⚖️👎🏽🤮☠️HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS BLAST BIDEN, HARRIS, GARLAND, MAYORKAS FOR ILLEGAL RETURNS TO COLOMBIA, CONTINUATION OF MILLER’S XENOPHOBIC, DEADLY & CORRUPT TITLE 42 ABUSES OF HUMANITY!

https://bit.ly/3upncgP

Letter to Biden/Harris on Expulsions of Venezuelan Asylum Seekers to Colombia

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Refugee Protection

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Dear President Biden and Vice President Harris:

We, the undersigned organizations committed to the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, write to express our serious concerns over reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun a new practice of using Title 42 to expel Venezuelan migrants to Colombia. We understand that the first two Venezuelan individuals to be expelled under this policy were flown to Colombia on January 27, 2022 and that additional Title 42 expulsion flights to the country are expected to take place on “a regular basis” for Venezuelans who “previously resided” in Colombia. This practice represents a concerning and unacceptable escalation to your administration’s misguided approach to border and migration policy that flouts domestic and international refugee and human rights law. We urge you to cease these and other Title 42 expulsions immediately, to prioritize protection and access to asylum in your regional and domestic migration policies, and to engage asylum and human rights experts as you pursue new policies.

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One year into your administration, you have continued the misuse of a xenophobic Trump-era policy that weaponized an obscure provision of Title 42 of the U.S. code to summarily block and expel individuals, often repeatedly, from the U.S. southern border, without providing them the opportunity to seek asylum or the ability to access any protection screening required by law. These new flights to Colombia come amidst troubling reports that your administration placed on hold plans to restart asylum processing at U.S. ports of entry and that high-level officials have resisted ending Trump-era asylum restrictions, including Title 42 expulsions.

Title 42 expulsions have nothing to do with protecting public health and are not necessary to protect the public from the spread of COVID-19. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts, the UN Refugee Agency, and other humanitarian advocates have demonstrated that it is possible to protect public health and ensure access to asylum simultaneously. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) objected to the use of Title 42 for mass expulsions of migrants and confirmed such expulsions lacked a valid public health basis. Your Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has himself stated that immigrants are “absolutely not” driving a COVID-19 outbreak and that expelling migrants is not a solution to an outbreak.

Over the past twelve months, your administration expelled people—often expelling the same person repeatedly—from the U.S. southern border more than one million times. In just the first seven months of your administration, U.S. border officials carried out 704,000 expulsions, a significant increase from the Trump administration’s 400,000 expulsions conducted over ten months. In addition to the new expulsion flights to Colombia, DHS also carries out land expulsions to Mexico and expulsion flights to send individuals and families back to their countries of origin, including Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and Brazil. Even though your administration has acknowledged that “Haiti is grappling with a deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses…” – the U.S. has since September 2021, inexplicably chartered nearly 150 flights of almost 16,000 Haitians, including families with infants, back to a country that is unquestionably unsafe without offering them any opportunity to seek protection before expulsion. These expulsions under Title 42 violate the law and risk sending people back to dangerous conditions – sometimes the very ones that caused them to seek safety in the first place.

As you are aware, Venezuela is currently facing a severe economic, political, and humanitarian crisis. Millions of Venezuelans have left the country due to political persecution, a collapse of basic services, food insecurity, and rampant violence. Over 1.7 million Venezuelans are being hosted in Colombia and many have been granted temporary status there and only a small percentage of Venezuelans have sought asylum in the United States; however, Colombia is not safe for all Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Venezuelans, and all other individuals fleeing persecution have the right to seek asylum under U.S. law and to have their claims for protection assessed on a case-by-case basis. Your administration is blatantly violating the law by expelling these people to other countries in the region, such as Colombia, and we are deeply troubled by the informal and opaque arrangements with third countries that facilitate these expulsions. Your administration terminated several such agreements with Central American countries when you came into office, making these new flights especially concerning.

During its first year in office, your administration committed to a comprehensive regional approach to migration, aiming to strengthen asylum systems and refugee resettlement programs in the region and promote “safe, orderly, and humane migration.” Despite this pledge, your administration’s actions suggest that the United States seeks out negotiations with countries throughout Latin America that externalize its borders further south, shifts responsibility to countries already hosting millions of refugees, and impedes people’s ability to seek protection in the United States. Earlier this month, under pressure from your administration, the Mexican government implemented new requirements that Venezuelans obtain a visa to travel to Mexico. According to reports, your administration has also requested that Mexico sign a safe third country agreement, which could effectively block most individuals (except Mexicans) from seeking asylum in the United States.

We urge your administration to abandon efforts to prevent people from seeking asylum through externalized migration controls in the region and to undermine the right of people to seek protection in the United States. As you pursue other regional efforts, it is imperative that your administration operate with increased transparency and engage with asylum and human rights experts about potential efforts such as anticipated regional compacts on migration with other countries in the Americas. While regional protections must be strengthened, these efforts must not and need not come at the expense of existing protection mechanisms and access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, including at ports of entry.

Your administration has the responsibility to uphold U.S. refugee law and treaty obligations. We call on your administration to cease further expulsions of Venezuelan migrants to Colombia, and to immediately end its use of all expulsions under Title 42. Our organizations continue to welcome the opportunity to engage on and inform how to promote a protection centered approach to “safe, orderly, and humane migration,” including restoring access to asylum at the border, including at ports of entry.

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Let’s be clear about the equation:

immigrants’ rights = human rights = civil rights = racial justice = economic stability = common good

By failing miserably on the first, the Administration has found itself flailing and failing on the rest.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at DOJ! Garland has squandered the precious first year in office by NOT cleaning house at EOIR and bringing in practical experts in immigration/human rights/due process to remake and reform the system so that it can deal fairly, timely, and justly with asylum applicants applying at the border and and elsewhere in the U.S., as they are legally entitled to do.

Instead of expertly culling the vast majority of backlogged pending cases which are neither priorities nor viable removal cases at this point, Garland has built the unnecessary, largely self-created backlog at a record pace to more than 1.6 million with no end in sight! Add that to his disgraceful failure to stand up against illegal and immoral policies and clear violations of human rights at the border by his own Administration and you get today’s catastrophic situation.

“Standing tall” for the rule of law (and human decency) is supposed to be the Attorney General’s job. Why are these NGOs being forced to do it for him?

How bad have things gotten at Garland’s DOJ? This has already been a tough week that saw his DOJ attorneys “blow” a plea bargain in a major civil rights case, be excoriated by the 4th Circuit in a published case for a miserably botched performance in what should have been a routine “reasonable fear” case, and have Chairwoman Lofgren introduce her Article 1 bill with a broadside against DOJ’s horrible stewardship over EOIR.

As if to punctuate Chairwoman Lofgren’s critique, Garland topped it off with this gem: a beatdown in a pro se Salvadoran asylum case, which OIL basically failed to “pull” although the BIA decision conflicted with Garland’s own more recent precedent, from a Fourth Circuit panel that included two recent Trump appointees not heretofore known for vigorously defending asylum seekers’ rights! https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/pro-se-ca4-psg-remand-luna-deportillo-v-garland

Folks, this is NOT “good government.” Not by a long shot!

There is no more important task — NONE — facing DOJ than pumping some due process and quality back into immigration law and making the long overdue management, personnel, procedural, and legal quality reforms at EOIR.

Yes, that apparently would require Garland to take on some folks at the White House who obviously consider human rights to be a “political strategy,” integrity and courage optional, and live in mortal fear of Stephen Miller and far-right nativists. It would mean taking decisive actions to treat asylum seekers and other migrants (including many individuals of color) as “persons” under our Constitution. It would end the intentional “Dred Scottification of the other.” It would send some Sessions/Barr “plants and holdovers” packing from their current jobs!

Unquestionably, these moves would incite predictable, tiresome, apoplectic reactions by Miller and the GOP White Nationalist cabal on the Hill. They would put Garland “in the spotlight” and interrupt the serenity of his inner sanctum on the 5th floor of the DOJ where he apparently likes to contemplate the world and “things other than due process for immigrants.”

But, taking on folks like that is what good lawyers are supposed to do. As a public lawyer, it’s not just about being somebody’s “mouthpiece” — it’s standing up for the rule of law!

I among many others have said from the outset that Garland won’t be able to sweep the total meltdown at EOIR and in immigration legal positions under the table, much as he obviously would like them to go away! Yes, he inherited an awful mess from his Trump predecessors. But, almost a full year in, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for failing to initiate the common sense steps to fix it and to bring in experts who actually know what they are doing and have the guts and backbone to follow through — even when the going gets tough, as it undoubtedly will. The problems at DOJ go far beyond EOIR; but, EOIR must be the starting place for fixing them. There is no more time to lose!

