"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
More than twice as many immigrants have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement this fiscal year than last after two detainees died this week. That brought this year’s total to 17, compared with eight deaths last year.
A 72-year-old Canadian man who had tested positive for the coronavirus died in ICE custody on Wednesday night at a Virginia hospital, the agency said Friday in a statement.
James Thomas Hill reported feeling shortness of breath to staff at an ICE detention facility in Farmville, Virginia, on July 10 and was admitted to Centra Southside Community Hospital before being transferred to Lynchburg General Hospital the following day, ICE said.
A COVID-19 test administered by hospital staff came back positive on July 11, the agency said.
Hill entered ICE custody on April 11 following his release from the Rivers Federal Correctional Institute in North Carolina after serving 13 years of a 26-year prison sentence for health care fraud and distributing a controlled substance, according to ICE. An immigration judge had ordered his removal on May 12, ICE said. At the time of his death, Hill was in ICE custody pending his removal to Canada, the agency said.
The agency said it had notified the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, the Canadian consulate and Hill’s next of kin. His death was first reported by BuzzFeed News.
A 51-year-old Taiwanese man died Wednesday afternoon at a Florida hospital after being a diagnosed with a “massive intercranial hemorrhage,” ICE said in a separate statement Thursday.
Kuan Hui Lee was found unresponsive at the Krome Service Processing Center in Florida on July 31 and taken to the Kendall Regional Medical Center.
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I think this is just the beginning of the true carnage that advocates have been predicting for months. And that doesn’t even count those killed after being “orbited” by DHS in violation of the statute and due process as a complicit Supremes majority egged them on.
The shame of our nation’s intentional dehumanization and mistreatment of asylum seekers and other migrants under the Trump regime won’t be eradicated. What kind of “democracy” runs a “Gulag” for non-criminals where all “sentences” are arbitrary and indefinite and the there is no readily available impartial review of detention by a neutral and detached magistrate? Where Supreme Court Justices worry more about the impact of “nationwide injunctions” and “bogus emergencies” declared by an patently unqualified and invidiously biased Executive than they do about the lives, health, and freedom of individuals whose “crime” is to assert their legal and Constitutional rights?
While the problem starts with a White Nationalist, racist regime and a feckless GOP-controlled Senate under Moscow Mitch, those Federal Judges at all levels who could have put an end to these “crimes against humanity,” but failed to do so, also bear responsibility for the death and destruction of human lives by the regime.
Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts, Never (Again). Better Justices & Judges For A Better America!
Diaz-Reynoso v. Barr, 9th Cir., 08-07-20, published
SYNOPSIS BY COURT STAFF:
Immigration
Granting Sontos Diaz-Reynoso’s petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision affirming the denial of her application for withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, and remanding, the panel held that the Board misapplied Matter of A-B-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018), as well as Board and circuit precedent, in concluding that Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group comprised of “indigenous women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” was not cognizable, and that she failed to establish that the government of Guatemala would acquiesce in any possible torture.
The panel rejected Diaz-Reynoso’s contention that Matter of A-B- was arbitrary and capricious and therefore not entitled to Chevron deference. The panel concluded that, despite the general and descriptive observations set forth in the opinion, Matter of A-B- did not announce a new categorical exception to withholding of removal for victims of domestic violence or other private criminal activity, but rather it reaffirmed the Board’s existing framework for analyzing the cognizability of particular social groups, requiring that such determinations be individualized and conducted on a case-by-case basis.
The panel observed that the Board rejected Diaz- Reynoso’s proposed social group, with almost no analysis,
** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.
because it “suffered from the same circularity problem articulated by the Attorney General in Matter of A-B-.” The panel explained that in doing so, the Board appeared to misapprehend the scope of Matter of A-B- as forbidding any mention of feared harm within the delineation of a proposed social group. The panel concluded that this was error, explaining that Matter of A-B- did not announce a new rule concerning circularity, but instead merely reiterated the well- established principle that a particular social group must exist independently of the harm asserted. The panel recognized that a proposed social group may be deemed impermissibly circular if, after conducting the proper case-by-case analysis, the Board determines that the group is defined exclusively by the fact that its members have been subjected to harm. The panel explained, however, that a proposed social group is not impermissibly circular merely because the proposed group mentions harm.
The panel concluded that the Board also erred in assuming that domestic violence was the only reason Diaz- Reynoso was unable to leave her relationship, and in failing to conduct the rigorous case-by-case analysis required by Matter of A-B-. The panel therefore remanded Diaz- Reynoso’s withholding of removal claim for the Board to undertake the required analysis applying the correct framework.
Because the Board failed to discuss evidence that Diaz- Reynoso reported her husband’s abuse to authority figures in her village community, and the government conceded remand was warranted, the panel also remanded Diaz-Reynoso’s CAT claim for further consideration.
4 DIAZ-REYNOSO V. BARR
Concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, Judge Bress agreed with remand of the CAT claim in light of the government’s concession, but disagreed with the majority’s conclusion that the Board misread Matter of A-B- in rejecting Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group. In Judge Bress’s view, Matter of A-B- held that a proposed group that incorporates harm within its definition is not a group that exists independently of the harm asserted in an application for asylum or statutory withholding of removal. Judge Bress wrote that substantial evidence supported the Board’s assessment that Diaz-Reynoso’s social group was defined exclusively by the harm suffered, and that the Board correctly applied Matter of A-B-, and the circularity rule, in rejecting Diaz-Reynoso’s proposed social group.
COUNSEL:
Gary A. Watt, Stephen Tollafield, and Tiffany J. Gates, Supervising Counsel; Shandyn H. Pierce and Hilda Kajbaf, Certified Law Students; Hastings Appellate Project, San Francisco, California; for Petitioner.
Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General; John S. Hogan and Linda S. Wernery, Assistant Directors; Susan Bennett Green, Senior Litigation Counsel; Ashley Martin, Trial Attorney; Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; for Respondent.
