Hispanics – Page 31 – immigrationcourtside.com

WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA: Trump Regime Announces Plans For All-Out Assault On Legal Immigration — “It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”

https://apple.news/AKO1peXCgQpS_Ol7Hfyg_6g

Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes:

Trump Plans Far-Reaching Set Of New Immigration Regulations

The Trump administration plans a far-reaching set of new immigration regulations that, if enacted, would profoundly affect employers, international students, H-1B and L-1 visa holders, EB-5 investors, asylum seekers and others. The proposed forthcoming rules are detailed in the administration’s just-released Unified Agenda for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

H-1B Visas: “As a result of more restrictive Trump administration policies, denial rates for H-1B petitions have increased significantly, rising from 6% in FY 2015 to 24% through the third quarter of FY 2019 for new H-1B petitions for initial employment,” according to a recent National Foundation for American Policy analysis. A new H-1B regulation would make life even more difficult for employers and high-skilled foreign nationals.

The summary of a forthcoming H-1B rule states it would: “[R]evise the definition of specialty occupation to increase focus on obtaining the best and the brightest foreign nationals via the H-1B program, and revise the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship to better protect U.S. workers and wages. In addition, DHS will propose additional requirements designed to ensure employers pay appropriate wages to H-1B visa holders.” (The target date for publishing a proposed rule is December 2019.)

The rule could be used to defend the administration against lawsuits from companies that contend many actions by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on H-1B petitions have violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not going through the rulemaking process.

“Undoubtedly they will push the boundaries and aim for long-term, structural changes to the H-1B visa category,” said Lynden Melmed, a partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden and former Chief Counsel for USCIS, in an interview. “But absent new authority from Congress, going too far risks a court injunction and they could end up with nothing.”

One way USCIS may try to push the boundaries would be to place into regulation the theory behind a March 31, 2017, internal document now used in adjudications that excluded computer programmers from qualifying as a specialty occupation. The document discusses computer programmers and tells adjudicators that since the Department of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook states that “. . . some employers hire workers with an associate’s degree . . . it suggests that entry level computer programmer positions do not necessarily require a bachelor’s degree and would not generally qualify as a position in a specialty occupation.” (Emphasis added.)

The March 31, 2017, document notes this has applicability to many occupations and states: “The Policy Memorandum is specific to the computer programmer occupation. However, this same analysis should be conducted for occupations where the Occupational Outlook Handbook does not specify that the minimum requirement for a particular position is normally a bachelor’s or higher degree in a specific specialty.” (Emphasis added.)

“Companies may be surprised to learn how many different positions do not require a bachelor’s degree under Department of Labor standards,” said Melmed. “Employers may have to rethink how they approach their talent strategy.”

A new regulation that would “revise the definition of employment and employer-employee” will make it even more difficult for IT services companies and others that place employees at customer locations. Such companies already have experienced much higher H-1B denial rates due to USCIS policies that, attorneys say, have targeted the companies for tougher scrutiny.

H-4 EAD: The administration continues to place on the regulatory agenda a measure to rescind an existing rule that allows many spouses of H-1B visa holders to work. The target date for a proposed rule is March 2020. (See here for more background.)

L-1 Visas: The irony of USCIS trying to tighten the L-1 visa category is companies complain the Trump administration already has made it nearly impossible to gain approval of L-1 visas at U.S. consulates in India to transfer employees into the United States. Companies also cite U.S. consular posts in China as a problem. “Our refusal rate for L visas at consular posts in India is 80% to 90%,” an executive of a major U.S. company told me in an interview. Denial rates have also increased considerably at USCIS for individual L-1B petitions (used for employees with “specialized knowledge”).

According to the summary of a new item placed on the regulatory agenda: “In order to improve the integrity of the L-1 program, the Department of Homeland Security will propose to revise the definition of specialized knowledge, to clarify the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship, and ensure employers pay appropriate wages to L-1 visa holders.” (September 2020 is the target date for publishing a proposed rule.)

Companies note they already endure visa denials by consular officers who, with little background knowledge, decide that a company should only have a limited number of people who possess “specialized knowledge” – even though there is nothing in the law or regulation about a numerical limit within a company on employees with specialized knowledge of a company’s “product, service, research, equipment, techniques, management, or . . . expertise in the organization’s processes and procedures.”

Regulating on L-1 wages may place USCIS in legal difficulties. “As a practical matter, most employers already pay their L-1 workers at high rates of pay,” said Kevin Miner, a partner at the Fragomen law firm, in an interview. “We will want to see what specific regulatory proposals are made regarding wage rates for L-1 workers, since Congress specifically did not impose prevailing wage requirements in the L-1 statute. Adding requirements that Congress has not put into the statute would be an overreach by the agency and would call into question the legal viability of the new regulations.”

International Students, OPT and Unlawful Presence: New enrollment of international students at U.S. universities declined by more than 10% between the 2015-16 and 2018-2019 academic years – and new Trump administration regulations are likely to further discourage international students from coming to America.

The ability to gain practical work experience following a course of studies attracts many international students to the United States. Many competitors for talent and students, such as Canada and Australia, already make it easier than the United States for international students to work after graduation.

The administration continues to target Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international students to work for 12 months after graduation and 24 additional months in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. A summary of a rule proposal on the agenda states: “ICE [Immigration and Custom Enforcement] will amend existing regulations and revise the practical training options available to nonimmigrant students on F and M visas.” (August 2020 is the target date for a proposed rule.)

Ironically, Trump administration officials from the State Department recently praised Optional Practical Training. “OPT is one of our greatest strengths,” said Caroline Casagrande, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of State, during a November 18, 2019, press event on international students. “And we know that students value the practical experience that they gain here in the United States and it is one of our most helpful recruitment tools as a reason that a student chooses to study in the United States.”

A 2019 National Foundation for American Policy study by economist Madeline Zavodny concluded, “There is no evidence that foreign students participating in the OPT program reduce job opportunities for U.S. workers.”

In 2018, USCIS issued policy memos that could cause many international students who unknowingly violate their immigration status to be barred from the United States for 10 years. On May 3, 2019, a U.S. District Court issued an injunction blocking the two policy memos following a lawsuit (Guilford College) filed by universities.

USCIS placed on the regulatory agenda plans for a proposed rule (with a September 2020 prospective date) called “Enhancing the Integrity of the Unlawful Presence Inadmissibility Provisions.”

“The recent announcement in the regulatory agenda regarding unlawful presence is likely a response to the Guilford College litigation,” Paul Hughes, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and the lead attorney in the case, told me. “In Guilford College, the court issued a nationwide injunction blocking USCIS from applying this memo, both because it did not undertake the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and because it was at odds with the statutory text. It appears that the administration is now trying to use rulemaking in an apparent effort to cure the procedural errors they made the first time.”

The Department of Homeland Security regulatory agenda contains at least two other measures of interest to the education community and international students. An item on the agenda (with a June 2020 target date for a proposed rule) states: “ICE proposes to vet all designated school officials (DSOs) and responsible officers (ROs), who ensure that ICE has access to accurate data on covered individuals via the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).”

An item that remains on the regulatory agenda – with a February 2020 target date for publishing a proposed rule – would establish a “maximum period of authorized stay for students.” Currently, international students are admitted for the “duration of status” until they complete their studies. Universities warn changing to a maximum period of stay is likely to carry negative consequences for students.

EB-5: USCIS has proposed and finalized (November 21, 2019) a rule governing EB-5 (employment-based fifth preference) “immigrant investor classification and associated regional centers” that made significant changes to the category, including substantially raising the minimum investment amount for a foreign investor. The administration appears interested in further restricting the category with two items placed on the agenda. One would make regulatory changes to the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Regional Center Program, including how they file, and their designation, termination and continued participation. The other rule would “increase monitoring and oversight of the EB-5 program as well as encourage investment in rural areas.”

Family Sponsorship: After failing to convince Congress to reduce or eliminate most family-sponsored immigration, the Trump administration put forward two measures that could significantly reduce legal immigration to the United States: 1) an October 4, 2019, presidential proclamation (blocked at least temporarily by a court) would bar new immigrants from entering the United States without health insurance and 2) a rule on Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds – finalized on August 14, 2019, but blocked by an injunction.

A proposed rule on “Enhancing the Integrity of the Affidavit of Support” shows the administration wants to restrict and discourage Americans from sponsoring family members. “DHS intends to update regulations at 8 CFR 213a by aligning the requirements with the statutory provisions and amending sponsorship requirements to better ensure a sponsor has the assets and resources to support the intended immigrant at the statutorily required level,” according to a summary. “DHS further intends to update the provisions to allow the public benefit granting agencies to more easily obtain information from USCIS in order to seek reimbursement from a sponsor when the sponsored immigrant has received public benefits.”

Asylum: Many items on the regulatory agenda aim to restrict asylum, which has already seen wholesale changes in procedures in the past three years. All of the proposed rules are designed to make it more difficult for individuals to avail themselves of the U.S. asylum system.

In one measure, “The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security propose to amend their respective regulations governing the bars to asylum eligibility. The Departments also propose to remove their respective regulations governing the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications.” In another proposed rule, DOJ and DHS would “amend regulations governing the standards and procedures for making credible fear determinations or reasonable fear determinations for aliens who are subject to expedited removal, but who want to seek asylum or express a fear of persecution or torture.” Others would affect asylum interviews, work authorization and procedures.

Other Rules on the Agenda: The administration proposes to continue with its announced fee increases for immigration benefits, make changes that could affect adjustment of status and limit a future administration’s use of parole and employment authorization. “Removal of International Entrepreneur Parole Program” is listed on the agenda with a “final action” date of December 2019.

The Trump administration’s regulatory agenda on immigration is ambitious and far-reaching. It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. There is one glaring omission from the Trump administration’s regulatory agenda – any measure to make it easier for foreign-born individuals to work, study or live in the United States.

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With “Moscow Mitch” and the GOP making sure that Congress can’t do its job and the Supremes and much of the Federal Judiciary apparently in his pocket, Trump’s plans for a White Nationalist Fascist State are on a roll. As Stuart points out, once the damage is done to our nation, it’s likely to take a long time to repair, regardless of when Trump finally leaves office.

Who would have thought that institutions and values developed painstakingly over centuries would be so easily thrust aside by a lawless authoritarian and his gang.

