this experience, we became a tight-knit community, gathering each night to process our experiences and try to steel ourselves for the next day. Working 12-hour shifts alongside us were two nuns in their late 70s, and it was one of them who best summed up the experience as we entered the facility one morning. “What is happening here,” she said, “makes me question the existence of God.”

It was a nun who best summed up the experience as we entered the facility one morning. ‘What is happening here,’ she said, ‘makes me question the existence of God.’

I am still in awe of the resilience I witnessed. Many of the women I met had gone for more than two weeks without even knowing where their children were. Most had been raped, tormented, threatened or beaten (and in many cases, all of the above) in their countries (predominantly Honduras and Guatemala). They came here seeking refuge from unspeakable horrors, following the internationally recognized process for seeking asylum. For their “crime,” they were incarcerated with hundreds of other women and children in la hielera (“the freezer,” cold concrete cells with no privacy where families sleep on the floor with nothing more than sheets of Mylar to cover them) or la perrera (“the dog kennel,” where people live in chain link cages). Their children were ripped from their arms, they were taunted, kicked, sprayed with water, fed frozen food and denied medical care. Yet the women I encountered were the lucky ones, because they had survived their first test of will in this country.

Woman after woman described the same scene: During their separation from their children ― before they learned of their whereabouts or even whether they were safe ― the women were herded into a room where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials handed them papers. “Sign this,” they were told, “and you can see your children again.” The papers were legal documents with which the women would be renouncing their claims to asylum and agreeing to self-deport. Those who signed were deported immediately, often without their children. Those who refused to sign were given sham credible-fear interviews (the first step in the asylum process), for which they were not prepared or even informed of asylum criteria.

The women were distraught, not knowing what ICE had done with their children or whether they would see them again. Their interviews were conducted over the phone, with an interpreter also on the line. The asylum officer would ask a series of canned questions, and often the women could reply only, “Where is my child? What have you done with my child?” or would begin to give an answer, only to be cut off midsentence. Not surprisingly, almost all of them got negative results — exactly the outcome this policy was designed to produce. Still, these women persisted.

After a court battle, my clients were reunited with their children and were fortunate enough to have access to free legal representation (many do not) through the CARA Pro Bono Project. The women arrived looking shell-shocked, tired, determined. Some of their children clung to them, afraid to be apart even for a few minutes, making it very hard for the women to recount their experiences, which often included sexual violence, death threats and domestic abuse. Other children stared into space or slept on plastic chairs, exhausted from sleepless nights and nightmares. Still others ran manically around the legal visitation trailer. But some of the children showed incredible resilience, smiling up at us, showing off the few English words they knew, drawing pictures of mountains, rivers, neat little houses. They requested stickers or coloring pages, made bracelets out of paper clips. We were not allowed to give them anything ― no treats or toys or books. We were not allowed to hug the children or their mothers ― not even when they sobbed uncontrollably after sharing the details of their ordeals.

In the midst of this sadness and chaos, the humanity of these women shined through. One of my clients and her son, who had traveled here from Guatemala, took great pleasure in teaching me words in their indigenous language, Mam. She taught me to say “courageous” ― hao-tuitz ― and whenever our work got difficult, we would return to this exhortation. These lessons were a welcome break from reviewing the outline of the experiences that drove them to leave, fleshing it out with details for their interview. They wearied of my pressing them to remember facts I knew the asylum officer would ask about. They wanted only to say that life is very hard for indigenous people, that their knowledge of basic Spanish was not enough to make them equal members of society. Mam is not taught in schools, and almost everyone in Guatemala looks down on those who speak it. They were so happy to have a licenciada (college graduate) interested in learning about their culture. We spent almost an hour finding their rural village on Google Earth, zooming in until we could see pictures of the landscape and the people. As we scrolled through the pictures on the screen, they called out the people by name. “That’s my aunt!” and “There’s my cousin!” There were tears of loss but mostly joy at recognizing and feeling recognized ― seen by the world and not just dismissed as faceless criminals.

A diabetic woman who had not had insulin in over a week dared to ask for medical attention, an infraction for which she was stripped naked and thrown in solitary confinement.

There were stories of the astonishing generosity of people who have so little themselves. One colleague had a client who had been kidnapped with her daughter and another man by a gang while traveling north from Guatemala. The kidnappers told the three to call their families, demanding $2,000 per person to secure their release. The woman was certain she and her daughter were going to die. Her family had sold, mortgaged and borrowed everything they could to pay for their trip. They had never met the man who was kidnapped with them. She watched as he called his family. “They’re asking for $6,000 for my release,” she said he told them. He saved three lives with that phone call. When they got to the U.S.-Mexico border, they went separate ways, and she never saw him again, never knew his last name.

Another client I worked with was a different kind of hero. After confronting gangs trying to extort her in her country, she fled north with her son and was caught at the U.S.-Mexico border. She and her son were forcibly separated, and she was pressured to sign papers waiving her legal rights. Not only did she resist doing so, but she also took great personal risks to confront the ICE officials. “You didn’t need my signature to take my son away from me. Why do you need my signature to bring him back?” Then she loudly urged all the women in the room not to sign. “It’s a trick!” she told them. She made sure to write down the names and contact numbers of the women she was detained with. When I worked with her, she would often ask if she could call the relatives of one of the women to notify the family or see if she had made it safely to her destination. Every day I was at Dilley, this client took other women with her to the legal visitation trailer, trying to ensure that everyone had access to representation. She is a budding community organizer, a true example of the kind of concern, compassion and courage that our country needs.

Not everything I heard was so positive. Without exception, the women described cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of ICE officials at the Port Isabel immigrant processing center, near Brownsville, Texas. There was the diabetic woman who had not had insulin in over a week and dared to ask for medical attention, an infraction for which she was stripped naked and thrown in solitary confinement. Women reported being kicked, screamed at, shackled at wrists and ankles and told to run. They described the cold and the humiliation of not having any privacy to use the bathroom for the weeks that they were confined. The children were also kicked, yelled at and sprayed with water by guards, then awoken several times a night, ostensibly so they could be counted.

Worse than the physical conditions were the emotional cruelties inflicted on the families. The separation of women from small children was accomplished by force (pulling the children out of their mothers’ arms) or by deceit (telling the women that their children were being taken to bathe or get medical care). Women were told repeatedly that they would never see their children again, and children were told to stop crying because they would never see their mothers again. After the children were flown secretively across the country, many faced more cruelty. “You’re going to be adopted by an American family,” one girl was told. Some were forced to clean the shelters they were staying in and faced solitary confinement (el poso) if they did not comply. Children were given psychotropic drugs to ameliorate the anxiety and depression they exhibited, without parental permission. One child underwent surgery for appendicitis; he was alone, his cries for his mother were disregarded, and she was not notified until afterward.

The months of limbo in which these women wait to learn their fate borders on psychological torture. Decisions seem arbitrary, and great pains are taken to keep the women, their lawyers and especially the press in the dark about the government’s actions and rationales for decisions. One woman I worked with had been given an ankle bracelet after receiving a positive finding at her credible fear interview. Her asylum officer had determined that she had reason to fear returning to her country and granted her freedom while she pursues legal asylum status. Having cleared this hurdle, she boarded a bus with others to be released, but at the last moment, she was told her ankle bracelet needed a new battery. It was removed, and she was sent instead to a new detention center without explanation. A reporter trying to cover the stories of separated families told me about her attempt to follow a van full of prisoners on their way to be reunited with their children so that she could interview them. First ICE sent two empty decoy vans in different directions, and then it sent a van with the detainees speeding down a highway, running red lights to try to outrun her. Every effort is being made to ensure that the public does not know what is happening.

The accounts of the horrors that women were fleeing are almost too graphic to repeat. Of the many women I spoke to, only one did not report having been raped.