Blaine Bookey, Karen Musalo, Neela Chakravartula, and Anne Peterson, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, U.S. Hastings College of Law, San Francisco, California, for Amicus Curiae Center for Gender & Refugee Studies.
Richard W. Mark, Amer S. Ahmed, Grace E. Hart, and Cassarah M. Chu, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, New York New York, for Amici Curiae Thirty-Nine Former Immigration Judges and Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals.
Sabrineh Ardalan, Nancy Kelly, John Willshire Carrera, Deborah Anker, and Zachary A. Albun, Attorneys; Rosa Baum, Caya Simonsen, and Ana Sewell, Supervised Law Students; Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Cambridge, Massachusetts; for Amicus Curiae Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.
Ana C. Reyes and Alexander J. Kasner, Williams & Connolly LLP, Washington, D.C.; Alice Farmer, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Washington, D.C.; for Amicus Curiae United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
PANEL: Ronald M. Gould, Morgan Christen, and Daniel A. Bress, Circuit Judges.
OPINION BY: Judge Cristen
CONCURRING/DISSENTING OPINION: Judge Bress
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Just another example of how under this regime, EOIR’s perverted efforts to deny and deport, especially targeting female asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle for mistreatment and potential deportation to death, waste time and effort that could, in a wiser more just Administration, be used to reduce dockets and waiting times by ensuring that well-documented, deserving cases like this one are rapidly granted. EOIR’s biased performance also reeks of both anti-Latino racism and misogyny. Here we are, two decades into the 21st Century with our immigration “justice” system still being driven by invidious factors.
The Supremes’ majority may feign ignorance and or indifference to Trump’s and Miller’s overtly racist immigration agenda. But, those of us working in the field of immigration had it figured out long ago. It’s not rocket science! The Trumpsters make little or no real attempt to hide their scofflaw intent and invidious motives. It has, disgustingly, taken a concerted and disingenuous effort by the Supremes’ majority to sweep these unconstitutional attacks on humanity under the carpet.
That’s why we need “regime change” in both the Executive and the Senate which will lead to the appointment of better judges for a better America. Justices and judges who will ditch the institutionalized racism and misogyny and who will make equal justice for all under our Constitution a reality rather than the cruel hoax and “throwaway line” that it is today under GOP mis-governance.
Many thanks to our good friends and pro bono counsel at Gibson Dunn for the help in drafting our Amicus Brief!
Opinion by the Editorial Board August 4 at 6:20 PM ET
COVID-19 has exploded at migrant detention centers nationwide, infecting detainees and employees alike and seeding the disease aboard deportation flights to countries ill-equipped to respond, especially in Latin America. The facilities, run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are petri dishes of contagion, and the residents — many of whom have no serious criminal record — are sitting ducks in the crosshairs of an inhumane policy. A federal judge has ordered the release of migrant children at two ICE family detention centers in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, having found them at risk to the virus and to spotty enforcement of safety measures. But across the country, scores more facilities have been hit hard by the pandemic, and ICE has been unable to contain it. [Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic] Roughly 1,000 new covid-19 cases have been diagnosed in ICE facilities since early July, bringing the number who have tested positive for the disease since March to roughly 4,000. That’s roughly a fifth of all those who have been tested, though some were infected before ICE took them into custody. Courts have ordered more than 500 at-risk detainees released, and ICE has released an additional 900 at its own initiative. Those reductions, along with ongoing deportations, have cut the detainee population by 40 percent since March, to roughly 22,000 now. That’s good, but it is clear that the agency’s steps to mitigate the outbreak have been inadequate. It is also clear that testing at the facilities has lagged, proper distancing at some is insufficient, and health care is not equal to the task of containment. At the Farmville Detention Center in Virginia, west of Richmond, nearly two-thirds of 400 detainees have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks. Moreover, ICE has been complicit in accelerating the pandemic’s reach into Central America, the Caribbean and elsewhere, by deporting tens of thousands of migrants since the spring, including some who were infected. At least a dozen countries assert that deportees arrived with the virus. Many were not tested before boarding the flights. On one deportation flight to India in May, 22 passengers — about 15 percent of those onboard — tested positive upon arriving in India. In Guatemala, authorities say more than 160 deportees who have arrived since April tested positive for the virus. “We understand the United States wants to deport people,” said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in May. “What we don’t understand is why they send us all these contaminated flights.” [We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people’s lives. Please tell us yours.] Advocates and public health officials have urged ICE to accelerate the release of at-risk detainees, who can be fitted with ankle monitors to encourage their appearance at immigration court proceedings. ICE has done some of that; it is critical that it do more. To continue detaining nonviolent detainees as the virus tightens its grip on ICE facilities is pointless and dangerous — for detainees and for employees, scores of whom have been infected with covid-19. It’s past time for ICE to intensify the fight against covid-19, and reassess a policy that has failed to contain a pandemic behind bars.
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ICE is a White Nationalist enabler operating within a White Nationalist kakistocracy.
Expecting ICE to do the right thing without being ordered to do so by Congress or the Federal Courts is absurd. We’re in the middle of a deadly meltdown of our democratic institutions.
And, led by the Roberts’ Court’s spineless complicity in the face of clear unconstitutionality, illegality, immorality, and inhumanity from the Trump regime, the failure of the Federal Courts to take a strong, unified approach against the “crimes against humanity” committed by the Trump regime on migrants and others is a national disgrace. Something we have to consider as a nation moving forward.
Better judges for a better America! Time to stop appointing “Dred Scottifyers” and non-believers in due process, human rights, and equal justice for all to our life-tenured courts! The damage they have done will take decades to repair. We can’t afford to continue the GOP’s recent tradition of elevating bad judges who won’t stand up for and don’t believe in American democracy.