PWS

11-22-19

AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL “COURT” SYSTEM WHERE POLITICOS & PROSECUTORS DETERMINE JURISDICTION CONTINUES TO DISPENSE INJUSTICE IN LIFE OR DEATH MATTERS AS FECKLESS ARTICLE III COURTS TANK & AN EMBOLDENED ADMINISTRATION COMMITS OVERT HUMAN RIGHTS, STATUTORY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS BY RETURNING ASYLUM APPLICANTS TO UNSAFE COUNTRIES WITHOUT FUNCTIONING ASYLUM SYSTEMS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandra, VA. Nov. 21, 2019. It’s one of the most elementary principles in law: a court has jurisdiction to determine its own jurisdiction. But, in the so-called U.S. Immigration Courts, where individuals are often essentially on trial for their lives, sometimes without the benefit of legal counsel or time to prepare, Department of Justice politicos and DHS prosecutors tell the Immigration Judges what jurisdiction, if any, they possess.

Thus, in a memorandum issued on November 19, 2019, the Director of EOIR, a non-judicial “mouthpiece” for DOJ politicos that run these unconstitutional administrative “courts,” instructed Immigration Judges on the requirements of clearly fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreements” put in place by the Administration to deter, punish, and in some cases likely kill asylum applicants in dangerous, non-statutorily-qualifying countries, without credible asylum systems. He told them how and when they could exercise jurisdiction over certain cases and when they only had jurisdiction if DHS prosecutors determined in their sole discretion that it was “in the public interest.”

Remarkably, in the face of a statute that clearly gives individuals a right to apply for asylum in the U.S. “regardless of status,” the DHS now will determine whether in the exercise of their prosecutorial discretion an individual will actually be allowed to apply for asylum before an Immigration Judge. And, that clearly won’t happen often, if at all.

Otherwise, under blatantly fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements, newly arriving asylum seekers will be “orbited” to three of the most dangerous countries in the world — Guatemala, Honduras, & El Salvador — that don’t even have functioning asylum systems. Indeed, these failed states, overrun by gangs and cartels, are among the world’s most notorious “sending counties” for asylum seekers! How would countries that can’t even provide minimal protection for their own citizens and without functional asylum systems possibly provide a safe opportunity for individuals to apply for asylum? Clearly, they won’t.

Of course, the Administration has put out a litany of outrageous lies in support of its fraud. One of the most patently absurd claims is that this illegal scheme will offer asylum applicants “protection in the area” without making the “dangerous journey.”

But, there is no chance that some of the most corrupt and inept governments in the world, unable to protect their own citizens, would be able to offer reasonable protection to asylum seekers from third countries. Some of the victims of the Trump Administration’s racist malfeasance probably won’t survive long enough to even make their claims. And, there isn’t any credible process for them to apply anyway. It took the U.S. decades to develop the asylum system that Trump has now dismantled. The idea that poor countries with no expertise and resources to devote to the process will be able to adjudicate asylum claims under a comparable “fair” system doesn’t pass the “straight face test.”

Beyond that 1) the hapless individuals being returned (with no access to counsel) have already made the “dangerous journey;” and 2) the gangs and cartels operate with government acquiescence, cooperation, and/or impunity throughout the small area of the Northern Triangle. Therefore, individuals are likely to be in danger and targeted for harm, kidnapping, extortion, or all three, the minute they set foot in any of these failed states.

That’s certainly been the experience of those returned to Mexico under the dishonestly named “Migrant Protection Protocols,” more accurately known as the “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico Program.” So outrageously unlawful has this program been that some Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges have resisted or actually quit over being required to engage in illegal acts and human rights violations.

Yet, a complicit Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed these deadly attacks on our system of justice and human dignity to continue. Perhaps the “lowlight” of that court’s judicial malfeasance has been the well documented cases of DHS officials issuing fake hearing notices to their victims. Just imagine if those abuses happened to the spouse, son, or daughter of one of the these feckless judges! Judges who place themselves above justice to the humanity they serve are a systemic problem.

There’s also the matter of no transparent procedures being in place to determine what will happen to these individuals and where they will be where housed once “orbited.” Finally, even if against the odds someone actually got asylum in a Northern Triangle country, they clearly would not be “protected” by countries incapable of offering protection to most of their citizens.

By comparison, the one pre-existing “Safe Third Country” agreement with Canada, a country that actually appears to qualify under the statute, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the broadly worded fraudulent agreements with the Northern Triangle countries. The Canadian agreement is carefully circumscribed with many protections and qualifications and applies to only a small number of individuals annually.

By contrast, the fraudulent agreements with the Northern Triangle potentially apply broadly to individuals from countries like Cuba and Haiti who have never passed through the Northern Triangle and have no connection whatsoever with those countries. That’s because Canada is a real country that negotiated at arm’s length with the U.S. By contrast, the failed states of the Northern Triangle had these bogus agreements shoved down their throats with threats to cut off aid and assistance by corrupt officials like “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan acting on Trump’s and Miller’s instructions.

But, complying with statutory requirements and protecting asylum seekers under the law never has been an objective of the Trump Administration. Killing and mistreating asylum seekers as a “deterrent” and then feeding the results to a White Nationalist base as “success” is the sole objective of these corrupt programs.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, who understands and cares about honest implementation of U.S. refugee and asylum law could have contemplated in their worst nightmares that we would be discussing the Northern Triangle countries as “Safe Third Countries.” Yet, here we are.

But, perhaps the most amazing and discouraging fact is that in the face of such blatant public fraud and illegal behavior, over and over in disregarding asylum laws and Constitutional requirements, the Article III Federal Appellate Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, have failed to consistently stand up to the dishonest thugs in the Trump Administration who are running roughshod over our asylum laws and our Constitution. They daily ignore the clear unconstitutionality of an Immigration “Court” system that denies individuals the “fair and impartial” adjudicators to which the are entitled under the Fifth Amendment. In the process they are dehumanizing all of us.

The statute purports to bar judicial review of individual claims denied under the “Safe Third Country” exception. But, surely some smart member of the New Due Process Army can come up with a theory to challenge the Constitutionality of such blatantly dishonest and overtly fraudulent agreements that subvert the statute and clearly deny Due Process to individuals within the jurisdiction of the U.S.

And, let’s not forget the Congress where all constructive immigration reforms are blocked by a GOP Senate. In a rational world, Congress would have acted by veto-proof margins to withdraw the Executive’s authority to enter into “Safe Third Country Agreements” in light of the Administration’s well-publicized plans to clearly ignore and abuse the Congressionally-mandated standards. They also would have created independent Article I Immigration Courts outside of the Executive Branch. But, that would be a Congress other than one beholden to today’s GOP and their slavish devotion to Trumpism.

Those involved in negotiating, implementing, enabling, and defending these fraudulent agreements are committing major human rights violations. While there might currently be no ways of holding them legally and personally accountable, the the truth eventually will come out. History will be their judge. And, when all the ugliness, dishonesty, racism, cowardice, and dereliction of legal duties are finally exposed, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes or the shoes of their descendants who will have to live with the eternal shame of those who abuse and deny the humanity and legal rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Due Process Forever!

Here’s the EOIR’s bogus “Guidance” for those who have the stomach to wade through it:

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1218516/download

WHILE LIFE-TENURED FEDERAL JUDGES CHICKEN OUT, FORMER ASYLUM OFFICER DOUG STEPHENS SPEAKS OUT IN NYT VIDEO EDITORIAL AGAINST JUDICIALLY-ENABLED NATIONAL DISGRACE OF “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — “A former asylum officer says ‘remain in Mexico’ and other policies undermining asylum aren’t just racist, they’re illegal.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/trump-asylum-remain-mexico-policy.html

By Doug Stephens

Mr. Stephens is a lawyer.

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

In the Video Op-Ed above, a former asylum officer reveals why he resigned: to protest President Trump’s policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.

Doug Stephens had been an asylum officer for two years. But two days and five interviews that resulted in sending asylum seekers back to danger shook him. He drafted a memo detailing his legal objections to the policy, and circulated it to 80 of his colleagues, his supervisors and a member of Congress. And then he quit.

Mr. Stephens is not the only asylum officer who has grappled with following orders. In interviews with a half-dozen current and former asylum officers across the country, The Times learned of individuals leaving their posts, requesting job transfers and falling into deep depression.

The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

To date, Mr. Trump’s remain in Mexico policy, officially known as one of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has left nearly 58,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.

Doug Stephens, a lawyer, resigned his post as a Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officer in San Francisco in August.

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See the video at the above link.

Doug “gets it,” and it didn’t take him long. My Georgetown Law students “got it.” They kept asking me how this could be happening when it seemed to be clearly illegal and a violation of the Fifth Amendment as well as international treaties.

But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority of the Supremes don’t get it? A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit didn’t get it? The Ninth Circuit ruminates for months on a question that a District Judge already answered in short order and that most first year law students could figure out in a few minutes. Circuit Courts keep signing off on removal orders produced by a clearly unconstitutional “kangaroo court” system where applicants are denied a fair and impartial decision-maker and the Chief Prosecutor can and does reach in and change results favorable to the applicant that he doesn’t like?

Something is wrong with this picture. And, it starts with intellectual corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our Federal Judiciary.

Trump has never made any secret that he hates refugees and migrants for unconstitutional racial, ethnic, and political reasons, that he intends to keep them out, and that he really doesn’t care about the Constitution, due process (except for himself), the Refugee Act, or international norms. He has utter contempt for Federal Judges and for Congress.

He tried, with spectacular lack of success, to get Congress to change the immigration and refugee laws by holding “Dreamers” hostage. Failing, he just went ahead and plowed through the Refugee Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the UN Convention, harming and killing folks in his wake. Just like he illegally reprogrammed money to build an unneeded, yet politically significant, “wall” that Congress had pointedly refused to fund. Never let the law, the national interest, or democratic institutions get in the way of the Trump White Nationalist political agenda.

The Court’s response: Let’s look the other way, like we did in the “Travel Ban Case.” We’re sort of offended by your unpresidential conduct, but, hey, as long as it doesn’t affect us and our families we’ll just hope you’ll tone it down because we really don’t want to confront you. But, if you “double down” instead, we’ll pretend like it’s never happened. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we can help you heap further abuse on your “Dreamer hostages.” What’s a little more pain and suffering on kids that we can cover up with legal gobbledygook.

One of Trump’s biggest “dissings” of the Supremes: His Administration’s total disregard and effective overruling of the Supreme’s landmark INS v. Cardoza -Fonseca case requiring the Government to implement a generous interpretation of the “refugee” definition for asylum to conform to the plain language of the statute as well as the Congressional intent behind the Refugee Act. Donald Trump and his immigraton thugs don’t even recognize what “generosity” is, and he has basically wiped out the Refugee Act and its asylum provisions without any changes in the law. How’s that for contempt of Court!

