Women’s Rights – Page 42 – immigrationcourtside.com

🇺🇸🗽😎👍🏼⚖️BREAKING: SOCIAL JUSTICE EEKS OUT A SUPREME VICTORY: CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FINALLY RISES TO OCCASION, BACKS HUMANITY, SAVES LIVES, HEADS OFF FURTHER SOCIAL UNREST FOR NOW — Four GOP Justices Remain Shills For White Nationalist Regime, Its Invidiously Motivated Racially-Driven Immigration Agenda, & Promoting Social Injustice Under Law! — DHS v. Regents of U. of Cal. — This Might Be Roberts’s Finest Hour As Chief Justice!

DHS V. Regents of U. of Cal., U.S. Supreme Court, 06-18-20

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-587_5ifl.pdf

Supreme Court Syllabus:

Syllabus

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ET AL. v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

No. 18–587. Argued November 12, 2019—Decided June 18, 2020*

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memo- randum announcing an immigration relief program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows certain unauthor- ized aliens who arrived in the United States as children to apply for a two-year forbearance of removal. Those granted such relief become eligible for work authorization and various federal benefits. Some 700,000 aliens have availed themselves of this opportunity.

Two years later, DHS expanded DACA eligibility and created a re- lated program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). If implemented, that program would have made 4.3 million parents of U. S. citizens or lawful perma- nent residents eligible for the same forbearance from removal, work eligibility, and other benefits as DACA recipients. Texas, joined by 25 other States, secured a nationwide preliminary injunction barring im- plementation of both the DACA expansion and DAPA. The Fifth Cir- cuit upheld the injunction, concluding that the program violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which carefully defines eligi- bility for benefits. This Court affirmed by an equally divided vote, and

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*Together with No. 18–588, Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People et al., on certiorari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and No. 18–589, Wolf, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, et al. v. Batalla Vidal et al., on certiorari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY v. REGENTS OF UNIV. OF CAL.

Syllabus

the litigation then continued in the District Court.

In June 2017, following a change in Presidential administrations,

DHS rescinded the DAPA Memorandum, citing, among other reasons, the ongoing suit by Texas and new policy priorities. That September, the Attorney General advised Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine C. Duke that DACA shared DAPA’s legal flaws and should also be rescinded. The next day, Duke acted on that advice. Taking into consideration the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court rulings and the At- torney General’s letter, Duke decided to terminate the program. She explained that DHS would no longer accept new applications, but that existing DACA recipients whose benefits were set to expire within six months could apply for a two-year renewal. For all other DACA recip- ients, previously issued grants of relief would expire on their own terms, with no prospect for renewal.

Several groups of plaintiffs challenged Duke’s decision to rescind DACA, claiming that it was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and infringed the equal protec- tion guarantee of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. District Courts in California (Regents, No. 18–587), New York (Batalla Vidal, No. 18–589), and the District of Columbia (NAACP, No. 18–588) all ruled for the plaintiffs. Each court rejected the Government’s argu- ments that the claims were unreviewable under the APA and that the INA deprived the courts of jurisdiction. In Regents and Batalla Vidal, the District Courts further held that the equal protection claims were adequately alleged, and they entered coextensive nationwide prelimi- nary injunctions based on the conclusion that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their APA claims. The District Court in NAACP took a different approach. It deferred ruling on the equal protection chal- lenge but granted partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs on their APA claim, finding that the rescission was inadequately explained. The court then stayed its order for 90 days to permit DHS to reissue a memorandum rescinding DACA, this time with a fuller explanation of the conclusion that DACA was unlawful. Two months later, Duke’s successor, Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen, responded to the court’s or- der. She declined to disturb or replace Duke’s rescission decision and instead explained why she thought her predecessor’s decision was sound. In addition to reiterating the illegality conclusion, she offered several new justifications for the rescission. The Government moved for the District Court to reconsider in light of this additional explana- tion, but the court concluded that the new reasoning failed to elaborate meaningfully on the illegality rationale.

The Government appealed the various District Court decisions to the Second, Ninth, and D. C. Circuits, respectively. While those ap- peals were pending, the Government filed three petitions for certiorari

Cite as: 591 U. S. ____ (2020) 3 Syllabus

before judgment. Following the Ninth Circuit affirmance in Regents, this Court granted certiorari.

Held: The judgment in No. 18–587 is vacated in part and reversed in part; the judgment in No. 18–588 is affirmed; the February 13, 2018 order in No. 18–589 is vacated, the November 9, 2017 order is affirmed in part, and the March 29, 2018 order is reversed in part; and all of the cases are remanded.

No. 18–587, 908 F. 3d 476, vacated in part and reversed in part; No. 18– 588, affirmed; and No. 18–589, February 13, 2018 order vacated, No- vember 9, 2017 order affirmed in part, and March 29, 2018 order re- versed in part; all cases remanded.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV, concluding:

1. DHS’s rescission decision is reviewable under the APA and is within this Court’s jurisdiction. Pp. 9–13.

(a) The APA’s “basic presumption of judicial review” of agency ac- tion, Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner, 387 U. S. 136, 140, can be rebut- ted by showing that the “agency action is committed to agency discre- tion by law,” 5 U. S. C. §701(a)(2). In Heckler v. Chaney, the Court held that this narrow exception includes an agency’s decision not to insti- tute an enforcement action. 470 U. S. 821, 831–832. The Government contends that DACA is a general non-enforcement policy equivalent to the individual non-enforcement decision in Chaney. But the DACA Memorandum did not merely decline to institute enforcement proceed- ings; it created a program for conferring affirmative immigration re- lief. Therefore, unlike the non-enforcement decision in Chaney, DACA’s creation—and its rescission—is an “action [that] provides a focus for judicial review.” Id., at 832. In addition, by virtue of receiving deferred action, 700,000 DACA recipients may request work authori- zation and are eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Access to such benefits is an interest “courts often are called upon to protect.” Ibid. DACA’s rescission is thus subject to review under the APA. Pp. 9–12.

(b) The two jurisdictional provisions of the INA invoked by the Government do not apply. Title 8 U. S. C. §1252(b)(9), which bars re- view of claims arising from “action[s]” or “proceeding[s] brought to re- move an alien,” is inapplicable where, as here, the parties do not chal- lenge any removal proceedings. And the rescission is not a decision “to commence proceedings, adjudicate cases, or execute removal orders” within the meaning of §1252(g). Pp. 12–13.

2. DHS’s decision to rescind DACA was arbitrary and capricious un- der the APA. Pp. 13–26.

(a) In assessing the rescission, the Government urges the Court to consider not just the contemporaneous explanation offered by Acting Secretary Duke but also the additional reasons supplied by Secretary

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DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY v. REGENTS OF UNIV. OF CAL.

Syllabus

Nielsen nine months later. Judicial review of agency action, however, is limited to “the grounds that the agency invoked when it took the action.” Michigan v. EPA, 576 U. S. 743, 758. If those grounds are inadequate, a court may remand for the agency to offer “a fuller expla- nation of the agency’s reasoning at the time of the agency action,” Pen- sion Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. LTV Corp., 496 U. S. 633, 654 (emphasis added), or to “deal with the problem afresh” by taking new agency action, SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U. S. 194, 201. Because Sec- retary Nielsen chose not to take new action, she was limited to elabo- rating on the agency’s original reasons. But her reasoning bears little relationship to that of her predecessor and consists primarily of imper- missible “post hoc rationalization.” Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, Inc. v. Volpe, 401 U. S. 402, 420. The rule requiring a new decision before considering new reasons is not merely a formality. It serves important administrative law values by promoting agency accounta- bility to the public, instilling confidence that the reasons given are not simply convenient litigating positions, and facilitating orderly review. Each of these values would be markedly undermined if this Court al- lowed DHS to rely on reasons offered nine months after the rescission and after three different courts had identified flaws in the original ex- planation. Pp. 13–17.

(b) ActingSecretaryDuke’srescissionmemorandumfailedtocon- sider important aspects of the problem before the agency. Although Duke was bound by the Attorney General’s determination that DACA is illegal, see 8 U. S. C. §1103(a)(1), deciding how best to address that determination involved important policy choices reserved for DHS. Acting Secretary Duke plainly exercised such discretionary authority in winding down the program, but she did not appreciate the full scope of her discretion. The Attorney General concluded that the legal de- fects in DACA mirrored those that the courts had recognized in DAPA. The Fifth Circuit, the highest court to offer a reasoned opinion on DAPA’s legality, found that DAPA violated the INA because it ex- tended eligibility for benefits to a class of unauthorized aliens. But the defining feature of DAPA (and DACA) is DHS’s decision to defer re- moval, and the Fifth Circuit carefully distinguished that forbearance component from the associated benefits eligibility. Eliminating bene- fits eligibility while continuing forbearance thus remained squarely within Duke’s discretion. Yet, rather than addressing forbearance in her decision, Duke treated the Attorney General’s conclusion regard- ing the illegality of benefits as sufficient to rescind both benefits and forbearance, without explanation. That reasoning repeated the error in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm— treating a rationale that applied to only part of a policy as sufficient to rescind the entire policy. 463 U. S. 29, 51. While DHS

Cite as: 591 U. S. ____ (2020) 5 Syllabus

was not required to “consider all policy alternatives,” ibid., deferred action was “within the ambit of the existing” policy, ibid.; indeed, it was the centerpiece of the policy. In failing to consider the option to retain deferred action, Duke “failed to supply the requisite ‘reasoned analysis.’ ” Id., at 57.

That omission alone renders Duke’s decision arbitrary and capri- cious, but it was not the only defect. Duke also failed to address whether there was “legitimate reliance” on the DACA Memorandum. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 742. Certain features of the DACA policy may affect the strength of any reliance interests, but those features are for the agency to consider in the first instance. DHS has flexibility in addressing any reliance interests and could have considered various accommodations. While the agency was not required to pursue these accommodations, it was required to assess the existence and strength of any reliance interests, and weigh them against competing policy concerns. Its failure to do so was arbitrary and capricious. Pp. 17–26.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE, joined by JUSTICE GINSBURG, JUSTICE BREYER, and JUSTICE KAGAN, concluded in Part IV that respondents’ claims fail to establish a plausible inference that the rescission was motivated by animus in violation of the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment. Pp. 27–29.

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV. GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined that opinion in full, and SO- TOMAYOR, J., joined as to all but Part IV. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which ALITO and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed opinions concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.

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Whew! Disaster avoided, at least for now! That was close for America and 800,000 of our most promising young people. A good day for justice, humanity, and common sense. The Supremes finally slow down the White Nationalist immigration juggernaught.

Thanks Chief Justice Roberts! Thanks for having the legal acumen, moral courage, independence, and human decency to get to the correct result. This could be your finest moment, where you have saved America from further social upheaval and outrage at a time of national instability and lack of credible leadership. That’s actually what your job is all about. You have missed some opportunities in the past, but better late than never in one of our darkest and most difficult hours as a nation! Justice without mercy and humanity is not justice at all. Thanks for recognizing that in this particular case.

In Plain English: Cutting Through The Legalese:

Roberts’s Majority: It would be insane, inane, and inhumane to do this to our kids at this point in time.

Sotomayor’s Concurring/Dissenting: Come on guys, you don’t have to be rocket scientists to connect the dots between the Administration’s racist approach to immigration and possible violations of constitutional Equal Protection.

Thomas’s Dissenting/Concurring: Stupidity, inhumanity, and injustice need no justification so long as they are directed against vulnerable migrants. Never let your sense of justice, practicality, or human decency interfere with right-wing ideology.

As an Immigration Judge I saw the justice, beauty, practicality, and real life positive results for America and for humanity from DACA. Lives saved! Cases that never should have been brought in the first place, taken off overcrowded dockets! Human potential unleashed! Fair, professional, uniform nationwide administration by USCIS! A “big win” for America, humanity, and everyone involved! Probably the best thing the Obama Administration achieved in its otherwise largely inept, lackadaisical, and tone-deaf approach to justice for immigrants.

The reprieve is narrow and temporary. It will become a pyrrhic victory for social justice if we don’t remove Trump and the GOP from power in November.