When our nation is experiencing massive and deadly institutional failure and a failure of legal and moral leadership, we must start looking at the qualifications and values (or in some cases the rather obvious lack thereof) of the folks in those failing institutions! In a democracy, bad leadership doesn’t “drop out of the sky.” It’s a product of bad decisions and apathy among those with the power to select our leaders. That means all of us who can vote or encourage others to vote.
This November, vote like your life and the future of our democracy depend on it! Because they do!
Federal agents are expelling asylum seekers as young as 8 months from the border, citing COVID-19 risks
Thousands of migrant children have been expelled by the Trump administration since March. Some have been held in hotels without access to lawyers or family. Advocates say many are now “virtually impossible” to find.
BY LOMI KRIEL, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA AUG. 4, 20208 HOURS AGO
A teenage girl carrying her baby arrived at the U.S. border this summer and begged for help. She told federal agents that she feared returning to Guatemala. The man who raped her she said had threatened to make her “disappear.”
Then, advocates say, the child briefly vanished — into the custody of the U.S. government, which held her and her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal officers summarily expelled them from the country.
Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.
It is instead expelling them — without a judge’s ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family, while in U.S. custody. The children are not even granted the primary registration number by which the Department of Homeland Security tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible” to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration arguing that the practice is illegal.
Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.
. . . .
A sense of deja vu
Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl fleeing a civil war in her homeland was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed private security guards. Jenny Flores’ case forced the most significant overhaul yet of how U.S. authorities can detain migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal settlement is named for her.
Carlos Holguín, who began litigating that case in 1985, said there is now a sense of “deja vu … but the degree of lawlessness is even beyond what was going on then.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to end the Flores Settlement, arguing that it and a 2008 trafficking law work as “loopholes” encouraging families to send children here alone. The government has attempted to undo the settlement through regulations and requested Congress curtail the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires certain safeguards for children arriving alone at the border.
So far, both efforts have failed.
The administration tried separating parents and children at the border, but a federal judge largely ruled against the practice in 2018, allowing it only in narrow circumstances such as if the adult poses a danger.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who is in charge of the Flores Settlement, has determined the administration must quickly release children locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently citing the risk of coronavirus spreading.
“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote in a June 26 order.
The government is now arguing it can force detained parents to choose between freeing their children or staying indefinitely imprisoned with them.
But none of the administration’s attempts to undo either the settlement or the law have been as effective as the expulsion order, which is “eviscerating every single protection mechanism outlined by Congress and the courts with one sweeping gesture,” said Podkul of KIND.
“We expect all Hilton properties to reject business that would use a hotel in this way,” a Hilton spokesperson said.
Government attorneys agreed to pause the expulsion of the migrants who they said remained in the McAllen hotel on the date of the lawsuit — once again, ACLU attorneys said, mooting litigation on the broader policy. A separate suit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran girl who was expelled this summer is still pending in a Washington, D.C., federal court.
By the time the administration stopped the removal of the migrants detained at the Hampton Inn, most who had been held there had already been expelled or transferred elsewhere — some, advocates said, just before the ACLU filed its lawsuit. Only 17 family members, including one unaccompanied child, remained in that hotel.
What happened to the rest? No one would say.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
It might be “below the radar screen” during COVID-19. After all, that’s what criminals like the Trump kakistocracy and their DHS accomplices count on — a diversion so that they can abuse children and violate human rights and human dignity to the content of their evil, White Nationalist hearts.
But, eventually, the truth about the “crimes against humanity” by the regime’s cowards as well as the complicity of legislators, the Roberts Court, and a host of others will come out.
How will we explain to future generations what we have done to our fellow humans, particularly the most vulnerable who have sought our legal protection and found only cruelty, racism, and lawlessness? How will we justify racist-driven institutionalized child abuse and “Dred Scottification” of “the other” on our watch? We have become “Perp Nation!”
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase Jeffrey S. Chase Blog Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges
Excerpt:
The immigration court system lacks independence. An agency within the Department of Justice, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) houses the immigration court system, which consists of trial-level immigration courts and a single appellate tribunal known as the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Immigration judges, including appellate immigration judges, are viewed by EOIR “management” not as judges, but as Department of Justice attorneys who serve at the pleasure and direction of the Nation’s prosecutor-in-chief, the Attorney General.
As former immigration judges, we offer the Court our experience and urge that corrective action is necessary to ensure that immigration judges are permitted to function as impartial adjudicators, as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA and its implementing regulations set forth procedures for the “timely, impartial, and consistent” resolution of immigration proceedings. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1103, 1230; 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(d)(1) (charging the Board with appellate review authority to “resolve the questions before it in a manner that is timely, impartial, and consistent with the [INA] and regulations”) (emphasis added); 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(b) (similarly requiring “immigration judges . . . to resolve the questions before them in a timely and impartial manner”) (emphasis added).
Although housed inside an enforcement agency and led by the Nation’s chief prosecutor, immigration judges must act neutrally to protect and adjudicate the important rights at stake in immigration cases and check executive overreach in the enforcement of federal immigration law. Applying a detached and learned interpretation of those laws, judges must correct overzealous bureaucrats and policy makers when they overstep the bounds of reasonable interpretation and the requirements of due process.
As I often say, it’s an honor to be a part of this group with so many of my wonderful colleagues. It’s also an honor to be able to assist so many wonderful “divisions and brigades” of the New Due Process Army, like the SPLC and Immigration Law Lab.
Here’s another thought I often express: What if all of this talent, creativity, teamwork, expertise, and energy were devoted to fixing our broken Immigration Court System rather than constantly fighting to end gross abuses that should not be happening? There is a “systemic cost” to “maliciously incompetent” administration and the White Nationalist agenda promoted by the Trump kakistocracy!