Roberts can blabber his head off about whether there are “Obama Judges” or “Trump Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words; until he and his fellow GOP appointees on the Court actually stand up to Trump’s abuses of the law, his babbling will be drowned out by Trump’s tweets.

Trump’s not right about much. But, maybe he has a point in his contemptuously arrogant attitude that the Supremes and most Circuits won’t dare require him to follow the laws or operate within the Constitution, particularly as his continues to “pack” the Federal Courts with his guaranteed judicial toadies.

That’s going to be the legacy of the “Roberts Court” if our Chiefie doesn’t wake up some morning with a new backbone and start joining his liberal colleagues in putting some breaks on Trump’s outrageous scofflaw conduct in the immigration and asylum area and saving some innocent lives in the process.

And the process should start with emphatically rejecting the Solicitor General’s unethical and often factually inaccurate and legally defective attempts to invoke the Supremes’ aid in short-circuiting the system any time the Big Baby Boss is upset with lower courts properly reigning in his illegal actions and making him follow the rules like everyone else.

Trump’s “malicious incompetence” often doesn’t accomplish much. He’s a divider, not a uniter. He’s only President of his base. The majority of the Americans can just “go pound sand” as far as he’s concerned.

But one thing he might eventually unite Americans on, for differing reasons, is contempt for spineless Federal Courts who won’t stand up to tyranny. And, that won’t be good for the future of our Constituitional Republic.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” could be the last, best hope for American’s survival. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! The “blood of the innocents” will be upon their spiffy robes if the “privileged life-tenured ones” don’t get out of their “ivory tower hazes” and have the guts to do their jobs!

PWS

11-20-19

GABE GUTIERREZ @ NBC NEWS: Here’s What “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Looks Like — The Systemic Failure Of The Supremes & The 9th Circuit To Hold Trump Administration Accountable For Dishonesty & Violating Statutory & Constitutional Rights Of Asylum Seekers In Multiple Contexts Has Human Consequences! — Encouraged By Feckless Appellate Judges, Corrupt DHS Officials Tout Benefits Of Endangering Lives Of Asylum Seekers As A “Deterrent!”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/asylum-seekers-wait-mexico-trump-admin-touts-drop-border-apprehensions-n1086291

MATAMOROS, Mexico — The stench is overpowering. During the day, it seems to bake on the squalid concrete. At dawn, it seeps into the cool air — a suffocating mix of human waste and campfires.

Just steps from Brownsville, Texas, a makeshift tent city is growing next to the international bridge. More than 1,200 migrants — many from Mexico and Central America, others from Cuba — are waiting.

This year, the Trump administration enacted what it calls Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. Also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it requires U.S. asylum-seekers to stay in that country while their claims are processed. Before MPP, families would be allowed to wait for their court hearings in the United States.

More than 55,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under this policy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said — and it’s become a bottleneck at the border.

“This is 100 percent a humanitarian crisis,” Jodi Goodwin, a Texas immigration attorney, said. “These policies are not implemented in a vacuum and there are very real human consequences.”

Carlos, from Honduras was among the migrants who spoke with NBC News and asked not to have his last name used for fear of reprisals. The 27-year-old said he’d been at the makeshift camp for four months with his 2-year-old epileptic son — and he’s struggled to find medical care.

“The most difficult part is when my son has convulsions and I’m alone in the tent,” he said. “It’s happened twice at night and I can’t do anything.”

“We’re sending a message”

According to CBP, apprehensions at the Southwest border have plummeted from 144,116 in May to 45,250 in October. That’s a 68 percent drop.

“Migrants can no longer expect to be allowed into the interior of the United States based on fraudulent asylum claims,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of CBP, said at a White House briefing last week. “We’re sending a message to their criminal organizations to stop exploiting these migrants.”

The Trump administration has argued the change is working because in essence, the Remain in Mexico policy has served as a deterrent for migrants as well as human smugglers.

But immigrants advocates argue that claim is dubious and has merely increased desperation and fear on the Mexican side of the border.

In Matamoros, the Mexican government recently opened a shelter about a 30 minute walk from the international bridge in response to the influx of migrants. But many of the families refuse to stay there because they fear a growing threat from the cartels.

One man, Josué, told NBC News his two young daughters were sexually assaulted by a man he believes was a cartel operative. The girls had been washing themselves in the Rio Grande when he touched them, Josué said. He showed NBC News a police report he’d filed.

“Matamoros is controlled by the cartels and the bad people,” he said. “When I got here, I was really scared.”

So volunteers are taking action. Every day, a group called “Team Brownsville” is among those who bring food and supplies across the border.

As the sun begins to set, migrant families line up for a meal.

“It breaks my heart to see the need here,” said Mary Vanderhoof, a volunteer from New Jersey. “There’s no reason that people should be living like this.”

Sergio Córdova, one of Team Brownsville’s organizers, said he’s been coming here since the summer of 2018. What started as just a few migrants with donated cots has exploded into a full-blown tent city.

“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”

Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Gabe Gutierrez

Gabe Gutierrez is an NBC News Correspondent based in Atlanta, Georgia. He reports for all platforms of NBC News, including “TODAY,” “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and NBCNews.com.

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Check out the video at the above link.

“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”

Sergio Cordova “gets it!” How come John Roberts and his tone-deaf “conservatives” who looked the other way at gross legal, Constitutional, and human rights abuses in East Side Sanctuary Covenant and the irresponsible judges on the Ninth Circuit panel that “greenlighted” these specific “designed to kill and abuse procedures” in Innovation Law Labs don’t?

How would anybody subjected to this type of cruel and inhuman treatment possibly be able to present their asylum case? Many, in fact, don’t even receive proper notice or timely access to their hearings, a fact patently obvious but ignored by the Ninth Circuit panel. Others shouldn’t even be in the program or receive knowingly “fake hearing notices” from a lawless DHS unleashed by feckless Federal Appellate Judges who won’t do their jobs.

Several U.S. Immigration Judges and a whole bunch of Asylum Officers have put their careers on the line to “just say no” to these outrages! What’s the excuse for the cowardly performance from those given the privilege of life tenure?

The grotesque derelictions of duty by the Supremes and the Ninth Circuit not only enable individual human rights abuses like these every day, but also their failure to require adherence to the Constitution, the Refugee Act, and our international obligations has emboldened the Administration to enter into totally fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements that will “orbit” asylum seekers to some of the most UNSAFE countries in the world, without credible asylum systems and without any procedures in place to guarantee their safety and fair treatment.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Federal Courts Never! Remember my “5Cs” — Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Make those who are trying to “look away” confront the legal mess and human carnage stemming every day from their irresponsibility and failure to stand up for justice for the most vulnerable among us.

PWS

11-20-20

JUDICIAL MALFEASANCE AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS: FECKLESS FEDERAL COURTS STAND BY & WATCH WHILE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ORBITS ASYLUM SEEKERS INTO THE VOID — Apparently Both The Law & Human Lives Have Ceased To Have Meaning For Those Blessed With Lifetime Tenure & No Accountability For Human Rights Abuses!

https://apple.news/AijtlVW8iRqm87hLGuQq7uA

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

Trump Is Sending Asylum-Seekers To Guatemala. His Administration Privately Admitted It Had No Idea What Would Happen To Them Next.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

A group of Guatemalan migrants deported from the US arrive at the Air Force base in Guatemala City on Sept. 5.

In the final days before launching a controversial plan to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala, Department of Homeland Security officials were still scrambling to figure out critical details, including how those seeking protection would obtain shelter, food, and access to orientation services, according to government briefing materials obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Despite the questions, the documents indicate that DHS planned to send 12 asylum-seekers on the first flight to Guatemala, a Central American country that has struggled with violent crime, and was tentatively scheduled to depart on Tuesday.

The materials, drawn up last week for newly appointed acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, suggest that department officials were trying to finalize key details regarding the implementation of a complicated proposal to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala as part of a deal similar to a safe third country agreement.

The plan has been highlighted by the Trump administration as a key element in its strategy to deter migration at the border and another method to restrict asylum-seekers from entering the US.

“There is uncertainty as to who will provide orientation services for migrants as well as who will provide shelter, food, transportation, and other care,” read the DHS brief, drafted for Wolf in the run-up to a meeting Friday with Guatemala’s Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart. The implementation plan spelled out that Guatemala would provide the services but recently there had been “confusion” as to whether that would happen, according to the materials.

Wolf was urged to raise the issues with Degenhart in their meeting and clarify the outstanding issues.

“The U.S. needs confirmation from the [Government of Guatemala] that they will provide shelter, transportation, and food,” the briefing materials read. “If not, the U.S. and [Government of Guatemala] need to brainstorm other avenues of assistance.”

It is unclear if the planned flight is still scheduled to take off.

Trump administration officials have said that partnering with countries in Central America ultimately benefits the US by cutting down on the number of asylum-seekers attempting to make the journey to the US. Advocates counter that such agreements place vulnerable populations in countries that lack systems for adequate asylum processing and have high murder rates and rampant crime.

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and has the sixth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world. Nearly half of the country suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the prevalence reaching about 70% in some indigenous areas of Guatemala, according to a 2018 report from USAID.

The country has struggled with violence but has seen a drop in murders in recent years, with a homicide rate of 22.4 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the US had a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000.

A recent United Nations report also found that about 98% of crimes in Guatemala went unpunished in 2018.

The government posted regulations on Monday that clear the way for asylum officers to begin screening asylum-seekers under the plan. The interim final rule, which takes effect Tuesday, creates a process for asylum-officers to screen migrants thrust into the plan. In short, unless an asylum-seeker can prove it is “more likely than not” that they will be persecuted or tortured in Guatemala, they will be removed to the country to obtain protections there.

Administration officials have previously told congressional staffers that more than 200 individuals had applied for asylum in Guatemala, but only 18 had been processed.

While DHS officials have in the past heralded the involvement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in helping build up Guatemala’s nascent asylum system, the briefing materials suggest that those efforts have been rocky, at best.

“It is our understanding that for some time now there has been friction between the [Government of Guatemala] and UNHCR regarding UNHCR’s role in the implementation” of the plan, according to the briefs. The UN has told US government officials it would provide orientation services for asylum-seekers who have been sent back to Guatemala.

But Guatemalan officials have told the US that UNHCR would not have access to their “reception centers and asylum programs.”

On Saturday, Reuters reported that US officials said asylum-seekers forced into the plan would not be flown to remote areas of Guatemala, an option the Central American country had proposed.