This November, vote like your life and the lives of many others depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

06-28-20

AMY HOWE @ SCOTUSBLOG — Supremes Take Up 4th Cir. Case Granting Bond Hearings in “Withholding Only” Cases –Albence v. Guzman Chavez

AMY WRITES IN SCOTUSBLOG:

And in Albence v. Guzman Chavez, the justices will decide which provision of immigration law – 8 U.S.C. § 1231 or 8 U.S.C. § 1226 – applies to the detention of a noncitizen who is seeking withholding of removal after a prior removal order has been reinstated. As John Elwood explained last week, the issue is arcane but the distinction between the two provisions matters, because under Section 1226 noncitizens generally have the right to a bond hearing, while the government argues that they do not have that right under Section 1231.

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This was another of Solicitor General Francisco’s petitions, after the DHS and DOJ quite deservedly lost on the bond issue in the Fourth Circuit.

While presented as an issue of statutory interpretation, the DOJ/DHS restrictive bond procedures are riddled with 5th Amendment unconstitutionality, including denial of opportunity to seek a bond before an fair and impartial decision-maker, putting the burden of proof on the prisoner, and failing to consider ability to pay, to name a few.

These abuses came to light recently in a comprehensive ruling invalidating unconstitutional bond practices in the Baltimore Immigration Court, Miranda v. Barr, U.S.D.C. D. MD., U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake, 05-29-20.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/05/30/due-process-victory-us-district-judge-requires-baltimore-immigration-court-to-comply-with-due-process-in-bond-hearings-round-table-warrior-judge-denise-noonan-slavin-provides-key-evidence/

It’s not a difficult constitutional issue. It would take a Court that saw immigrants as fellow human beings and were willing to apply its own due process precedents about six sentences to unanimously throw DOJ and DHS out on their tails for such unconstitutional behavior, statute or no.

But, this version of the Supremes is all over the place on immigration. While immigrants have scored a few well-deserved victories, mostly on issues involving misinterpretation of statutes by the immigration bureaucracy, the Supremes have “tanked” on the larger issues involving constitutional and human rights.

They actually have furthered and in some cases bought into the false narratives and dehumanization of migrants, particularly asylum seekers, by Trump & co. That’s why folks who probably should be granted asylum or long since admitted as refugees were the government required to follow the law and the Court’s 1987 ruling in INS v. Cardoza Fonseca are instead illegally condemned to rot in Mexico, suffer in refugee camps, arbitrarily and capriciously returned to danger zones to face torture and possible death, separated from their families, or put in cages and “iceboxes.”

Depending on how you characterize it, the Supremes’ majority have been part of judicially-enabled child abuse or “Dred Scottification” of immigrants. Either way, it’s legally wrong and morally indefensible. Equal justice and social justice for all in America will continue to be both elusive and divisive until we get a majority of Supreme Court Justices who believe in it, put it first, and require it even in the face of a recalcitrant Executive whose political agenda is built on the exact opposite.

I’m certainly not the first or last critic of the “Supreme failure” of our highest judges to show the necessary legal and moral leadership at this key point in our history. Professor Steven I. Vladeck from U. of Texas Law essentially says the same thing in a more circumspect manner in an op-ed today’s NY Times. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/05/30/due-process-victory-us-district-judge-requires-baltimore-immigration-court-to-comply-with-due-process-in-bond-hearings-round-table-warrior-judge-denise-noonan-slavin-provides-key-evidence/

I find no reason for circumspection about the failure of privileged judges at the top of our legal system who are unwilling to treat vulnerable individuals as human beings and to give them the legal and constitutional protections to which they are entitled. Enabling the cruel, illegal, and racially-driven Trump immigration agenda is disgraceful conduct that deserves to be called out. Three-plus years into a regime dedicated to running roughshod over our Constitution and eradicating human rights we “are where we are” to a large extent because those empowered and entrusted to prevent such abuses have failed — miserably!

And, with an emboldened scofflaw Administration promoting an unconscionable and illegal trashing of the little still left of our imperfect, yet previously functional and occasionally aspirational, asylum system by Executive fiat, the worst is yet to come if we don’t get better performance from the Supremes! We have a “Frankenstein proposal” out now because we have a Supremes’ majority who think “Frankenstein is OK” as long as the monster only devours migrants and their families (folks apparently below their “humanity index”). Wait till it turns on them and their families!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-17-20

SUZANNE MONYK @ LAW360: Experts Say New Asylum Rule Unconstitutional Because It Guts Due Process🏴‍☠️, Effectively Repeals Asylum Statute, Will Result in Near 100% Denial Rate — While Denials & Illegal “Deportations to Death☠️” Will Soar, Asylum Seekers Not Likely to be Deterred From Coming, Meaning That Court Backlogs & Avoidable Litigation Will Continue to Mushroom!

Suzanne Monyak
Senior Reporter, Immigration
Law360

https://www.law360.com/articles/1282494/planned-asylum-overhaul-threatens-migrants-due-process

Analysis

Planned Asylum Overhaul Threatens Migrants’ Due Process

By Suzanne Monyak | June 12, 2020, 9:34 PM EDT

The Trump administration’s proposed overhaul of the U.S. asylum process, calling for more power for immigration judges and asylum officers, could hinder migrants’ access to counsel in an already fast-tracked immigration system.

The proposal, posted in a 161-page rule Wednesday night, aims to speed up procedures and raise the standards for migrants seeking protection in the U.S. at every step, while minimizing the amount of time a migrant has to consult with an attorney before facing key decisions in their case.

“It certainly sets a tone by the government that fairness, just basic day-in-court due process, is no longer valued,” said Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, director for the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State Law, University Park, Pennsylvania.

The proposed rule, which will publish in the Federal Register on Monday, suggests a slew of changes to the U.S. asylum system that immigrant advocates say would constitute the most sweeping changes to the system yet and cut off access for the majority of applicants.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University Law School, said that it was as if administration officials took every precedential immigration appellate decision, executive order and policy that narrowed asylum eligibility under this administration and “wrapped them all in one huge Frankenstein rule that would effectively gut our asylum system.”

Among a litany of changes, the rule, if finalized, would revise the standards to qualify for asylum and other fear-based relief, including by narrowing what types of social groups individuals can claim membership in, as well as the very definitions of “persecution” and “torture.”

In doing so, the proposal effectively bars all forms of gender-based claims, for example, as well as claims from individuals fleeing domestic violence.

These tighter definitions and higher standards would make it difficult even for asylum-seekers who are represented to win their cases, attorneys said.

“I worry about how a rule like this can cause a chilling effect on private law firms, or even BigLaw, from even engaging with this work on a pro bono level because it’s just so challenging and this rule only puts up those barriers even more,” said Wadhia.

But for migrants without lawyers, the barrier to entry is particularly profound. For instance, the rule permits immigration judges to pretermit asylum applications, or deny an application that the judge determines doesn’t pass muster before the migrant can ever appear before the court.

This could pose real challenges for migrants who may not be familiar with U.S. asylum law or even fluent in English, but who are not guaranteed attorneys in immigration court.

“If you’re unrepresented, give me a break,” said Lenni B. Benson, a professor at New York Law School who founded the Safe Passage Project. “I don’t think my law students understand ‘nexus’ even if they’ve studied it,” she added, referring to the requirement that an individual’s persecution have a “nexus” to, or be motivated by, their participation in a certain social group.

Dree Collopy of Benach Collopy LLP, who chairs the American Immigration Lawyers Association‘s asylum committee, told Law360 that she thought the pretermission authority was the most striking attack on due process in the proposal, noting that some immigration judges have asylum denial rates of 90% or higher.

“Giving all judges the authority to end an asylum application with no hearing at all is pretty jaw-dropping,” she said. “Those 90%-denial-rate judges are doing that with the respondent in front of them who’s already testifying about the persecution they’ve suffered or their fear.”

The proposal also allows asylum officers, who are employed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and are not required to have earned law degrees, to deem affirmative asylum applications frivolous, and to do so based on a broader definition of “frivolous.”

Currently, applicants must knowingly fabricate evidence in an asylum application for it be deemed frivolous. But the proposal would lower that standard, while expanding the definition of “frivolous” to include applications based on foreclosed law or that are considered to lack legal merit.

The penalty for a frivolous application is steep. If an immigration judge agrees that the application is frivolous under the expanded term, the applicant would be ineligible for all forms of immigration benefits in the U.S. for making a weak asylum claim, Collopy said.

“And under the new regulation, everything is a weak application,” she added.

Benson also said that allowing asylum officers to deny applications conflicts with a mandate that those asylum screenings not be adversarial.

When consulting for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, Benson had once supported giving asylum officers more authority to grant asylum requests on the spot when migrants present with strong cases from the get-go. But with this proposal, DHS “took that idea,” but then went “the negative way,” she said.

. . . .

“I can’t even think of a single client I have right now that could get around this,” Collopy said.

“It’s a fairly well-crafted rule,” said Yale-Loehr. “They clearly have been working on this for months.”

But it may not be strong enough to ultimately survive a court challenge, he said.

The proposal was met with an onslaught of opposition from immigrant advocates and lawmakers, drawing sharp rebukes from Amnesty International, the American Immigration Council and AILA, as well as from House Democrats.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who leads the committee’s immigration panel, slammed the proposal in a Thursday statement as an attempt “to rewrite our immigration laws in direct contravention of duly enacted statutes and clear congressional intent.”

If the rule is finalized — the timing is tight during an election year — attorneys said it would likely face a constitutional challenge alleging that it doesn’t square with the due process clause by infringing on an individual’s right to access the U.S. asylum system.

And while the administration will consider public feedback before the policy takes effect, attorneys said it could still be vulnerable to a court challenge claiming it violates administrative law.

Benson said the proposed rule fails to explain why its interpretation of federal immigration law should trump federal court precedent.

“They can’t just do it, as much as they might like to, with the wave of a magic wand called notice-and-comment rulemaking,” she said.

Yale-Loehr predicted a court challenge to the policy, if finalized, could go the way of DHS’ public charge rule, which was struck down by multiple lower courts, and recently by a federal court of appeals, but was allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court to take effect while lawsuits continued.

If the policy is in place for any amount of time, it will likely lead to migrants with strong claims for protection being turned away, attorneys said. But Yale-Loehr didn’t believe it would lead to fewer asylum claims.

“If you’re fleeing persecution, you’re not stopping to read a 160-page rule,” he said. “You’re fleeing for your life, and no rule is going to change that fact.”

–Editing by Kelly Duncan.

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Read Suzanne’s full analysis at the above link.

Although nominally designed to address the current Immigration Court backlog by encouraging or even mandating summary denial without due process of nearly 100% of asylum claims, as observed in the article, the exact opposite is likely to happen with respect to backlog reduction.

As Professor Steve Yale-Loehr points out, finalization of these regulations would undoubtedly provoke a flood of new litigation. True, the Supreme Court to date has failed to take seriously their precedents requiring due process for asylum seekers and other migrants. But, enough lower Federal Courts have been willing to initially step up to the plate that reversals and remands for fair hearings before Immigration Judges will occur on a regular basis in a number of jurisdictions.

This will require time-consuming “redos from scratch” before Immigration Judges that will take precedence on already backlogged dockets. It will also lead to a patchwork system of asylum rules pending the Supreme Court deciding what’s legally snd constitutionally required.

While based on the Court Majority’s lack of concern for due process, statutory integrity, and fundamental fairness for asylum seekers, particularly those of color, shown by the last few major tests of Trump Administration “constitutional statutory, and equal justice eradication” by Executive Order and regulation, one can never be certain what the future will hold.

With four Justices who have fairly consistently voted to uphold or act least not interfere with asylum seekers’ challenges to illegal policies and regulations, a slight change in either the composition of the Court or the philosophy of the majority Justices could produce different results.

As the link between systemic lack of equal justice under the Constitution for African Americans and the attacks on justice for asylum seekers, immigrants, and other people of color becomes clearer, some of the Justices who have enabled the Administration’s xenophobic anti-immigrant, anti-asylum programs might want to rethink their positions. That’s particularly true in light of the lack of a sound factual basis for such programs.