Alfred E. Neumann — It’s time for Garland to start worrying about running “America’s most unfair and dysfunctional courts,” defending grotesque human rights violations and scofflaw policies by his own Administration, and a DOJ that takes untenable and embarrassingly bad legal positions before the Federal Courts. Much as he’d like to pretend that “immigration doesn’t matter,” or expressed a different way “human lives don’t matter if they are only migrants,” he’s starting to get pressure from Congress, the Article IIIs, and NGOs to fix EOIR and “shape up” the DOJ’s lousy, sometimes unprofessional and ethically questionable, approach to immigration, human rights, and racial justice issues. Justice for immigrants is the starting point for achieving racial justice in America.
PHOTO: Wikipedia Commons

Garland’s failure to institute widely recommended common sense legal reforms — government for the common good — at EOIR undermines our democracy while endangering “real” human lives every day! That’s a toxic legacy that he won’t be able to avoid!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-04-22

FOR MOST OF US HISTORY, APPOINTMENTS TO THE SUPREMES WERE ABOUT FINDING A SUITABLE WHITE, CHRISTIAN, MAN, NO MATTER HOW THINLY QUALIFIED — Now That Exceptional Black Women Are About To Get A Long Overdue Shot, The Dishonest Whining From The GOP Right Is All Too Predictable!

Charles M. Blow in The NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/opinion/supreme-court-nomination-identity-politics.html?referringSource=articleShare

. . . .

Not all of the white men who served on the court were paragons of morality. Not all of them went to college, let alone law school. But they each had the golden ticket: low melanin and high testosterone.

So now, it is fascinating to watch as people work themselves into conniptions about Joe Biden committing to choosing a Supreme Court nominee from a group that has long been overlooked: Black women.

. . . .

I say, look at it another way.

Of the 115 justices who have served on the bench since 1789, 108 — roughly 94 percent — have been white men. Zero percent have been Black women.

Viewed this way, through the long sweep of American history, the United States has some work to do.

There is no legitimate or logical argument against inclusion. Consciously including racial groups can be one of the most effective reparative remedies for centuries of racial exclusion.

Only when we disentangle the concepts of whiteness and maleness from the concept of power can we see the damage the association has done. Only then can we truly accept and celebrate the power of inclusion, diversity and equity. Only then can representative democracy in a pluralistic society begin to live up to its ideals.

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Read the full article at the link.

Black women historically have made outsized, grossly under-appreciated contributions to America.

I also note that the overall qualifications of Biden’s list of potential nominees exceed those of the Trump McConnell nominees. The latter’s qualifications were largely limited to proven subservience to right wing judicial activism (particularly elimination of a woman’s right to choose and civil rights for individuals of color), indifference to human suffering, compassion, and practicality, combined with support from out of the mainstream, right wing legal organizations like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Being White and Christian also didn’t appear to hurt their chances.

The idea that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were the two “best qualified lawyers in America” to serve on the High Court is preposterous!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-31-22

🇺🇸🗽IN MEMORIAM: BELOVED “PRACTICAL SCHOLAR” DR. DEMETRIOS G. PAPADEMETRIOU, DIES @ 75 — Renowned Migration Expert Co-Founded Migration Policy Institute, Among Many Other Life Achievements!

As reported on ImmigrationProf Blog:

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/01/mpi-honors-the-life-of-dr-demetrios-papademetriou.html

Friday, January 28, 2022

MPI Honors the Life of Dr. Demetrios Papademetriou

By Immigration Prof

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Dr. Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president emeritus and co-founder of Migration Policy Institute, and founding president of MPI Europe, died Wednesday, January 26, at the age of 75. He was one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars and lecturers on international migration, with a rich body of scholarship shared in more than 275 books, research reports, articles and other publications. He also advised numerous governments, international organizations, civil society groups and grant-making organizations around the world on immigration and immigrant integration issues.

Papademetriou began his career as Executive Editor of the International Migration Review. After stints at Population Associates International and the U.S. Labor Department, he served as Chair of the Migration Group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He then joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s International Migration Policy Program, which in 2001 was spun off to create the freestanding Migration Policy Institute.

He co-founded Metropolis: An International Forum for Research and Policy on Migration and Cities, which he led as International Chair for the initiative’s first five years and then served as International Chair Emeritus. He was Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Migration (2009-11) and founding Chair of the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative (2010-15).

Papademetriou, who traveled the world lecturing and speaking at public conferences and private roundtables, also taught at the University of Maryland, Duke University, American University and the New School for Social Research.

MHC

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Demetrios was one of those amazing, charismatic, “larger than life” intellects who could “electrify” a room just by walking through the door. His ability to “connect” with audiences far beyond the world of scholarly research — and to appreciate the “human lives and heroic stories beyond the number-crunching” was unparalleled.

He led in “putting immigration scholarship on the map” — as an academic discipline, a ground-breaker in clinical legal education, and a basis for progressive migration and human rights policies in government and NGOs. Through his work at MPI, Carnegie, and other institutions, he used scholarship to spur and encourage practical “grass roots” reforms in our immigration system and, indeed, in the international migration system. Many leaders of today’s “New Due Process Army” can trace their “practical scholarly roots” to Demetrios’s inspiration and example!

Perhaps ironically, another recent posting on ImmigrationProf Blog points out how the Biden Administration has disturbingly and inexcusably failed to “cash in” on the full potential of the extraordinary growth in “applied migration scholarship” fueled by Demetrios, his long time friend and colleague former Immigration Commissioner Doris Meissner, MPI Executive Director Donald Kerwin, Jr., and other giants in the field.

Rather, the Biden Administration has veered far off-track on immigration, human rights, and social justice issues by placing politicos without immigration expertise and lacking both moral courage and belief in fundamental human values in charge of its flailing and failing immigration mess. In particular, these tone-deaf politicos have failed to “connect the dots” between immigrant justice and racial justice in America.

Not surprisingly, that has resulted in across the board failures, unfulfilled promises, and angry, disgruntled potential allies on meaningful reforms in both areas. This, in turn, has demoralized and turned off the younger, dynamic, diverse, progressive, expert immigration, human rights, and social justice leaders who are key to the future of the Democratic Party and the preservation of American democracy.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/01/mpi-honors-the-life-of-dr-demetrios-papademetriou.html

Talk about a lose-lose-lose approach! And, I guarantee that it hasn’t garnered one vote of support from “hard-liners” and “naysayers” who continue to mindlessly and dishonestly babble about “open borders!”

I’m not exaggerating here. Yesterday, I was on (Zoom) panels in Houston and DC. Both audiences and fellow panelists were stunned and outraged by the betrayal of due process, good government, expertise, common sense, and human values demonstrated by Biden’s “Miller Lite” approach to asylum at the Southern Border, the intentional mistreatment of migrants of color, and Garland’s beyond dysfunctional and chronically unjust Immigration Courts!

Particular disgust was reserved for the Administration’s intentional, continued, cowardly abuse of Haitian migrants. That, actually says more about their attitude toward true racial justice than the promise to appoint a Black Woman to the Supremes.

Welcome and long overdue as the latter is, it isn’t going to change the result on any major issue before this version of the Supremes. By contrast, the Biden Administration’s anti-Haitian policies are actually harming, dehumanizing, endangering, and even potentially killing Black migrants every day! No wonder they want to “sweep truth under the rug.”

It’s exactly the type of “applied stupidity,” willful blindness, intentional cruelty, and disdain for common sense, humanity, facts, and relevant experience that Demetrios would have resisted!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-29-22

⚖️🗽NDPA ALERT: Effective Advocacy Involves Grass Roots Organization: This Podcast Featuring Lifelong Social Justice Warrior-Queen 👸🏻⚔️ Kathleen Sullivan Will Give You Insight & Inspiration In This Critical Time For Democracy!

Kathleen Sullivan — Kathleen M. Sullivan Founder, Fine Gauge Strategies
Photonby Ryuji Suzuki

Kathleen writes:

I’m on a podcast — direct link is here, hosted by Ann Price of Community Evaluation Solutions in Georgia.

Ann is active in evaluation circles nationally. Her evaluation practice and podcast center on Georgia and its community-based social service organizations.

On the pod we make the following points:

(1) Advocacy is an important tactic to achieve social change goals.

(2) Strong advocacy is led by affected communities. Allies in the nonprofit and philanthropy sectors provide important support to community-led change.

(3) Elected officials need and want input from service providers in their districts. Whether you have lots of time for advocacy or only a very limited amount of time, your input can make a difference.

(4) Help is available for community organizations that want to investigate advocacy but are not sure what they are legally permitted to do. Bolder Advocacy, a program of Alliance for Justice, provides technical assistance and training.

The podcast went up on Tuesday January 25.

Here’s where I am on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/katilist/

I’m @Katilist and Ann is @annwprice on Twitter.

KMS

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Thanks, Kathleen, my friend, and Ann for putting this important guidance together and making it accessible!

Also, a special “shout out” to Bolder Advocacy at Alliance for Justice for their expertise in helping 501(c)(3) orgs “color within the lines” especially during these challenging times.