The accounts of the horrors that women were fleeing are almost too graphic to repeat. Of the many women I spoke to, only one did not report having been raped. The sexual assaults the women described often involved multiple perpetrators, the use of objects for penetration and repeated threats, taunting and harassment after the rape. A Mormon woman I worked with could barely choke out the word “rape,” much less tell anyone in her family or community what had happened. Her sweet, quiet daughter knew nothing of the attack or the men who stalked the woman on her way to the store, promising to return. None of the women I spoke with had any faith that the gang-ridden police would or could provide protection, and police reports were met with shaming and threats. Overwhelmingly, the women traveled with their daughters, despite the increased danger for girls on the trip, because the women know what awaits their little girls if they stay behind. Sometimes the rapes and abuse were at the hands of their husbands or partners and to return home would mean certain death. But under the new directives issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, domestic violence is no longer a qualifying criterion for asylum.

Two things I experienced during my time in Dilley made the purpose of the detention center crystal clear. The first was an interaction with an employee waiting in line with me Monday morning to pass through the metal detector. I asked if his job was stressful, and he assured me it was not. He traveled 80 minutes each day because this was the best-paid job he could get, and he felt good about what he was doing. “These people are lucky,” he told me, “They get free clothes, free food, free cable TV. I can’t even afford cable TV.” I did not have the presence of mind to ask him if he would give up his freedom for cable. But his answers made clear to me how the economy of this rural part of Texas depends on prisons. The second thing that clarified the role of the detention center was a sign in the legal visitation trailer, next to the desk where a guard sat monitoring the door. The sign read, “Our stock price today,” with a space for someone to post the number each day. The prison is run by a for-profit corporation, earning money for its stockholders from the incarceration of women and children. It is important to note the exorbitant cost of this cruel internment project. ICE puts incarceration costs at $133 per person per night, while the government could monitor them with an ankle bracelet for $10 to $15 a day. We have essentially made a massive transfer of money from taxpayers to holders of stock in private prisons, and the women and children I met are merely collateral damage.

I have been back home for almost a month now. I am finally able to sleep without seeing the faces of my clients in my dreams, reliving their stories in my nightmares. I have never held my family so tight as I did the afternoon I arrived home, standing on the sidewalk in tears with my 7-year-old in my arms. I am in constant contact with the women I volunteered with, sharing news stories about family detention along with highlights of our personal lives. But I am still waiting for the first phone call from a client. I gave each of the women I worked with my number and made them promise to call when they get released. I even told the Mormon woman that I would pray with her. No one has called.

I comb the details of the Dilley Dispatch email, which updates the community of lawyers and volunteers about the tireless work of the on-the-ground team at Dilley. This week the team did 379 intakes with new clients and six with reunified families. There were three deportations ― two that were illegal and one that was reversed by an ACLU lawsuit. Were the deported families ones I worked with? What has become of the Mam-speaking woman and her spunky son, the Mormon woman and her soft-spoken daughter, the budding community organizer who joked about visiting me? Are they safely with relatives in California, North Carolina and Ohio? In each case, I cannot bear to imagine the alternative, the violence and poverty that await them. I have to continue to hope that with the right advocates, some people can still find refuge here, can make a new life ― that our country might live up to its promises.

Catherine Powers is a middle school social studies teacher. She lives in Colorado with her wife and two daughters.

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Yes, every Administration has used and misused immigration detention to some extent. I’ll have to admit to spending some of my past career defending the Government’s right to detain migrants.

But, no past Administration has used civil immigration detention with such evil, racist intent to penalize brown-skinned refugees, primarily abused women and children from the Northern Triangle, so that that will not be able to assert their legal and Constitutional rights in America and will never darken our doors again with their pleas for life-saving refuge. And, as Catherine Powers points out, under Trump and Sessions the “credible fear” process has become a total sham.

Let’s face it! Under the current White Nationalist Administration we indeed are in the process of “re-creating 1939” right here in the USA. If you haven’t already done so, you should check out my recent speech to the International Association of Refugee and Migration Judges entitled “JUST SAY NO TO 1939: HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS” http://immigrationcourtside.com/just-say-no-to-1939-how-judges-can-save-lives-uphold-the-convention-and-maintain-integrity-in-the-age-of-overt-governmental-bias-toward-refugees-and-asylum-seekers/

Even in the “Age of Trump & Sessions,’ we still have (at least for now) a Constitution and a democratic process for removing these grotesquely unqualified shams of public officials from office. It starts with removing their GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

Get out the vote in November to oust the GOP and restore humane, Constitutional Government that respects individuals of all races and genders and honors our legal human rights obligations. If decent Americans don’t act now, 1939 might be here before we know it!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-24-18

HUFFPOST: “’Demographic Change’ Doesn’t Cause Racism, Racists Do”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-laura-ingraham-immigration-racism_us_5b71e018e4b0ae32af9ab7f8

Noah Berlatsky writes in HuffPost:

“Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people,” Laura Ingraham declared in a now-infamous rant on Fox News, “and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”

America has more people of color than it used to, and for Ingraham, the natural result of that demographic change is anger, resentment and anxiety.

The truth, though, is that racism is not natural. It is an ideology cultivated by propaganda and designed to subjugate, terrorize, control and exploit marginalized people.

Claiming that racism is natural, or implying as much, as Ingraham does, is itself a powerful means of spreading and legitimizing racism. Because, if racism is natural, then white people aren’t to blame for it. Instead, they can blame “demographic change.”

Which is to say, they can imagine that racism is caused by the existence of people of color ― and that the solution to racism is to remove those people, in one way or the other.

Ingraham’s rhetoric is extreme. But the idea that racism is normal, expected and understandable is actually quite common.

Ingraham’s rhetoric is extreme. But the belief that racism is normal, expected and understandable is actually quite common. In their book Racecraft, Barbara Fields and Karen Fields point out that writers on racism frequently use phrases like, “black people are denied rights because of the color of their skin.”

No one is denied rights because of skin color. People are denied rights because racists decide to use skin color as an excuse for hatred and violence. Blaming racist acts on skin color, Fields and Fields write, “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is.” It is, they write, “a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.”

There’s a similar sleight of hand in blaming racism on “demographic change,” which transform racism into a natural disaster, like a flash flood or an earthquake. A recent Washington Post report on white workers at a chicken plant in Pennsylvania, for example, argues that “demographic anxiety is contributing to many of the social fissures polarizing the United States.” That’s a nicer way of paraphrasing Ingraham: White people aren’t racist, they just react helplessly ― and understandably ― to the experience of working alongside brown people.

Similarly, New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat recommended restricting immigration because “increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.” And social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in 2016 that “those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order.”

No one is denied rights because of skin color. People are denied rights because racists decide to use skin color as an excuse for hatred and violence.

Haidt, in particular, has argued at length that resentment of immigration or diversity is not racist. He argues that nationalism and love of a particular country and a particular culture is a valuable moral commitment. A shared sense of self or culture leads to lower crime rates and greater generosity, he says.

“People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses,” Haidt insists. “They hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear.”

That may well be true, but where do Haidt’s reasonably moral nationalists get the idea that certain people’s values are incompatible with their own?

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The Spanish-speaking people at the Pennsylvania chicken plant are doing hard work of the same kind and in the same place as their English-speaking co-workers. What’s the difference in values supposed to be? For that matter, Spanish-speaking people have been in the Americas longer than English speakers have been here. The idea that the United States is somehow essentially English-speaking not a permanent, inviolable truth ― it is a myth.

LEIGH VOGEL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Jonathan Haidt has argued at length that resentment of immigration or diversity is not racist.

Human beings are quick to organize in-groups and out-groups. And human beings also have huge latitude in how they conceptualize the membership of those groups. At one point in the United States, white American Protestants considered Irish Catholics to be dangerous outsiders whose traditions were fundamentally opposed to democracy and reason. Now, St. Patrick’s Day is seen as a celebration of quintessential American-ness. Irish people didn’t change; they were human beings then and they’re human beings now. White Americans just decided to start including the Irish in their in-group.