“All airports are being analyzed,” Degenhart told Reuters. “There are some that’ll qualify but others that won’t.”

The agreement could be one way for the Trump administration to attempt to safeguard a potential court overturn of its policy banning asylum for those who cross through a third country.

While the Supreme Court allowed for the policy to continue while the case continues in a federal appeals court challenge, it’s unclear whether the justices or the federal appellate court will ultimately side with the Trump administration.

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

So, the Supremes and the 9th Circuit are “ruminating” about these issues while folks are dying or being sent off to oblivion by an Administration notorious for its operational incompetence and its bad faith approach to immigration and asylum laws. How is that a “Safe Third Country” or a “right to apply for asylum regardless of status?” How is that performing the judicial duties for which they supposedly are being paid?

Meanwhile, corrupt immoral Administration officials are out there touting these programs as “deterrents” — not a means of fair adjudication or actual protection under our laws and international Conventions. So, why are Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices so oblivious to truth?

Hopefully, law schools are bringing up a new generation of lawyers that pay more attention to ethics, take the time to understand the human side of the law, and who will be courageous enough to stand up for individuals’ human rights against Government overreach. Obviously, too many of the preceding generations of “lawyers turned appellate judges” flunked on all counts.

Maybe a period of time representing migrants pro bono should be an absolute requirement for future Federal Judicial appointments. No matter how you look at it, we’re experiencing an institutional meltdown in the Federal Appellate Judiciary that, when combined with a lawless authoritarian Administration run wild, is endangering both our country and humanity.

PWS

11-19-19

TRUMP’S KIDDIE GULAG HITS NEW MILESTONE IN “RACE TO THE BOTTOM” — U.S. Now Leads The World In Rate Of Child Imprisonment – We Spend Billions Abusing Kids, Eschew Leadership In Solving Humanitarian Problems!

https://apple.news/Ai5Np-WWSR6KvhWeSfkMlGw

By Stephanie Nebehay | GENEVA

U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention: U.N. study

The United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention, including more than 100,000 in immigration-related custody that violates international law, the author of a United Nations study said on Monday.

Worldwide more than 7 million people under age 18 are held in jails and police custody, including 330,000 in immigration detention centres, independent expert Manfred Nowak said.

Children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest time possible, according to the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.

“The United States is one of the countries with the highest numbers – we still have more than 100,000 children in migration-related detention in the (U.S.),” Nowak told a news briefing.

“Of course separating children, as was done by the Trump administration, from their parents and even small children at the Mexican-U.S. border is absolutely prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I would call it inhuman treatment for both the parents and the children.”

There was no immediate reaction from U.S. authorities. Novak said U.S. officials had not replied to his questionnaire sent to all countries.

He said the United States had ratified major international treaties such as those guaranteeing civil and political rights and banning torture, but was the only country not to have ratified the pact on the rights of children.

“The way they were separating infants from families only in order to deter irregular migration from Central America to the United States to me constitutes inhuman treatment, and that is absolutely prohibited by the two treaties,” said Nowak, a professor of international law at the University of Vienna.

The United States detains an average of 60 out of every 100,000 children in its justice system or immigration-related custody, Nowak said, the world’s highest rate, followed by countries such as Bolivia, Botswana and Sri Lanka.

Mexico, where many Central American migrants have been turned back at the U.S. border, also has high numbers, with 18,000 children in immigration-related detention and 7,000 in prisons, he said.

The U.S. rate compared with an average of five per 100,000 in Western Europe and 14-15 in Canada, he said.

At least 29,000 children, mainly linked to Islamic State fighters, are held in northern Syria and in Iraq – with French citizens among the biggest group of foreigners, Nowak added.

Even if some of these children had been child soldiers, he said, they should be mainly treated as victims, not perpetrators, so that they could be rehabilitated and reintegrated in society.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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

Why is Trump not being held accountable for leading the “race to the bottom” while littering the track with illegalities and trampling on our Constitution?

This is how we will be remembered by future generations!

Contrary to the rants of dangerous subversive Billy Barr, “The Resistance” may be the only thing that can save American and our national values.

And, let’s “lose” all the GOP/Fox News BS about “reversing election results.” Not only is impeachment an authorized Constitutional process, but, in fact, removal of Trump would result in his replacement by his hand-picked GOP stalwart successor VP Mike Pence. Hardly a “reversal” of results.

As I’ve said before, in some ways Pence could be worse than Trump, because he’s much more competent and knowledgeable on how Government actually works. Where Trump often trips over his own two feet (or, perhaps, “tweet”), Pence might be able to get things done even where they aren’t in the national interest. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t stop anyone from voting to remove Trump, because it’s the right thing to do. Unlikely to happen, though, given the blind commitment of the GOP to Trumpism and its ugly messages of cruelty, intellectual dishonesty, and dehumanization.

PWS

11-19-19

STEPHEN MILLER’S OVERT WHITE SUPREMACY ISN’T “IN THE MARGINS” OF THE GOP — IT IS THE GOP! — That’s Why He Isn’t Going Anywhere & Even If He Did His Fascist Message Of Hate Would Remain The Face Of Today’s GOP! — “Republican voters made Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief.“

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/16/stephen-miller-white-supremacy-republican-party?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

By Cas Mudde for The Guardian:

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a bombshell article revealing troubling emails that White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller sent to editors at Breitbart News, the far-right media outlet previously led by Steve Bannon.

Marie Yovanovitch says state department fails to fight ‘corrupt interests’

The emails, which were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh and predate Miller’s period in the White House, show Miller’s obsession with immigration and his seemingly successful attempts to get Breitbart editors to write anti-immigration stories, some of which were based on openly white nationalist sources like American Renaissance and V-Dare.

The widespread public outrage in response to the revelations is understandable. Miller is the longest serving senior advisor to President Trump who is not related to the president, and is believed to be the architect of the White House’s draconian anti-immigration policies, which doesn’t just target “illegal immigration” but also aims to return to the country to the infamously racist immigration policy of the early 20th century.

In its response to the leak, the White House tried to discredit the source, SPLC, which has had some internal and external problems recently, but is overall a very reliable authority on the US far right (full disclaimer: I regularly collaborate with the SPLC). One White House spokesperson went full “alternative facts” by accusing SPLC of antisemitism, because Miller is Jewish. By doing so, the White House displayed a complete lack of understanding about what antisemitism is, which is no surprise, given that Trump considers himself “the least antisemitic person you’ve ever seen”.

The Democratic responses were predictable and swift as well. Of all the 2020 candidates, Julian Castro went the furthest in condemning Miller – he called him a “neo-Nazi” – but all agreed that he should resign from the White House.

But would Miller’s resignation change anything? While Miller might be behind the concrete policies that harm immigrants, he is not the main white supremacist in the White House. And Trump can easily find someone else to do Miller’s work, particularly now that almost the whole Republican party has fallen in line with their president.

It also externalizes white supremacy, as if it lives in the margins. But it has been hiding in plain sight within the Republican Party for decades. Miller wrote the emails to Breitbart when he was still an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been a consistent voice of white supremacy in Congress since 1997. And the Alabama Senator was not alone in Congress either. Representative Steve King has been the most open and unapologetic voice for the cause since 2003. Others, like representatives Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher, might not be as open in their support, but they all encourage white nationalism to varying degrees.

But white supremacy in the Republican party is not limited to just these individual congressmen and women. It runs much deeper than them. White supremacy was at the core of the “Southern Strategy”, dating back to the unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which was formative for the future conservative movement. Perfected by President Richard Nixon, with the help of speechwriter Pat Buchanan, dog whistles to white supremacy have been at the heart of virtually every Republican campaign since the 1970s.

Talking of Buchanan, more than 25 years ago he gave his now famous “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention. While the term has become mainly linked to the religious right, Buchanan is at least as much a white supremacist as a Christian fundamentalist. In many ways, he is the intellectual father of the Trump administration, personifying Mike Pence and Donald Trump in one.

This is why calling for Stephen Miller’s resignation wouldn’t change much. Neither Miller nor Bannon “made” Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief. And Trump is not the only problem either, as Joe Biden seems to believe. He won the Republican primaries, and presidential elections, not despite white supremacy but because of it.

In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.

Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia

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

Mudde’s conclusion is worth repeating:

In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.

Let’s take a real life example. Joe Biden clearly would be a huge upgrade over Donald Trump as President, whether or not he’s your “first choice.” But, one of Biden’s “selling points” has been his long experience in the Senate and his good working relationships and mutual respect with GOP Senators.

Yet recently, Trump has shamelessly slandered and blatantly lied about Biden while besmirching his character. This is all without a scrap of actual supporting evidence.

Under the circumstances, you would certainly expect some of Biden’s long time GOP colleagues to speak up in his defense and vouch for his character. Almost all Republicans know that Trump is a chronic liar and everything he says about Biden is untrue.

Yet, not a murmur of support or sympathy from the GOP for their “old buddy Joe.” That would cast at least some doubt on Biden’s optimism that he could work successfully with Mitch McConnell and the GOP in the Senate to get bipartisan things done for the country.

More likely, the GOP would treat him exactly like they treated his former “boss” President Obama. That means opposing and mischaracterizing everything, regardless of merit, in an attempt to make Biden a one-term President and to play to the “Trump base.”

Even if Trump loses the next election (by no means a given), his white supremacist base will remain critical to the GOP’s future. Without its enthusiastic support, they become perhaps a “20% party” until they finally cease to exist.

With it, the GOP has a decent chance of imposing some semblance of minority rule over the majority of Americans for decades to come, even if they don’t always control the White House. Given the GOP’s strength in lesser populated states which are “over represented” in the Senate, they also have a decent shot at indefinitely controlling the Senate and therefore the appointments process as well as the judiciary.

Consequently, Trump or no Trump, there is little incentive for the GOP to abandon white supremacy as their fundamental identity. Perhaps that counsels a Democratic strategy of less hand wringing about how to reach out to GOP voters and more of a focus on how to get new Democratic voters registered, get out the Democratic vote, hold the party together (note that the GOP’s “hard right” under Trump didn’t by any means split the party as many pundits had predicted), and use their potential numerical advantages, their wider appeal to a diverse America, and their more positive message to restore at least some semblance of majority rule.

Recapturing the White House certainly won’t solve all of America’s problems. But, it’s an important start.

It could be America’s last chance for survival as a Constitutional Republic.