As good advocates continue to document the deadly results and inhumanity, as well as the administrative failures, of the Trump-Miller White nationalist program, even those justices who have to date been blind to what they were enabling might have to take notice and reflect further on both the legal moral obligations we owe to our fellow human beings.

In perhaps the most famous Supreme Court asylum opinion, INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 436-37 (1987), Justice Stevens said:

If one thing is clear from the legislative history of the new definition of “refugee,” and indeed the entire 1980 Act, it is that one of Congress’ primary purposes was to bring United States refugee law into conformance with the 1967 United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 19 U.S.T. 6223, T.I.A.S. No. 6577, to which the United. States acceded in 1968.

These proposed regulations are the exact opposite: without legislation, essentially repealing the Refugee Act of 1980 and ending U.S. compliance with the international refugee and asylum protection instruments to which we are party. Frankly, today’s Court majority appears, without any reasonable explanation, to have drifted away from Cardoza’s humanity and generous flexibility in favor of endorsing and enabling various immigration restrictionist schemes intended to weaponize asylum laws and processes against asylum seekers. But, are they really going to allow the Administration to overrule (and essentially mock) Cardoza by regulation? Perhaps, but such fecklessness will have much larger consequences for the Court and our nation.

Are baby jails, kids in cages, rape, beating, torture, child abuse, clearly rigged biased adjudications, predetermined results, death sentences without due process, bodies floating in the Rio Grande, and in some cases assisting femicide, ethnic cleansing, and religious and political repression really the legacy that the majority of today’s Justices wish to leave behind? Is that how they want to be remembered by future generations?

Scholars and well-respected legal advocates like Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, Professor Lenni Benson, and Dree Collopy have great expertise in immigration and asylum laws and an interest in reducing backlogs and creating functional Immigration Courts consistent with due process and Constitutional rights. Like Professor Benson, they have contributed practical ideas for increasing due process while reducing court backlogs. Instead of turning their good ideas, like “fast track grants and more qualified representation of asylum seekers, on their heads, why not enlist their help in fixing the current broken system?

We need a government that will engage in dialogue with experts to solve problems rather than unilaterally promoting more illegal, unwise, and inhumane attacks on, and gimmicks to avoid, the legal, due process, and human rights of asylum seekers.

As Professor Yale-Loehr presciently says at the end of Suzanne’s article:

“If you’re fleeing persecution, you’re not stopping to read a 160-page rule,” he said. “You’re fleeing for your life, and no rule is going to change that fact.”

Isn’t it time for our Supreme Court Justices, legislators, and policy makers to to recognize the truth of that statement and require our asylum system and our Immigration Courts to operate in the real world of refugees?

Due Process Forever! Complicity Never!

PWS

06-16-20

DHS/BIA JOINT DEPORTATION MILL CONTINUES TO CRANK OUT ERRONEOUS DENIALS — 2D CIR LATEST TO EXPOSE POTENTIAL DEATH SENTENCE W/O DUE PROCESS — Martinez de Artiga v. Barr — The Vile Legacy of Those Complicit in The Trump Regime’s Racist Human Rights Abuses Will Be Their Lasting Shame!

Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

Rebecca Press Esquire — Rebecca Press, Esquire
Legal Director
UnLocal

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca2-on-cat-el-salvador-ms-13-martinez-de-artiga-v-barr

Dan Kowalski reports for Lexis/Nexis Immigration Community:

Daniel M. Kowalski

10 Jun 2020

CA2 on CAT, El Salvador, MS-13: Martinez de Artiga v. Barr

Martinez, 2d Cir.

“Patricia Xiomara Martinez De Artiga challenges the denial of her 26 application for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the 27 Convention Against Torture (CAT). Martinez listed her son as a derivative 28 beneficiary on her application. The Immigration Judge (IJ) found that Martinez 29 testified credibly regarding serious, individualized threats against her and her 30 children by the infamous Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang. Nevertheless, the IJ 31 denied Martinez’s claims for asylum and withholding, concluding that the 32 gang targeted Martinez because she had frustrated the gang’s recruitment 33 efforts and not on account of membership in her son’s family. On the issue of 34 CAT protection, the IJ determined that Martinez failed to meet her burden for 35 relief because she fled El Salvador promptly after MS-13 threatened her. We 36 hold that the IJ erred as a matter of law when it penalized Martinez for her prompt flight, and we cannot confidently predict that a remand would be 2 futile. We therefore DENY the government’s motion for summary denial, 3 GRANT Martinez’s petition for review, and REMAND the case.”

[Hats off to Rebecca Press!]

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

Let’s see. Woman credibly threatened with torture by group known to have capability, often aided and/or abetted by a corrupt and often complicit government, and renowned for leaving a trail of headless corpses behind. She does what any reasonable human might do in the same position: flees immediately for her life. It’s an “open and shut” case for CAT protection — should have been granted by stipulation between the parties.

Instead, in the warped, twisted, irrational, misogynist, and racially biased world of EOIR, a Latino women’s rational actions become a judge’s reason to deny her clearly warranted protection. According to this judge, she had to be dumb or unfortunate enough to wait to be tortured or killed to get protection. Of course it’s absurd! But, what’s even more absurd is that a corrupt, unconstitutional system that daily metes out this type of deadly utter nonsense to vulnerable humans seeking legal protection is allowed to continue to operate in our nation at all.

Can it really get any worse! It raises the obvious question of why the “appellate immigration judges” who approved this ludicrous abomination of illegality and “counter logic” are still on the bench rather than in remedial training or looking for other jobs.

It’s no surprise that a fundamentally unjust and unconstitutional system that wastes time looking for ways to deny cases that should easily be granted is running an uncontrolled backlog of at least 1.4 million cases. It’s obvious that under Sessions, Whitaker, and Barr, the already stressed, reeling, and mismanaged Immigration “Courts” have become hotbeds of misogyny, anti-immigrant bias, anti-asylum bias, anti-Latino bias, pro-DHS favoritism, unprofessionalism, grotesque mismanagement and waste of taxpayer funds, and just all around horrible judging. They are America’s Star Chambers, pure and simple.

Remanding individual cases is not going to fix these systemic problems that are bringing down our Constitution and de-legitimizing our entire justice system. But, shutting down the system and requiring that it be administered by an independent judicially-appointed monitor to return some semblance of due process and fundamental fairness is not only within the Article III Courts’ power, but is actually constitutionally required to halt this Administration’s systemic abuses of justice. Or, send the cases that actually need to be tried at this point in time to U.S. Magistrate Judges for real due process hearings.

The Courts of Appeals constantly expose the elementary mistakes, illegality, outright irrationality, the widespread, intentional denials of due process, fundamental fairness, and the gross failures of basic judicial expertise by the “EOIR Subdivision” of DHS Enforcement. But, you can be sure that this is just the “tip of the iceberg.”

Some Court of Appeals panels use the same “rubber stamp” techniques as the BIA, hiding their own deficiencies behind a shield of “undue deference” to a failed and unconstitutionally biased agency. And, even more individuals with potentially valid claims are unfairly turned down because they can’t find competent lawyers or don’t have the wherewithal to get to the Court of Appeals at all.

Then there are those who can’t stand the pain and torture inflicted by the “New American Gulag” so give up viable claims without full litigation. Or they are sent to rot and die in Mexico waiting for a purposely unfair hearing system stacked against.

Now, tens of thousands, many with potentially valid claims for protection, are simply being turned back at the border in clear violation of our statutes, our Constitution, and international obligations, not to mention our obligations to our fellow humans. They are denied access to the system. The Administration fabricates numerous lies and false myths to justify its actions, most rooted deeply in the anti-Hispanic racism and misogyny of Trump, Miller, and their accomplices.

The reasons given by the regime for this racist misconduct are phony as a three dollar bill. Yet, some equally dishonest authorities, including judges who should know better, will accept them without critical examination of their fraudulent nature.

Complicity comes in many forms and can often be hidden in the present. But, the the massive, intentional, human rights violations, fueled by the inherent racism of the Trump Administration and its toadies, will someday come out. The full extent of the entirely unnecessary human carnage inflicted on humanity by our nation and the invidious reasons behind it will be documented.

Then, future generations will ask: Where were the Federal Courts while this was happening? Why didn’t privileged and supposedly independent life-tenured judges stop the “slaughter of innocents?” Why did they allow baby jails, kids in cages, family separation, torture in the New American Gulag, Star Chambers, and Nazi-style abuses by corrupt U.S. border guards to continue, unabated? Why were they complicit in the dehumanization of people of color by an overtly racist and scofflaw regime? What is it about Trump’s and Miller’s racist agenda that they were too dim or intellectually dishonest to understand?

Justice will be too late for the dead, tortured, maimed, dehumanized, and destroyed. But, the reputations of these “Modern Day Confederates, Jim Crows, and their enablers” eventually will come tumbling down just like the statutes of their morally and intellectually bankrupt predecessors who also fought for or advanced the cause of racism and man’s inhumanity to men, women, and particularly, children. They had their own flimsy excuses, fabrications, myths, and B.S. justifications which have crumbled over time leaving just the nakedness and ugly truth of their racism and/or complicity for others to see.

This is not a “normal Administration” and falsely treating it as such by approving or failing to stand up to their attacks on our Constitution, human rights, and human dignity is not “normal behavior” for Federal Judges, legislators, and other public officials who allow this grotesque system to continue to destroy lives. “Deferring” to patently racist schemes and overtly biased officials isn’t legal, even when the “cover” of some other legal pretext is offered.

Those who are witness to the many abuses must insure that those who operate and allow this thoroughly corrupt system to persist don’t escape with the “Nuremberg Defense” of “just following orders” or “just following the law.”

Actually, equal justice for all isn’t just a slogan. Our Constitution clearly requires it, and it’s the job of Federal Judges to insure that it happens. Judges who won’t do that, don’t belong on the bench. Certainly, when there is regime change, no future Federal Judge or Justice should be appointed or confirmed unless he or she has demonstrated a commitment to equal justice for all supported by a record of opposing the systemic racial injustice and other invidious discrimination inflicted by the Trump regime through its program of “Dred Scottification” of the other.

There is no national emergency more important right now than the failure of our justice system to provide and enforce equal justice for all. The many who are enabling this regime’s toxic agenda by insuring that justice is unequal and that the system discriminates against and demeans immigrants, asylum applicants, and others of color are themselves operating outside the law, not to mention humanity. There will be a reckoning! Count on it!

Due Process Forever. Complicity in Racist Abuses, Never!

PWS

06-13-20

KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Catherine Rampell @ WashPost Shows How Regime’s Maliciously Incompetent White Nationalist Stupidity @ USCIS Has Bankrupted Once-Profitable Agency! PLUS: Once Again, Failed Supremes Big Part of The Problem! — What’s The Purpose of A Court That Promotes Injustice And Fails To Resist Evil?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-so-set-on-harassing-immigrants-that-his-immigration-agency-needs-a-bailout/2020/06/11/52c2ae06-ac1b-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html

Catherine writes:

The immigration agency admonishing immigrants to pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems to have destroyed its own boots.

For three years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that processes visas, work permits and naturalizations — has lectured immigrants about how they should become more self-sufficient. It has alleged, without evidence, that too many immigrants are on the dole. (Actually, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and the foreign-born use fewer federal benefits than do their native-born counterparts.)

The agency implemented a broad, and likely illegal, rule allegedly designed to weed out immigrants who might ever be tempted to become a “public charge” and try to benefit from taxpayer largesse.

Well, now USCIS is broke — and is trying to become a “public charge” itself, by begging Congress for a bailout.

The agency is funded almost entirely by user fees, rather than congressional appropriations. But under President Trump’s leadership, it has mismanaged its finances so badly that it has sought an emergency $1.2 billion infusion from taxpayers.

Unless it get a bailout, the agency will furlough three-quarters of its workforce next month, Government Executive reported Thursday.

The agency claims it’s a novel coronavirus victim. No doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted operations. But USCIS was in financial trouble long before the virus’s outbreak.

[[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]]

It acknowledged as much in public documents last fall, when it proposed a massive increase in user fees because of large projected budget deficits.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Trump took office, USCIS inherited a budget surplus. Last year, the agency saw record highs in both revenue and revenue per user.

So what went wrong?