Deciding that someone is part of an out-group because they speak Spanish is a choice. Deciding immigrants don’t share “our” values is a choice. Insisting immigrants are criminals despite all the evidence to the contrary is a choice.

“These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues,” Haidt admits. But if your “moral concerns” are based on lies amplified by demagogues, maybe those concerns aren’t really “moral” at all. They certainly are not natural, unstoppable and unchangeable.

Deciding that someone is part of an out-group because they speak Spanish is a choice. Deciding immigrants don’t share “our” values is a choice.

Thomas Jefferson, as was his wont, outlined the logic of natural racism with unusual clarity. In explaining why he didn’t believe white people and black people could ever live together, Jefferson pointed to white prejudice and to black people’s resentment for years of oppression. But, tellingly, he also cited “the real distinctions that nature has made.” Jefferson believed white people hated and disliked black people because white and black people were fundamentally different from one another. Natural difference produces natural animosity. Racism, for Jefferson, is inevitable because race is real.

But Jefferson was wrong. Race isn’t a biological fact; humans are all the same species. There’s no instinctual demand that white people panic when someone with a different skin tone moves in next door. There’s no universal cultural imperative that says that English speakers must be filled with rage and fear when they hear someone speaking a different language.

“Difference” doesn’t make us hate. In fact, Ingraham and her ilk have it precisely backward: It’s the choice to hate that defines other people arbitrarily as “different.” When Ingraham says that “massive demographic changes” have made Americans angry, she’s blaming the victims of that anger.

But the existence of people of color is not the cause of racism. The cause of racism is racists like Laura Ingraham.

Noah Berlatsky is the author most recently of Nazi Dreams: Films About Fascism.

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Yup! Couldn’t agree more! And, blaming the victims is exactly what Trump, Sessions, Miller, Ingraham, and the White Nationalist restrictionists are all about.

Just say no to Trump, Sessions, Miller and racism!

PWS

08-16-18

GONZO’S WORLD: AG’S LATEST SCAM, “RELIGIOUS LIBERTY TASK FORCE” @ USDOJ WIDELY PANNED!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/twitter-sessions-religious-liberty-task-force_us_5b5f92bae4b0b15aba9bfcff

Mary Pappenfuss reports for HuffPost:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the U.S. Justice Department is launching a “religious liberty task force” — and Twitter erupted.

The new unit will aid the department in fully implementing the religious liberty legal “guidance” issued last year under President Donald Trump’s direction, Sessions said in a speech at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit in Washington.

The attorney general charged that the freedom to practice religion in America has come “under attack” in the nation’s current “cultural climate.”

A “dangerous movement, undetected by many, but real, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom …. It must be confronted … and defeated,” he added.

“We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives. We’ve seen United States senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma …. We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips,” Sessions added, referring to the Colorado baker who won a religious liberty challenge to LGBTQ anti-discrimination law in the U.S. Supreme Court after refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Sessions called freedom of religion “indeed our first freedom being the first listed right in the First Amendment” and said that the Trump administration is “actively seeking to accommodate people of faith.”

Sessions touted his department’s prosecution of attacks on religion, among them court actions shielding about 90 plaintiffs from Obama-era requirements that employer health insurance cover contraception, an amicus brief “we were proud to file” on behalf of Phillips, and indictments in an arson attack and threats directed at two mosques.

Twitter exploded, with critics charging that the Religious Liberty Task Force was a front to protect religious zealots attacking LGBTQ rights and an unconstitutional push to marry church and state on the altar of Christianity.

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Read the entire Article, including the “Twitter Storm” at the link. Some pretty funny but “right on” reactions!

Yet another taxpayer-financed scam by our corrupt and bigoted Attorney General. Obviously this is a thinly disguised effort to use Government funding and power to promote and establish far right-wing Christian views and biases.

Don’t expect any help for Muslims targeted for hate crimes, irrationally excluded under the “Travel Ban,” or targeted by anti-Muslim pronouncements of Administration officials and GOP right-wing politicos. Don’t expect any assistance or protection for those religious groups actually engaged in “God’s work on earth” and carrying out Christ’s true humanitarian, forgiving teachings by providing help to migrants and resisting inhumane and illegal Administration policies. Don’t expect any help for Bhuddists, atheists, deists, or any other non-right-wing Christian groups trying to vindicate their First Amendment rights. Don’t expect any help for members of the LGBTQ community whose rights are being trampled upon by so-called Christians who promote intolerance, discrimination, humiliation, de-humanization, and hate in the name of false “religious expression.”

Interestingly, Sessions himself has been charged within the Methodist Church (of which my wife and I are members) with violation of teachings of Christ and the Church’s own rules and values.

He’s a total scofflaw and a fraud, seeking to impose his corrupt, inhumane, intolerant views on the rest of us by abusing his Government position and squandering taxpayer funds on an anti-Constitutional attempt to establish particular “so-called Christian views” as the law of the land.

PWS

08-01-18

SESSIONS’S CLAIM THAT HE WAS “REQUIRED BY LAW” TO PROSECUTE ALL ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSERS IS BOGUS — CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS ARE ALWAYS DISCRETIONARY — “[W]hen it comes to prosecuting immigration laws, it’s never not a choice.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-hernandez-family-separations_us_5b5a0a30e4b0fd5c73cd2e59

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández writes in HuffPost:

When President Barack Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of U.S. citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him.

Within days of entering the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” To Republicans, prosecutorial discretion subverts the rule of law. Or so they say.

Government data about the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy toward border crossers reveal that it, too, is picking and choosing whom to target. In May, at the height of its policy of tossing parents into criminal proceedings while their children were hauled to government-run prisons, Border Patrol agents sent 9,216 people to prosecutors. That is about 1,000 more than in April and over 5,000 more than the same month a year earlier. The increase was especially noticeable in the family separation epicenter of McAllen, Texas, where I was born and where my law firm is based. Lawyers in my hometown saw 841 prosecutions in April jump to 2,079 in May.

That is a lot of people, but it’s not everyone. In May, Border Patrol agents stationed across the southwest border caught almost 29,000 adults clandestinely entering the United States. Eighty-five percent had no children; the rest are the parents whose anguish has been heard across the world.

Of all the adults apprehended that month, most were not prosecuted criminally. Only one-third were charged with a federal immigration crime. The rest presumably ended up in the civil immigration court system or in fast-track legal proceedings in which immigration officials deport people without taking them in front of a judge. Zero tolerance apparently didn’t mean zero exceptions.

It makes complete sense that the government did not go after everyone. The federal courts can’t handle that many cases. Picking and choosing is a part of every big law enforcement system. The important question isn’t whether that happens ― despite Republican insistence, it always does. The important question is why law enforcement officers choose to target some people over others.

. . . .

When it comes to taking a child from her parent, nothing is simple. And when it comes to prosecuting immigration laws, it’s never not a choice.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is an associate professor of law at the University of Denver, publisher of the blog crimmigration.com, and of counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law.

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

Of course separating children from parents has always been a choice driven by Sessions’s racism, White Nationalism, and xenophobia and having nothing whatsoever to do with sound law enforcement policy.

Indeed, studies have shown that so-called “zero tolerance” enforcement programs are failures across the board from a law enforcement standpoint. And, low level immigration prosecutions such as those promoted by Sessions have no documented deterrent effect. But, they have been shown to reduce the amount of time that Federal prosecutors and Federal Judges have to spend on “real” law enforcement, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, organized crime, and fraud.

PWS

07-31-18

HUFFPOST: UNDER TRUMP & SESSIONS, ICE ASSISTS DOMESTIC ABUSERS!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ice-domestic-violence-abuse_us_5b561740e4b0b15aba914404

Melissa Jeltsen reports for HuffPost:

Domestic abusers are known to be crafty, finding inventive ways to exert power and control over their victims. They use smart home gadgets to spy on their partners. They post revenge porn online. They rack up debt in their victims’ names. And as a recent incident in North Carolina demonstrates, abusers now have another powerful tool in their arsenal: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

On July 9, ICE agents arrested an undocumented woman and her 16-year-old son at a courthouse in Charlotte after they appeared at a domestic violence hearing.