Federal Court Denies Government’s Motion to Dismiss in Immigration Court Case Advocates’ challenge to immigration courts as “deportation machines”
moves forward; constitutionality of immigration court system at issue
PORTLAND, OR – Immigrant rights advocates challenging the weaponization of the U.S. immigration courts applaud Friday’s late-afternoon ruling by the U.S. District Court of Oregon that their lawsuit, Las Americas v Trump, will move forward. The legal services providers, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Innovation Law Lab, and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP), working with Perkins Coie LLP for pro bono support, allege that the Administration has failed to establish an impartial immigration court as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and the Take Care Clause of the U.S. Constitution – weaponizing them into deportation machines against asylum seekers and other noncitizens – and asks the court to end the unlawful use of the courts to effectuate mass deportations instead of fair decisions.
In Friday’s order, the Honorable Karin Immergut denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case. The district court rejected the government’s arguments, holding that all of the organizations’ claims could proceed, including their claim that the Attorney General has grossly mismanaged the immigration court system and weaponized the system against asylum seekers.
“This is a clear victory for everyone who has sought a fair hearing in immigration court, only to face a system plagued by rampant dysfunction and policies designed to subvert justice,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “For asylum seekers and those who represent them, the current process is like playing Russian roulette. Despite the life-or-death stakes in these cases, there is little rhyme or reason to the court’s workings apart from prioritizing deportation at all costs.”
“Friday’s decision is an important milestone in our fight for a truly fair, transparent, and independent immigration court,” said Tess Hellgren, staff attorney with Innovation Law Lab. “Whether an asylum seeker wins or loses should not depend on the political whims of the President or Attorney General. ”
Not only does the Court’s decision confirm that the gross mismanagement of the immigration court system is subject to judicial review, it also recognizes that there may be important constitutional checks and balances on the power of presidential administrations to manipulate the immigration courts to achieve mass deportation.
“This win is incredibly validating. We often operate under the guise that the work we are doing is impossible,” said Linda Corchado, Managing Attorney of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “We feel uplifted as we can take the giant step forward to tackle the system now, with everything we’ve got.”
“ASAP works with families across the United States and at the border who fled persecution and now face countless obstacles to seeking asylum in the U.S. immigration court system,” said Conchita Cruz, Co-Executive Director of ASAP. “This decision gets us one step closer to showing that the injustices of the U.S. immigration court system are not only wrong, but illegal. We stand with asylum seekers and immigrants’ rights advocates in bringing these abuses to light and demanding better from our government.”
The lawsuit, which was filed in December 2019, alleges President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and other members of the executive branch have failed to establish a fair immigration court system in which the plaintiff organizations can provide meaningful legal assistance to their asylum-seeking clients. The complaint outlines pervasive dysfunction and bias within the immigration court system, including:
The Enforcement Metrics Policy, , which requires immigration judges to decide cases quickly, at the expense of a fair process, in exchange for favorable performance reviews.
The “family unit” court docket, which stigmatizes the cases of recently arrived families and rushes their court dates, often giving families inadequate time to find an attorney and prepare for their hearings.
Areas that have become known as “asylum-free zones,” where virtually no asylum claims have been granted for the past several years.
The nationwide backlog of pending immigration cases, which has now surpassed 1 million — meaning that thousands of asylum seekers must wait three or four years for a court date.
In June 2019, Innovation Law Lab and SPLC also released a report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, documenting the failure of the immigration court system to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case adjudication. The report can be accessed here: The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org and follow us on social media: Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook and @splcenter on Twitter.
Innovation Law Lab, based in Portland, Oregon with projects around the country and in Mexico, is a nonprofit organization that harnesses technology, lawyers, and activists to advance immigrant justice. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.
The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) provides community support and emergency legal aid to asylum seekers, regardless of where they are located. ASAP’s model has three components: online community support, emergency legal aid, and nationwide systemic reform. For more information, see www.asylumadvocacy.org and follow us on social media at @asylumadvocacy on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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So, finally, the clear unconstitutionality of“Star Chambers” run by a biased prosecutor who basically views himself as the personal lawyer for a racist xenophobic President is going to get some scrutiny, along with the beyond grotesque mismanagement of EOIR that has created a “backlog” that in all likelihood now exceeds 2 million cases. But, of course we don’t know, and may never know, the exact extent of the backlog because of 1) the notoriously defective record keeping at EOIR; and 2) the manipulation of and sometimes outright misrepresentation of data by the Trump Administration.
Thanks to SPLC and Innovation Law Lab for undertaking this long-overdue effort. And, special appreciation to my friends and New Due Process Army superstars Melissa and Tess.
Atty. Gen. William Barr left us with a terrifying certainty in the wake of his testimony Tuesday in front of the House Judiciary Committee: Under him, the Department of Justice stands ready to advance any pro-Trump policy, justifying it on the basis of a blinkered, tenuous view of the facts and the law, or maybe just Barr’s personal ideological intuitions.
For all its finger-wagging, the Judiciary Committee is not in a position to constrain the attorney general. There is no real brake on Barr’s conduct short of a Trump loss in November. Or, to adopt Barr’s own unsettling gloss, a Trump loss that is sufficiently “clear” that he and his boss would accept it.
Since the hearing, commentators have seized on a couple of blows that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee — Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) primarily — landed on the attorney general. But there was nothing close to a knockdown, and the hard facts remain: The House will not impeach Barr and President Trump will continue to give him full rein.
It’s no secret that the Democrats in Congress (and more than half of the country) view Barr as Mephistopheles — dishonest, partisan, corrupt, even racist. He did nothing Tuesday to try to revise that view; in fact, he seemed indifferent to it.
Norms of evenhandedness, professionalism and especially political disinterest, which traditionally check U.S. attorneys general, do not moderate his conduct. He championed every partisan act his DOJ has taken on the president’s behalf, blandly claiming they reflected the faithful application of the rule of law.
For example, when he defended the highly unusual deployment of federal agents in Portland, Ore., Barr described a “Batman”-like dystopia in which a few U.S. marshals were beset by a marauding horde of uncontrollable professional anarchists. If that were accurate, it would be hard to quibble with sending in the feds.