The administration has frittered away funds on phantom cases of immigration fraud — which, like the president’s allegations of voter fraud, it has struggled to prove is an actual widespread problem that’s been going undetected.

USCIS has siphoned resources to create a denaturalization task force, which strips citizenship from immigrants found to have lied or otherwise cheated on applications. Last year, the agency revealed intentions to double the size of its fraud detection unit.

The bigger drain on resources, though, is its deliberate creation of more busy work for immigrants and their lawyers — as well as thousands of USCIS employees. These changes are designed to make it harder for people to apply for, receive or retain lawful immigration status.

For instance, the agency has demanded more unnecessary documentation (“requests for evidence”) and more duplicative, mandatory in-person interviews. Previously, staffers had more discretion to determine whether these interviews were necessary.

Staffers have been directed to comb through applications looking for minor (frivolous) reasons to reject otherwise eligible applicants.

. . . .

The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council offer a few obvious suggestions, including eliminating some of the stupid processing requirements that raise costs for both applicants and USCIS without actually adding value. Other ways to reduce costs include holding virtual naturalization oath ceremonies and allowing electronic payments for everything.

Congress could also demand the agency raise more money on its own, without gouging, say, poor asylum seekers. For instance, it could expand the cash cow known as “premium processing” (faster processing, for a fee) to more types of its applications.

Finally, get rid of the “public charge” rule. It’s a perfect example of everything that got USCIS into this mess: an expensive-to-administer — and, again, likely illegal — solution in search of a problem, whose only purpose is to punish immigrants just trying to follow the law.

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

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

Wow, what a terrific analysis! The “problems” were self-created by a regime with an irrational, White Nationalist, racist agenda. The solutions are actually quite obvious and readily available, as Catherine points out. But, they won’t happen until Trump is removed from office.

Catherine also raises a larger problem in America’s abject failure to insist on constitutionally-required social justice for everyone, regardless of color, status, or ethnicity. Stephen Miller’s racist changes in the public charge regulations never should have happened. It’s not rocket science. It’s Con Law 101, Administrative Law 101, with a dose of common sense and human decency thrown in.

In fact, the lower Federal Courts spotted the “racist stink-bomb” in Miller’s idiotic public charge changes right from the “git go” and properly stopped the change in its tracks. But, a GOP Supremes’ majority improperly granted Solicitor General Francisco’s unethical and blatantly disingenuous request for a stay of the injunction, providing no reasoning for their outrageous conduct. Four Justices dissented, led by Justice Sotomayor who lodged a vigorous dissent exposing the unlawful favoritism shown by her GOP colleagues to the Trump/Miller racist immigration agenda. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/22/complicity-watch-justice-sonia-sotomayor-calls-out-men-in-black-for-perverting-rules-to-advance-trump-miller-white-nationalist-nativist-immigration-agenda/

The current racial crisis, failure to achieve Constitutionally-required equal justice for all, and perhaps worst of all pandering to obviously fabricated pretexts for the Trump regime’s racist agenda, particularly as it has targeted asylum seekers and migrants of color, can be laid to no small degree at the feet of five GOP-appointed Supreme Court Justices disgracefully led by our failed Chief Justice.

They have failed to achieve and enforce equal justice for all because they don’t believe in what our Constitution requires. Millions of individuals who are neither lawyers nor judges know exactly what our Constitution requires and what morality and simple human decency mandates. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump stands for.

But, a Supremes’ majority that neither believes in Constitutional due process and equal justice for all nor possesses the guts and human decency to stand up to an overtly racist President and his toadies will continue to be part of the problem, rather than the solution to the blatant injustices that currently plague our society.

I’m certainly not the only former judge to recognize the intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption at the heart of today’s failed Supremes!

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/12/u-s-district-judge-lynn-s-adelman-channels-courtside-blasts-roberts-company-for-aiding-the-forces-seeking-to-destroy-our-democracy-instead-of-doing-w/

America needs and deserves better Justices who believe in and stand up for equal justice. Our Supremes’ institutional failure isn’t an exercise in legal academics or legitimate intellectual differences of opinion, like the majority often pretends.

No, bad judging injures, maims, and kills people every day. It undermines the health and safety of America every day. It allows baby jails and star chambers to flourish in our midst. It allows the illegal return of refugees to the dangerous countries they fled without any process at all, let alone “due” process. In enables corrupt Government officials to propose an outrageously unlawful, malicious, bogus, misogynist, and evil “administrative repeal” of asylum accompanied by a battery of racist-inspired lies because they know there is no legal accountability for their reprehensible conduct so long as the J.R. Five is there to protect their misdeeds. It allows police officers to act believing they won’t be held accountable for killing George Floyd.

It’s no wonder that democracy is crumbling before our eyes when the majority of Justices charged with protecting it place loyalty to a political party and its immoral, unqualified leader, perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and the rule of law in our history, above the common good.

Due Process Forever. Complicit, Racism-Enabling Courts, Never!

PWS

06-12-20

BIGOTED BULLY BILLY BARR BRUTALLY BATTERS U.S. JUSTICE SYSYEM: B/T/W He Also Runs America’s Most Screwed Up, & Most Clearly Unconstitutional “Court” System Right Under The Noses of Feckless Article III Judges! — It’s Not “Justice” — Just The Open Fraud That Passes For Justice When Democratic Institutions & Moral Leadership Fails — Barr’s DOJ is a “Thugocracy,” Says Post’s Dana Milbank!

Bigoted Bully Billy Barr Brutalizes Justice as Federal Courts Fail

Dana Milbank
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/so-this-is-why-bill-barr-is-such-bully/

Milbank writes in WashPost:

Police in Buffalo shove a 75-year-old man to the ground and blood pours from his ear. Police in Brooklyn knock down a young woman and call her a “bitch” because she asked why she had to leave the street. Federal authorities in Washington fire tear gas at peaceful demonstrators, then lie about it.

Get the feeling law enforcement in this country is being run by a middle-school bully?

If so, you are not wrong.

Childhood bullies have a predisposition to become adult bullies, research shows, and, sure enough, it seems Attorney General William Barr was a teenage bully more than 50 years ago.

Back in 1991, during Barr’s confirmation to be George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, lawyer Jimmy Lohman, who overlapped with Barr at New York’s Horace Mann School and later Columbia University, wrote a piece for the little-known Florida Flambeau newspaper about Barr being “my very own high-school tormentor” — a “classic bully” and “power abuser” in the 1960s who “put the crunch on me every chance [he] got.”

Nobody noticed the Flambeau piece at the time, but Lohman posted it on Facebook when President Trump nominated Barr in 2018, and it took on “a life of its own,” Lohman told me Tuesday from Austin, where Post researcher Alice Crites tracked him down. The article resurfaces in social media each time Barr does something unconscionable — which is often.

The 1991 description of 1963 Barr’s harassment sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr. He “lived to make me miserable,” with a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass,” Lohman alleged, because he wore peace and racial-equality pins. He said the four Barr brothers picketed the school’s “Junior Carnival” because proceeds went to the NAACP, and he alleged that Billy Barr, the “most fanatic rightist” of the four, later “teamed with the New York City riot police to attack anti-war protesters and ‘long hairs.’ ”

The 1991 article says Barr, a “sadistic kid,” has “come a long way from terrorizing seventh graders just because they wore racial equality buttons.” The Justice Department didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Lohman’s account is consistent with Marie Brenner’s reporting for Vanity Fair: “A few who knew the Barr boys came to call them ‘the bully Barrs’; the siblings, these former classmates claimed, could be intimidating.” A petition from Horace Mann alumni asks the school to “rethink” an award for Barr, who “violated our school’s Core Values of Mutual Respect and Mature Behavior.”

Historian Paul Cronin, in Politico this week, says Barr was part of the “Majority Coalition” at Columbia that fought antiwar demonstrators. Barr had told the New York Times Magazine he was part of a “fistfight” in which “over a dozen people went to the hospital.” Cronin noted: “There appears to be no record of any trip to the hospital.”

Now Barr exaggerates violence on a grand scale. After he directed the forceful eviction of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square, he claimed to Fox News on Monday that the image of peaceful demonstrators was “miscreated” to ignore “all the violence that was happening preceding that.” He alleged that there were two “bottles thrown at me” when he surveyed the scene; footage showed him at a safe distance. He charged that previously “things were so bad that the Secret Service recommended that the president go down to the bunker”; Trump claimed it was merely a bunker “inspection.”

. . . .

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

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

Sadistic kid grows up to be racist bully, becomes Attorney General, institutes thugocracy, perverts justice, enabled by courts who look the other way. Wow! What a “great American success story.”

What’s the purpose of an independent life-tenured judiciary that lacks the courage, integrity, and commitment to our Constitution to hold Barr accountable for his attacks on truth, the rule of law, and human decency?

The road from Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Lafayette Park leads directly to the Supremes’ failure of legal and moral leadership. “Equal justice for all” will never become a reality until we get a Supremes’ majority that actually believes in it and has the guts to make it happen! When judges will neither admit nor engage the problem, they are the problem!

Better judges for a better, fairer, more equal America!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-10-20

☠️🤡🥵KAKISTOCRACY KORNER W/ EYORE: Tal Kopan @ SF Chron & Tanvi Misra @ Roll Call Report on Our (Anti) Hero’s Latest Adventures in Fraud, Waste & Abuse @ America’s Most Dysfunctional (Non) Courts! Can Eyore Trample Due Process, Squander Money, & Escape Accountability Forever? — What Happened to Congress & The Article IIIs? — Yeah, Eyore is Justifiably Sad, But Not Very “Lovable” Any More! — Tune In Next Week To See More of Your Taxpayer Money Poured Down the Drain by “Malicious Incompetents” Scheming to Inflict Injustice on The Most Vulnerable Humans!

Tal Kopan reports for the SF Chron:

Trump officials cut immigration court interpreters after miscalculating costs, report finds

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration grossly miscalculated budget projections before it cited funding problems to replace many immigration court interpreters in San Francisco and elsewhere with recorded videos, according to a new watchdog report.

The Justice Department began requiring immigration judges to use videos last year to explain the court system at immigrants’ initial appearances instead of in-person interpreters, a move first reported by The Chronicle. The department said the move was necessary to save money.

But an analysis by the department’s inspector general released Tuesday found that Justice Department officials were working off faulty numbers, part of an inaccurate portrayal of the agency’s larger budget situation.

The department “erroneously estimated its yearly interpreter costs by extrapolating a single, unusually high monthly interpreter expense, which was not supported by invoices or other contemporaneous evidence,” the watchdog wrote. “This erroneous estimate adversely affected (the agency’s) leadership’s communication of accurate budget needs to department and congressional decision makers.”

Full story: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Trump-officials-cut-immigration-court-15327674.php

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

Meanwhile, over at Roll Call, Tanvi Misra reports:

DOJ ‘reassigned’ career members of Board of Immigration Appeals

The nine BIA members, all appointed before Trump took office, had recently rejected buyout offers from DOJ

By Tanvi Misra

Posted June 9, 2020 at 4:55pm

Career members at the Board of Immigration Appeals appointed prior to the Trump administration have been “reassigned” to new roles after they rejected recent buyout offers by the Justice Department.

The step appears to be the latest administrative move that critics say dilutes the independence of an important appeals body by filling it with new hires more willing to carry out the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies.

The change was announced in an internal email viewed by CQ Roll Call.

“This is to inform you that effective June 8, 2020, you will be reassigned from your current position as Board Member (Senior Level) to the Appellate Immigration Judge position,” said an email that went out last week to nine career members.

The Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA, is a 23-member body under the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency overseeing the immigration court system. Three-member BIA panels review immigration court decisions and issue precedent-setting rulings that shape national immigration law.

Volume 0%

[DOJ memo offered to buy out immigration board members]

The difference between “board member” and “appellate immigration judge” roles goes beyond title, extending to pay ranges and leave policy. Appellate immigration judges also hear cases at both the trial and appellate levels, creating potential conflicts of interests, critics say. Sources familiar with the agency’s personnel matters, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed that all nine career members selected prior to the Trump administration received the email.

CQ Roll Call first reached out to EOIR for confirmation of the reassignments. Agency spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said via email that “board member roles and responsibilities are established by regulation and have not changed.”