The woman, who is being identified only as Maria, is living in a domestic violence shelter and has a protective order against her ex. But that morning, she was in court as a defendant, facing what her lawyer described as “bogus” retaliatory charges brought by her ex after she left him.

Those charges have since been thrown out, but they put Maria in ICE’s crosshairs. Now, she faces possible deportation.

Advocates say her case sends a chilling message to undocumented victims that abusers can essentially wield the immigration system as a weapon against them, and that ICE will be more than willing to help.

“ICE is effectively partnering with abusers to keep their victims from seeking help from law enforcement and the judicial system,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Maria’s arrest comes during a period of heightened immigration enforcement that has undocumented victims of domestic violence laying low. As deportations ramp up across the country, victims are trapped in a Catch-22: Ask for help and risk deportation, or stay with a violent partner and risk their lives. Many are afraid to contact police, pursue civil or criminal cases, or go to court for any reason. Advocates say abusers use this to their advantage, threatening to turn victims over to immigration officials and filing frivolous complaints to get them in trouble.

Maria, who is originally from Colombia, legally entered the U.S. in August 2016 but overstayed her visa.

In January of this year, Maria made the difficult decision to call police for help, her public defender, Herman Little, told HuffPost. According to Little, Maria’s ex-fiancé had beaten her, and when her son, then 15, had stepped in to stop him, the ex beat him too, injuring his arms and face.

“He was a brave young man to try to protect his mom from a grown man,” Little said.

Maria’s ex was arrested and charged with assault on the teenager. Maria fled to a domestic violence shelter with her children.

Nine days later, she was due in court to get a temporary protective order against her ex. That same day, her ex told authorities he wanted to press charges against Maria for allegedly assaulting him. Experts in domestic violence say it’s a common tactic for abusers to bring charges against victims. He later brought more charges, claiming that Maria had stolen items from his house. According to Little, the “stolen” items were personal belongings that she took when she fled to the shelter, like the baby’s crib.

“He used the criminal justice system as his bully pulpit,” Little said. The charges against Maria were dismissed by the district attorney’s office on Tuesday, he added. An attorney for the ex-fiancé did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On July 9, Maria and her son appeared at the Mecklenburg County courthouse to attend two hearings ― one for the charges against Maria and one for the charges against her ex involving her son. But inside the courthouse, plainclothes ICE agents arrested the mother and son and whisked them off to an ICE office, leaving behind Maria’s 2-year-old child, who was being looked after at the court day care.

It is unclear how ICE knew Maria was undocumented and would be in court on July 9, but Little recalls seeing her ex talking on the phone before the agents showed up. He suspects her ex called them.

At a rally on Friday in Charlotte, Maria described the arrest as “one of the most humiliating and embarrassing experiences I’ve ever endured” and said she was terrified about being separated from her 2-year-old.

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In an email to HuffPost, a spokesman for ICE, Bryan Cox, defended the decision to arrest Maria, saying the criminal charges against her prompted ICE’s actions.

“This person was in court as the defendant facing criminal charges themselves, not as a plaintiff,” Cox wrote. “You’ll have to ask local authorities why those charges were filed as ICE cannot speak to charges filed by another entity, but this fact is not in dispute.”

He did not explain why Maria’s son, who was in court as a victim in a pending domestic violence case against her ex-partner, was also arrested.

Archi Pyati, chief of policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works with immigrant women and girls who have survived gender-based violence, said ICE’s actions demonstrate “this administration’s willful blindness towards the realities of domestic violence and how they play out.”

Pyati noted this is not the first instance of ICE agents targeting domestic violence victims at court appearances. In February 2017, an undocumented woman was arrested while seeking a domestic violence protective order against her boyfriend.

In another case, ICE agents allegedly threatened to deport a domestic violence victim with an open U visa application ― which is intended to protect victims of crime from deportation after they come forward to work with law enforcement ― unless her estranged husband turned himself over to federal immigration agents. The woman has lived in Wisconsin for 20 years and does not know where her estranged husband is, according to a statement from Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee immigration rights organization.

Wilmarie Santos, a bilingual advocate who takes calls for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said a growing number of callers are reporting that their abusers are using their immigration status as a way to control and psychologically torment them. She described one caller who said her abuser threatened to hurt himself and tell authorities that she did it, and another who said her abuser threatened to falsely claim she’d kidnapped the children so she would be arrested.

“They basically comply with whatever is demanded of them,” Santos said. “Right now, contacting the police or getting help is not really an option for women [who are undocumented]. It’s terrifying actually ― their options are very limited and trust is a big deal for any victim of abuse, and on top of this you have this extra barrier.”

“The degree of fear and anxiety is at a level I’ve never experienced before,” said Monica Trejo, the director of phone service at the hotline, where she has worked for 12 years. “There’s definitely an increase in hopelessness.”

Maria is now in deportation proceedings, which her immigration lawyer, Lisa Diefenderfer, said they will fight.

“Had ICE done any minimal investigating they would have quickly discovered that the charges against her were retaliatory and going to be dismissed. She is not a danger to our community, she is a victim of domestic violence,” Diefenderfer said. “This completely changes her life.”

This story has been updated to reflect that the charges brought against Maria by her ex were later dismissed.

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

Sure, I know, Sessions technically isn’t in charge of ICE. But, let’s be honest about it: Kirstjen Nielsen is a lightweight sycophant appointed solely because she wasn’t going to resist or get in the way of the White Nationalist, racist immigration agenda of Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and Trump. And, she certainly hasn’t disappointed, demonstrating intellectual vapidity, moral cowardice, ignorance, and sycophancy in every possible way.

Sessions is a well-known unapologetic racist, xenophobe, and misogynist who has demonstrated his hatred and contempt for migrants, Hispanics, women, refugees, asylum seekers, and domestic violence survivors in every possible way. Apparently not satisfied with just abusing children, returning Latina refugees to harm’s way, and torturing individuals in the “New American Gulag,” he has now targeted domestic violence victims in the United States for abusive retaliation.

Behind the fake “law and order” facade, Sessions continues to be one of the greatest enablers, encouragers, and abettors of serious criminal conduct in modern American history! We can only hope that someday he will be held accountable for his actions.

PWS

07-26-18

HON. NANCY GERTNER: CAN THE LOWER ARTICLE III COURTS SAVE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY FROM TRUMP, SESSIONS, AND THE SPINELESS SUPREMES’ MAJORITY? — “Then there is the even more absurd claim that family separation deters asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S. Asylum-seekers will not be deterred by Trump’s cruelty; they have already decided to risk a dangerous trek from Central America to the U.S. because they believe their families will be killed if they stay.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-gertner-judiciary-trump_us_5b50d5a0e4b0b15aba8cc82b

Retired U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner writes in HuffPost:

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s final writing as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, his concurrence in the travel ban case, was a cri de coeur. It simply, even pathetically, lamented the court’s limited role in controlling a lawless executive.

Throwing up his hands, he wrote that the acts of government officials often are not subject to judicial scrutiny, while adding that this “does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it protects. The oath is not restricted to the actions that the Judiciary can correct.”

Wrong message, Mr. Justice.

Even though the travel ban the court upheld is not related to the asylum crisis — the travel prohibition is about immigrants coming here for all sorts of reasons, not asylum seekers fleeing violence in their country — to President Donald Trump, it does not matter. The high court’s decision is perceived as a vindication of all of his immigration policies, no matter how lawless, cruel and dysfunctional. And with Kennedy’s concurrence, it risks signaling that the judiciary will abdicate its own obligations to uphold our country’s laws and ideals.

Take “zero tolerance.” When asylum-seekers so much as step across the border, they are violating the law, according to this administration, even if they immediately present claims to an immigration official. The rule of law, the president insists, requires the prosecution of all crimes, no matter how trivial. This from the same man who pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio after he was found guilty of flouting a court order to stop racial profiling.