PWS

11-19-19

THE 9th CIRCUIT’S DESCENT INTO THE LEGAL AND MORAL ABYSS OF TRUMPISM: With Court’s Aid, Trump Administration Helps Smugglers, Kidnappers, & Extorters in Mexico Target Hapless Asylum Seekers! – Can We As A Nation Get Any More Cowardly & Immoral? – This Is What Intellectually Corrupt Federal Judges Are Doing For Their Paychecks While The Innocent Suffer: “Kidnapped migrants generally were told they could avoid being killed by either paying ransom or working for the cartel.”

https://apple.news/A0kbZvXqkS_GkfZ67SldXDA

Maria Verza reports for the Associated Press:

Migrants stuck in lawless limbo within sight of America

The gangsters trawling Nuevo Laredo know just what they’re looking for: men and women missing their shoelaces.

Those are migrants who made it to the United States to ask for asylum, only to be taken into custody and stripped of their laces — to keep them from hurting themselves. And then they were thrust into danger, sent back to the lawless border state of Tamaulipas.

In years past, migrants moved quickly through this violent territory on their way to the United States. Now, due to Trump administration policies, they remain there for weeks and sometimes months as they await their U.S. court dates, often in the hands of the gangsters who hold the area in a vise-like grip.

Here, migrants in limbo are prey, and a boon to smugglers.

———

This story is part of an occasional series, “Outsourcing Migrants,” produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

———

They recount harrowing stories of robbery, extortion by criminals and crooked officials, and kidnappings by competing cartels. They tell of being captured by armed bandits who demand a ransom: They can pay for illegal passage to the border, or merely for their freedom, but either way they must pay.

And then they might be nabbed again by another gang. Or, desperate not to return to the homes they fled in the first place, they might willingly pay smugglers again.

That’s what a 32-year-old Honduran accountant was contemplating. She had twice paid coyotes to help her cross into the U.S. only to be returned. Most recently, in September, she was sent back across the bridge from Brownsville to Matamoros.

Now, biding her time with her daughter in the city of Monterrey, she said one thing is for sure: “We are a little gold mine for the criminals.”

———

Tamaulipas used to be a crossroads. Its dangers are well known; the U.S. has warned its citizens to stay away, assigning it the same alert level as war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Syria.

Whenever possible, migrants heading north immediately crossed the river to Texas or presented themselves at a U.S. port of entry to file an asylum claim, which would allow them to stay in the U.S. while their cases played out.

But the U.S. has set limits on applicants for asylum, slowing the number to a mere trickle, while the policy known colloquially as “Remain in Mexico,” has meant the return of more than 55,000 asylum-seekers to the country while their requests meander through backlogged courts.

The Mexican government is ill-prepared to handle the influx along the border, especially in Tamaulipas, where it has been arranging bus rides south to the relative safety of the northern city of Monterrey or all the way to the Guatemala border, citing security concerns — tacit acknowledgement, some analysts say, of the state of anarchy.

The gangs have adapted quickly to the new reality of masses of vulnerable people parking in the heart of their fiefdom, experts say, treating the travelers, often families with young children, like ATMs, ramping up kidnapping, extortion, and illegal crossings to extract money and fuel their empires.

“There’s probably nothing worse you could do in terms of overall security along the border,” said Jeremy Slack, a geographer at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies the border region, crime and migration in Mexico. “I mean, it really is like the nightmare scenario.”

———

Yohan, a 31-year-old Nicaraguan security guard, trudged back across the border bridge from Laredo, Texas, in July with his wife and two children in tow, clutching a plastic case full of documents including one with a court date to return and make their asylum claim to a U.S. immigration judge two months later.

Penniless, with little more than a cellphone, the family was entering Nuevo Laredo, dominated by the Northeast cartel, a splinter of the brutal and once-powerful Zetas gang.

This is the way he tells the story now, in an interview at a nonprofit in Monterrey that provides the family with shelter and food:

The plan was to call and ask help from the only people they knew in the area — the “coyotes,” or people smugglers, who earlier helped them cross the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft and had treated them well. Only that was in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, about a two-hour drive south parallel to the river.

On their way to the bus station, two strange men stopped Yohan while another group grabbed his loved ones. At least one of them had a gun. They were hustled into a van, relieved of their belongings and told they had a choice: Pay thousands of dollars for their freedom, or for another illegal crossing.

All along the border, there have abuses and crimes against migrants by Mexican organized crime, which has long profited off them. But Tamaulipas is especially troubling. It is both the location of most illegal crossings, and the state where the United States has returned the most asylum seekers — 20,700 through Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros as of early October.

The Mexico City-based Institute for Women in Migration, which tracks kidnappings of migrants and asylum-seekers, has documented 212 abductions in the state from mid-July through Oct. 15. And that’s surely an undercount.

Of the documented kidnappings in Tamaulipas, 197 occurred in Nuevo Laredo, a city of about 500,000 whose international bridges fuel the trade economy.

Yohan’s family was among them.

They had left Esteli in northwestern Nicaragua over three months earlier after armed, government-aligned civilian militias learned that Yohan had witnessed the killing of a government opponent, he said. They followed him and painted death threats on the walls of their home.

He is identified only by his middle name, because he and others quoted in this story fear for their lives and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Yohan borrowed against his mother’s house to pay smugglers $18,000 for the family’s trip. But he had not bargained on the closed door at the border, or the ordeal in Nuevo Laredo, and his bankroll was depleted.

The men who grabbed the family “told us they were from the cartel, that they were not kidnappers, that their job was to get people across and that they would take us to the smuggler to explain,” Yohan said. Then they connected a cable to his cellphone to download its contents.

Yohan’s first instinct was to give the passphrase that his previous smugglers used to identify “their” migrants. “‘That doesn’t mean anything to us,’ one of them told me,” Yohan said — this lot belonged to a different group.

Gangs in Tamaulipas have fragmented in the last decade and now cartel cells there operate on a franchise model, with contacts across Mexico and Central America, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political scientist specializing in organized crime, immigration, border security and human trafficking at George Mason University.

“They are contractors. They provide a service, control the territory, operate safe houses and charge for all that,” she said.

Yohan’s family was held in a series of what appeared to be private homes or offices, along with a family from El Salvador, two Cubans and two Mexicans. Everyone slept on the floor.

One captor, a 16-year-old, told him, “We have 15 smugglers, the cartel brings the people to us here and we take them across paying the cartel for the river crossing.”

The gang had been hiring lately: “Since the United States is deporting so many through here, we are capturing them and that has meant more work,” the teen told him. “We’re saturated.”

Initially the captors demanded $16,000. They gave Yohan and his wife a list of names and accounts; relatives were supposed to deposit $450 into each one without using companies seen as traceable by authorities.

But they were able to scrape together just $3,000, and that angered the gangsters.

“I’m going to give you to the cartel,” one shouted.

Then Yohan’s son came down with the mumps. The family got the captors to provide a bit of extra milk for him in exchange for his daughter’s little gold ring, but the boy wasn’t getting better and they abruptly released the family.

“They told us that the cartel doesn’t allow them to hold sick children,” Yohan said.

This is a matter of business, not humanity: A dead child could bring attention from the media, and then authorities, says George Mason’s Correa-Cabrera.

After 14 days captive and before leaving the safe house, Yohan was given a code phrase: “We already passed through the office, checking.” Only hours later they would need to use it. Arriving at the bus station, a group of strange men tried to grab them. Yohan spoke the six words in Spanish, and they were let go, and they went on to Monterrey.

On Sept. 22, Yohan’s family returned to Nuevo Laredo for their court date, bringing with them a report on the family’s kidnapping. Though U.S. law allows at-risk people to stay, they were sent back to the parking lot of a Mexican immigration facility, surrounded by seedy cantinas and watching eyes.

Mexican authorities organized bus transportation for those who wanted to return to their home countries. The family did not intend to go back to Nicaragua, so they asked the driver to leave them in Monterrey where they would await the next hearing.

After they were under way, the driver demanded $200. They couldn’t pay, so he dumped them about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the city at 1 a.m., along with four others.

———

Unlike other border cities such as Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez, migrants and asylum seekers are rarely seen on the streets in Nuevo Laredo. Fear keeps them in hiding, and safety isn’t a sure thing even inside shelters. This summer pastor Aarón Méndez was abducted from the shelter he ran. He has not been heard from since.

Nor is it safe on the streets going to and from the station. A couple of months after Méndez disappeared, gunmen intercepted some people who were helping migrants make those trips; those being transported were taken away, and the helpers were told they would be killed if they persisted.

Kennji Kizuka, a researcher for New York-based Human Rights First, told of one woman who crossed into the U.S. for a hearing date, where she had to surrender her phone. While she was incommunicado for hours, calls were placed to relatives in the United States claiming she had been kidnapped and aggressively demanding a ransom.

“It’s clear that they have a very sophisticated system to target people,” Kizuka said.

In another instance, Kizuka said, cartel members were in the Nuevo Laredo office of Mexican migration, openly abducting asylum seekers who had just been sent back from the United States.

One woman hid in the bathroom with her daughter and called a local pastor for help; he tried to drive them away, but they were blocked by cartel members blocks way. The two were taken from the car and held by the gangsters, though they eventually were released unharmed.

A spokesperson for the Mexican foreign affairs secretary declined comment on allegations that Mexico cannot guarantee safety for immigrants returned from U.S.

U.S. Border Patrol officials said recently they are continuing to send asylum seekers back over the border, and that includes Nuevo Laredo. The number of people returned there has been reduced recently, but that was related to a decrease in migrants arriving at the border — and not violence in Tamaulipas.

In an interview, Brian Hastings, Border Patrol chief of law enforcement operations, told AP that officials didn’t see a “threat to that population” in Tamaulipas and “there was basically a small war between the cartel and the state police” there.

But the numbers indicate the danger is real.

As of August, Human Rights First had tabulated 100 violent crimes against returnees. By October, after it rolled out to Tamaulipas, that had more than tripled to 340. Most involved kidnapping and extortion. Kizuka said the danger is even greater than the numbers reflect because they are based solely on accounts his organization or reporters have been able to document.

Of dozens of people interviewed by AP who said they had been victimized in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros and Monterrey, just one had filed a police report.

Kidnappings of migrants are not a new phenomenon. According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, in just six months in 2009 nearly 10,000 migrants were abducted while passing through the country.

Back then the cartels were splintering amid a government policy targeting their top bosses, leading them to fight among themselves in the people-smuggling business to fill two needs: money and labor. Kidnapped migrants generally were told they could avoid being killed by either paying ransom or working for the cartel.