But the justification dries up immediately if the protests were, as a lot of the reporting on the ground indicates, largely peaceful, and if local law enforcement were capable of defending the Portland federal courthouse and separating lawbreakers from peaceful protestors. (The announcement Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s mystery troops were withdrawing suggests the argument for the invasion was tenuous all along.)
Or consider Barr’s legally tortured defense of the president’s memo attempting to exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the 2020 census. The plain language of the 14th Amendment, as well as a unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, leaves no room for argument: Everyone who “inhabits” the U.S. must be counted.
But Barr claims that Congress has delegated to the Commerce Department an ability to advance an Orwellian definition of “inhabitant.” He called it an “arguable position.” It isn’t arguable; it’s wrong.
And given that it is the attorney general’s job to uphold the law of the land, he shouldn’t even bring up the theory, regardless of the half- or quarter-baked views of the president.
Barr’s partisan proclamations went on and on, with this whopper as a high point: “From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
Beyond Congressional fecklessness, perhaps the most disturbing and scary aspect of Billy’s anti-democracy, anti-humanity, racist agenda is that it has received only “light pushback” from the supposedly independent Article III Courts, particularly the Supremes’ majority led by Roberts.
Private practitioners who made the types of specious, disingenuous, and wrong arguments to Federal Courts advanced by Billy and fellow Trump toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco and their minions would probably have been disbarred or even in jail by now. Not only do these guys continue their wanton destruction of our legal system, but Roberts & Co. sometimes actually reward the DOJ’s fraud, racism, and bad faith.
Crooked and corrupt politicos are one thing. But, Supreme Court Justices who won’t call them out for their invidious motivations, won’t stand up for equal justice under law, allow racist abuses in the guise of patently bogus “national security” and Executive prerogative pretexts, won’t protect refugees, asylum seekers, children, or migrants of color, favor tyranny over humanity, and allow their courts to be paralyzed by frivolous Government litigation, dilatory appeals, and transparently bogus procedural gimmicks are the real problem here!
As Litman points out, despite the “smokescreens” thrown up by Barr and complicit courts, there’s really no ambiguity about what’s happening here. It’s straightforward! It’s a full scale attack on our justice system, our democracy, and our humanity by a bunch of would-be facist thugs operating out of the Executive Branch of our Government. America needs better Justices and Federal Judges who will cut through the legalistic BS, show courage, have integrity, and stand up for democracy, humanity, and equal justice for all!
Laura Coates is a CNN legal analyst. She is a former assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia and trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She is the host of the daily “Laura Coates Show” on SiriusXM. Follow her @thelauracoates. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)Attorney General Bill Barr’s written opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee was replete with mischaracterizations, fallacies and unnerving stereotypes that run afoul of the principle of equal justice — and which, taken together, show how he has transformed the Department of Justice that enforces the law to a department that undermines the rule of law.
These are but a few lines that should evoke a visceral reaction to the views of a man who sits at the helm of the most powerful prosecutorial office in the country.
1. “Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.”
No, Attorney General Barr, you are not being accused of being a factotum, colloquially defined as a handyman. You stand accused of being a henchman who acts not only under the President’s instructions but, perhaps more nefariously, exclusively in the President’s interests. And what conveys this impression is not a deceptive narrative crafted by the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, but rather your own conduct.
Case in point: undermining career prosecutors in what appears to clearly be the interests of President Donald Trump. Not once can I recall an attorney general weighing in on a career prosecutor’s sentencing recommendations for a defendant convicted of multiple felonies by a jury. Yet, this appears to be an increasingly frequent endeavor by this Attorney General on behalf of Trump associates, including, most recently former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the President’s long-time friend Roger Stone.
The disturbing trend is underscored by the fact that the one convicted felon who has fallen out of the President’s favor, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, felt the knife twisted rather than removed when the Justice Department recently, albeit briefly, sent him back to prison under questionable
And Barr’s misuse of terms continues with the use of the term “Russiagate.” The use of the suffix “gate” insinuates that it is conspiratorial, farcical and worthy of derision. And yet, the Attorney General has confirmed, as recently as today’s colloquy with Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, that Russia did interfere with the past presidential election and will presumably continue to interfere with our upcoming presidential election. Perhaps the nod to conspiracy theorists was inadvertent in light of overwhelming evidence he fails to dispute.
2. “Like his predecessors, President Trump and his National Security Council have appropriately weighed in on law-enforcement decisions that directly implicate national security or foreign policy, because those decisions necessarily involve considerations that transcend typical prosecutorial factors.”
No one doubts the propriety of the President of the United States and members of his National Security Council to get involved in cases that directly implicate the national security of this nation or those matters that directly relate to our foreign policy interests. What is in doubt is whether Barr’s defense of deploying federal agents to US cities is anything more than a pretextual reason to infringe upon the constitutional rights of Americans, namely their First Amendment rights to assemble and to protest their grievances with the government. A bald assertion of a national security interest does not absolve the executive branch from having to provide an appropriate and lawful justification when constitutional rights are implicated. And yet Barr has offered no compelling reason.
3. “I had nothing to prove and had no desire to return to government. … When asked to consider returning, I did so because I revere the Department and believed my independence would allow me to help steer her back to her core mission of applying one standard of justice for everyone and enforcing the law even-handedly, without partisan considerations.”
This is just laughable. He had no desire to return to the government? I have a June 2018 memo that says otherwise. It was entirely unsolicited, offered Barr’s insight on special counsel Robert Mueller’s handling of an investigation into Russia’s interference in our presidential election and read like a solicitation for a job. And lo and behold, he got his wish. Now, Barr has launched an investigation into the origins of what he calls “Russiagate” that seems to track the very outline he presented when he, ahem, had no desire to put skin in the game.