Then there is the even more absurd claim that family separation deters asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S. Asylum-seekers will not be deterred by Trump’s cruelty; they have already decided to risk a dangerous trek from Central America to the U.S. because they believe their families will be killed if they stay. In fact, the number of asylum requests has increased notwithstanding Trump’s policies; its driving force is violence in asylum-seekers’ home countries, not U.S. immigration policy.

Nor are these asylum-seekers miscreants intent on defrauding the U.S. or committing crimes. This year, fewer than 1 percent of those apprehended have presented claims found to be false. Studies show that in general, undocumented immigrants — of whom asylum-seekers are a part — commit fewer crimes than those born in this country.

Worse, Trump now wants to deport asylum-seekers without any review. We don’t need more judges, he says, just more border cops. Where is the rule of law here?

HANDOUT . / REUTERS

A view of inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in Rio Grande City, Texas, last month.

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The Constitution’s due process requirement applies to anyone physically in the U.S., whether they have arrived legally or not. Likewise, international law requires us to review whether asylum-seekers’ claims of violence are credible, and if they qualify, let them in. And obviously, this government should not threaten to take children from their parents unless the families agree to voluntary deportation. That’s not just the absence of due process; it’s the presence of extortion.

If Kennedy signaled his belief that the court has very limited power to control an errant president, his putative replacement, federal Circuit Coury Judge Brett Kavanaugh, may well be worse. He does not just lament court’s limited power to control a president, he embraces it.

Kavanaugh has a particularly robust view of presidential power in certain areas — significantly, national security or immigration. In Klayman v. Obama, the D.C. Circuit ruled against a challenge to the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program on technical grounds, in a per curiam decision ― meaning an opinion of the entire court and not any individual judge. Kavanaugh, however, felt the need to file a concurring opinion.

Rather than simply signing on the decision, he went out of his way to make the breadth of the president’s national security power clear: Even if the collection program were the functional equivalent of a search, the government did not need to seek a warrant from a judge because the president said the program was necessary to combat terrorism and that need outweighed any impact on privacy.

Echoing Kennedy’s lament in the travel ban case, Kavanaugh added that while the chief executive and Congress may want to limit the program, until they do the judiciary was literally without the power to control it. Not only was the door to a constitutional challenge was firmly shut; he wanted to make certain that everyone knew it.

But there are judges who are not simply wringing their hands about the limits of judicial review over immigration issues, like Kennedy did, or who are bent on deferring to the president whenever he intones a national security rationale, as Kavanaugh might well do. They are working each day to prevent this president from running roughshod over the Constitution ― not just in the executive orders that he promulgates but in the way his orders and policies are implemented on the ground, in the day-to-day encounters on our borders.

A federal judge in California, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a nationwide injunction temporarily stopping the Trump administration from separating children from their parents at the border. Another in D.C. blocked the systematic detention of migrants who show credible evidence that they were fleeing persecution in their home countries, halting a practice that is an obvious and unlawful attempt to deter them and others from seeking refuge here.

There will surely be others, because these judges ― like the president ― also swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. But for them, unlike the president, it is not an empty promise.

Nancy Gertner served as a Massachusetts United States District Court judge from 1994 to 2011, when she retired to teach at Harvard Law School. Her first memoir, In Defense of Women, was published in 2011, and a judicial memoir, Incomplete Sentences, will be published in 2019.

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

Almost everything that Trump and Sessions have said about asylum seekers and border policy is absurd — clearly refuted by the facts and by past failures.

Lies, racism, xenophobia, absurd positions, claims that are demonstrably false, just plain stupidity, fraud, waste, abuse, it’s all in a day’s work for Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and the other White Nationalists firmly committed to the downfall of American democracy.

And, as Judge Gertner points out, they are aided and abetted by a spineless “go along to get along” Supreme Court majority unwilling to uphold their oaths of office and defend the Constitution and our country against the outrageously unconstitutional, cruel, unjustified, and immoral actions of the Trump Administration.

Can the lower Article IIIs stem the tide long enough for us to get “regime change” at the ballot box and save America? The answer is a resounding “maybe.”

Better get out the vote in November to throw the White Nationalists/Putinists and their fellow travelers out of office. Otherwise, it might be too late for the world’s most successful democracy.

PWS

07-22-18

NEWS FROM JUST OUTSIDE SESSIONS’S “AMERICAN KIDDIE GULAG” – MOTHER & SON “CAMP OUT” NEARBY IN SEARCH OF TRUTH ABOUT OUR NATION’S OFFICIAL PROGRAM OF CHILD ABUSE! — “These children are victims of state-sanctioned violence — they are essentially experiencing child abuse — and the organizations claiming to serve children are wholly complicit in this abuse.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mom-camping-tender-age-shelter_us_5b476891e4b0e7c958f8cbd8

Ashley Casale writesin HuffPost:

In June, once school let out in rural Dutchess County, New York, I packed up my 7-year-old son and drove 2,054 miles to the Texas-Mexico border. I needed to see with my own eyes what is happening to migrant children separated from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s escalated “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

I told my son we were going, in person, to demand the reunion of children and parents. Gabe was up for the trip, no questions asked, as he always is when I tell him there is activism to be done. After two nights of sleeping in our car, three days of driving, and 1,764 inquiries of “are we there yet,” we arrived in Texas.

We visited six shelters in the border towns of Raymondville, Combes and Brownsville, and asked for tours. We were denied. Next, we asked to speak with representatives from BCFS or Southwest Key Programs, the organizations that operate these shelters. We were denied again. We were given business cards with the names of public relations officials to call, and repeatedly directed back to the Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families.

None of these contacts promptly returned my calls. So we pitched a tent outside Casa El Presidente, the “tender age” shelter operated by Southwest Key Programs in Brownsville, where children from the ages of 0 to 12 are being held, and we hunkered down for the night. Two weeks later, we are still here.

Our message is this: Reunite these small children with their detained parents now.

Every morning between 9 and 9:45 we can hear the sounds of children playing not far from our encampment. To get close enough to the opaque playground fence outside the shelter, we have to trespass in front of an abandoned building on the adjacent lot. From there, we can see the shapes of children running around — their little feet under the fence, the balls they are playing with flying up in the air. But we must make our glimpses stealthy and quick: Within 15 minutes, without fail, a police car arrives and circles the abandoned lot. Someone inside Southwest Key Programs has called the authorities because we have come too close to seeing the detained children.

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE

A photo Gabe took of kids playing in the back of Casa El Presidente. In the bottom left corner are freelancers for The New York Times.

We have become buddies with news crews who are covering what is happening at Casa El Presidente, exchanging Gatorade and bags of ice and tidbits of news as they wait patiently, sometimes all day, for an official rumored to be visiting the shelter to finally appear. On the Thursday of our first week here, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen supposedly visited, but this was not confirmed until long after her convoy of vehicles left. The members of the media here know as little about what’s going on as we do.

Last Saturday, we met a mother, Lesvia, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala with her son, Yudem, almost two months ago. She was taken into custody 56 days ago and finally released from the T. Don Hutto immigration detention center in Taylor, Texas, on Thursday. She was driven to Brownsville by representatives of the Austin-based organization Grassroots Leadership, who had advocated for her release, to have a one-hour visit with 10-year-old Yudem, who is being held at Casa El Presidente. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over a month. She sobbed as she was led away from our tent while CNN’s news cameras surrounded her.

She deserved to leave with him, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Trump administration has created so much red tape for parents trying to get their children back that she left alone. Lesvia was told that although she showed documents proving her relationship to Yudem, she needed to be fingerprinted and submit to a background check, and may not see her son’s release for another 20 days. I hugged her, kissed her forehead and told her “I’m so sorry” and “We love you.” The Grassroots Leadership representatives translated my words, but they were just words. Her tears wouldn’t stop. There is no comfort. There is no consolation.

I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.