As I constantly preach, expertise is important, even if Democrats too often “don’t get that” when dealing with human rights, and other social and racial justice issues.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-28-21

TAL KOPAN @ SF CHRON: NO DUE PROCESS HERE☹️: GARLAND’S DESPICABLE “STAR CHAMBERS” CHEERED “ENGINEERED IN ABSENTIA” DEPORTATION ORDERS — Garland Fails To Provide Justice @ The Border Or In Biased “Courts,” But Inflicts Outrageous “Miller Lite” Anti-Due-Process “Gimmicks” On Vulnerable Migrants!🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽

Immigration court officials cheered results of fast-tracked deportation orders, emails reveal

WASHINGTON — Last June, the San Francisco Immigration Court quietly tested a new idea: Fast-track the cases of immigrants whose mail wasn’t reaching them. In the trial run, 80% of the immigrants scheduled were ordered deported for not showing up.

Top officials were effusive with praise over the results, emails obtained by The Chronicle show, and rushed to set up more hearings: “Very positive!” emailed one of the top supervising immigration judges overseeing the nation’s hundreds of courts.

The newly uncovered emails reveal that the fast-track docket for immigrants with returned mail, which was first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle last fall, was cheered at the highest levels of the courts and pursued with full awareness that scores of immigrants would likely be ordered deported as a result.

Advocates and attorneys for immigrants raised concerns about the practice as a sort of deportation conveyor belt last year, as many of the lawyer-less immigrants may have no idea they missed a court hearing, much less that they were ordered deported during it, because they didn’t know how to update their address with the court or thought that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would do so on their behalf. The immigration courts are run by the Justice Department, with judges hired and ultimately overseen by the attorney general.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by a nonprofit watchdog group, American Oversight, prompted by The Chronicle’s reporting. The group shared the records with The Chronicle.

The Department of Justice declined to comment specifically on the emails, noting that removal orders for failing to appear in court are legally valid and that issuing notices with new hearing dates gives unreachable immigrants an opportunity to appear in court and avoid a deportation order.

Chronicle analysis of available data last year found that the practice significantly increased the number of immigrants who were ordered deported for not being present in court, called an “in absentia” removal order. As many as 173 people were given deportation orders because of such proceedings in August and September — a nearly ninefold increase from the 20 similar orders given the previous seven months combined.

More here:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigration-court-officials-cheered-results-of-16791798.php

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Star Chamber Justice — This guy doesn’t realize that he could have avoided “justice” in Garland’s Star Chambers by not appearing for his hearing!

For Garland’s “judiciary,” the object appears to be avoiding fair hearings rather than conducting them! Perhaps, that’s understandable (not justifiable) considering how poorly many of his courts’ decisions fare upon judicial review in the Article IIIs.

For his cowardly attacks on migrants and backlog-building mismanagement and misdirection of EOIR, Garland gets “Courtside’s” coveted “Five Puke-Five Thumbs Down Award!” 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽👎🏽

While Garland is failing in his job, his concerted efforts to break apart and “alienate” key segments the Dem coalition that elected Biden is succeeding and should pay great dividends (for the GOP and Trump) in the Fall Midterms! No wonder Garland’s running the system into the ground using “Trump/Miller holdovers.”

Garland and his equally poorly performing lieutenants (Monaco, Gupta, Clarke, Prelogar) are giving us a “Master Class” in “Why Dems Can’t Govern and Blow Elections 101.”

A party that lacks the courage to act on the values it espoused to get elected doesn’t stand for anything at all!🤮👎🏽

Maybe lots of Dems pulled the lever because they wanted more of Gauleiter Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist policies. But, I haven’t heard of any!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-20-21

🤮🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️ GARLAND’S “SHAMEFUL RECORD” GETS EVEN WORSE AS HE DEFENDS STEPHEN MILLER’S DEGRADATION OF HUMANITY AT OUR BORDERS!

Biden’s “Shadow Attorney General” speaks through the likeness of Merrick Garland! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com

Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/title-42-biden/index.html

. . . .

“Today we heard the same unconvincing arguments from the Biden administration that we’ve been hearing for the last year about this xenophobic and baseless policy, arguments that have already been rejected in federal court. Title 42 unjustly and unnecessarily inflicts harm on families seeking asylum at our border, and we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that this policy ends once and for all,” said Diana Kearney, senior legal adviser with Oxfam America, in a statement.

In a recently released report, Human Rights First found nearly 9,000 reports of kidnappings and other violent attacks against people who had been expelled to Mexico or blocked from seeking protection in the US.

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Read Priscilla’s full story on the bottomless depths to which Garland has taken American “justice” and the Department of “Justice” at the link.

I can always count on Garland to illustrate and punctuate my points about his unfitness for the job of achieving racial equality, re-establishing the rule of law, and promoting human rights in America, not to mention his total unsuitability and inability to run a fair, impartial, due-process-oriented court system! He probably would have been right at home with the “GOP Six” on the Supremes.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-20-22

⚖️🗽NDPA OPPORTUNITY: U BALTIMORE LAW SEEKS CLINICAL DIRECTOR!

Elizabeth Keyes
Associate Professor
Director, Immigrant Rights Clinic
U of Baltimore Law
Photo: U of Baltimore Law Website

Friends,

I have the best job in the legal profession. Maybe this could be your best job in the legal profession.

I’m excited to share a hiring announcement for the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at University of Baltimore, which has been my own beloved position for the last decade. (I’m staying at UBalt, but shifting to purely doctrinal teaching for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with how much I love our clinical program and community at UBalt). We are looking for a dynamic junior or pre-tenure lateral person for this position.

As you probably know, UBalt is an exceptionally good place to be a clinician. We are on a unitary tenure-track, with case coverage over the breaks. Our clinicians lead the law school in all kinds of ways, from committee-leadership to scholarship and beyond. We also have a beautifully collegial clinical faculty, with weekly brown-bag lunches focused on everything from pedagogy to workshopping our own scholarship. In the next four weeks alone, we have one lunch devoted to the pedagogy of Bell Hooks, another on clinics and emergency response, and another workshopping two articles by our teaching fellows. We have a lot of independence within our clinics, but we also share the same deep roots in non-directive, client-centered pedagogy.

Please share the announcement widely with your networks.

Warmly,

Liz

Elizabeth Keyes

Associate Professor, Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic

University of Baltimore School of Law

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

Great opportunity for an up and coming NDPA “practical scholar!”

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-18-22

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Biden has delivered the worst of all worlds: inhumane, immoral, potentially illegal policy — and bad-faith political blowback about “open borders” all the same.”☠️🏴‍☠️🤮🤯👎🏽⚰️🆘

Catherine writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/17/year-into-his-presidency-biden-has-kept-some-trumps-worst-immigration-policies-place-why/

. . . .

But these are, mostly, obscure policy changes or unrealized proposals. When Miller et al. condemn Biden’s “immigration record,” they zero in on his decisions at the Southern border.

Which is, frankly, odd. You’d never know it from the right-wing hysteria about Biden’s supposedly “open borders,” or Biden’s own campaign promise to “end Trump’s detrimental asylum policies.” But Biden has continued Trump’s most restrictionist, inhumane and possibly illegal border policies.

In some cases Biden has even expanded them.

As evidence of Biden’s supposedly lax border policies, Republicans sometimes cite his attempt, on Day One of his presidency, to end the program informally known as “Remain in Mexico.” This Trump-created program forced asylum seekers to wait in dangerous camps in Mexico while their U.S. cases were processed; there, vulnerable immigrants have been frequent targets for rape, kidnappings, torture and murder.

If Biden had terminated the program, that would have been a good thing, from a human rights perspective (not a Republican priority, apparently). But Biden did not succeed. After a legal challenge, a federal judge ordered the program to be resurrected — and the Biden administration not only obeyed but also expanded the program’s scope to cover even more categories of immigrants.

[Catherine Rampell: Joe Biden is president. Why is he maintaining Trump’s immigration agenda?]

Worse, Biden has maintained Trump’s Title 42 order. This likely illegal order involves automatically expelling hundreds of thousands of people encountered at the border without ever allowing them to apply for asylum, in contravention of rights guaranteed under both U.S. and international law. Both Trump and Biden have cited a little-used public health provision as pretext for this policy, even though legions of public health experts have argued that it doesn’t protect public health.

Perversely, continuing this Trump policy has also given ammunition to the hard-right nativists, because it has the unintended consequence of inflating the count of U.S. border crossings. Many of those expelled immediately turn around and attempt another crossing; in fiscal 2021, 27 percent of individuals were apprehended multiple times by Border Patrol, nearly quadruple the share in 2019.

The disconnect between GOP claims about “open borders” and Biden’s actually-quite-Trumpy border policies, is enormous. Two of Biden’s own political appointees who resigned last fall lambasted his actions as “inhumane” on their way out the door; six other high-level immigration officials have recently announced they were leaving the administration, without much public explanation.

It’s unclear why Biden has maintained his predecessor’s policies. One possibility is politics — that these choices were intended to stave off right-wing attacks about lax enforcement. If that was the motivation, though, it failed. Instead, Biden has delivered the worst of all worlds: inhumane, immoral, potentially illegal policy — and bad-faith political blowback about “open borders” all the same.

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Yup! It’s what “Courtside” has been saying all along! Read her complete article at the link!

Catherine sees much more clearly than any member of the Biden Administration the ridiculous failings of their so-called “immigration policies” (actually a series of disjointed, often self-contradictory, knee-jerk responses that sometimes undermine each other and reflect a total lack of thoughtful, morally courageous, informed leadership).