Asked for additional comment this week once CQ Roll Call viewed the email, Mattingly said: “Adjudicator authorities are established by law and have not changed.”

The reassignment comes after DOJ offered, in an April 17 memo, “voluntary separation incentive payments” to the nine career board members, “individuals whose positions will help us strategically restructure EOIR in order to accommodate skills, technology, and labor markets.”

That memo, authored by EOIR Director James McHenry, noted the window for requesting these incentives closed on May 15. None of the nine career members accepted the offer, according to the sources at EOIR.

Under the Trump administration, the BIA has expanded from 17 members to 23. In addition, a flurry of career members have departed the agency, prompting EOIR to launch successive hiring sprees to fill new openings and vacant positions.

The nine most recent hires to the board include several immigration judges who denied over 90 percent of the asylum requests before them. Some also have a history of formal complaints of bias. The new hires have come on not as “board members” but as “appellate immigration judges.”

Ashley Tabaddor, who heads the immigration judges’ union, the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the “appellate immigration judge position” appeared to be a conflation of the BIA and the immigration judge roles. Adding more appellate immigration judges — who might review trial- and appellate-level cases at the same time — dilutes labor protections and undermines the independence of the immigration court system as a whole, she said.

“Over and over again, they’re just trying to conflate everything into one: ‘They’re all the same and no one should get protection from the union,'” Tabaddor said in an interview. “It’s so transparent that everything that they’re doing is to dismantle any semblance of a traditional court model.”

EOIR has repeatedly denied that accusation.

“Many board members have viewed themselves as appellate immigration judges for years, and EOIR first proposed such a designation in 2000,” the Justice Department said in a May 27 statement. “Elevating trial-level judges to appellate-level courts is common in every judicial system in the United States.”

Government officials also have said the agency has been trying to streamline a lengthy, inefficient hiring process. Recent changes to EOIR hiring procedures “have made the selection process of board members more formalized and neutral,” the department said in its May statement.

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

A link to a complete copy of the IG Report is embedded in Tal’s report above.

Eyore’s Continuing Clown Show 🤡 rolls on, grinding up ☠️ and spitting out 🤮ruined human lives and mocking due process every day! When, oh when, will Congress and/or the Article IIIs do their jobs and put this grotesque spectacle of injustice out of its misery and end the unnecessary and clearly unconstitutional human pain and suffering that it inflicts? Is there no human decency and integrity left anywhere in our failing institutions beyond the regime’s direct control?

After dealing with the Trump Kakistocracy, Eyore probably never figured he’d be followed and exposed by tenacious folks like Tal & Tanvi who actually know more about what’s really happening at America’s Star Chambers than he does! Why don’t our legislators and judges have the same awareness, courage, and integrity as journalists like Tal and Tanvi? Why have those whose primary job it is to protect the Constitution and the general welfare by holding an overtly corrupt and maliciously incompetent Executive accountable gone “belly up?”

As usual, Judge Tabaddor is “right on.” Any resemblance between EOIR and a “court system” is purely coincidental. But, this mess is all too real for its victims — asylum seekers and other migrants asking for justice. The real question: How do the legislators and life-tenured Article III Judges who ignore and enable these deadly abuses get away with it? How do they sleep at night knowing that Eyore will trample more rights and destroy more lives of vulnerable fellow humans tomorrow, on “their watch!”

Due Process Forever! Institutional Complicity Never!

PWS

06-10-20

AMERICA’S FLAILING & FAILING JUDICIARY: ACHIEVING “EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL” REQUIRES COURAGEOUS AND EMPATHETIC JUDICIAL LEADERSHIP — Don’t Expect It From A Supremes’ Majority Firmly Wedded to Promoting “Dred-Scottification” (De-Humanization) of “The Other!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/sunday/supreme-court-religion-coronavirus.html

Linda Greenhouse writes in The NY Times:

The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

A Southern California church, represented by a Chicago-based organization, the Thomas More Society, which most often defends anti-abortion activists, had sought the justices’ intervention with the argument that by limiting worshipers to the lesser of 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, while setting a 50 percent occupancy cap on retail stores, California was discriminating against religion in violation of the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause.

Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California’s limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second-guessing.

So why did the court’s order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief?

It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like.

As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying.

Does that sound like an overstatement? Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion. “California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses,” he wrote. “Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”

It’s interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he’s just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. Fair enough, but he evidently couldn’t be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Linda’s op-ed at the above link.

This is just a symptom of an ongoing cancer at the Court. Cases like Hawaii v. Trump (“greenlighting” arbitrary and capricious punishment of refugees, Muslims, certain immigrants based on clearly pretextual “security grounds”), Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (“Let ‘Em Die in Mexico!” Particularly when they are “only” Central American asylum seekers), and Wolf v. Cook County (final greenlighting of Stephen Miller’s racist scheme to deny health care and spread deadly fears in American Hispanic communities) should all have been 9-0 in favor of those opposing Trump’s racially-biased, illegal, unconstitutional policies.

Additionally, Trump Toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco should have been strongly cautioned against continuing to bend the ethical codes with largely fabricated “emergencies” intended to interfere with the normal functioning of the Federal Courts.

Instead, the Supremes’ majority gave the regime totally undeserved, immoral victories in all three cases. As a result, many innocent individuals were denied rights, forced into life-threatening conditions, and some even died. The Supremes’ inflicted damage on society at large. They assisted in trampling social justice and human rights. They grotesquely perverted and “turned on its head” the concept of “irreparable harm.” They indelibly and irreparably damaged their reputation and our system of justice.

In the meantime, the message to Francisco and the rest of his human rights denying scofflaw crowd over at the DOJ is clear: Justice is dead, courage has fled, you’re in charge.

Unhappily, by most accounts, the tone-deaf and disconnected Supremes’ majority might be on the cusp of throwing more gasoline on the fires of social justice, at the worst possible time for our nation. If, as expected, they endorse the regime’s intentionally cruel, illegal, dishonest, and racially charged scheme to,”shaft” Dreamers — some of our finest young people, many of whom are “essential workers” — it’s likely to spark more justified outrage and further protests!

So certain are the regime’s White Nationalists that they have the “J.R. Five” in their pocket that they reportedly already are planning to use these American youths as “hostages” to demand even further immigration restrictions as “ransom” from House Dems. The Dems are unlikely to bite, so Dreamers will be left to “twist in the wind” pending the results of the election.

The Supreme Court majority has been hand selected by the GOP to insure that a minority, anti-democratic ideology, often willfully devoid of humanity and historical awareness, will continue to exercise disproportionate influence over the U.S. legal system for years, perhaps decades, to come.

We can’t change the past. But, a better “appointing authority” will be a start of long overdue change and “pushback” from the forces and institutions of democracy, humanity, and racial justice to restore integrity to our highest Court that, in actuality, now functions more like the lowest denominator and an instigator of racial and institutional injustice in our hurting nation.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-06-20

TA-NEHISI COATES IS OPTIMISTIC THAT WE’RE FINALLY AT A MOMENT OF CHANGE IN AMERICA’S APPROACH TO RACE RELATIONS — Read Ezra Klein’s Vox News Interview With Ta-Nehisi to Find Out Why!

https://apple.news/Tn2n0n8PnRUG6W-1mAp_OZw

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful

The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.

The first question I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates during our recent conversation on The Ezra Klein Show was broad: What does he see right now, as he looks out at the country?

“I can’t believe I’m gonna say this,” he replied, “but I see hope. I see progress right now.”

Coates is the author of the National Book Award winner Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, among others. We discussed how this moment differs from 1968, the tension between “law” and “order,” the contested legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Donald Trump’s view of the presidency, police abolition, why we need to renegotiate the idea of “the public,” how the consensus on criminal justice has shifted, what Joe Biden represents, the proper role of the state, and much more.

But there’s one particular thread of this conversation that I haven’t been able to put down: There is now, as there always is amid protests, a loud call for the protesters to follow the principles of nonviolence. And that call, as Coates says, comes from people who neither practice nor heed nonviolence in their own lives. But what if we turned that conversation around? What would it mean to build the state around principles of nonviolence, rather than reserving that exacting standard for those harmed by the state?

An edited transcript from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.

Ezra Klein

What do you see right now, as you look out at the country?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment.

I had an interesting call on Saturday with my dad, who was born in 1946, grew up dirt poor in Philadelphia, lived in a truck, went off to Vietnam, came back, joined the Panther Party, and was in Baltimore for the 1968 riots. Would’ve been about 22 at that time.

I asked him if he could compare what he saw in 1968 to what he was seeing now. And what he said to me was there was no comparison — that this is much more sophisticated. And I say, well, what do you mean? He said it would have been like if somebody from the turn of the 20th century could see the March on Washington.

The idea that black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods would resonate with white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London — that was unfathomable to him in ‘68, when it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.

I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black, that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is. I think that’s different.

Ezra Klein

Do you think there is more multiethnic solidarity today than there was then?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do. Within my lifetime, I don’t think there’s been a more effective movement than Black Lives Matter. They brought out the kind of ridiculousness that black folks deal with on a daily basis in the policing in their communities.

George Floyd is not new. The ability to broadcast it the way it was broadcasted is new. But black folks have known things like that were going on in their communities, in their families, for a very long time. You have a generation of people who are out in the streets right now, many of whom only have the vaguest memory of George Bush. They remember George Bush the way I remember Carter. The first real president who they actually grappled with was a black dude. That’s a different type of consciousness.

Ezra Klein

I was watching the speech Trump gave before tear-gassing the protesters in the park in DC. What so chilled me about that speech was how much he clearly wanted this — like this was the presidency as he had always imagined it, directing men with guns and shields to put down protesters so he could walk through a park unafraid and seem tough.

He’s always seemed so disinterested and annoyed by the actual work of being president, even during coronavirus. But this is the thing that he seems energized and excited by. And that’s been the scary part of it to me — that you have somebody in that role who is eager for escalation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is pretty clear that the war-making part of being head of state was the part that most appeals to Donald Trump.

What does this mean for the election? It may be true that Donald Trump will win. Maybe this will lead to some sort of white backlash that ultimately helps him. I can’t really call that. But what I will say is this is a massive denial of legitimacy. Donald Trump may win the election in November, but he will be a ruler and not a president.

I think that those things need to be distinguished. When you’re calling out the military to repress protests that are in cities across the country, not just in ghettos and in hoods, all you have is force at that point. Most likely if he wins, he’ll be someone who won with a minority of the vote two times, which will be a first in American history. And violence will be the tool by which he rules. I think it’s a very different situation to be in.

Ezra Klein

I’m glad you brought in that word legitimacy. I wrote a piece the other day called “America at the breaking point,” and one of the things that I was imagining as I wrote that was a legitimacy crisis. The stakes have been going higher and higher this year: coronavirus, the entire country locked in houses, upset, angry, scared. Then you add on a series of basically televised lynchings.

And then you think: This is an election year. In some ways, I’m more afraid of the situation you just described. If Donald Trump is reelected in a way that does not feel legitimate to people — if he loses by more votes than he did in 2016, or there’s a contested-vote situation — this could turn out badly. Legitimacy crises are scary things. And I don’t think we’re really well equipped for one right now.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I agree. But when I look back historically, the alternative to me is 1968.

I think, amongst a large swath to a majority of black people in this country, the police are illegitimate. They’re not seen as a force that necessarily causes violent crime to decline. Oftentimes you see black people resorting to the police because they have no other option, but they’re not seen with the level of trust that maybe Americans in other communities bestow upon the police. They know you could be a victim to lethal force because you used a $20 bill that may or may not have been counterfeit, because you were asleep at night in your home and somebody got a warrant to kick down your door without knocking.

I would argue that [feeling] has been nationalized. I don’t know that everybody in America feels that way, but I think large swaths of Americans now feel that Trump is the police. And they feel about Trump the way we feel about cops: This is somebody that rules basically by power. I would prefer that situation to 1968, where we’re alone in our neighborhoods and we know something about the world and we know what the police do, but other folks can’t really see it — and if they can, they’re unsympathetic. I would prefer now.