Tamaulipas became a bloody emblem of the problem in 2010 when 72 migrants were found slain at a ranch in San Fernando, and a year later when the bodies of 193 migrants were found in the same area in clandestine mass graves — apparently murdered by a cartel to damage a rival’s people-smuggling business.

Raymundo Ramos of the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee said gangs today are more interested in squeezing cash from migrants: “They have to recover a lot of the money lost in those wars.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has acknowledged that another massacre or escalation of violence is a major fear and has deployed more than 25,000 troops and National Guard agents to police people-trafficking in border regions and along smuggling routes. But all the accounts of violence in this account took place after that deployment.

———

Reynosa, a factory city of about 650,000, is the largest in Tamaulipas and home to some of the worst drug war violence. It’s also a key part of the migratory route and one of the busiest crossing points along with Ciudad Miguel Aleman.

Disputed by rival gangs, Reynosa has the feel of a place with invisible fences demarcating their territories, and numerous migrants said they had to pay to get past checkpoints at the main entrances to the city.

Lawyer and human rights worker Fortino López Balcázar said the gangs first took control of the river, attacking and beating migrants. Then they started grabbing them from bus stations, and then from the streets.

The airport is also tightly controlled.

A 46-year-old teacher from Havana recalled arriving with her 16-year-old son Aug. 13 by plane from Mexico City with the phone number for a taxi driver, provided by a lawyer who arranged their trip. As they drove into Reynosa, two other taxis cut the vehicle off. Two men got in, took away her cellphone and money and whisked them to a home that was under construction.

The lawyer “sold us out,” the woman said.

That night they were moved to a thicket near the Rio Grande where they were held captive in an outdoor camp for a week with dozens of others. They met another group of Cubans, who were also abducted shortly after flying into Reynosa: Several taxi and vans brazenly intercepted them in broad daylight, bringing traffic to a halt.

“It was as if we were terrorists and the FBI had swooped down on us,” one of the men said. He speculated they may have been betrayed by an airport immigration agent with whom they had argued over their travel documents.

López Obrador’s government has said the National Immigration Institute is one of Mexico’s most corrupt agencies. In early 2019 the institute announced the firing of more than 500 workers nationwide. According to a person with knowledge of the purge, Tamaulipas was one of four states where the most firings took place. Some worked in airports, others in the city of Reynosa.

In February the institute’s deputy delegate to the city was fired and accused of charging detained migrants over $3,000 to avoid deportation. Later new complaints surfaced of people being shaken down for $1,500 to be put at the top of wait lists to present claims in the United States.

At the riverside camp, the Cuban teacher was introduced to its “commander” who demanded “rent” and a fine for not traveling with a guide. The ransom was set at $1,000.

Previously the Cuban woman’s only exposure to the world of organized crime came from movies she watched on the illegal satellite TV hookup that caused her to run afoul of authorities back home. Now, they were witnessing things both terrifying and hard to understand.

There was the time a man tried to suffocate another with a plastic bag, or when the kidnappers, some barely in their teens, beat a “coyote” for working for a rival outfit. From what she was able to understand from the shouting, he had been kidnapped along with clients he was guiding and they wanted him to switch loyalties.

The captors at the thicket referred to themselves as “the corporation,” the teacher said. People came and went, some delivered by men in uniforms who may or may not have been police.

Edith Garrido, a nun who works at the Casa del Migrante shelter in Reynosa, said both crooked officers and criminals dressed as police — known as “black cops” or “the clones” — are mixed up in the racket, making the rounds of safe houses to buy and sell kidnap victims.

“They say ‘give me 10, 15, 25.’ They tell them they are going to take them to a safer place, and they give them to the highest bidder,” Garrido explained. “A migrant is money for them, not a person.”

The captors let the Cubans use their cellphones for a few hours to coordinate ransom payments with relatives, always small amounts to different bank accounts. Weeping, the teacher recalled how her 25-year-old daughter in Cuba had to pawn all her belongings.

After the ransom came through, the captors took her picture and she, her son and another woman were put in a taxi and driven off. The cabbie stopped the car along a highway, took her cellphone and said they could go.

She and her son now await their immigration court date in Reynosa, where she has found temporary construction work to pay for rent and food.

There’s not enough space for everyone at the shelters, so many rent rooms, and that demand has pushed prices up. It can range from $35 per person per month for a spot in a cramped five-person bedroom in a seedy area, to $300-$500 for a more secure home.

But nowhere is truly safe. Last month a family from El Salvador missed their turn to present themselves for U.S. asylum after a shootout erupted in the streets and they were afraid to leave their home.

Garrido said some pay protection fees so they are not bothered in their homes, while others rent directly from the gangs.

“So one way or another,” she said, “they make money.”

———

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Mexico City and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

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

Beyond disgusting! Profiles in Judicial and Executive cowardice (not to mention Congressional fecklessness) to be sure!

It all goes back to Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan and a 9^th Circuit panel that spoke legal gibberish rather than courageously standing up to the Trump Administration’s outrageously illegal behavior. Then, the full Ninth Circuit has compounded the problem by “sitting on the case” for months. In the meantime, folks are unnecessarily dying and being victimized by judicial abdication of duty.

PWS

11-18-19

GREAT MOMENTS IN U.S. HISTORY WITH HEATHER COX RICHARDSON & AL KAMEN: Reliving The “Brooks Brothers Riots” of ‘00! — “Al Gore thought the recount was a high-minded policy debate. He didn’t understand that it was an extension of a war, of a political campaign,” Said Recently Convicted Trumpster Roger Stone!

American Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her daily e-mail for today:

A friend read the proofs for me, and asked why I had not mentioned the Brooks Brothers Riot. I had no good answer, so today I went back to the sources.

For those of you who don’t remember everything that happened in those crazy days when we were all trying to figure out what the heck had happened in the 2000 election, the Brooks Brothers Riot was made up of a bunch of Republican operatives, many of whom had flown in from other states, who gathered on November 22, 2000 at the Miami-Dade polling station where Florida officials were attempting to recount the confusing ballots, to insist that the Democrats were trying to steal the election. Their noise and outrage helped to get the recount called off. As I was reading through the articles about the riot, the name Roger Stone jumped out at me. That name meant nothing to me in 2000, but it sure does today.

This is the same Roger Stone who advised the Trump campaign and who has just been convicted for lying to Congress about his connections to Wikileaks before the 2016 election. Wikileaks worked to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump by dumping emails that Russia had hacked from the Democratic National Committee. Stone is a no-holds-barred political operative who got his start on the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, whose face is tattooed on Stone’s back (no, I’m not kidding) and who, after Nixon’s fall, went on to start a political consulting firm with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman from June to August 2016 (who is also now a convicted felon), and Lee Atwater, the man behind the viciously racist Willie Horton ad that sank Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (Atwater apologized for his actions as he was dying).

At the time of the Brooks Brother’s Riot, Stone claimed he was there “as a volunteer,” and “knew nothing about the protesters other than the fact I approve of Republicans expressing their First Amendment rights.”

This was a lie. In reality, Stone was a key operative, eavesdropping on the Democratic recount team with a walkie-talkie and determined to undermine the recount to get Bush in office, regardless of the popular vote or the real outcome in Florida. “What I admire about Nixon was his resilience,” he later told a reporter, “It’s attack, attack, attack. Al Gore thought the recount was a high-minded policy debate. He didn’t understand that it was an extension of a war, of a political campaign.”

That comment jumped out to me, just as Stone’s name had. That’s it, isn’t it? While the rest of us believe in the rules of democracy, people like Stone and Manafort see political engagement as a war in which winning is everything. It is worth lying, cheating, and stealing, because the goal is not better government, the goal is to win, and then to use that victory to reward your friends and hurt your enemies. After working for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, Stone and Manafort advised dictators. Then they turned their hands to the Trump campaign. Their approach to politics appears by now to be embedded in today’s Republican Party. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative writer at the Washington Post, had a story today entitled “The Party of Lying Liars,” in which she laid out a litany of Republican whoppers, designed solely to appeal their base and thus stay in office.”

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Heather’s write-up inspired me to dig a little deeper “into the archives.” Here’s what I found:

A picture of “The Rioters” (note the diversity):

And a 2005 article by Al Kamen, then with the Washington Post, with a “numbered key” to “to Rioters of note:”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31074-2005Jan23.html

Miami ‘Riot’ Squad: Where Are They Now?

By Al Kamen

Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A13

As we begin the second Bush administration, let’s take a moment to reflect upon one of the most historic episodes of the 2000 battle for the White House — the now-legendary “Brooks Brothers Riot” at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters.

This was when dozens of “local protesters,” actually mostly Republican House aides from Washington, chanted “Stop the fraud!” and “Let us in!” when the local election board tried to move the re-counting from an open conference room to a smaller space.

With help from their GOP colleagues and others, we identified some of these Republican heroes of yore in a photo of the event.

Some of those pictured have gone on to other things, including stints at the White House. For example, Matt Schlapp, No. 6, a former House aide and then a Bush campaign aide, has risen to be White House political director. Garry Malphrus, No. 2 in the photo, a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice, is now deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. And Rory Cooper, No. 3, who was at the National Republican Congressional Committee, later worked at the White House Homeland Security Council and was seen last week working for the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Here’s what some of the others went on to do:

No. 1. Tom Pyle, who had worked for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), went private sector a few months later, getting a job as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.

No. 7. Roger Morse, another House aide, moved on to the law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. “I was also privileged to lead a team of Republicans to Florida to help in the recount fight,” he told a legal trade magazine in a 2003 interview.

No. 8. Duane Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee, was a solo lobbyist and formerly with the Greenberg Traurig lobby operation. He is now with the Livingston Group as a consultant.

No. 9. Chuck Royal was and still is a legislative assistant to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a former House member.

No. 10. Layna McConkey Peltier, who had been a Senate and House aide and was at Steelman Health Strategies during the effort, is now at Capital Health Group.

(We couldn’t find No. 4, Kevin Smith, a former GOP House aide who later worked with Voter.com, or No. 5, Steven Brophy, a former GOP Senate aide and then at consulting firm KPMG. If you know what they are doing these days, please e-mail shackelford@washpost.comso we can update our records.)

Sources say the “rioters” proudly note their participation on résumés and in interviews. But while the original hardy band of demonstrators numbered barely a couple of dozen, the numbers apparently have grown with the legend.

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How to build a great GOP resume!

Interestingly, “Rioter # 2,” Garry D. Malphrus (face partially obscured in the photo) went on to become a U.S. Immigration Judge and later an Appellate Immigration Judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), supposedly the highest administrative tribunal in immigration (although it now functions within the Department of Justice more or less as an extension of DHS Enforcement and Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist, anti-immigrant agenda).