While the Trump administration is flagrantly ignoring court-imposed deadlines and heartlessly taking its time reuniting children with their parents, each day that passes is agonizing and traumatic for the tender age children at Casa El Presidente.

I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.

Every morning, Gabe reminds me that it’s time to walk a few yards over to the guards and ask for a tour. I get tired of hearing “No ma’am, we cannot let you inside” and “No ma’am, we cannot release that information” when I ask an employee about what is happening in the shelter.

But every day we still ask for a tour, and every day we call the PR spokesperson for Southwest Key Programs asking for answers.

And, without fail, each day we do not get a tour and we do not get any answers.

So we wait.

Beside our tent we paint signs that read “Complicit,” “All we’re asking for is a tour,” “Try transparency,” “We will go home when the children are reunited” and “How many separated kids do you have?” My son made a sign, not in the neatest handwriting, that simply says “Free The Kids.”

Gabe doesn’t understand why one sign says “Give Yudem to Lesvia.” Don’t we want all kids reunited? he asks. I explain that sometimes telling the story of just one family can be more powerful. I tell him it can humanize what is happening more than a sign that reads “Reunite Every Child” might.

We spent the first few days here chasing after our signs, until we finally got smart about the Texas wind and bought some twining.

NORMA HERRERA

The author holds a sign reading “Give Yudem To Lesvia.” The photo was taken by Norma Herrera from Grassroots Leadership through her car window as she was driving Lesvia away from Casa El Presidente.

Southwest Key Programs, though nominally a nonprofit, is explicitly benefiting from the separation of children and parents through hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts. The employees, security guards and constables I have met in the last two weeks are not just “doing their job” ― they’re complicit in a national atrocity.

But it’s unclear to me if they know that. One security guard, referring to a sign we’ve made that originally read “14 days is running out” and now reads “14 days is up,” asked me, “Ma’am, what does 14 days mean?”

How could he be standing out here for a 12-hour shift and not know about the now come-and-gone court-imposed deadline that required children ages 5 and under to be reunited with their parents within 14 days?

The Trump administration claimed on Thursday that all children 5 and under would be reunited by that morning “if they are eligible.” But who decides eligibility? The administration has said, rather vaguely, that factors like a criminal record, having already been deported, or being “otherwise unfit” would make parents trying to reunite with their children 5 and under ineligible. It was then decided that only 57 children were eligible for reunification, and 46 were not. When, if ever, will those 46 children under 5 be reunited? And what about the thousands of children over the age of 5 who are currently in shelters? When will they see their families again?

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I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them — even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes.

The U.S. government has created a dehumanizing frenzy surrounding the notion of “illegal immigration,” and convinced the president’s supporters that we need more hostility, more arrests, more detention centers, more Border Patrol agents, more border wall. What we really need now is an army of moms and dads patrolling the border, demanding the reunion of these children with their parents.

Finding myself unexpectedly unemployed several months ago, I had the time, freedom and privilege to personally start this patrol. The idea of taking a 9-to-5 desk job and putting my son in day care all summer while children are in detention at the border and activists and lawyers are clamoring to get them released did not feel right, so I put my job search on hold. I needed to be on the ground, adding what I could to the work being done.

On the drive down, I briefed my son on what is happening at the border, and he talked about how he hoped to make friends with the kids in the shelters. We haven’t been able to get anywhere close to that. But at the very least, I hope he’s learning about the importance and power of direct action. This mother is fighting for other mothers. This mother is demanding answers. I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them ― even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes. When our tent is removed (this happened last week, while it was unattended for an hour), we get a new tent, move it even closer to the entrance and make our signs even bolder. We have it all set up before sunrise.

I also want my son to see that direct action works. When Lesvia arrived for her next one-hour visit with her son this past Thursday, one thing had changed: She had brought a tent with her. She planned to camp out with me and Gabe until Yudem was released, and she made this clear to Southwest Key Programs. Her story had gained press attention, and there were members of the media waiting outside while she visited with her son. Yudem was released to her shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, and she never had to pitch her tent.

Seeing Yudem come out of Casa El Presidente and tearfully walk over to our tent as Grassroots Leadership members translated our signs for him was magical. Seeing his face when he saw his name on a sign, as he realized complete strangers had been advocating for his release, was magical. And when Yudem cried as his mother kissed him, it was hard for anyone there ― including the reporters ― not to weep themselves. Still, as beautiful as this moment was, we cannot forget there remain dozens of tender age children just like Yudem inside Casa El Presidente waiting to be released.

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE

Lesvia kisses her son Yudem just moments after he was released from the Casa El Presidente shelter.

I finally spoke with Cindy Casares, a spokeswoman for Southwest Key Programs, after countless calls and a barrage of tweets from my handle, @BorderPatrolMom (and perhaps also after reports from inside Casa El Presidente that two people were camping outside). She wouldn’t confirm that where we’re camping is a tender age facility, although press has already confirmed this. She wouldn’t confirm how many children are inside. She wouldn’t discuss reunification plans.

The evasiveness and secrecy is all supposedly in the name of protecting confidentiality, but I believe this is about covering up the lies of the Trump administration and the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents. I believe Southwest Key Programs fully realizes that the American people would be outraged to know the truth about the suffering of the children inside, so everything is being kept under wraps. Rather than agitating for swifter reunions, they choose to play innocent and present themselves as a benevolent nonprofit simply complying with government orders. They could do more. They could do better. But it’s a good time to be in the business of immigration detention.

So, with no answers and very little having changed, we prepare for another night outside Casa El Presidente. I wouldn’t want my environmentalist friends back home to know I’m using bug spray with DEET, but we need it to ward off the Texas mosquitoes ― “little hummingbirds,” as my son calls them. We brush our teeth crouched by the front tire of our Prius, spitting toothpaste on the ground. We wash our hair using jugs of water left to heat up in the tent and shampoo ourselves in the middle of the street. It’s not exactly a glamorous life.

But every day, I’m reminded of our privilege. Every day I’m reminded that for my son, this is like a camping trip, an exciting adventure. We’re sleeping in a tent, eating food out of a cooler, tossing around a baseball with our gloves while we wait. He’ll assemble complicated Lego structures while I’m journaling or making phone calls or typing on my laptop: This is not all that different from being home. Every day I’m reminded that though it may be 100 degrees here and I may resort to dumping melted ice from the cooler over my head to cool down a bit, I have my son sitting out here with me, cuddling with me in the tent when the sun sets and waking me up when it rises. These parents and these children deserve the same.

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE

Gabe sitting on our cooler.

Still, there’s more to think about, beyond and after the reunions finally happen. While most discussions about what is taking place at the border have centered on the need to reunite separated children with their parents, we should also be discussing the trauma that has been inflicted upon these tender age children, which includes having a conversation about reparations. Who will pay for the therapy they will need to begin to heal from this terrifying experience? These children are victims of state-sanctioned violence — they are essentially experiencing child abuse — and the organizations claiming to serve children are wholly complicit in this abuse.

My son and I want Southwest Key Programs to reveal the number of children inside Casa El Presidente. We want to know the ages of the children being held here. We want to know how the people running this shelter, and all the other shelters like it, plan to reunite these tender age children with their families. We want to know the timeline for making this happen. In the meantime, you can find us at our campsite, demanding answers and refusing to leave until we get them.

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

As Ashley makes clear, the idea that anyone in the Trump Administration is acting for the welfare or in the best interests of these children is beyond preposterous!

Sessions plans to return all brown-skinned refugees to countries where they will be “sitting ducks” for gangs and domestic abusers and the governments will either join in or willfully ignore what’s happening. In other words, he intends to sentence them to lives of abuse or perhaps death without even fairly considering their claims for refuge. He just doesn’t care, because they aren’t white.

We all should be ashamed of what America has become under Trump & Sessions.