The long history of black folks in this country is conflict and struggle, between ourselves and the state and other interests within the society so that we can live free. And this is the first time that I think a lot of us have felt that the battle was legitimately joined, not just by white people but other people of color. When I hear that brother in Minneapolis talk about how his store was burned down and him saying, “Let it burn.” That’s a very different world. It’s a very, very different situation. It’s not a great one. It’s not the one we want. But it’s not ‘68.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the interview at the link.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Coates’s novel about slavery and freedom, The Water Dancer, which I highly recommend.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️I also found the just-released streaming movie Just Mercy instructive. It’s based on the true story of unjustly convicted Alabama death-row inmate Walter McMillan and his courageous young just-out-of-Harvard African-American attorney Bryan Stevenson, played by Michael B. Jordan. In the movie, as in real life, justice was achieved in the end.

But, was it really?

Why should justice in America a be so dependent on both the “right lawyer” and the particular location and judges before whom you are tried? Why should it be so difficult, time consuming, painful, and uncertain to obtain? Why weren’t the crooked sheriff and the other perpetrators of deadly fraud held accountable? Why was such a tone-deaf judge on the bench in the first place? Why was a corrupt system not interested in real justice for the murder victim? Why do we still have the death penalty — clearly “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Constitution by any rational definition?

It’s also worth remembering that one of the greatest advocates of putting African Americans in Alabama to death was none other than White Nationalist prosecutor Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. Sessions then went on to a further career involving child abuse, squandering of taxpayer funds on “gonzo” prosecutions of legal asylum seekers, and unfairly sentencing Hispanic refugee women to torture, and even death. Yet, Sessions walks free. He even has the audacity to run for public office again based on his perverted, racist views of “justice” in America.

Whether or not he, or the equally repulsive and bigoted other GOP candidate, former football coach Tommy Tuberville, get elected will be a true test of how far we have come as a nation, and in particular, how far Alabama has come in atoning for past wrongs. Anybody who cares about equal justice for all should send at least a few bucks to the re-election campaign of wholly decent, competent, U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) to help him fight the GOP “forces of darkness, racism, and inequality,” arrayed against him.

I really hope Coates is right. But, based on the “reality of the moment” we still have a long way to go. True social justice would involve accountability for individuals like Trump, Miller, Sessions, and Barr who have been actors and proponents of injustice toward “the other” in our society. When folks like unapologetic White Nationalist provocateur Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) are no longer placed in public office, then, and only then, will social justice and equal justice for all have been achieved.

And, I personally doubt our capacity as a nation for true due process and equal justice under law as long as the “JR Five” rule the Supremes. So far, there haven’t been many racial injustices or “Dred Scottifications” of the other that they have had the courage and integrity to condemn! Better judges, with more humanity and empathy, are a requirement for a truly just nation.

That pandering, maliciously incompetent, willfully ignorant, bigot Donald Trump, with his vile, intentionally racially divisive message of fear still polls at 42% shows just how far we have to go to achieve due process and equal justice for all in America. “Equal Justice For All” isn’t just a “snappy slogan;” it requires leaders who really believe in it!

Right now, save for Nancy Pelosi, we conspicuously lack such leaders in all three Branches of our National Government. Better results will require change at the top. It will also require a significant minority of voters to stop enabling the intolerant, incompetent, and divisive to rule.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once wrote:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The quote isn’t just an “abstract concept;” it has “real life” meaning. It’s from King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he was unjustly imprisoned in 1963 for participation in peaceful protests against racial injustice.

“Social Justice” isn’t just an idealistic concept. It’s an absolute necessity for a well-functioning, just, and fully productive society!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-07-20

JAMELLE BOUIE @ NYT: The Police & Often The Misuse of a “Bogus Rule of Law” (when used to allow the empowered to run roughshod over the legal and human rights of “the other”) Are Long-Standing Roadblocks to a Fair & Just Society —“The simplest answer to the question ‘Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?’ is that they were never intended to be.”

Jamelle writes in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/police-riots.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.

It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.

By Jamelle BouieJune 5, 2020

If we’re going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren’t destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many officers are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets.

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

Jamelle Bouie’s Newsletter: Discover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle.

African-American observers have never had any illusions about who the police are meant to serve. The police, James Baldwin wrote in his 1960 essay on discontent and unrest in Harlem, “represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are simply for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here in his place.” This wasn’t because each individual officer was a bad person, but because he was fundamentally separate from the black community as a matter of history and culture. “None of the police commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling.”

Go back to the beginning of the 20th century, during America’s first age of progressive reform, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad does in “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” and you’ll find activists describing how “policemen had abdicated their responsibility to dispense color-blind service and protection, resulting in an object lesson for youth: the indiscriminate mass arrests of blacks being attacked by white mobs.”

The police were ubiquitous in the African-American neighborhoods of the urban North, but they weren’t there to protect black residents as much as they were there to enforce the racial order, even if it led to actual disorder in the streets. For example, in the aftermath of the Philadelphia “race riot” of 1918, one black leader complained, “In nearly every part of this city peaceable and law-abiding Negroes of the home-owning type have been set upon by irresponsible hoodlums, their property damaged and destroyed, while the police seem powerless to protect.”

If you are trying to understand the function of policing in American society, then even a cursory glance at the history of the institution would point you in the direction of social control. And blackness in particular, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh argues, was a state of being that required “permanent supervision and sometimes direct domination.”

The simplest answer to the question “Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?” is that they were never intended to be. And to the extent that the police appear to be rejecting accountability outright, I think it reflects the extent to which the polity demanding it is now inclusive of those groups the police have historically been tasked to control. That polity and its leaders are simply rejected as legitimate wielders of authority over law enforcement, especially when they ask for restraint.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Jamelle’s op-ed at the above link.

Truth is, we have the legal tools to do things like prosecute police misconduct, honor the human and civil rights of African Americans, overcome the years of unfair and discriminatory treatment of African Americans in education, employment, and leadership, promote community cooperation to allow each individual to reach maximum levels of contribution and enjoyment, correct the due process and bias flaws in court systems, tax more rationally and equitably, grant asylum to refugees we are now unfairly and illegally turning away, end inhumane and counterproductive “civil” detention, stop putting disproportionate numbers of minority communities in jail and prison, and end “Dred Scottification” of the other.

What we lack is 1) the honest, courageous, humane, and wise public officials necessary to make the laws and existing tools work; 2) the political will to get those types of officials into the correct offices.

I don’t know how much it would cost. But, whatever it is, we need to invest in it. And some “ready funds” could be made available if we stop building unneeded walls, detention centers, prisons, separating kids, and wasting legal and judicial resources fighting against the institutional fascism and tyranny of the Trump regime.

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

PWS

06-07-20

GEORGE PACKER @ THE ATLANTIC: With Failed Institutions & Lousy Leaders, Including a President Leading the Charge to the Bottom, America Faces An Uncertain Future — “A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.” — Joe Biden & The Dems Could Be The Last, Best Hope For American Democracy & Real Progress Toward “Equal Justice For All!”

George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://apple.news/A-6795FCPQU6LRBMW1_nzvw

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

IDEAS

Shouting Into the Institutional Void

Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.

In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.

The commission’s report, written by the executive director, David Ginsburg, an establishment liberal lawyer of New Deal vintage, appeared at the end of February 1968. It became an instant million-copy best seller. Its language is bracing by the standards of any era: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for far-reaching policy reforms in housing, employment, education, and policing, to stop the country from becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

[Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit]

It was too much for Johnson, who resented not being credited for his efforts to achieve civil rights and eradicate poverty, and whose presidency had just been engulfed by the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. He shelved the report. A few weeks later, on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The next night, Johnson—who had just announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection—spoke to a country whose cities were burning from coast to coast. “It is the fiber and the fabric of the republic that’s being tested,” he said. “If we are to have the America that we mean to have, all men of all races, all regions, all religions must stand their ground to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time, and in all times to come. Last evening, after receiving the terrible news of Dr. King’s death, my heart went out to his family and to his people, especially to the young Americans who I know must sometimes wonder if they are to be denied a fullness of life because of the color of their skin.” To an aide, he was more blunt in assessing the uprising: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”

King’s murder and the riots it sparked propelled Congress to pass, by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, the decade’s last major piece of civil-rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enforced fair standards in housing. Johnson signed it on April 11. It was too late. The very best reports, laws, and presidential speeches couldn’t contain the anger in the streets. That year, 1968, was when reform was overwhelmed by radicalization on the left and reaction on the right. We still live in the aftermath. The language and ideas of the Kerner Report have haunted the years since—a reminder of a missed chance.

The difference between 1968 and 2020 is the difference between a society that failed to solve its biggest problem and a society that no longer has the means to try. A year before his death, King, still insisting on nonviolent resistance, called riots “the language of the unheard.” The phrase implies that someone could be made to hear, and possibly answer. What’s happening today doesn’t feel the same. The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.

After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

[James Fallows: Is this the worst year in modern American history?]

If 2020 were at all like 1968, the president would go on national television and speak as the leader of all Americans to try to calm a rattled country in a tumultuous time. But the Trump administration hasn’t answered the unrest like an embattled democracy trying to reestablish legitimacy. Its reflex is that of an autocracy—a display of strength that actually reveals weakness, emptiness. Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman trying to show that he was still master of the country amid reports that he’d taken refuge in a bunker: the phalanx of armored guards surrounding him as he strutted out of the presidential palace; the tear gas and beatings that cleared his path of demonstrators and journalists; the presence of his daughter, who had come up with the idea, and his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square.

William Barr has reacted to the killing of George Floyd like the head of a secret-police force rather than the attorney general of a democratic republic. His first act was not to order a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, but—as he’s done before—to rush out ahead of the facts and try to control public opinion, by announcing that the violence following Floyd’s death was the work of left-wing agitators. Streets of the nation’s capital are now blocked by security forces from Barr’s Department of Justice—many from the Federal Bureau of Prisons—wearing uniforms that make them impossible to identify, like paramilitary troops with unknown commanders.

The protests have to be understood in the context of this institutional void. They resemble the spontaneous mass cry of a people suffering under dictatorship more than the organized projection of public opinion aimed at an accountable government. They signify that democratic politics has stopped working. They are both utopian and desperate.

[Read: The double standard of the American riot]

Some public figures—politicians, policy experts, civic leaders—have come forward with proposals for changing the mindset and tactics of the police. Terrence Floyd, the brother of the murdered man, urged protesters to educate themselves and vote. But the overwhelming message of the protests is simply “end racism,” which would be a large step toward ending evil itself. The protesters are demanding an absolute, as if they’ve stopped expecting the state to produce anything that falls a little short. For white protesters—who are joining demonstrations on behalf of black freedom and equality in large numbers for the first time since Selma, Alabama, 55 years ago—this demand means ending an evil that lies within themselves. It would be another sign of a hollow democracy if the main energy in the afterglow of the protests goes into small-group sessions on white privilege rather than a hard push for police reform.

. . . .

This is where we are. Trust is missing everywhere—between black Americans and police, between experts and ordinary people, between the government and the governed, between citizens of different identities and beliefs. There’s an election coming in five months. It won’t end racism or the pandemic, or repair our social bonds, or restore our democracy to health. But it could give us a chance to try, if we get that far.

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

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

Well said! The only thing missing is specific reference to the toxic failure of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We once had a Court with the legal experience, ethics, vision, and moral courage to lead America forward toward a more just and equal society. That’s been totally dissipated by years of GOP erosion of the Court’s legal expertise, practical problem-solving ability, humanity, courage, vision of a better future for all in America, and integrity.

The “journey downward and march backward” from Brown v. Board of Education to legal travesties like Trump v. Hawaii and Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (to name just two glaring examples of the Court’s disgraceful and illegal “Dred Scottification” of the other in our society) is certainly one of the most outrageous, disturbing, and disgusting tales in post-Plessy v. Ferguson American jurisprudence.

The Court’s abject failure to move forward and make voting rights and equal justice for all a reality is in no small measure linked to the death of George Floyd and other Americans of color and the nationwide protests of injustice. Failure of judicial integrity, vision, and leadership — in other words failures of both legal and moral justice — imperils our nation and many of its inhabitants.