And, Catherine doesn’t even highlight the single biggest failure — one that cuts across every failure she mentions and also goes to the heart of our legal system!

That’s, of course, the abject failure of Biden AG Merrick Garland to bring due process reforms and better judges to his totally dysfunctional, grotesquely unfair, wholly-owned U.S. Immigration Courts. These “courts” — that function more like 21st Century Star Chambers than anyone’s concept of a “real court” — were “weaponized” by Garland’s Trumpy predecessors, Sessions and Barr.

They filled the courts at all levels with less than well qualified judges, many with no immigration experience or prosecutorial experience only, who were intended to help carry out the White Nationalist, anti-asylum, anti-immigrant policies developed by Gauleiter Stephen Miller. Garland has not replaced these unqualified judges with better talent, selected in a open, transparent, merit-based process with “outside input.” He has failed to make the substantive and procedural reforms necessary to bring order and some semblance of efficiency to his hopelessly backlogged “courts.”

He has declined to remove poor leaders appointed by his predecessors; nor has he tapped the large supply of progressive, expert human rights/immigration talent who could begin the process of restoring due process. He has continued to promote enforcement “gimmicks” — like “Dedicated Dockets” and the illegal use of Title 42 — that accelerate “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and have led to even higher backlogs.

His refusal to bring common sense, achievable reforms, and better judges to the Immigration Courts has demoralized lawyers and made pro bono representation even more difficult.

He has ignored the pressing need for better judicial training implemented by qualified outside experts. He hasn’t bothered to engage with those like the VIISTA Villanova program turning out exceptionally well-trained potential “accredited representatives” who could help reduce the staggering representation gap in his courts. Worse yet, he has allowed EOIR bureaucrats to create entirely new backlogs in the agency process for recognizing pro bono organizations and accrediting their representatives.

Garland’s horrible failure to energize and attract the progressive leadership and judicial talent who know how to begin solving these problems (rather than aggravating them) might eventually go down as one of the biggest “blown opportunities” for due process reforms in modern American legal history! This is the “low hanging fruit” that Garland and the Biden Administration has allowed to “rot on the tree.” What a (needless and deadly) tragedy!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-18-22

⚖️Erwin Chemerinsky and Jeffrey Abramson in LA Times: TEACHING LAW IN THE ERA OF SCOFFLAW SUPREMES: “One critical lesson: Fight for justice, even if victory is distant!”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky
UC Berkeley Law
PHOTO: law.berkeley.edu

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=ae54659a-8b29-4c3e-b707-be24dd10b7d6

. . . .

So what should we tell our students? Many are dispirited and cynical because, as far into the future as they can see, this court appears likely to do more harm than good to democracy.

First, we shouldn’t hide the reality that judicial decisions often depend on who is on the bench. That has never been more true because the entrenched partisan Senate confirmation process now guarantees that a Supreme Court nominee will be chosen to carry out political and ideological aims. For the first time in American history, the ideology of the justices precisely corresponds to the political party of the president who appointed them. All six conservatives were appointed by Republican presidents and all three liberals were appointed by Democrats.

Until recently, there were moderate liberals, such as John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, appointed by Republicans, and there were moderate conservatives, such as Byron White and Felix Frankfurter, who had been appointed by Democrats. Trump picked three of the most ideologically conservative judges on the federal bench.

If students are to one day become effective litigators on constitutional rights, they will need to understand the ideologies of the justices interpreting the law. In the past, we certainly discussed the ideology of the justices with our students, but we must focus on it far more now as the ideological differences between the Republican-appointed justices and judges and those appointed by Democratic presidents are greater than they have ever been.

Second, we must remind students that there have been other bleak times in constitutional law when rights were contracted. From the 1890s until 1936, a conservative Supreme Court struck down over 200 progressive federal, state and local laws protecting workers and consumers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the court refused to stand up to the hysteria of McCarthyism. The current court will not last forever, though it may feel like that to them.

Third, we should direct focus on other avenues for change. Students need to look more to state courts and legislatures, at least in some parts of the country, as a way to advance liberty and equality. For instance, the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law known as the “Roe Act,” protecting a woman’s right to abortion under state law, no matter what the Supreme Court decides. We need to teach our students how to use the power of local governments to protect fair housing, public education and public health.

Fourth, we must encourage them to look at the sweep of history. In the early 1960s, almost half the states had Jim Crow segregation laws, there were few women going to law school, and every state had a law criminally prohibiting same-sex sexual activity. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice — if we work for it.

There really are just two choices: Give up or fight harder, even if there will be a lot of losses along the way. If we can instill in students a desire to defend justice, even if victory is distant, it will be a good semester, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a contributing writer to Opinion. Jeffrey Abramson is professor of law and government at the University of Texas at Austin.

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

Read the full article at the above link.

Sometimes, the best you can do is save as many lives as you can, one at a time. Eventually, it adds up. Also, as the article suggests, it’s critical to get involved and speak out on local political issues. That’s where the fascist far-right has made huge inroads.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-17-21

⚖️🤯🤮GARLAND’S OHIO JUDICIAL MELTDOWN — “High-Asylum-Denying” Immigration Judges Appointed By Barr & Sessions Remain On Garland’s Bench In Cleveland Despite Referring To Migrants As “Illegals” & “Pretty Virgins!” — EOIR Disciplinary System Remains As Opaque As Ever Under Garland!🏴‍☠️ Yulin Cheng Reports @ Columbus Dispatch!

Yilun Cheng
Immigration Reporter, Columbus Dispatch
PHOTO: Twitter

Woman Tortured — Attorneys who complain about misbehaving judges in Merrick Garland’s dysfunctional Immigration “Courts” might well find themselves in uncomfortable positions!
Amazing StoriesArtist Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/15/discipline-system-immigration-judges-lacks-transparency/9157927002/

In the fall of 2020, “Juan” had trouble falling asleep whenever he thought about his upcoming court appearance in Cleveland, where the only immigration court in Ohio is located.

The 43-year-old father of three from Mexico, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, had already gone through three hours-long hearings for his application to obtain permanent residency. He said he was nervous and exhausted when he stepped into the court on Oct. 16, 2020, for his fourth hearing.

Juan expected from experience that he would once again face a series of aggressive questions from Judge Teresa Riley, whose intimidating style almost made him give up on his case altogether, he said.

But it still astounded him when Riley called Mexican immigrants “illegals” while cross-examining his wife about the subcontractors that Juan employed at his construction business.

Juan is not alone in his grievances. In May 2021, the Ohio chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association submitted a group complaint against Riley to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency within the Department of Justice that oversees immigration courts.

Citing the experience of six anonymous immigrants, including Juan, the complaint accuses Riley of biases against Latino immigrants, bullying and hostile questioning, a lack of professional competence and other alleged misconducts.

But complainants like complainants like Juan and their attorneys said they have been disappointed that their efforts did not lead to any lasting changes or that there was little transparency in the investigation process.

Riley stopped hearing cases for a few weeks in July and August, but returned shortly after, according to hearing schedules shared with the Dispatch. It is unclear why the judge was absent.

. . . .

Because these complaints rarely generate substantial disciplinary actions and there is a fear of retaliation from the judges, immigration attorneys and their clients often hesitate to report misconducts, said Austin Kocher, a research associate professor at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research institute at Syracuse University.

“Immigration attorneys don’t file these complaints often enough because they still have to practice in front of these judges,” said Kocher, whose research focuses on immigration policies. “You can’t file a complaint one day against a judge and the next day come in with your client and expect the judge to treat them well. There’s just a real lack of systematic accountability.”

. . . .

Emmanuel Olawale, a Westerville-based immigration attorney, said he has faced this dilemma firsthand. In October 2020, when he received a notice from the Cleveland Immigration Court that the asylum case of one of his clients was denied, he was disturbed by the language that Judge Jonathan Owens used in the decision.

In the asylum application, Olawale’s client, a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Cameroon, said armed officers from that country sexually assaulted her when she was a minor while they were searching for English-speaking dissidents like her family.

In an attempt to establish that the abuse did not happen due to the client’s identity, Owen stated that it is likely that officers raped the teenage girl not because she was a member of the English-speaking minority but because “they wanted to do so and thought that the respondent was a pretty virgin,” according to court documents shared with The Dispatch.

“If someone’s a ‘pretty virgin,’ is that a good reason for them to rape her in any context?” Olawale said. “That statement is misogynistic and very shocking to me.”

Instead of submitting a complaint against Owen, however, the immigration attorney opted to voice his concerns in an appeal, which is currently pending.

“Filing a complaint against the judge is something on the table,” Olawale said. “But it won’t really change anything in my client’s case. There’s also an imbalance of power in the courtroom and the fear of retaliation. I’ll have to weigh my options and consider how bad it is before I stick my neck out there.”

. . . .

Judges are not always made aware of the existence of a complaint in a timely fashion, and there is no transparency or consistency when it comes to sanctions imposed in a particular case, according to Dana Marks, president emerita at the National Association of Immigration Judges who spent 35 years on the bench in San Francisco, California, before retiring in December.