Judge Malphrus was recently named the Acting Chair of the BIA by Billy Barr. Although Barr is a notorious “law enforcement hard liner,” I guess his strong commitment to “law and order” only goes so far.

Got to focus on the “real threats” to our democracy: the Dreamers and other hard working, law abiding, tax paying long-time American residents who are propping up our society and our economy so that Barr, Stone, Trump, and the former rioters can “live the good life.” And certainly, insuring the death or abuse of as many asylum applicants and kids as possible should be high on the list of worthy expenditures of our taxpayer dollars and moral capital.

The moral: Liberals get in trouble for rioting; conservatives get promoted!

Meanwhile, who knows? Could the Supremes be the next stop for Judge Malphrus?

PWS

11-18-19

FOR DECADES HE HID HIS RADICALLY SUBVERSIVE MESSAGE OF INTOLERANCE, INJUSTICE, & FASCIST DEVOTION TO AUTHORITY BEHIND DARK SUITS AND CONSERVATIVE TIES IN THE WORLD OF BIG LAW AND CORPORATE BOARDROOMS — Then Billy Barr Unleashed His Anti-Americanism & Contempt For Our Constitution & Humanity On Our Republic & Those Courageously Defending It Against A Lawless Executive!

These articles say it all about Barr’s unprincipled attacks on American democracy and his bizarre, yet frightening, rewrite of American history.

First, from American historian and Professor at Boston College Heather Cox Richardson:

November 16, 2019

7 hr Public post 49

Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.

The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.

In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”

Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)

Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.

But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.

Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)

Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.

The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.

Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.

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

Here’s Samantha Michaels @ Mother Jones:

https://apple.news/AIHrb7Qk7R5yRbYg7kHgTwg

Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives

As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.

“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.

The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”

. . . .

Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.

. . . .

“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”

. . . .

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

Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.

And here’s Amy Russo @ HuffPost:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/attorney-general-william-barr-federalist-society-speech_n_5dd03689e4b01f982f02dd62

Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”

In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.

“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”

Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.

“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”

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Here’s Max Boot in the WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/17/william-barrs-chilling-defense-virtually-unlimited-presidential-power/

President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.

Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.

Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.

Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”

Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”

Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.

As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.

The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.

Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.

Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.

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

Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/william-barr-impeachment-federalist-society-speech_n_5dd0775fe4b0294748185c6c

Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.

Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”

. . . .

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

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

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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.

Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves. According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?

One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!

But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.

Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”

Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.

George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”

Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.

But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.

Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.

PWS

11-18-19

ATTENTION NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY: A Call To Action By Professor Lindsay Muir Harris: “Speak out, ask questions, and take action. We cannot continue to sign off on these practices because they fundamentally undermine the human rights of asylum seekers, and, in turn, our own humanity.”

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/11/guest-post-lindsay-m-harris-silence-is-not-an-option-we-cannot-sign-on-to-new-asylum-policies.html

Friday, November 15, 2019

Guest Post: Lindsay M. Harris, Silence is Not an Option: We Cannot Sign On to New Asylum Policies

By Immigration Prof

Silence is Not an Option: We Cannot Sign On to New Asylum Policies by Lindsay M. Harris

As I write, it is a Friday night. It’s been a busy week as an immigration lawyer. On Thursday, during a five-hour long interview at the asylum office, I received an important reminder on the price of silence. The asylum officer asked my courageous client, a torture survivor, what she would do if she returned to her home country. Her response? “I cannot stay quiet. Staying silent is like putting your signature on the things that are happening. It is like saying they are OK. For as long as there is injustice against my people, I cannot stay quiet.”

And so, I cannot stay quiet. The attack on asylum seekers continues. Data obtained by journalists last week revealed that Customs and Border Protection officers are granting as low as 10% of the credible fear interviews they conduct. Perhaps this statistic sounds high to you. Bear in mind that the credible fear interview was designed to be a threshold screening interview, a “beep test” if you will, so that any asylum seeker who could establish a significant possibility of asylum eligibility would be allowed to move forward and present her case to an immigration judge. The issue here is that CBP officers should not be conducting these interviews in the first place. Prior to June, only USCIS asylum officers, also part of the Department of Homeland Security, were allowed to conduct these highly sensitive interviews. Asylum officer grant rate of credible fear interview has in the past been as high 90%, at least back when USCIS released data on these interviews. This made a great deal of sense because those officers receive extensive and ongoing training on key topics, including the labyrinthine and ever-changing nature of asylum law, interviewing survivors of trauma and torture, sensitivity around gender-based violence, power dynamics with authority figures, etc.

But, direction from Stephen Miller in the White House, whose emails we have also been privy to this week, was to shift responsibility from USCIS asylum officer to CBP officers to conduct credible fear interviews. This massive shift in the job function of CBP officers has not been accompanied by any public information about the training they have received. Recently the American Immigration Council and others sued to obtain the training materials, if there even are any, given to CBP officers prior to taking on this new role.

It is not at all surprising that CBP officers are granting fewer credible fear interviews. Indeed, CBP is, at its core, an enforcement agency, focused on keeping immigrants out. CBP’s track record of wrongfully deporting asylum seekers, over the last 23 years, at least, speaks for itself. I have written at length about how CBP officers ignore their duties to even ask asylum seekers four very basic questions to screen whether or not they have a fear of return to their home country. From the institution of the credible fear system in 1996, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, American Immigration Council, and others, have documented CBP’s failure to ask the questions, failure to record accurate responses, and flat out ignoring expressions of fear and wrongfully deporting asylum seekers to their home countries where they face harm and possibly death.

Dilley, Texas, is home to the largest immigration detention center in the country. Up to 2400 women and their children can be held inside the center, purpose-built and opened in 2015 on a former site for oil and gas drilling. I’ve written about this place and the unforgivable waste of detaining families before. The majority of families at Dilley are asylum seekers. At this female only facility, CBP has seen fit to assign male officers to conduct credible fear interviews with the mothers. This is despite the very well-documented extremely high levels of gender-based violence and trauma survivors among this asylum-seeking population.

This is not, of course, the only attack on asylum seekers and immigrants this week. Late Friday afternoon the government quietly released new proposed regulations to increase fees throughout the agency. This includes, for the first time ever, a $50 fee for individuals to apply for asylum protection. This may not seem like very much, but asylum seekers are not permitted to even apply for a work permit until 150 days after their asylum application is received. At the same time, asylum seekers are not entitled to any federal benefits (and hardly any state benefits, except a couple of outliers, like Maine), $50 will be a barrier to some from obtaining protection. Years ago I worked for a non-profit organization where we charged a $100 fee for each client, and many of my clients struggled to pay that in $10 or $20 installments over a period of a year or more.

At the same time, the government has already released proposed regulations to remove the 30-day court mandated processing deadline for asylum seeker work permits, eliminating any processing deadline whatsoever and enabling the government to delay work authorization indefinitely with impunity. And, on Wednesday the Administration released their proposed rule to more than double the 150-day waiting period after filing an asylum application to file for a work permit to a year. This will leave asylum seekers unable to fend for themselves, vulnerable to those who would prey on individuals living at the margins of society, and unable to access healthcare, public transportation, obtain driver’s licenses, banking systems, and, of course, access to legal counsel.

I ask you to heed the powerful words of my client this week. Americans, call on Congress to act. Call your senators demand that they question Acting USCIS Director Kenneth Cuccinelli and CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan, who appeared before Congress earlier this week, on these new policies. Ask Cuccinelli about his agency’s dereliction of duty in permitting CBP officers to conduct credible fear interviews. Ask him about the fees for asylum. Ask him about unreasonably delaying work authorization. Ask Morgan about what specific training his officers have received to conduct credible fear interviews. Speak out, ask questions, and take action. We cannot continue to sign off on these practices because they fundamentally undermine the human rights of asylum seekers, and, in turn, our own humanity.

Lindsay M. Harris is Associate Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia – David A. Clarke School of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic. She serves as Vice Chair of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association National Asylum and Refugee Committee and as Vice Chair of the Board of the Asylum Seeker Assistance Project.

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Thanks for speaking out and for all you do for humanity and American Justice, Lindsay!

PWS

11-16-19

“CONSTITUTIONAL CASTRATION”– CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: HOW THE FECKLESS GOP CONGRESS IS SCREWING THE MOST VULNERABLE AMONG US BY LETTING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TRASH THE IMMIGRATION LAWS AND END-RUN THE CONSTITUTION WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL PARTICIPATION! – “The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-bulldozed-over-congress-on-immigration-will-lawmakers-ever-act/2019/11/14/67401466-0722-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

Catherine writes @ WashPost:

By

Catherine Rampell

Columnist

November 14, 2019 at 7:09 p.m. EST

Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.

The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.

To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.

Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.

Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.

Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.

Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.

Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. This would have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.

Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.

But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.

Take asylum law.

“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.

But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.

Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.

This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”

“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.

A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.

The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?

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

Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?

It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.

Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!

PWS

11-15-19

BENEATH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LIES: LET’S SEE WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IN EL SALVADOR: “We don’t hear that what’s happening at the border is a symptom of the real crisis in El Salvador and other countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America.”

Meghan E. Lopez
Head of Mission
International Rescue Committee
El Salvador

Yesterday my colleague Frank Mc Manus updated you on the escalating crisis in Yemen. Today, I wanted to share what’s happening in El Salvador — and why your help is needed now.

The threat to women and girls is real. It is frightening. And it must not go unnoticed any longer.

Our teams at the IRC supports women and girls around the world, including in El Salvador. Donate now to help us provide women and girls and entire families in need with lifesaving support.

In the States, we often don’t hear much about El Salvador aside from it being the country of origin for many asylum seekers at the border. We don’t hear that what’s happening at the border is a symptom of the real crisis in El Salvador and other countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America.

El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent and deadly places, similar to those of active war zones. The high level of violence is largely due to organized crime and rampant gang activity — and it’s what drives people to flee for their lives. Here are some startling facts:

In 2018, one woman was murdered every 20 hours.

There were more than 9.2 homicides per day.

Approximately 10 people each day disappear.

My teams on the ground are seeing that it’s teenage girls who are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence from state, civilian and criminal entities. They are also being forced into becoming “gang girlfriends,” which is essentially sex slavery so they can protect their families.

We are helping women and girls and their families in El Salvador in many ways. We run an online platform called CuentaNos.org which has become a lifeline. It provides information for people during moments of crisis or while on the move in El Salvador, and soon in Honduras and Guatemala as well. We provide emergency cash assistance to help people find shelter and safety when they most need it and a crisis referral service to help people connect directly with the support they need, all the while working to improve those services that our partners provide.