America already faces long-term threats to our justice system and those it supposedly serves from the irresponsible and poorly-qualified life-tenured judicial appointments of Trump and the Mitch-led GOP. To them, things like “equal justice for all,” “voting rights,” “due process for all,” “women’s rights,” and “human rights” are just cruel hoaxes — things to be privately mocked, publicly “lip-serviced,” then buried forever beneath an avalanche of disingenuous and opaque legal gobbledygook intended to hide their true anti-democratic, White Nationalist enabling intent. The appointment of any more Justices along the lines of the “J.R. Five” likely would be the final “nail in the coffin” for our democratic republic! 🏴‍☠️👎🏻🥵

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

PWS

06-06-20

ANNE APPLEBAUM @ THE ATLANTIC: “History Will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?” ☠️👎🏻

https://apple.news/Al__dZnidS7iBkjiQiuWRfg

. . . .

In February, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment. All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of Ukraine. All of them knew that he had tried to use American foreign-policy tools, including military funding, to force a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent. Yet Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never took the charges seriously. They mocked the Democratic House leaders who had presented the charges. They decided against hearing evidence. With the single exception of Romney, they voted in favor of ending the investigation. They did not use the opportunity to rid the country of a president whose operative value system—built around corruption, nascent authoritarianism, self-regard, and his family’s business interests—runs counter to everything that most of them claim to believe in.

Just a month later, in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism—his one true “ideology”—was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

This utter disaster was avoidable. If the Senate had removed the president by impeachment a month earlier; if the Cabinet had invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as soon as Trump’s unfitness became clear; if the anonymous and off-the-record officials who knew of Trump’s incompetence had jointly warned the public; if they had not, instead, been so concerned about maintaining their proximity to power; if senators had not been scared of their donors; if Pence, Pompeo, and Barr had not believed that God had chosen them to play special roles in this “biblical moment”—if any of these things had gone differently, then thousands of deaths and a historic economic collapse might have been avoided.

The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. Unless, of course, they decide not to.

When I visited Marianne Birthler, she didn’t think it was interesting to talk about collaboration in East Germany, because everybody collaborated in East Germany. So I asked her about dissidence instead: When all of your friends, all of your teachers, and all of your employers are firmly behind the system, how do you find the courage to oppose it? In her answer, Birthler resisted the use of the word courage; just as people can adapt to corruption or immorality, she told me, they can slowly learn to object as well. The choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of “a number of small decisions that you take”—to absent yourself from the May Day parade, for example, or not to sing the words of the party hymn. And then, one day, you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. Often, this process involves role models. You see people whom you admire, and you want to be like them. It can even be “selfish.” “You want to do something for yourself,” Birthler said, “to respect yourself.”

For some people, the struggle is made easier by their upbringing. Marko Martin’s parents hated the East German regime, and so did he. His father was a conscientious objector, and so was he. As far back as the Weimar Republic, his great-grandparents had been part of the “anarcho-syndicalist” anti-Communist left; he had access to their books. In the 1980s, he refused to join the Free German Youth, the Communist youth organization, and as a result he could not go to university. He instead embarked on a vocational course, to train to be an electrician (after refusing to become a butcher). In his electrician-training classes, one of the other students pulled him aside and warned him, subtly, that the Stasi was collecting information on him: “It’s not necessary that you tell me all the things you have in mind.” He was eventually allowed to emigrate, in May 1989, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In America we also have our Marianne Birthlers, our Marko Martins: people whose families taught them respect for the Constitution, who have faith in the rule of law, who believe in the importance of disinterested public service, who have values and role models from outside the world of the Trump administration. Over the past year, many such people have found the courage to stand up for what they believe. A few have been thrust into the limelight. Fiona Hill—an immigrant success story and a true believer in the American Constitution—was not afraid to testify at the House’s impeachment hearings, nor was she afraid to speak out against Republicans who were promulgating a false story of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” she said in her congressional testimony. “The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.”

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—another immigrant success story and another true believer in the American Constitution—also found the courage, first to report on the president’s improper telephone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, which Vindman had heard as a member of the National Security Council, and then to speak publicly about it. In his testimony, he made explicit reference to the values of the American political system, so different from those in the place where he was born. “In Russia,” he said, “offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life.” But as “an American citizen and public servant … I can live free of fear for mine and my family’s safety.” A few days after the Senate impeachment vote, Vindman was physically escorted out of the White House by representatives of a vengeful president who did not appreciate Vindman’s hymn to American patriotism—although retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, apparently did. Vindman’s behavior, Kelly said in a speech a few days later, was “exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave. He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

[Read: John Kelly finally lets loose on Trump]

But both Hill and Vindman had some important advantages. Neither had to answer to voters, or to donors. Neither had prominent status in the Republican Party. What would it take, by contrast, for Pence or Pompeo to conclude that the president bears responsibility for a catastrophic health and economic crisis? What would it take for Republican senators to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love? What would it take for their aides and subordinates to come to the same conclusion, to resign, and to campaign against the president? What would it take, in other words, for someone like Lindsey Graham to behave like Wolfgang Leonhard?

If, as Stanley Hoffmann wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of “collaborationisms,” because the phenomenon comes in so many variations, the same is true of dissidence, which should probably be described as “dissidences.” People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations like the one Wolfgang Leonhard had when walking into his fancy nomenklatura dining room, with its white tablecloths and three-course meals. They can also be persuaded by outside events: rapid political changes, for example. Awareness that the regime had lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harald Jaeger, an obscure and until that moment completely loyal East German border guard, decide on the night of November 9, 1989, to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall—a decision that led, over the next days and months, to the end of East Germany itself. Jaeger’s decision was not planned; it was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. “Their will was so great,” he said years later, of those demanding to cross into West Berlin, “there was no other alternative than to open the border.”

But these things are all intertwined, and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable. Leonhard’s “sudden” revelation may have been building for years, perhaps since his mother’s arrest. Jaeger was moved by the grandeur of the historical moment on that night in November, but he also had more petty concerns: He was annoyed at his boss, who had not given him clear instructions about what to do.

Could some similar combination of the petty and the political ever convince Lindsey Graham that he has helped lead his country down a blind alley? Perhaps a personal experience could move him, a prod from someone who represents his former value system—an old Air Force buddy, say, whose life has been damaged by Trump’s reckless behavior, or a friend from his hometown. Perhaps it requires a mass political event: When the voters begin to turn, maybe Graham will turn with them, arguing, as Jaeger did, that “their will was so great … there was no other alternative.” At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting “Trump First,” especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than in much of the rest of the world.

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham—along with Pence, Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures—will understand what he has enabled.

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

This article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “The Collaborators.”

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Read Applebaum’s entire, much longer article at the link. Part of it is a fascinating study of how and why, despite backgrounds pointing in exactly the opposite directions, Lindsey Graham abandoned principle and became one of Trump’s “chief collaborators,” while Mitt Romney stood up against Trump and his GOP collaborators in the Senate.

These days, the GOP doesn’t produce many folks with intellectual honesty and capacity for self-examination. Indeed, those exhibiting anything suggesting those qualities might be lurking in their souls are shunned or railroaded out of the party (see, e.g., Jeff Flake). So, I wouldn’t hold my breath for any of Trump’s toadies to actually own up to or take responsibility for their “crimes against humanity.”

And “decency,” well, that’s been absent from GOP politicos for some time now. Kids in cages. Taking away the legal and constitutional rights of asylum seekers. Sending abused women refugees back to be tortured by their abusers. Attacking California’s meager payments to our undocumented fellow humans, many performing essential services at risk to their health. Turning Immigration Courts into Star Chambers. Using false narratives to incite hate attacks on African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and American Journalists. Failing to speak out forcefully against anti-semitic White Nationalist thugs. Looking the other way or even encouraging Trump to mistreat those courageous civil servants who dare speak truth to his lies. “Orbiting” vulnerable asylum seekers back to squalid danger zones. Denying detained kids toothbrushes.The list of indecent acts could go on almost forever.

But, fortunately, as Applebaum suggests, that won’t save these GOP collaborators from the judgments of history. Unfortunately, however, historical vindication won’t save the lives of those victims who have died at the collaborators’ hands, nor will it undo the scars that some will bear for life as the result of the “crimes against humanity” committed by Trump and his GOP cronies. And, that’s the indelible shame of a nation that let Trump and the GOP wield their toxic political power in the first place.

Due Process Forever! Complicity in the Face of Tyranny, Never!

PWS

06-04-20

🏴‍☠️“BIZARRO COURTS” — THE CONSTITUTION APPLIES TO ALL PERSONS IN THE U.S., YET ICE & THEIR “PARTNERS” AT EOIR HAVE ESTABLISHED A CONSTITUTION-FREE “COURT SYSTEM” THAT OPERATES BEYOND THE LAW & MORALITY IN A LEGAL NEVER-NEVER LAND 🧚‍♂️ — How Do They Get Away With It Under The Noses Of Congress & Article III Courts? — An Outrageous Story of Gross 🤮 Institutional & Personal Failures & Ethical Lapses Across All Three Branches of Our Federal Government ☠️👎🏻!

Paul Moses and Tim Healy report for The Daily Beast:

‘The Bizarro-World’ Immigration Courts Where the Constitution Isn’t Applied Detainees can be held for weeks or months before seeing a judge. The Justice Department gave “the word of the agency under penalty of perjury” that it would fix that—but only in NY

·         ICE officials acknowledged that they couldn’t handle the volume of arrests their own agents made; the major clog was in getting a legal review from the agency’s understaffed legal unit.

·         In 11 of the 55 venues that heard more than 500 cases last year, detainees spent six weeks or more in jail before an initial hearing. Such long waits would be unconstitutional in criminal cases; the right to due process requires authorities to not only get a case filed but also to provide an arraignment promptly, generally in no more than 48 hours.

·         Among the 55 venues that handled 500 or more detainee cases last year, the longest waits from arrest to initial hearing were in hearing locations at privately run lockups under contract with ICE: Winn Correctional Center in Winnifield, Louisiana, a median of 140 days; T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 72 days; Richwood Correctional Center in Richwood, Louisiana, 64 days…

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Ironically, by his own overt corruption and open disdain for our Constitution and the rule of law, Trump has exposed the deep flaws, grotesque derelictions of duty, and unethical complicity throughout our Constitutional institutions that are supposed to protect all of us, particularly the most vulnerable among us like civil immigration detainees and asylum seekers, from abuses by would-be authoritarian tyrants like Trump!

Here’s a gem:

“The larger question behind this mass of numbers is why DHS is detaining so many people when both its legal office and the court lack the staffing—not only judges but support staff as well—to handle them.

‘I would just say, they are the prosecuting agency and in this context, they have complete control over the timeline,’ said Aaron Hall, an immigration lawyer who practices at the court in Aurora, Colorado, which has had substantial delays. ‘If the charging document isn’t ready to go, why are they arresting them?’”

Good question! But don’t expect a straight answer from the “malicious incompetents” at DHS. Nor will today get anything except misleading nonsense from their “partners” at EOIR (“ICE Jr.”).

DOJ was forewarned of this disaster by an independent consultant back in 2017. But, rather than solving the problem, then AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions intentionally made things even worse at EOIR. You might remember “Gonzo” as the “mastermind” behind the regime’s unconstitutional child separation policy. His victims were returned to abuse, scarred for life, or imprisoned for the “crime” of asserting their Constitutional and legal rights to fair treatment.

All of this is wrong, plain and simple! It’s part of “Dred Scotiffication” — now playing out across our nation in many ways. Finally, the systematic “dehumanization of the other” as aided, abetted, and actually encouraged by a majority of the Supremes, is getting some much-needed and long overdue “pushback.”

But the abuses of our Constitution and our values, and the unaccountability of corrupt public officials, present and former, of the Trump immigration kakistocracy, won’t cease until we get “regime change.” That requires substantial personnel and attitude changes across all three branches of our reeling Federal Government! And that definitely includes accountability for those who have failed to insure “equal justice for all” and instead permitted and sometimes aided and abetted the existence of “Constitution-Free Zones” right under their noses!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Officials & Institutions, Never!