“It’s not consistent because a complaint usually starts out with the person’s immediate supervisor being told,” Marks said. “Some of the supervisors discuss the complaint with the judge immediately and others don’t. There’s a wide spectrum of when judges are notified, how much information they are provided, and whether they are allowed to give their side of the story before decisions are made.”

There is a fine line between judges’ taking a harsh stance on immigration and their exhibiting unprofessional behaviors, said Paul Schmidt, a former immigration judge based in Arlington, Virginia, who retired in 2016. While judges should not be punished for making a good-faith legal decision, using terms like “illegals” seems to be a clear violation of professionalism, he said.

“There are complaints that were made because someone is not happy that they lost a case, and those claims need to be taken with a grain of salt,” Schmidt said. “But at the point where judges are using racially charged terms or demeaning people, then that seems to me that it goes beyond what they should be allowed to do.”

. . . .

The Cleveland Immigration Court, much like the rest of the country, saw dramatic personnel changes during Donald Trump’s presidency.

The court used to have only three judges, all of whom have since left their posts. The Trump administration filled the openings and expanded the size of the bench, appointing 10 judges who currently make up the court. Most of them are former government attorneys, and five used to prosecute immigration cases on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.

The lack of a transparent complaint process is especially concerning given an influx of new judges, who tend to come from enforcement backgrounds and lack experience on the bench, [Attorney Julie] Nemecek said.

“I think about the hundreds of thousands of immigrants across the country who have been wronged by the misconducts of Trump-appointed judges,” she said. “There are still good judges out there. But we have to address these bad judges.”

. . . .

Yilun Cheng is a Report for America corps member and covers immigration issues for the Dispatch. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at https://bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.

ycheng@dispatch.com

@ChengYilun

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

Read Yulin’s full article at the link.

First, congrats to Yulin Cheng! Last time I published her work, she was an aspiring student journalist.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/01/18/⚖%EF%B8%8F🗽🇺🇸slavin-benitez-kowalski-schmidt-speak-out-on-broken-courts-yilun-cheng-reports-for-borderless-magazine/

Now, she’s a Report for America member carrying out her dream and commitment to report truth and hold immigration officials, regardless of party affiliation, accountable for their mockery of the rule of law and shunning of best practices!

So, why might a private practitioner hesitate to file a complaint against an Immigration Judge in Garland’s system still “packed” with a majority of judges hand-selected by White Nationalist nativists Sessions and Barr?

The complaint would go not to an independent, objective panel containing public representation. No, it would be treated as a “supervisory matter” in an agency (not a real “court”) where the ranks of supervisors are still stacked with Barr & Sessions appointees that Garland hasn’t replaced.

Stunningly, the “top judge” in this bizarre, abusive, and dysfunctional system is Chief Immigration Judge Tracy Short — a hard line DHS prosecutor with no prior judicial experience elevated by Barr because of his commitment to the Stephen Miller White Nationalist, anti-asylum, anti-attorney agenda! Remarkably, Garland hasn’t replaced Short with a competent, expert, due-process-oriented “real judge,” notwithstanding unanimous urging from immigration experts that he do so!

Pursue as an alternative a legal appeal to Garland’s BIA? Well, amazingly, that body also remains “packed” with 23 of 24 appellate judges who are holdovers from the Trump Administration. Several of these judges were themselves members of the “90% asylum deniers club” and some were renowned for their disrespect for immigrants (particularly asylum seekers) and their lawyers while on the trial bench.

Look for some binding BIA precedents on improper IJ conduct? Won’t find those either, save for a mild, pre-Trump rebuke of an Atlanta IJ (without identifying the judge) for abusing a juvenile in court.

Then, there’s Garland himself. For heaven’s sake, even Bush crony former AG Alberto Gonzales (“Gonzo I”) finally got so embarrassed by the misbehavior of his IJs that he had to publicly “call off the dogs.” But, from Garland, not a peep or decisive action demanding that his “wholly-owned judges” put due process and fundamental fairness first and treat the individuals coming before them and their lawyers with professionalism, dignity, and respect!

Judge Riley, appointed by Barr in May 2019, without any significant immigration or human rights background, has a TRAC asylum denial rate of 87.7%.

Judge Owens, appointed by Sessions in August 2018, also without any significant immigration or human rights background, has a TRAC asylum denial rate of 94.5%. That’s 58th highest out of 558 Immigration Judges!

The TRAC “national average” for asylum denials by IJs during this period was 67.6%.

So, even in the virulent, officially-sanctioned “anti-asylum era” @ EOIR during the late Obama Administration and the entire Trump Administration, these two judges are “outliers.”

As someone familiar with the Ohio Immigration Bar, there are dozens of much better qualified judicial candidates out there in the private sector. Some of them even applied in the past and were rejected in favor of these judges who, whatever else you might think, no expert would find to be among “best and brightest minds in immigration and human rights,” deserving of elevation to the bench.

All Immigration Judges are “DOJ attorneys,” serving “at the pleasure of the Attorney General” and therefore subject to replacement and/or reassignment at his discretion. Judge Riley was “in probation” until May 20121, so Garland could have terminated her, essentially for any reason, or at least “re-competed” her position under a fair process that would have been open, welcoming to immigration experts in the private sector, and involved private sector input.

Owens and the other Trump-era appointees should also have been required to re-compete for their positions under revised procedures. It’s unlikely either Owens or Riley would have been selected in such a merit-based process.

Of course, Garland has not actively recruited from among better-qualified diverse expert immigration practitioners, established transparent merit-based procedures, or re-competed the disgracefully inadequate selections of his White Nationalist, anti-immigrant predecessors!

Additionally, Garland has failed to address, in any manner whatsoever, the quality control, bad attitude, lack of professionalism, and anti-immigrant bias problems in his dysfunctional Immigration Courts. Poor precedents continue to be issued by his BIA, and sloppy work by his judges at all levels continues to be “outed” by the Article IIIs notwithstanding the substantial (undue) deference given to EOIR decisions by the Article IIIs. Backlog building “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and “mindless gimmicks” continue to proliferate under Garland’s disconnected leadership.

The disciplinary system remains opaque and highly ineffective. Illegal retaliation by IJs against those filing complaints remains a realistic possibility that actually deters and improperly discourages reporting of misconduct. An ineffective, “rubber-stamp” appellate review process of removal orders by the BIA almost never holds IJs accountable, even for the most egregious legal errors and the grossest misconduct on the bench.

While Circuit Courts point out the deficient performance of EOIR judges on a remarkably frequent basis, one will search in vain for any recent BIA precedent “calling out” inappropriate and biased treatment of respondents and their lawyers in Immigration Court. Likewise, while Jeff Sessions was outspoken in encouraging anti-asylum and anti-lawyer bias among “his judges,” I’m not aware that Garland, in word or deed, has ever insisted that Immigration Judges at all levels give primacy to due process, fundamental fairness, and treat all coming before them with dignity and respect. In other words, Garland has failed to use his “bully pulpit” to demand an end to bullying of the most vulnerable among us in his Immigration Courts.

He also has failed to repudiate the “DHS Enforcement is our partner” statements by Sessions. (Perhaps not surprisingly, since, as noted earlier, Garland employs a DHS prosecutor, Tracy Short, as his “top judge” notwithstanding Short’s glaring unsuitability for the position. And, Garland continues to defend many “Miller Lite” policies in Federal Court.)

Pro-DHS biases, mistreatment of migrants and their attorneys, lack of basic scholarship, and failure of impartial judging continue to run rampant in Garland’s broken system!

Indeed, a full year the SF Chron’s Tal Kopan exposed the misconduct by Immigration Judges throughout the nation, the DOJ has taken no known actions despite Deputy AG Lisa Monaco’s “promise to investigate.”

From top to bottom, this broken, unfair, and out of control system needs reform, redirection, integrity, a focus on due process, and decisional excellence. It certainly isn’t coming from Garland and his senior political team at DOJ. So where IS it going to come from?

Chair Lofgren and her Subcommittee need to find out why Garland has failed to address the ongoing disaster in his courts, and what needs to be done to bring due process, fundamental fairness, equal justice, and respect for humanity to the forefront at EOIR, the DOJ, and the rest of our legal system! And, if anyone in the Administration stubbornly claims that the “primary answer” is to randomly throw more judges into this toxic mess, Lofgren should laugh in their face(s)! We need to replace bad judges and reform the existing system into something fair and functional before seeking to expand it, even assuming that expansion is warranted somewhere “down the line.”

As being run by Garland right now, EOIR is an affront to American democracy! That needs to stop!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-15-22

UPDATE:

The news isn’t all bad from Cleveland. Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis reports that Cleveland Judge Jennifer Riedthaler-Williams (also a “high asylum denier — 94%) terminated without prejudice a removal case based on a defective Notice to Appear. https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/cleveland-ij-terminates-proceedings-defective-nta

Sadly, a couple of correct decisions, no matter how welcome, aren’t going to solve the systemic due process deficiencies in Ohio or elsewhere in Garland’s dysfunctional nationwide “Clown Courts.” 🤡

There are some pressing problems in America that Dems and the Biden Administration can’t solve on their own. Garland’s dysfunctional Immigration Courts are NOT one of those!