Barr’s suggestion that he was compelled to return to the helm out of a sincere interest to restore the objectivity and credibility of the Department of Justice is belied by his decision-making. His sentencing decisions that seem to show political favor, his failure to justify the use of force against peaceful protestors and his involvement in the removal of Geoffrey Berman, the former Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, comprise just a handful of the many instances where his conduct has undermined — not restored — the credibility of the Justice Department.
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Read the rest of Laura’s seven points at the link.
It’s a familiar pattern. After “stonewalling” Congressional oversight, Administration Kakistocrat finally shows up and arrogantly spews lies, misrepresentations, and false narratives under oath. Dems spend their time lecturing and pontificating, but don’t create the factual record for a subsequent perjury prosecution. (Ask yourself: What if Laura Coates were doing the questioning?)
GOP toadies in Congress “circle the wagons” and double down on the lies showing their complete contempt for truth, human decency, and good governance.
We already knew Barr was a shady character and that the GOP is unfit for any office in any branch. So, this hearing didn’t really accomplish much.
But it does demonstrate the absolute necessity for the majority of us who want to save our nation to get out the vote to remove Trump and the GOP at every level 🧹 in November.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does! Another four years of Trump’s racist malicious incompetence and the GOP kakistocracy could kill us all (including the truth-impervious Trumpsters and GOP toadies willing to seek the end of our democracy)! Victory for the “good guys” isn’t inevitable —it will take lots of energy and continuing hard work to save our nation!👍🏼🗽🇺🇸
“Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.
“When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don’t use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.
“It’s just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he’s the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he’s brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.”
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That about sums it up!
Or, you could just say: “A kakistocracy led by a maliciously incompetent racist moron!”
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut
Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.
This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.
Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.
The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.
Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.
In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.
From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.
. . . .
Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.
The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”
Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.
Reporting and translation were contributed by Pedro Pablo Solares in Guatemala and El Salvador, and Louisa Reynolds and Juan de Dios García Davish in Mexico.
Data for opening globe graphic from “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” by Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Marten Scheffer, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic by Bryan Christie Design/Joe Lertola.
Maps in Central America graphics sequence show total population shift under the SSP5 / RCP 8.5 and SSP3 / RCP 8.5 scenarios used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it is calculated on a 15-kilometer grid. A cube-root scale was used to compress the largest peaks.
Projections based on research by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Model graphics and additional data analysis by Matthew Conlen.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint and Shannon Lin.
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Read the full article, with pictures and neat graphics, at the link!
“Safe Third Countries” indeed! It’s total fraud-enhanced immorality by the Trump regime, with our failed and failing “governing institutions” and the rest of the world fecklessly watching us be driven by the irrational hate and stupidity filled agenda of a madman and his toadies!
No wall will be high enough, no “American Gulag” cruel enough, no rhetoric racist enough, no laws hateful enough, no Supreme Court dehumanizing enough, no immorality and stupidity gross enough to stop mass human migration driven by climate change. “Desperate people do desperate things!”
This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!
“Ricardo Javier Blanco, a citizen of Honduras, is a member of Honduras’s Liberty and Refoundation (“LIBRE”) Party, an anti-corruption political party that opposes the current Honduran president. After participating in six political marches, he was abducted by the Honduran police and beaten, on and off, for twelve hours. He was let go but received death threats over the next several months until he fled to the United States. He applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). The Immigration Judge (“IJ”) denied all relief, and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirmed. Blanco now petitions for review of the agency’s decision, arguing that the BIA and IJ erred in denying his asylum and withholding of removal claims on the basis that his treatment did not rise to the level of persecution. He also argues that it was improper to require him to corroborate his testimony to prove his CAT claim. Because the agency misapplied our precedent when determining whether Blanco had established past persecution, and because it did not follow the three-part inquiry we established in Abdulai v. Ashcroft, 239 F.3d 542, 554 (3d Cir. 2001), before requiring Blanco to corroborate his CAT claim testimony, we will grant the petition, vacate the BIA’s decision, and remand for further proceedings.”
This should have been a “no brainer” asylum grant!
Instead, after two levels of disturbingly unprofessional administrative decision-making, now driven by racism and overt anti-immigrant bias, and one layer of “real court” review, the case is basically back to square one. No wonder this “Deadly Clown Court” ☠️🤡 is running a 1.4 million backlog, and counting!
Think we have the wrong folks on the “Immigration Bench?” You bet! Two smart patent lawyers from Baker Hostetler run legal circles around an IJ, the BIA, and OIL!
Interestingly, a significant number of students in my Georgetown Law Summer Semester Immigration Law & Policy (“ILP”)Class have been patent examiners and/or patent attorneys! They have all been amazing, both in class dialogue and on the final exam. I suspect it has something to do with analytical skills, meticulous research, and attention to detail — always biggies in asylum litigation!
That’s why we must end a “built to fail” system that preys on unrepresented or underrepresented asylum seekers in illegal, intentionally inhumane and coercive, detention settings, where adequate preparation and documentation are impossible and where judges, too often lacking in asylum expertise, humanity, and/or the time to carefully research and deliberate, are pressured to engage in “assembly line denials.”
And, thanks to the racial dehumanization embraced by the Supremes’ majority many refugees, disproportionately those with brown or black skins, are completely denied fair access to the asylum hearing system. They are simply treated by our highest Court like human garbage — sent back to torture or potential death in unsafe foreign countries without any due process at all. So, the systemic failure is not by any means limited to the “Immigration Star Chambers.”
A simple rule of judging that appears “over the heads” of the current Supremes majority: If it wouldn’t be due process for you or your family in a death penalty case, than it’s not due process for any “person.” Not “rocket science.” Just “Con Law 101” with doses of common sense and simple humanity thrown in. So why is it beyond the capabilities of our most powerful judges?