PWS

07-16-18

A-R-C-G- RULING SAVED THE LIFE OF THIS WOMAN, HER CHILDREN, & OTHERS LIKE THEM – SESSIONS PLANS “DEATH ROW” FOR FUTURE REFUGEE WOMEN & CHILDREN OF COLOR — Their Blood Will Be On Our Hands As A Nation If We Don’t Stop His White Nationalist Agenda!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/these-are-the-asylum-seekers-that-jeff-sessions-wants-to-turn-away_us_5b2b966ee4b0321a01ce5efb

Melissa Jeltsen reports for HuffPost:

BALTIMORE, Md. ― Aracely Martinez Yanez, 33, knows she’s one of the lucky ones. A deep scar that carves a line through her scalp, from crown to cheek, is proof of that fortune.

She got lucky when her abusive partner shot her point-blank in the head, and she survived.

She got lucky when she escaped her tiny village in Honduras. Local villagers blamed her for her partner’s death; he killed himself and their two young sons after he shot her.

She got lucky when she wasn’t harmed as she made the treacherous 2,000-mile journey to America.

And she got luckiest of all when she was granted asylum after she got here.

If she were to make her journey to America now, she would likely be turned away. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that immigration judges generally cannot consider domestic violence as grounds for asylum. Sessions overturned a precedent set during the Obama administration that allowed certain victims to seek asylum here if they were unable to get help in their home countries.

Domestic abuse of the kind experienced by Martinez Yanez is endemic in Central America. In Honduras, few services for victims exist, and perpetrators are almost never held criminally responsible. One woman is killed every 16 hours there, according to Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights.

For many victims, the United States is their best shot at staying alive.

While the exact numbers are not available, immigration lawyers have estimated that the Trump administration’s decision could invalidate tens of thousands of pending asylum claims from women fleeing domestic violence. Advocates warn it will be used to turn women away at the border, even if they have credible asylum claims.

“This administration is trying to close the door to refugees,” said Archi Pyati, chief of policy at Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that works with immigrant women and girls who have survived gender-based violence. They represented Martinez Yanez in her asylum case. Travel bans, increased detention and family separation are all being used as tools to deter individuals from coming here, Pyati said.

Still, that will not stop women from coming. Because there are thousands of women just like Martinez Yanez, and their stories are just as harrowing.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST

Aracely Martinez Yanez is pictured with her three daughters: Alyson, 4, Emely, 11 and Gabriela, 7. She holds her only photograph of her murdered sons: Daniel, 4, and Juancito, 6.

A Violent Start

Martinez Yanez grew up in a tiny village in Honduras with her parents and seven siblings. Her family made a living by selling homemade horchata, a sweet drink made from milky rice, and jugo de marañon, cashew juice. They also sold fresh tortillas out of their house. Her childhood was simple and happy.

But after she turned 15, a man in her village named Sorto became obsessed with her. At her cousin’s wedding, he tried to dance with her. She pushed him off: He was 15 years her senior, and gave her the creeps. A few days later, Martinez Yanez said, he waited outside her house with a gun and kidnapped her. He took her to a mountain and raped her repeatedly.

“I wanted to die,” she told HuffPost through an interpreter at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday. “I felt dirty. He said that I was his woman, and that I would not belong to anyone else.” As she told her story, she rubbed her legs up and down, physically uncomfortable as she recalled the terrible things that had happened to her.

Over the next six years, she said, Sorto went on to rape and beat her whenever he pleased. In the eyes of the village, she was his woman, just like he said. She got pregnant immediately, giving birth to her first son, Juancito, at 16, and her second son, Daniel, at 18. Sorto would come and go from the village, as he had a wife and children in El Salvador. But when he wasn’t there, she said she was watched by his family.

As for help, there were no police in her village, she said. She had seen what happened to other women who traveled to the closest city to report abuse: It made things worse. The police did nothing, and the abuser would inevitably find out.

“I felt like I was worthless, like I had no value,” she said.

A few years after her sons were born, she became friends with a local barber who cut her children’s hair. He was sweet and respectful, nothing like Sorto, she said. They began a secret relationship. Sorto had been gone from the village for a few years, and Martinez Yanez hoped she was free of him. Then she got pregnant. Scared that Sorto would find out, she fled to San Pedro Sula, a city in the north of the country. She didn’t tell anyone where she had gone.

But Sorto found her anyway. He called her on the phone and told her if she did not come back to the village within the next 24 hours, he would kill her family, she said. Martinez Yanez got on the next bus back.

A few days after she returned, she said, Sorto told her that he was taking her and their two boys to the river. He brought a hunting rifle with him. The family walked through the mountainside. Martinez Yanez recalled handing her children some sticks to play with, and crouching on the ground with them. Then she felt the rifle pressing into her head. The rest is a blank.

Sorto shot her in the back of the head, and killed her two sons, before shooting himself. Juancito was 6, Daniel was 4. Somehow, Martinez Yanez, five months pregnant, survived. She was hospitalized for months and had to relearn to walk and talk. She is still deaf in one ear, and has numbness down one side of her body.

When she returned home to the village, she said, people threw rocks at her and called her names. Someone fired a gun into her house. Someone else tried to run her over with a bicycle. The community blamed her for the killings because she had tried to leave Sorto, she explained. His family wanted to avenge his death.

“The whole village was against me,” she said. “Children, adults. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.”

A few months later she gave birth to a girl, Emely, but she was overwhelmed with stress. On top of grieving the death of her two sons, learning to live with a traumatic brain injury, and caring for her newborn, she was constantly worried about being killed by people in her village.

It was too much. She eventually fled to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, but Sorto’s family found her there too, she said. In a last-ditch effort to save Martinez Yanez’s life, her family paid over $7,000, an enormous sum for the family, to a coyote, a person who helps smuggle people across the border to the U.S. Emely, who was now 2, had to stay behind. They couldn’t afford to send her, too.

Martinez Yanez made the heartbreaking decision to go alone.

The Journey To Freedom

She left in the middle of the night, traveling with a group of four or five people. They were transported in a van for part of the trip, and then in taxis.

There was very little to eat or drink, she said, and she barely slept. Her stomach was upset and she suffered from debilitating headaches. In Mexico, she almost turned back.

“I missed my parents and my daughter so much,” she said. “But the threats and the conditions that I knew were waiting for me in my village gave me the motivation to continue to the U.S. to be safe.”

It took them two weeks to get to the U.S. border. Then they waited two days before attempting to cross, she said. She was terrified that she would be caught by immigration officials and sent back. She crossed the border illegally in February 2009, and went to her uncle’s house in Houston, Texas, before traveling on to Annapolis, Maryland, where her brother lived.

Women like Aracely are saving their own lives.Kristen Strain, a lawyer who worked on Martinez Yanez’s asylum case.

Martinez Yanez didn’t know that she could apply for asylum as a domestic violence victim until a few years later, when she sought medical care for her head injury in Maryland. There, she was referred to Tahirih Justice Center.

Kristen Strain, an attorney who worked on her case, wrote the legal brief arguing that Martinez Yanez should be granted asylum.

Generally, applicants must show that the persecution they have suffered is on account of one of five grounds: race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Strain successfully argued that being a female victim of severe gender-based violence in Honduras counted as a particular social group for purposes of obtaining asylum.

“There simply aren’t laws in place that protect women like Aracely,” she said. “They have no recourse. It is accepted in their communities that women can be treated like men’s property.”

She said it took over a year to gather all the evidence for Martinez Yanez’s claim, which included a neurological evaluation, medical documents, news stories from Honduran papers about the shooting, dozens of interviews, and statements from friends and family in Honduras to corroborate her story.

“It is not as if it’s easy,” Strain said. “In addition to having to physically get here, which is harrowing and dangerous, women have to navigate a complex legal system that is difficult to understand, especially when they don’t speak the language. It’s hard for them to even know what their rights are, let alone find an attorney who can advocate for them.”

“Women like Aracely are saving their own lives,” she went on.

Martinez Yanez was granted asylum in 2013. Her daughter, Emely, was allowed to join her in 2014. While they talked on the phone regularly, the mother and daughter had not seen each other for five years.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST

Martinez Yanez watches her daughters play outside the family’s Baltimore apartment.