The Immigration Courts are the biggest most consequential national problem that is totally within the Administration’s power to fix. That Garland has failed to do so should be of existential concern and a cause for unrelenting outrage from all who believe in the future of American democracy!

☹️HE BEAT THE GOVERNMENT TWICE IN COURT — But, After Three Years In Jail Without Being Charged With Any Crime, Omar Ameen Still Can’t Get A Bond From Garland’s Courts — How Can A System Where The Prosecutor Makes The Rules & Picks The Judges, Mostly From The Ranks Of Former Prosecutors, Provide The “Fair & Impartial Judging” Required By Due Process?

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

IMMIGRANT LEGAL DEFENSE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 10, 2022

Contacts:

Immigrant Legal Defense

Ilyce Shugall, ilyce@ild.org, (415) 758-3765

Siobhan Waldron, siobhan@ild.org, (510) 479-0972

Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, The University of Chicago Law School Nicole Hallett, nhallett@uchicago.edu, (203) 910-1980

Omar Ameen Files Federal Lawsuit Seeking His Release

After the U.S. Government Fails Once Again to Prove Any Connection to Terrorism

San Francisco, CA. Immigrant Legal Defense and the University of Chicago Immigrants’ Rights Clinic have filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Omar Ameen seeking his immediate release from immigration custody. Mr. Ameen has been held by the U.S. government for over three years based on false allegations that he was involved in terrorism in Iraq before he arrived in the United States as a refugee. Multiple courts have now rejected those allegations. The petition alleges that his continued detention in these circumstances violates the Due Process Clause and the Immigration and Nationality Act.

After an investigation initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Iraqi government issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the 2014 murder of a police officer in Rawa, Iraq. Mr. Ameen was subsequently arrested by U.S. authorities in August 2018 and placed in extradition proceedings, with the government arguing that not only was Omar responsible for the 2014 murder, but that he also occupied a leadership position in ISIS. After two and a half years of fighting his extradition, the federal magistrate judge found that the warrant was not supported by probable cause because Mr. Ameen had been in Turkey, not Iraq, at the time of the murder. He further found that there was no evidence that Mr. Ameen was an ISIS leader and ordered his immediate release.

Instead of releasing him or charging him with a crime, DHS took Mr. Ameen into immigration custody, and placed him in removal proceedings before the Department of Justice (DOJ). DHS abandoned the murder claim, but otherwise made the same terrorism allegations against Mr. Ameen in immigration court that had been made – and rejected – in the extradition proceedings. After months of proceedings, the immigration judge found that the government had not proved that Mr. Ameen had any involvement with terrorism, yet still denied him bond while he seeks relief from deportation. Mr. Ameen continues to fight for his freedom, to remain in the United States, and to clear his name.

“It is a fundamental principle that the government cannot detain someone based on unsubstantiated rumors and unproven accusations,” said Ilyce Shugall, an attorney with Immigration Legal Defense (ILD) and a member of Mr. Ameen’s legal team. “The government keeps losing, yet continues to believe it can detain Omar indefinitely without cause. The Constitution does not allow such a cavalier denial of individual liberty.”

“Omar’s bond request was denied by the same agency – the Department of Justice – that has maliciously targeted for him years. Omar deserves a fair hearing in federal court,” said Siobhan Waldron, another ILD attorney on Mr. Ameen’s legal team.

“The government seems to think that it can do whatever it wants as long as it invokes the word ‘terrorism,’” said Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, “Rather than admit it was wrong about Omar, the government will go to extraordinary measures to keep him locked up. We are asking the federal court to put a stop to this abuse of power.”

###

Immigrant Legal Defense’s mission is to promote justice through the provision of legal representation to underserved immigrant communities.

The Immigrants’ Rights Clinic is a clinical program of the University of Chicago Law School and provides representation to immigrants in Chicago and throughout the country.

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

Unfortunately, “cavalier denial of individual liberty” largely describes the daily operations of Garland’s dysfunctional and hopelessly backlogged “wholly owned Immigration Courts” — where due process, scholarship, quality, and efficiency are afterthoughts, at best. “Malicious targeting” — that’s a Stephen Miller specialty shamelessly carried forth by Garland in too many instances! Miller must be gratified, and not a little amazed, to find that the guy Dem progressives and human rights advocates thought would be leading the charge to undo Miller’s White Nationalist, scofflaw attack on migrants and people of color would instead be proudly “carrying his water” for him.

To punctuate my point, today Garland’s Solicitor General will follow in the disgraceful footsteps of predecessors in both GOP and Dem Administrations. Essentially (that is, stripped of its disingenuous legal gobbledygook), the SG will argue that individuals, imprisoned without conviction, struggling to vindicate their rights before Garland’s broken, backlogged, and notoriously pro-Government, anti-immigrant Immigration Courts, renowned for their sloppiness and bad judging, are not really “persons” under the Constitution and therefore can be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely, in conditions that are often worse than those for convicted felons, without any individualized rationale and without recourse to “real” courts (e.g., Article III courts not directly controlled by the DOJ).

“The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court seems to be planning to eliminate the only way a lot of people in immigration detention can challenge their imprisonment,” appellate public defender Sam Feldman commented in a quote-tweet. “People would still be held illegally, but no court could do anything about it.”

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/jan-11-2022-sc-oral-arg-previews-detention-bond-jurisdiction

One might assume that our nation’s highest Court would unanimously make short-shrift of the SG’s scofflaw arguments and send her packing. After all, that’s what several lower courts have done! But, most experts predict the exactly opposite result from a Supremes’ majority firmly committed to “Dred Scottification” — that is de-humanization and de-personification” — of people of color and migrants under the Constitution.

It’s painfully obvious that Congress must create an independent Article I Immigration Court not beholden to the Executive Branch. But, don’t hold your breath, given the current political gridlock in Washington. It’s equally clear that the Article IIIs, from the Supremes down, have “swallowed the whistle” by not striking down this blatantly unconstitutional system, thereby forcing Congress to take corrective action to bring the system into line with our Constitution.

In the meantime, Garland could bring in better-qualified expert judges, reform procedures, and appoint competent professional administrators who would institutionalize fairness, efficiency, and independence that would help transition the Immigration Courts to a new structure outside the DOJ. He could stop echoing Stephen Miller in litigation.

He could have replaced the architects of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and exponentially growing back logs with practical scholars and progressive experts who could reduce backlogs and establish order without violating human or legal rights of individuals. He could have set a “new tone” by publicly insisting that all coming before his Immigration Courts be treated fairly, with respect, dignity, and professionalism.

But, instead, Garland has stubbornly eschewed the recommendations of immigration and human rights experts while allowing and even defending the trashing of the rule of law at the border and elsewhere where migrants are concerned. He’s also done it with many questionably qualified “holdover” judges and administrators appointed by Sessions and Barr because of their perceived willingness, or in some cases downright enthusiasm, to stomp on the legal and human rights of asylum seekers and other migrants.

It’s curious conduct from a guy who once was only “one Mitch McConnell away” from a seat on the Supremes! I guess the “due process” Garland got from McConnell and his GOP colleagues is all that he thinks migrants and other “non-persons” of color get in his wholly-owned “courts.”

Good luck to our Round Table colleague, Judge Ilyce Shugall, and her great team, on this litigation! Obviously, the wrong folks are on the Federal Bench — at all levels of our broken and floundering system.

Interestingly, Judge Shugall was once an Immigration Judge until forced to prematurely resign, as a matter of conscience, by the lawless anti-immigrant policies of the Trump Administration carried out through its DOJ. As in many cases, the Government’s loss is the Round Table’s gain!🛡⚔️

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-11-22

☹️MORE IMMIGRATION EXPERTS FLEE THE COOP AS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TURNS ITS BACK ON HUMAN AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS — Esther Olavarria & Tyler Moran Latest To Jump Biden’s Sinking Human Rights Ship!

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/588663-key-member-of-white-house-immigration-team-retiring-report

Olafimihan Oshin reports for The Hill:

Esther Olavarria, the deputy director for immigration of the Biden administration’s Domestic Policy Council (DPC), is retiring from her position.

A White House spokesperson confirmed Olavarria’s pending departure from her position to Politico and CNN.

“I could not be more grateful for Esther Olavarria’s myriad contributions to the Biden-Harris Administration, particularly her work to reverse the cruel and reckless policies of the previous Administration and to implement President Biden’s vision for a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system,” DPC head Susan Rice said in a statement to Politico.

A source told Politico that Olavarria hasn’t decided when her last day at the White House will be and will continue to work with the administration for the time being.

This comes as Tyler Moran, a senior adviser on migration, is set to leave this month after spending roughly six months with the Biden administration.

The Hill has reached out to White House for comment.

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

The suggestion by Susan Rice that Olavarria was able to help implement a “fair, orderly, humane immigration system” is preposterous.