If there is any good news coming out of this mess, it’s that more talented litigators like Gary Levin and Aaron Rabinowitz from firms like Baker Hostetler are becoming involved in immigration and human rights litigation. They often run circles around Billy the Bigot’s ethically-challenged group of captive DOJ lawyers, who can no longer operate independently and ethically, even if they want to.
So, in a better future, after regime change, there are going to be lots of really great sources for better judges out there at all levels of the Federal Judiciary from the eventually independent Immigration Courts, to the U.S. District Courts and Magistrate Judges, to the Courts of Appeals, all the way to the Supremes.
At the latter, we need new and better Justices: Justices who understand immigration and human rights laws and the overriding human interests at stake, who will “lose” the White institutional racial bias and perverted right-wing ideologies that infect our current Court, and who are dedicated to making the vision of folks like Dr. King and Congressman John Lewis for “equal justice under law” and an end to dehumanization of persons of color a reality under our Constitution and within our system of justice!
There is no excuse for the current Supreme Court-enabled travesty unfolding in a biased, broken, and dysfunctional immigration system every day!
Due Process Forever!
This November, vote like our nation’s future existence depends on it! Because it does!
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During the 2014–2015 school year, Caleigh Wood started to learn about Islam as part of her 11th grade world history class. Upon discovering this, Caleigh’s dad, John, wrote on Facebook that he “just about fucking lost it,” adding in response to a commenter, “A 556 round [of ammunition] doesn’t study Islam and it kills them fuckers everyday.” John told the school’s vice principal that “you can take that fucking Islam and shove it up your white fucking ass,” according to federal court records. After saying that he was going to create a “shit storm like you have never seen,” he got banned from the La Plata, Maryland, high school.
That could have been the end of the story. Instead, Brandon Bolling and other lawyers from the Thomas Law More Center, a right-wing Christian group that declares itself “battle ready to defend America,” represented John as he sued the Charles County public school system for allegedly attempting to indoctrinate his daughter into Islam.
Last week, the Justice Department announced that it had hired Bolling, a former Marine and federal attorney, to be an assistant chief immigration judge in Texas, even though he has no discernible immigration experience. During two stints at the Thomas More Law Center—neither of which is disclosed in his government bio—Bolling worked on numerous cases that pitted his clients against Muslims and the gay community. Now Bolling will help oversee the immigration cases of people detained in El Paso, and could be responsible for deciding whether victims of persecution based on their religions and sexual orientations receive protection under US asylum laws.
Bolling is one of 46 new immigration judges recently hired by the Trump administration. Another is Matt O’Brien, who served as the research director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the country’s leading anti-immigrant groups. The decision to hire both men is an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to select judges sympathetic to its anti-immigration agenda. (The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Thomas More Law Center did not respond to requests for comment.)
As part of the Justice Department, immigration courts lack the independence of federal courts. The decisions they make can determine whether immigrants who have been in the United States for decades can remain, or whether asylum seekers will be deported to the countries they fled. Even when immigrants appeal their decisions, they generally stick, since the Trump administration has made a point of filling the Board of Immigration Appeals with judges known for denying nearly all asylum claims.
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Read the rest of Noah’s article at the link.
As the world watches America spiral downward and our institutions, once admired by democracy advocates everywhere, spinelessly crumble in the face of tyranny, nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in the clearly unconstitutional, bias-driven, and grotesquely unfair Immigration “Courts.”
Racial justice and equal justice in America will remain cruel illusions unless and until we demand an end to these Star Chambers and hold those responsible for creating and enabling their current toxicity accountable!
Certainly giving Thomas More a bad name. And like lots of those caught up in the EOIR Star Chamber, he has no way of defending himself against the Bollings and Barrs of the world!
In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-the-scenes look at the process.
But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election. After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day.
Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.
At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.
“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.
The filmmakers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, who are a couple, turned drafts of their six-part project called “Immigration Nation” over to ICE leadership in keeping with a contract they had signed with the agency. What they encountered next resembled what happened to Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, who was eventually sued in an unsuccessful attempt to stop her from publishing a memoir that revealed embarrassing details about the president and his associates.
Suddenly, Ms. Clusiau and Mr. Schwarz say, the official who oversaw the agency’s television and film department, with whom they had worked closely over nearly three years of filming, became combative.
The filmmakers discussed their conversations on the condition that the officials they dealt with not be named out of fear that it would escalate their conflict with the agency.
. . . .
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Read Caitlin’s full article at the link.
The multi-part documentary begins airing on Netflix on August 3. You can watch the trailer at this link:
See firsthand how your tax dollars are being largely wasted on cruel, unnecessary terrorizing of ethnic communities and populating the “New American Gulag” — “enforcement” that in too many cases actually harms our economy and our society and certainly diminishes both our integrity and humanity as a nation.
Catlin’s concluding paragraphs are worth keeping in mind:
The filmmakers said they came away with some empathy for the ICE officers, but became convinced that the entire system was harmful to immigrants and their families.
The problem, they said, was summarized in the first episode by Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.
“Is a government agency evil? No. Is every single person inside ICE evil? No,” Ms. Heller told the filmmakers. “The brilliance of the system is that their job has been siphoned off in such a way that maybe what they see day to day seems justified, but when you add it up, all of the people just doing their job, it becomes this crazy terrorizing system.”
We have all been harmed by Trump’s racist-driven “weaponization” of DHS and the Immigration Courts, and that includes the DHS employees and the Immigration Court employees who are caught up in this grotesque, often illegal, and overall immoral abuse of government authority and resources.
We should also be concerned about the First Amendment implications of Trump’s attempts to misuse Government authority to manipulate the election in his favor by, once again, suppressing truth in reporting. Thank goodness we have courageous journalists like Caitlin and these filmmakers to keep exposing the ugly truth about the Trump/Miller/Wolf/Barr ongoing White Nationalist immigration charade.
Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limit on child separations
Former deputy attorney general’s 2018 conference call with US prosecutors in border states shocked some participants, Guardian learns
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
Published:
06:00 Thursday, 23 July 2020
Follow Stephanie Kirchgaessner
Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, advised US attorneys implementing the 2018 zero-tolerance policy that there could be no blanket ban on prosecuting migrant parents who had children under the age of five, the Guardian has learned.
The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to face criminal prosecution.
‘Suddenly they started gassing us’: Cuban migrants tell of shocking attack at Ice prison
The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.
The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under 10.
Rosenstein issued his guidance to US attorneys from states on the Mexican border about two weeks after the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued an order that there would be an “escalated effort” to prosecute all illegal entries into the US along the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity.
Previously, under the Obama administration, most families who crossed the border illegally were detained together if they were arrested or were released pending an immigration trial, but were only separated if authorities deemed children to be in danger.
There were questions among the border state US attorneys at that time about how the zero-tolerance policy would be implemented and the conference call with Rosenstein sought to address those issues.
On the call, one US attorney, John Bash of the western district of Texas, said he had declined to prosecute several cases that had been referred to him by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that involved children under the age of five.
In response, sources familiar with the matter said Rosenstein told the US attorneys that they could not decline to prosecute cases based on the age of the children who would be separated from their parents because there was “no categorical exemption” under the order.
During the call, Rosenstein was also asked whether prosecutors could decline to prosecute parents with children who only spoke indigenous languages, meaning they were unable to communicate in English or Spanish, or those whose children had intellectual disabilities. Rosenstein said that prosecutors could opt to decline to prosecute individuals with children under those two circumstances on a case-by-case basis, sources said.
The comments were met with shock by some of the US attorneys, sources said, because there was concern that children who were under the age of five would not know their own names or their parents’ names and that it posed a risk of children potentially getting lost in the system.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
What does this say about firms like King & Spaulding who offer employment and “cover” to human rights abusers like Rosenstein? Why is serving a racist, neo-Nazi, would-be authoritarian regime considered “OK” by “big law” and other supposedly “legitimate” employers? Where’s the outrage?
If human lives and human dignity matter, why is Rosenstein on anyone’s payroll? Why is he still licensed to practice law?
On the bright side: Unapologetic White Nationalist racist “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions is finally off the public dole, hopefully for good.
In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged sweeping changes to immigration policy. As president, Trump has succeeded — despite a broad public outcry and many legal roadblocks — in implementing many of his proposed restrictions through a series of executive orders.
Now Congress is pushing back. On Wednesday the House passed the No Ban Act, legislation introduced last year by Sen Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). The act aims to repeal Trump’s ban on arrivals from majority-Muslim countries and prevent future presidents from issuing discriminatory bans on foreign nationals or followers of specific religions.
“Throughout the history of the U.S., we’ve had a series of tragic nativist chapters in our history,” Coons told me this week. “Did I think we’d be facing another one? No. But when Donald Trump announced his candidacy, I remember thinking I am so glad I live in a country where a man like this couldn’t be president. I was wrong, and we’ve seen how damaging that has been.”
In recent months, the novel coronavirus pandemic, the associated economic downturn, and protests over police killings of African Americans have diverted public attention from Trump’s immigration policies. But they must not be forgotten.
Trump’s plans for an immigration ban have inspired widespread outrage. Some dismissed Trump’s words as empty threats, noting that they were probably unconstitutional. But Trump pressed ahead as soon as he took office.
The first iteration of what became known as the Muslim ban halted entry into the United States of citizens from seven countries, five of which are majority-Muslim.
Since then we’ve watched as immigration officials have separated kids from their parents in detention centers, with at least one of them dying in custody. The images of children in cages provoked an intense backlash and could end up costing Trump at the polls — to the extent that his policies have led his own voters, especially college-educated white Republican women, to question his xenophobic and racist policies.
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Read the rest of Jason’s op-ed at the above link.
Somewhat like Sen. Coons, I originally thought that there would be some institutional integrity and moral courage even among the more conservative members of our Judiciary, particularly among the Supremes. After all, there have been at least a few times in our history when judges across the ideological and political spectrum have stood together against the evils of racism, religious bigotry, and hate.
It’s not like Trump, Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Ross, and their hate-mongering cronies were ever particularly subtle about their invidious intent (although, to be fair, I was at the very beginning willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt,” until I saw that his assurances to the Senate were lies under oath in the face of the deep moral corruption and bigotry that infected his whole being).
Boy was I wrong! Right from the git go, even with the advantage of clear evidence of invidious intent, ridiculously transparent and overtly dishonest “pretexts,” (some publicly contradicted by Trump in mid-stream) and the vast majority of lower Federal Court Judges pointing the way with cogent opinions standing up to the Trump charade and endless parade of hate, the Supremes majority tanked. Where the rights of “the other” particularly Muslims and persons color are concerned, they fully embraced Trump’s unconstitutional and tyrannical program of hate and bias thinly disguised as legitimate exercises of Executive Power. They became willing “Dred Scottifiers!”
Perhaps just as seriously, the Supremes’ “normalized” demonstrable lies, false narratives, and dishonesty as attributes that were to be expected and tolerated from our Chief Executive. What a crock! Ordinary persons are held to basic standards of honesty and candor when dealing with the Government and with Government tribunals. But the President is above it all. While, later on, the Supremes fecklessly claimed that “nobody is above the law,” their actions have shown a disturbing and intellectually dishonest unwillingness to require Trump and his regime to comply with the basics of the rule of law and to act with even a minimal level of candor and honesty.
We can’t vote the “JR Five” out of their lifetime sinecures. But, our democracy does enable us to take the actions necessary to insure that folks like the “JR Five” and other Federal Judges who embrace racism, bigotry, and political corruption over the “equal justice and real due process for all persons” required by our Constitution are not selected to serve in the future in positions requiring legal experiences and moral qualifications that they so obviously lack.
Better judges for a better America. This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!