A New Life

In her Baltimore home, more than 3,000 miles from the tiny village in Honduras where she was raised, Martinez Yanez likes to be surrounded by photos. They remind her of those she had to leave behind.

There’s one of her sister graduating college. Another of her parents beaming happily.

And then, hanging in the entrance to the kitchen, is a photograph of her with her two deceased sons. It is the only picture she owns of them. She brought it with her when she fled Honduras. When she spoke to HuffPost about her sons, she cried. She still doesn’t understand why they were killed.

Since she’s been in the U.S., Martinez Yanez has expanded her family. Emely, who is 11, now has two sisters: Gabriela, 7, and Alyson, 4.

“I’m very fortunate to be able to have my daughters with me,” she said. “I can’t ask for anything better to happen. I am so happy with my life.”

Martinez Yanez still struggles with the repercussions of being shot in the head. She is forgetful and can get confused easily. She said she has to put every appointment she has in her phone with an alarm, otherwise she’ll miss it.

She said she was grateful that she was granted asylum, and heartbroken for other women who may not have the same opportunity she did.

“I just feel so sad that other women in my situation, or even in worse situations than mine will not be allowed in the country anymore,” she said. “Here, I don’t have to hide or run away from anyone.”

So, without the interference of the DOJ politicos, here was an actual working system that helped get deserving cases granted and off the docket, conserved judicial resources, saved time, saved lives, and complied completely with Due Process. In other words, a smashing Immigration Court and U.S. system of justice “success story” by any rational measure!

That has all been disgracefully dismantled by Sessions. Now, following his perversion of the law in Matter of A-B-, He’s encouraging DHS and Immigration Judges to deny such cases without even hearing the testimony (even though every one of these individuals easily should qualify for the lesser relief of protection under the Convention Against Torture). That’s almost certain to result in appeals, prolonged litigation in the Courts of Appeals, and ultimately return of most cases to the Immigration Courts for full hearings and fair consideration.

At some point, not only is A-R-C-G- likely to be reinstated, but it is likely to be expanded to what is really the fundamental basis for these claims — gender as a qualifying “Particular Social Group.” It’s undeniably immutable/fundamental, particularized, socially distinct and clearly the basis for much of the persecution in today’s world!

In the meantime, however, those who don’t have the luxury of great pro bono representation, lack an attentive Circuit Court of Appeals, or who can’t get through the “credible fear interview” as it has now been “rigged for denial” by Sessions will likely be unlawfully returned to their home countries to suffer abuse, torture, and a lifetime of torment or death, along with those cute little kids in the pictures we’re seeing.

The White Nationalist, neo-Nazi regime of Trump, Sessions, and their enablers will be one of the most horrible and disgusting periods in our history. History will neither forget nor treat kindly those who failed to stand up to the racists and child abusers running and ruining our Government, and destroying many innocent lives in the process.

Due Process Forever! Jeff Sessions Never!

PWS

06-25-18

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE: JUST AS I’VE BEEN SAYING, THE SOUTHERN BORDER PROBLEM ISN’T ASYLUM LAW — IT’S THE CRUEL, CORRUPT, & IGNORANT TRUMP KAKISTOCRATS ADMINISTERING IT — ELISE FOLEY & JENNIFER BENDERY @ HUFFPOST TELL US ABOUT ANOTHER GREAT IMMIGRATION SOLUTION THAT WORKS — At Least It Did Work Until Trump & His Fellow White Nationalists Dismantled It For No Reason (Except Xenophobia & Racism)!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-family-detention-alternative_us_5b2d4731e4b0321a01d1002e

Elise Foley & Jennifer Bendery report for HuffPost:

The way the Trump administration talks about it, you’d think there are only two ways to respond to families crossing into the U.S. illegally: either separate kids from their parents while the adults are tried as criminals or put entire families into indefinite detention.

But there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.

The Family Case Management Program, which President Donald Trump ended several months after taking office, was meant to keep track of immigrant parents and kids in removal proceedings without having to keep them locked up. It was relatively small ― about 950 families in five locations. But it was hugely successful: More than 99 percent of families in the program showed up for their court dates, and 97 percent participated in required check-ins with their case managers, according to a report from Geo Care, the private prison company that operated the program. And it reportedly cost the government just $36 per family each day, versus $319 per bed per day in a family detention center.

Now, as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress seek to expand the government’s ability to lock up immigrant families long term, Democrats and immigrant rights advocates are asking why they don’t bring back the alternative program in an expanded version.

“In both bills the plan is to incarcerate families,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. “To put mothers in cages with toddlers, as if that’s the only alternative, which clearly it is not. Unless your intention is to be punitive and harsh and punish people before seeking asylum.”

The FCMP was meant for people deemed too vulnerable for detention, such as pregnant or nursing women or families with special needs children. It required families to be briefed on their responsibilities in the immigration court process, which can be complicated, and to check in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their case manager. Case managers referred families to services — such as lawyers and children’s school enrollment — and, if they received a deportation order in court, helped them prepare to return to their native country.

It was a success story for alternatives to detention, according to experts who served on an advisory committee for the program.

“The message is if you do this kind of frequent and fairly intensive case management, you can get almost 100 percent compliance,” said Randy Capps, the director of research for U.S. programs at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “You don’t have to detain people.”

ICE abruptly shut down the program last June with little explanation for advisory committee members, some of them said. They were simply told at a meeting that it would be their last.

Agency spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez said in a statement that ICE discontinued the program after determining that other alternatives to detention “proved to be a much better use of limited resources” with similar rates of compliance. She added that “removals of individuals on [alternatives to detention] occur at a much higher rate” than the FCMP.

“There are no plans to reinstate the FCMP at this time,” she said.

That method for assessing the program doesn’t make sense, said another former member of the FCMP advisory committee, Michelle Brané, the director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. The FCMP wasn’t in effect long enough for many of the participants to complete their removal proceedings, she said. She added that the program’s purpose was to ensure immigrants went to their removal hearings and that whether those hearings resulted in relief or deportation was irrelevant.

“The program’s efficacy shouldn’t be assessed by removals because if people are getting legal help and qualify [for relief], then that’s not a removal, but it is full compliance,” she said. “That means their system works.”

Another ICE spokesman, Matthew Bourke, said in an email that removals were “a relevant way to determine the program’s effectiveness” because a key reason ICE created the program “was to promote participant compliance with immigration obligations which included final orders of removal.”

He said that immigrants monitored under other alternatives to detention comply with court hearings more than 99 percent of the time and with check-ins almost 98 percent of the time.

But it’s unclear whether expanding alternatives to detention is part of Trump’s plan to address the issue of families arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s certainly not one he has boosted. His executive order this week, which he said would stop routine family separations for unauthorized immigrant families, presented only detention as an option.

Immigrant rights advocates are pushing for policymakers to remember that detention isn’t the only option.

“ICE has a whole range of alternatives to detention,” said Ashley Feasley, a former advisory committee member and the director of policy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration and refugee services. “These are existing programs that could be implemented now in lieu of building large-scale family-child detention facilities.”

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

Elise & Jennifer’s article ties in nicely with my essay yesterday “SOLVING THE SOUTHERN BORDER: It’s Not Our Asylum Laws That Need Changing — It’s The Actions Of Our Leaders Who Administer Them That Must Change.”

https://wp.me/P8eeJm-2Ij

As long as we treat refugees as a law enforcement issue and a political football that can be solved by “bogus deterrence,” rather than as a humanitarian crisis that requires empathy and a thoughtful effort to address the causes by working with the international community, our policies will continue to fail miserably, do more harm than good, and diminish us as a nation and as human beings.

We need better political and moral leadership from our nation’s leaders. That’s unlikely to happen with the current morally twisted, functionally incompetent, and tone-deaf White Nationalist Kakistocracy.

PWS

06-24-18

PWS

11-06-18

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A New Life

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