The Biden Administration dishonestly continues to use Stephen Miller’s bogus, racially motivated Title 42 ruse to deny fair treatment of asylum seekers at the Southern Border. Garland’s regressive “Miller Lite” Immigration Courts are in free fall, paralyzed by an astounding, ever-expanding 1.5 million case backlog. There is no functioning due process asylum system at our borders. Nor has Biden established robust, realistic “overseas” refugee programs in Latin America that could help obviate the pressure at the border.

Most of Mayorkas’s and Garland’s ill-conceived proposed asylum regulations have been panned by the Round Table and other experts. Biden’s promise to reform and strengthen gender-based asylum has disappeared into the bureaucratic morass at DHS and DOJ. In plain terms, Biden’s human rights’ program is a mess — lacking leadership, moral courage, practical experience, and legal expertise.

These are the real reasons why the “progressive practical experts” who should be leading human rights and immigration reforms for Biden are instead abandoning ship. The “deterrence crowd” and those who live in mortal fear of the nativist right are “driving the train” for Biden.

These notable departures follow in the wake of the resignation of widely respected human rights/immigration expert Harold Koh who blasted the Biden Administration’s spineless, inept, and immoral performance on racial justice, human rights, and the Constitutional rights of vulnerable legal asylum seekers. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/10/04/%f0%9f%91%8d%f0%9f%8f%bcprogressive-legal-icon-harold-koh-rips-bidens-bogus-stephen-miller-lite-xenophobic-policies-resigns-dos-post-amid-a-cresendo-of-administration-lies/

Additionally, as covered earlier today, widely admired Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks retired at the end of the year. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2022/01/09/%f0%9f%98%8e%f0%9f%97%bd%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%91%a9%e2%80%8d%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f-flash-judicial-maven-hon-dana-leigh-marks-retires-joins-round-table-%f0%9f%9b%a1%e2%9a%94%ef%b8%8f/

Garland blew the chance to use Marks’s last six to nine months prior to retirement to harness her incomparable knowledge and leadership to institute long overdue progressive personnel, procedural, and policy reforms to his disastrously dysfunctional Immigration Courts. Talk about loss of institutional knowledge of everything that has gone wrong at EOIR over the past two decades!

Also, ICE Principal Legal Advisor John Trasvina departed after an unusually short stint on the job, although he was replaced with another experienced immigration lawyer, Kerry Doyle.

Obviously, some of the “best and brightest” who once were willing to lend their expertise to an incoming Administration that (apparently disingenuously) claimed that it would reverse the “dehumanization of the other” by Trump and his cronies now believe their talents can be better used elsewhere.

As to the claims that the Olavarria and Moran departures were “normal,” don’t believe a word of it. Senior level policy advisors who believe their views are respected, making government better, and saving lives don’t “retire” after a few months on the job. It’s not like they weren’t bright enough to know their jobs would be highly stressful and personally inconvenient when they accepted their positions.

All this comes at a time when America is experiencing a worker shortage that many experts believe is being fueled by a declining birth rate and declining immigration. Seems like many of the workers we could use are legal asylum seekers who are being illegally turned around at our border while Mayorkas and Garland refuse to stand up for the rule of law. Could that have something to do with why those who have spent careers understanding the shortcomings of our immigration and human rights systems are “voting with their feet” on the Biden Administration’s muddled and wildly inconsistent approach to immigration?

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-09-21

😎🗽⚖️👩‍⚖️ FLASH: JUDICIAL MAVEN HON. DANA LEIGH MARKS RETIRES, JOINS ROUND TABLE! 🛡⚔️ — “Founding Mother” Of U.S. Asylum Law Successfully Argued INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca @ Supremes, Led Immigration Judges’ Association, Spearheaded “Article I” Movement For Judicial Independence, Saved Thousands of Lives Over Career On Bench Spanning More Than Three Decades!

Hon. Diana Leigh Marks — Hon. Dana Leigh Marks
U.S. Immigration Judge (Ret.) One of the most influential, outspoken, and dynamic Federal Judges of the past half-century enters the next phase of her illustrious career, as a caregiver for her granddaughter and a “fighting knightess” of the Round Table, with typical optimism. “Decades of dealing with DOJ and EOIR management has given me the best possible toolbox to meet any challenges on the road ahead,” says “NanaDana.”

😎🇺🇸🗽⚖️👩‍⚖️ FLASH: JUDICIAL MAVEN HON. DANA LEIGH MARKS RETIRES, JOINS ROUND TABLE! 🛡⚔️ — “Founding Mother” Of U.S. Asylum Law Successfully Argued INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca @ Supremes, Led Immigration Judges’ Association, Spearheaded “Article I” Movement For Judicial Independence, Saved Thousands of Lives Over Career On Bench Spanning More Than Three Decades!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Jan. 9, 2022

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, one of America’s leading “applied scholars” and human rights jurists, joined the Round Table of Former Immigration Judges. Marks retired from the San Francisco Immigration Court on December 31, 2021, following an extraordinary nearly 35-year career on the bench. Round Table spokesperson Judge Jeffrey S. Chase announced Marks’s move in an e-mail yesterday to the group’s more than 50 members.

In addition to her “number one retirement priority” — helping care for her granddaughter — Marks told Courtside that she “looks forward to continuing the fight for Article I and due process for all in America, now without the disclaimers that DOJ requires.” It’s a mission and a sentiment shared by the group.

Long time colleague and fellow past president of the National Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”), Judge John Gossart enthusiastically welcomed and recognized Marks’s fearless advocacy “for due process, fundamental fairness, the right to be heard, and an Article 1 Court.”

Other Round Table judges greeted their newest member with an avalanche of praise, appreciation, admiration, and love for Marks’s intellectual prowess, courage under pressure, and embodiment of the one-time vision of making the U.S. Immigration Courts “the world’s best tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Over the last several decades, many experts say that noble vision was cashiered by Department of Justice (“DOJ”) politicos in favor of the “go along to get along” and “good enough for government work” aura that infects today’s broken and dysfunctional Immigration Court system. Those courts, now running an astounding, largely self-created backlog in excess of 1.5 million cases, are inappropriately located within the byzantine, politicized bureaucracy of a DOJ still reeling from four years of grotesque mismanagement and misdirection by the Trump group.

Marks graduated from Cal Berkeley in 1974 and received her J.D. from Hastings Law in 1977. She worked for almost ten years as an immigration lawyer in private practice, and was an active leader in AILA’s Northern California chapter during that time. In 1986, as a partner with Simmons & Ungar, then San Francisco’s premier immigration law specialty firm, Marks successfully argued the landmark case, INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 US 421 (1987).

There, the Supreme Court rejected the Government’s argument that asylum seekers must establish that their future persecution is “more likely than not” to happen. Instead, the Court adopted the much more generous international standard of a “well founded fear” of persecution. The Court thereby recognized that asylum could be granted where the fear was objectively reasonable, even if it were significantly less than “probable.”

Some also consider this to be the “high water mark” of the Court’s positive use of international law concepts in a human rights case involving immigration. Despite considerable internal resistance to fairly applying the more generous legal standard, Cardoza has undoubtedly saved the lives of tens of thousands of refugees and their families over the past three and one-half decades.

Shortly after submitting the brief (co-authored with Bill Ong Hing, Kip Steinberg and Susan Lydon), but prior to her Cardoza argument, Marks was selected for a judgeship by then Chief Immigration Judge, the late William R. Robie. Then Attorney General Ed Meese adopted Robie’s recommendation, and Marks was sworn in as a U.S. Immigration Judge for San Francisco in January, 1987, two months after the oral argument and two months prior to the decision being issued by the Court.

During her distinguished career on the immigration bench, Marks has been an outspoken fighter for professional treatment of her fellow Immigration Judges, for true judicial independence in the Immigration Courts, and for fair, humane, professional treatment of those coming before the courts. She served on a number of occasions as the President and Executive Vice President of the NAIJ, sometimes “swapping” leadership positions with her close friend Judge Denise Slavin, also President Emerita of NAIJ and now a “fearless fighting knightess” of the Round Table.

Marks and Slavin helped battle two DOJ attempts to “decertify” the NAIJ and thus silence the powerful voices that often exposed severe problems in the administration of the Immigration Courts. Indeed, Marks’s determination to speak “truth to power,” her outsized personality, and her willingness to “level” with the media often put her at odds with “handlers” in the court’s bloated bureaucracy and their DOJ overlords.

The latter often sought to divert the Immigration Courts from their due process mission to focus instead on “deterrence” of asylum seekers and fulfilling each Administration’s goals for immigration enforcement. Among other things, this led to a backlog-building phenomenon known as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.”

In her writings, speeches, and interviews, Marks decried these glaring conflicts of interest and abuses of normal judicial ethics, not to mention common sense and human decency. She tirelessly advocates that the United States adhere more closely to international standards governing refugees and asylees, which was the clearly expressed legislative intent when the Refugee Act of 1980 was enacted.

Summing up her new life after Immigration Court, Marks said “I will enjoy my new day job of caring for my granddaughter, but will continue my hobby of telling truth about EOIR [the bureaucratic acronym for Immigration Courts] through NAIJ and the Roundtable. I am proud to be in such good company!” The feeling is mutual! Due process forever!