PWS

6-04-20

IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG: Johnson, Olivas, Wadhia on DACA: “DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope.“

Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
UC Davis School of Law

Professor Michael Olivas
University of Houston Law Center

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/06/the-meaning-of-daca-by-kevin-r-johnson-michael-a-olivas-and-shoba-sivaprasad-wadhia-.html

The Meaning of DACA

By Kevin R. Johnson, Michael A. Olivas, and Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

The Supreme Court will soon release an opinion on the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s choice to end DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Former President Barack Obama rolled out DACA in June 2012 and the Department of Homeland Security implemented it two months later through a memorandum signed by then-Secretary Janet Napolitano.

DACA, based on a conventional concept of prosecutorial discretion, provided limited relief from removal – and work authorization — to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants through a discretionary tool called “deferred action.” All legal challenges to DACA, including one by campus immigration hawk former Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, failed. How will the story of DACA be remembered?

Much more than the sum of its parts, DACA will be remembered as an intriguing political story. For years, Congress introduced legislation known as the DREAM Act to provide legal status and a pathway to permanent residency for young undocumented college students. Congress has debated some kind of comprehensive immigration reform over two decades. All of these efforts failed. Said President Obama in announcing DACA “In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places.” DACA helped jump start the forceful movement across the nation calling for the vindication of the rights of immigrants.

Politics led to DACA’s demise. Donald J. Trump ran for President on a strident immigration enforcement ticket and promised to end the “unconstitutional” DACA policy. After the inauguration of President Trump and lobbying by some Republican leaders to keep DACA, the administration tried to terminate DACA and announced this “wind-down” in a press conference on September 5, 2017. Ultimately, political slogans, not reasoned analysis, were offered for the decision to end DACA.

The Trump administration’s arguments to the Supreme Court defending the end of DACA were also mired in politics. In a convoluted fashion that wended its way to federal appellate courts from coast to coast, the administration—through a series of Interim leaders—simply ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and in an arbitrary and capricious way simply declared that DACA was “illegal,” and that they were required to end it.

The claim that DACA was somehow “illegal” was simply not true. No court found it to be, and for good reason. Deferred action is an instrument of discretion used to shield “low priority” immigrants from deportation. Deferred action enjoys a long history and legal foundation across both Republican and Democratic administrations. The administration could decide to end the policy it, but not by undertaking the judicial role of declaring their own exercise of discretion to be unconstitutional. As it did in the Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) in manufacturing a civil rights rationale for a U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 Census that would have chilled the participation of many Latina/os and immigrants, the administration simply misrepresented facts. The Supreme Court should require the Department of Homeland Security to undertake the searching analysis of facts and policy impacts, and honestly proceed, playing by the rules. Those with DACA have upheld their part of this bargain, and the administration must abide by open and fair procedures required by the law.

DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope. Said one DACA recipient one author spoke to described September 5, 2017, the day the end of DACA was announced as “just an awful day … Eventually you just get over the pain, get over the fear… and you continue to organize and protect your community in whatever way you can.” Throughout the time DACA has been tossed around in the courts, thousands continue to build families of their own, work in the frontlines of healthcare. and revitalize classrooms in colleges and universities across the country, a phenomenon we have seen first-hand as educators and administrators. DACAmented recipients are now our doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, repaying the investment this country has made in them.

If the Supreme Court fails to require the Trump administration to abide by the law, as we urge the Court to insist upon, those with DACA must live under a cruel Sword of Damocles, with no clear pathway to legal permanent residency. They deserve an honest policy determination, and the Supreme Court should insist on no less. Ultimately, it will take Congressional action to enact a DREAM Act, and comprehensive immigration reform to enable these young members a means to their rightful place in our society.

—–

Kevin R. Johnson is Dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law and Mabie/Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicanx Studies.

Michael A. Olivas is William B. Bates Distinguished Chair of Law, Emeritus, at the University of Houston Law Center and the author of Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of The DREAM Act and DACA.

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar, Founding Director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State Law in University Park, and the author of Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases and Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump.

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I’ll be more blunt.

The Administration’s legal arguments for ending DACA have always been bogus and totally disingenuous. Indeed, they do not even remain the same from case to case as they essentially make it up as they go along. It’s all transparently about White Nationalist racism and political pandering to a right-wing minority.

The lower Federal Courts were nearly unanimous in rejecting the DOJ’s various bad faith positions. Yet, instead of unanimously blasting the Administration’s frivolous request for intervention out of hand and sending a clear message reaffirming the lower courts, the Supremes granted an audience to Francisco and the scofflaws.

By failing to send a clear message that political pandering at the expense of human lives won’t be tolerated, the Supremes have encouraged further lawless, insidiously-motivated acts by Trump and have become part of the problem. They have also unconscionably undermined lower Federal Court judges who stood up for the rule of law and removal of racism and dehumanization from government decision-making.

Among other things, the Supremes have helped Trump: eradicate 40 years of asylum protections without legislation; weaponize the public charge provisions without legislation to endanger the health an safety of immigrants and our nation; allowed invidious discrimination against Muslims and refugees; and forced individuals who have established reasonable fear of persecution to be sent to live in life-threatening squalor and danger in Mexico.

The Supremes’ majority has knowingly and intentionally furthered the “Dred-Scottification” of “the other” in society: African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, asylum seekers, the poor, women, prisoners, workers, etc. Our nation is paying the price.

The solution eventually will require a re-examination of the type of individuals to whom we give the high privilege of serving on the Supremes: their humanity, courage, practical experience, empathy, moral leadership, problem-solving ability, expertise in furthering human rights, and commitment to equal justice for all, rather than narrow “out of the mainstream” political ideologies. The current outrage and unrest over the lack of social justice in the United States can be tied directly to the Supremes’ lack of leadership, courage, humanity, and an overriding commitment to equal justice under law. This version of the Supremes has failed America. Badly! We must do better in the future!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-01-20

COURTSIDE HISTORY: ANNIKA NEKLASON @ THE ATLANTIC: How White Supremacist Conspiracy Theories Fueled The Civil War & Continue To Divide & Endanger America!🏴‍☠️☠️

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/conspiracy-theories-civil-war/612283/

The Conspiracy Theories That Fueled the Civil War

The most powerful people and institutions in the South spread paranoia and fear to protect slavery. Their beliefs led the country to war—and continue to haunt our politics to this day.

Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.May 29, 2020

Photo-illustration by Damon Davis

In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country” and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.” Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts and then allow the South to burn, rather than stepping in to quell resistance. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending “emissaries” to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.” Georgia’s insisted that the “avowed purpose” of Republican leaders was to “subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.”

These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.

The lies might not have spread so far or engendered so much violence if not for the real threat, and the real fear, that they tapped into. There was no great sectional war planned to root out slavery in the South, no plot among Lincoln’s allies to execute a mass murder of slaveholders and their families. But there were slave revolts. And those slave revolts could become deadly. In the Caribbean, a series of mass rebellions broke out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most successful of these, the Haitian Revolution, forged a new free state out of a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands of Europeans and white colonists, along with more than 100,000 slaves and freedmen. In the United States, where slaves remained a minority of southern state populations, violent uprisings were more limited, but still occurred: Individual slaves lashed out; groups of fugitives fought off slave catchers; and, every so often, an organized rebellion was planned.

These uprisings contradicted the narratives that southern slaveholders had constructed. In their telling, slaves were well cared for and content, provided with a better life than they could ever build for themselves in freedom—a life that would give them no good reason to turn on their owners.

To square this defense of slavery with the threat of resistance, southern slaveowners “over time shifted toward a more conspiratorial view,” Matthew J. Clavin, an American- and Atlantic-history professor at the University of Houston, told me. “Slaveowners blamed outsiders. Or they blamed free black people. Or they blamed foreign emissaries from London [for] trying to incite their slaves to rebel.”

Writing in The Atlantic in 1861 about the free black man Denmark Vesey’s thwarted plans to lead an uprising in Charleston, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the first official report on the revolt considered a range of possible motivations for the rebels—including “Congressional eloquence,” “a Church squabble,” and “mistaken indulgences”—but not that slavery itself might be to blame. “It never seems to occur to any of these spectators,” Higginson observed, “that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.”

Abolitionists were a favorite boogeyman in slaveholders’ stories. Antislavery pamphlets and speeches were also cited in reports about Vesey’s plans as a “means for inflaming the minds of the colored population” and instigating rebellion.

Such accusations were common in the first half of the 19th century, Clavin noted. “There would be episodes of a slave burning a slave owner’s house to the ground or slitting an overseer’s throat,” he said. “And there would be a wealthy abolitionist from New York City who would give a speech, and the speech didn’t incite violence, didn’t encourage anyone to run away, but six months later, southerners would be blaming that northern orator for causing the slave disturbance. It really [was] just an unbelievable ignorance of the facts used to create a community-wide response that was anti-abolitionist.”

John Brown’s attempt to start a mass slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859 seemed to confirm these sentiments. Brown was like a character straight out of a conspiracy theory: a white abolitionist who intended to arm slaves and turn them against their owners with the backing of a secretive network of antislavery supporters in New England (one of whom laid out the conspiracy in detail in The Atlantic years later).

For southerners, the John Brown rebellion “lent credence to that conspiratorial thinking that The abolitionists are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts,” Clavin said. But Brown’s raid was, in reality, “an absolute anomaly. Very few, if any, abolitionists, black or white, were literally willing to start a slave insurrection themselves.”

And slaveholders knew it. “They overstated the threat from abolitionists,” Clavin said. “They did that on purpose, because it served their intellectual needs”—allowing them to unite the South against a common enemy and to defend the narrative that slaves were docile and content.

At the same time, slaveholders worked to further unite the white South in fear of rebellion by circulating the “diametrically opposed image” of enslaved people as innately violent and dangerous, Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. The revolutionaries in Haiti, for example, were portrayed not as “freedom fighters, but as barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake,” she said.

The abolitionist John Weiss detailed how the revolution was transformed into a scary story for southerners—commonly called “the Horrors of San Domingo”—in an 1862 article for The Atlantic. “The Haytian bugbear” had been wielded by pro-slavery forces “to render anti-slavery sentiment odious” and “to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity” of emancipation, he wrote.

The specter of mass uprising spread “both in public and private narratives,” Sinha said. Southerners grew to fear that “at the moment of emancipation” slaves “were going to wage a huge Haitian Revolution–like rebellion that would kill all whites and establish ‘black supremacy,’” or that they “were just going to rise up, rape all white women, and that would be the end of whiteness.”

These conspiracy theories made an existential threat out of emancipation, and insidious enemies out of northern antislavery forces. Eventually, they became so powerful that southern leaders decided to break from the Union and launch the Civil War. Their racist defenses of slavery could not admit the possibility of a peaceable emancipation such as the one that Lincoln and northern abolitionists actually sought. So after decades of preaching that abolition would mean sweeping violence, southern leaders brought that violence on themselves—and hastened the end of slavery in the process.

Slavery was, however, survived by the racist fears intended to protect it. Sinha traced their legacy through generations of murder, incarceration, and exclusion, from the “regime of racial terror” in the postwar South to the restrictive immigration laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the way up to the “authoritarian mindsets, conspiratorial ways of thinking, and demonization of the other” that continue to pervade American politics in the present day. The belief in abolitionist terror and black violence that southern slaveholders had constructed, she explained, made the prospect of “a republic of equal citizens” feel like an existential threat not only to the culture of white supremacy but to all the white people who lived in it. The groups of people embodying the threat have changed and expanded over time: from slaves to Asian immigrants to civil-rights activists to Muslim Americans. But the fear has never entirely gone away. Through the lens of that fear, racist violence, such as that practiced by the Ku Klux Klan, and laws, such as voting restrictions or Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” have been reframed as protective measures. Conspiratorial vigilance and authoritarianism become shields against an imagined revolution.

. . . .

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

Clearly, Donald Trump did not originate the concept of “fake news,” nor did he invent internet conspiracy theories. But, he, his cronies, and his enablers have become experts in exploiting it for their own selfish purposes: From the absurdist, yet dangerous and divisive, “birtherism” to today’s disingenuous attempts to shift blame for the racism that has spawned disorder throughout our nation.

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

PWS

05-31-20

This November, vote like your life and the lives of many others depend on it! Because they do!

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