🤮👎🏽WASHPOST SLAMS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION FOR ABANDONING NEGOTIATIONS WITH FAMILIES WHO SUFFERED CHILD ABUSE BY SESSIONS & MILLER! — “Having condemned a policy that traumatized children and their parents, Mr. Biden now leads an administration fighting in court to deny recompense to those same families.”

“Floaters” — So, what’s the “dollar value” of brown-skinned human lives to Biden, Harris, & Garland? We’re about to find out!
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/05/president-biden-broke-his-promise-separated-migrant-families/

Opinion by the Editorial Board

January 5 at 2:18 PM ET

When the Trump administration wrenched migrant babies, toddlers and tweens from their parents as a means of frightening away prospective asylum seekers, it was guilty of emotionally torturing innocent children. Americans of every political leaning expressed revulsion toward the policy implemented in 2018, especially when it became clear that the government had kept no clear records linking parents with their children — in other words, no ready means to reunite the families.

President Biden, as a candidate and also once in office, made clear his own disgust at the so-called zero-tolerance policy, calling it “criminal.” He said, correctly, that it “violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”

Now the president, having explicitly endorsed government compensation that would address the suffering of separated migrant family members, has apparently had a change of heart — or political calculation. In mid-December, the Justice Department abruptly broke off negotiations aimed at a financial settlement with hundreds of affected families. Having condemned a policy that traumatized children and their parents, Mr. Biden now leads an administration fighting in court to deny recompense to those same families.

The government has no means of alleviating the trauma inflicted by the previous president’s egregious treatment of those families. That is particularly true as regards the children, whose torment has been described and documented by medical professionals, advocates and journalists. The babies and toddlers who didn’t recognize their own mothers when they were finally reunited; the depression; the fear of further separations, even brief ones — the human aftershocks of Donald Trump’s heartlessness will linger for years, and for lifetimes in some cases.

The administration compounds the hurt by breaking off negotiations on compensating victims. The government must be held accountable; compensation is the most potent and credible vehicle for achieving that.

Granted, there may be a political price to pay. Republicans had a field day blasting the White House after media reports this fall suggested the government might pay $450,000 to separated family members — a settlement that could amount to $1 billion if applied to the several thousand affected migrants. Mr. Biden, apparently unaware of the status of negotiations at that time, said the reports, first published in the Wall Street Journal, were “garbage.” He later backed away from that remark, saying he did not know how much money would be suitable but that some amount was certainly due.

Now, it seems, all bets are off. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, the government would enter into what would likely be years of costly litigation, in which Mr. Biden’s Justice Department would be in the awkward position of defending a policy that Mr. Biden himself — and most Americans — have condemned as evil. There is no predicting how individual judges or juries might react to documented accounts of harm done to children. No one should be surprised if some were to award enormous damages — conceivably in amounts that exceed the $450,000 contemplated in the now-stalled negotiations.

By walking away from the bargaining table, Mr. Biden has broken an explicit, repeated promise. Whatever the political calculus behind that decision, it is morally indefensible.

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

Garland fails to stand up for the rights of families of color — again. At the same time, he ties up resources on a frivolous DOJ defense of the indefensible!

“Replacement theory,” White Nationalism, and racism always have been and remain at the core of the GOP’s anti-democracy insurrection. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s plans to de-stabilize American democracy began with cowardly attacks on vulnerable migrants (enabled by a failed Supremes) and culminated in open insurrection.

The dots aren’t that hard to connect. But, Garland doesn’t seem to be able to do it!

If Garland can’t handle the “low hanging fruit” — like settling these cases and creating a progressive judiciary at EOIR who will stand up for the rights of all persons while using expertise and “practical scholarship” to replace dysfunction with efficiency, his pledge to hold the January insurrectionists and their leaders accountable rings hollow!

I’m not the only one to note and question Garland’s uninspiring performance as Attorney General at a time of existential crisis. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Merrick-Garland-isn-t-going-to-save-16752522.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headlines&utm_campaign=sfc_opinioncentral&sid=5bfc15614843ea55da6b8709

For those who read the LA Times, there was a “spot on” letter to the editors today accurately characterizing Garland as the “Attorney General for different era.”

As I’ve noted before, this is NOT Ed Levi’s, Griffin Bell’s, or Ben Civiletti’s DOJ. It isn’t even Janet Reno’s DOJ. (I ought to know, as I worked under each of the foregoing.)

It’s an organization that has become increasingly politicized over the last two decades (as it was during Watergate), and that allowed itself to be weaponized by Trump’s White Nationalist regime. EOIR, Executive Orders, and immigration litigation were perhaps the most obvious, but by no means the only, examples.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-07-22

🏴‍☠️NO ACCOUNTABILITY: ONE YEAR AFTER PUBLICLY INSTIGATING A FAILED COUP, TRUMP CONTINUES TO OPENLY PLOT TO OVERTHROW DEMOCRACY, AS NEO-FASCIST GOP & ITS TOADY POLITICOS LINE UP BEHIND THE “BIG LIE!” — THE GOP, & THOSE WHO SUPPORT & ENABLE IT, HAS ACTUALLY BECOME THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE FUTURE OF OUR REPUBLIC!🤮👎🏽🏴‍☠️

S.V. Date
Senior White House Correspondent
HuffPost
PHOTO: HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coup-attempt_n_61c2733fe4b04b42ab6602a2

SV Date on HuffPost:

WASHINGTON — What if you attempted a coup but people were unwilling to wrap their heads around what you had done?

A year after Jan. 6, 2021, that is the peculiar situation in which Donald Trump finds himself. Instead of being carted off in handcuffs for inciting an insurrection against the United States, or even just being banished from federal office for life by the Senate, the former president instead remains the leader of one of the two major political parties and is openly considering another run for the White House in 2024.

. . . .

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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/05/capitol-attack-january-6-democracy-america-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Cas Mudde on The Guardian:

The government is finally taking the threat of far-right militia groups seriously. But the larger threat are the Republican legislators who continue to recklessly undermine democracy

One year ago, he was frantically barricading the doors to the House gallery to keep out the violent mob. Today, he calls the insurrection a “bold-faced lie” and likens the event to “a normal tourist visit”. The story of Andrew Clyde, who represents part of my – heavily gerrymandered – liberal college town in the House of Representatives, is the story of the Republican party in 2021. It shows a party that had the opportunity to break with the anti-democratic course under Donald Trump, but was too weak in ideology and leadership to do so, thereby presenting a fundamental threat to US democracy in 2022 and beyond.

The risk of a coup in the next US election is greater now than it ever was under Trump | Laurence H Tribe

Clyde is illustrative of another ongoing development, the slow but steady takeover of the Republican party by new, and often relatively young, Trump supporters. In 2015, when his massive gun store on the outskirts of town was still flying the old flag of Georgia, which includes the Confederate flag, he was a lone, open supporter of then-presidential candidate Trump, with several large pro-Trump and anti-“fake news” signs adorning his gun store. Five years later, Clyde was elected to the House of Representatives as part of a wave of Trump-supporting novices, mostly replacing Republicans who had supported President Trump more strategically than ideologically.

With his 180-degree turn about the 6 January insurrection, Clyde is back in line with the majority of the Republican base, as a recent UMass poll shows. After initial shock, and broad condemnation, Republicans have embraced the people who stormed the Capitol last year, primarily referring to the event as a “protest” (80%) and to the insurrectionists as “protesters” (62%), while blaming the Democratic party (30%), the Capitol police (23%), and the inevitable antifa (20%) for what happened. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Republicans (75%) believe the country should “move on” from 6 January, rather than learn from it. And although most don’t care either way, one-third of Republicans say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who refuses to denounce the insurrection.

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The increased anti-democratic threat of the Republican party can also be seen in the tidal wave of voting restrictions proposed and passed in 2021. The Brennan Center for Justice counted a stunning 440 bills “with provisions that restrict voting access” introduced across all but one of the 50 US states, the highest number since the Center started tracking them 10 years ago. A total of 34 such laws were passed in 19 different states last year, and 88 bills in nine states are being carried over to the 2022 legislative term. Worryingly, Trump-backed Republicans who claim the 2020 election was stolen are running for secretary of state in various places where Trump unsuccessfully challenged the results.

. . . .

At the same time, the Republican party has become increasingly united and naked in its extremism, which denies both the anti-democratic character of the 6 January attack and the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, and is passing an unprecedented number of voter restriction bills in preparation for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections. As long as the White House mainly focuses on fighting “domestic violent extremism”, and largely ignores or minimizes the much more lethal threat to US democracy posed by non-violent extremists, the US will continue to move closer and closer to an authoritarian future.

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

You can read both articles in full at the above links.

If you are counting on AG Merrick Garland to “lead the charge” on establishing accountability, your optimism might be tempered by his own failure to “clean house” at DOJ and in particular by his failure to reform his wholly-owned Immigration Court system that was front and center in assisting and carrying out the Trump/Miller White Nationalist assault on the rule of law, primarily targeting individuals of color and the “world’s most vulnerable” seeking justice in our system.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-06-22

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Jan. 9, 2022

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