The IRC provides support in many places facing emergencies around the world. You can help women and girls in the places where we work, including in El Salvador, by making a lifesaving gift today.

Thank you so much for giving your attention to this often forgotten crisis.

My very best,

Meghan Lopez
Head of Mission
IRC El Salvador

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

So why are we not only returning vulnerable women, children, and families to El Salvador, but, outrageously, also trying to send asylum applicants from other countries there, even though the Administration knows full well:

It isn’t “safe,” by any definition;
It’s a hellhole where gangs, narcos, and corrupt government officials aligned with them are in control of much of the country;
It doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system; and
It can’t protect and support its own population, let alone tens of thousands of refugees from other countries that the U.S. intends to “outsource” there.

These outrageous shams are some of the “proud legacy” that folks like “Big Mac With Lies” leave behind. And the new DHS honchos, Wolf and “Cooch Cooch,” have promised to be even more cruel, racist, and scofflaw.

Remember the truth and the facts the next time you hear a dishonest Trump official falsely claim that the only reason folks are fleeing for their lives is to take advantage of “loopholes” in US. law.

PWS

11-13-19

U.S. MINISTER OF HATE! — As We Approach 75th Anniversary Of The End Of WWII, Our Taxpayer Dollars Are Paying For Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller To Spread His Vile Hitlerian Propaganda Of Racism & White Supremacy From The White House! — “At various times, the SPLC reports, Miller recommendations for McHugh included the white nationalist website, VDare; Camp of the Saints, a racist novel focused on a ‘replacement’ of European whites by mass third-world immigration; conspiracy site Infowars; and Refugee Resettlement Watch, a fringe anti-immigrant site whose tagline is ‘They are changing America by changing the people’.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/12/trump-adviser-stephen-miller-white-nationalist-agenda-breitbart?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Jason Wilson reports for The Guardian:

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.

Emails from Miller to a former Breitbart writer, sent before and after he joined the Trump campaign, show Miller obsessively focused on injecting white nationalist-style talking points on race and crime, Confederate monuments, and Islam into the far-right website’s campaign coverage, the SPLC report says.

Miller, one of the few surviving initial appointees in the administration, has been credited with orchestrating Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies.

The SPLC story is based largely on emails provided by a former Breitbart writer, Katie McHugh. McHugh was fired by Breitbart over a series of anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced the far right, telling the SPLC that the movement is “evil”.

However, throughout 2015 and 2016, as the Trump campaign progressed and she became an increasingly influential voice at Breitbart, McHugh told the SPLC that Miller urged her in a steady drumbeat of emails and phone calls to promote arguments from sources popular with far-right and white nationalist movements.

Miller’s emails had a “strikingly narrow” focus on race and immigration, according to the SPLC report.

At various times, the SPLC reports, Miller recommendations for McHugh included the white nationalist website, VDare; Camp of the Saints, a racist novel focused on a “replacement” of European whites by mass third-world immigration; conspiracy site Infowars; and Refugee Resettlement Watch, a fringe anti-immigrant site whose tagline is “They are changing America by changing the people”.

McHugh also says that in a phone call, Miller suggested that she promote an analysis of race and crime featured on the website of a white nationalist organization, American Renaissance. The American Renaissance article he mentioned was the subject of significant interest on the far right in 2015.

In the two weeks following the murder of nine people at a church in Charleston by the white supremacist Dylann Roof as Americans demanded the removal of Confederate statues and flags, Miller encouraged McHugh to turn the narrative back on leftists and Latinos.

“Should the cross be removed from immigrant communities, in light of the history of Spanish conquest?” he asked in one email on 24 June.

“When will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since Stalin?” he asked in another the following day.

When another mass shooting happened in Oregon in October 2015, Miller wrote that the killer, Chris Harper-Mercer “is described as ‘mixed race’ and born in England. Any chance of piecing that profile together more, or will it all be covered up?”

Miller repeatedly brings up President Calvin Coolidge, who is revered among white nationalists for signing the 1924 Immigration Act which included racial quotas for immigration.

In one email, Miller remarks on a report about the beginning of Immigrant Heritage Month by writing: “This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century.” The four decades in question is the period between the passage of the Immigration Act and the abolition of racial quotas.

Miller also hints at conspiratorial explanations for the maintenance of current immigration policies. Mainstream coverage of the 50th anniversary of the removal of racial quotas in immigration policy had lacked detail, Miller believed, because “Elites can’t allow the people to see that their condition is not the product of events beyond their control, but the product of policy they foisted onto them.”.

Miller used a US government email address during the early part of the correspondence, when he was an aide to senator Jeff Sessions, and then announced his new job on the Trump campaign, and a new email address, to recipients including McHugh.

As well as McHugh, recipients of his emails included others then at Breitbart who subsequently worked in the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon and current Trump aide, Julia Hahn.

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“The Worst Generation?”

Also, remember that Miller is an acolyte of shameless White Nationalist racist Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. The latter was last seen groveling and pleading before Donald Trump in what hopefully for America will be a vain attempt to regain his Senate seat in Alabama. The country certainly has been enriched by not having this vile purveyor of racist lies, false narratives, and gratuitous cruelty on the national scene since Trump fired him. Nevertheless, his cruelty, illegal, and immoral actions during his tenure as Attorney General continue to destroy lives and haunt our nation.

PWS

11-13-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — U.S. ASYLUM OFFICER EXPOSES TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INTENTIONAL RACIST VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, ENABLED BY A COMPLICIT 9th CIRCUIT! — “The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/12/scathing-manifesto-an-asylum-officer-blasts-trumps-cruelty-migrants/

Greg Sargent writes in the WashPost:

November 12, 2019 at 3:47 p.m. EST

President Trump’s requirement that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while they await hearings in the United States is creating a new humanitarian crisis. Yet it isn’t generating nearly the outrage and media scrutiny that his horrific family separations did.

But now a deeply dismayed asylum officer has authored a remarkable manifesto that was obtained by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), as part of an investigation Merkley is conducting of Trump’s asylum policies.

The manifesto indicts the “Remain in Mexico” program from the inside in sweeping and scalding terms, describing it as illegal under U.S. law, a violation of the United States’ international human rights obligations and arbitrarily implemented to deliberately punish people for seeking asylum here.

The policy is “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States,” the asylum officer writes in the manifesto.

The asylum officer recently left their job, and in the missive, the officer says he or she could not continue to implement it “after careful consideration and moral contemplation.”

The officer’s condemnations of the policy are among the key revelations in a forthcoming assessment of Trump’s asylum policies by Merkley’s office.

Those policies include everything from ongoing efforts to send asylum seekers back to Honduras, which is “one of the most violent and unstable nations in the world,” to a new proposal to charge asylum applicants a $50 fee.

Merkley’s report, portions of which I’ve seen, will conclude that the administration has undertaken “systemic efforts” to “effectively rewrite U.S. asylum laws, rules and procedures,” with the overarching goal of “gutting the asylum system” but “without congressional approval or involvement.”

Merkley’s report will also conclude that Trump’s policies have “intentionally inflicted trauma” on asylum seeking families.

The Remain in Mexico policy — which is also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — requires migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico pending hearings in the United States, with the ostensible goal of preventing them from disappearing into the interior during that waiting period. About 50,000 migrants have been relocated there.

Numerous critics have said it’s deeply cruel to knowingly force migrants to wait in places where they’ll be subjected to serious risk, and journalistic exposés and studies alike have documented that the MPPs do does just that.

The officer, who has repeatedly been in touch with Merkley’s office as part of its investigation, will remain anonymous.

But the officer’s lawyer — Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project — confirmed to me the authenticity of the manifesto and confirmed that it accurately depicts the person’s circumstances.

“In addition to this whistleblower, we are representing several other Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers who have raised serious concerns about immigration-related abuses,” Gold said. “That Congress is taking these issues seriously is essential to promoting accountability and protecting ethical civil servants committed to upholding their oaths of office.”

Tensions have been rising between asylum officers and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the asylum system. And the union for asylum officers has already issued a legal brief condemning MPP amid litigation over the program.

But this asylum officer’s personal indictment of the policy goes much further.

For one thing, he or she accuses the administration of implementing the policy in an “arbitrary” manner:

The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.

For another, he or she alleges that internal processes are breaking down. Under MPP, if asylum seekers in U.S. territory declare in their initial interview a fear of being returned to Mexico, they’re supposed to get a second screening, conducted by a trained asylum officer who is supposed to determine whether that fear is credible.

But the asylum officer charges that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment — is mismanaging the system in a way that’s deliberately designed to be punitive and to make it harder for applicants to succeed:

The implementation is calculated to prevent individuals from receiving any type of protection or immigration benefits in the future. As such, it is a punitive measure intended to punish individuals who attempt to request protection in the United States. There is no clearly established policy and system for notifying applicants of changes to hearing dates and times, or for the applicants to provide change of addresses to the courts and Border Patrol. Without a highly functional notice system, the administration has ensured that a high number of applicants will miss their court dates.

And the asylum officer blasts the program as “ad hoc” and rigged against applicants:

The current process places on the applicants the highest burden of proof in civil proceedings in the lowest quality hearing available. This is a legal standard not previously implemented by the Asylum Office and reserved for an Immigration Judge in a full hearing. However, we are conducting the interviews telephonically, often with poor telephone connections, while at the same time denying applicants any time to rest, gather evidence, present witnesses, and, most egregious of all, denying them access to legal representation.

In a statement sent my way, Merkley vowed more revelations to come.

“This whistleblower reveals that in multiple ways, the Trump administration has asked them and other American asylum officers to take actions they believe break their oath of office and violate the law,” Merkley told me. “In the coming days, I will be releasing a report that details the full scope of this administration’s efforts to gut our legal asylum system.”

What this will confirm again is that for Trump, the goal is to make it as hard as possible for people to apply for asylum who actually would likely qualify for it — further eroding our commitment to the principle that desperate people have the right to appeal for refuge here and get a fair hearing without fear of being returned to face catastrophe.

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So, why are those supposedly sworn to uphold the law, given the privilege of life-tenure, participating in overtly transparent human rights, legal, and constitutional violations?

Why do “ordinary civil servants” have more legal understanding and courage than the “robed ones in the ivory tower?”

Why are Federal Judges permitting a corrupt, biased, and racist Administration to cut off access to courts and punish individuals for exercising their legal rights under our laws?

Why is it OK to use the legal system as a “deterrent” to those seeking legal refuge under our laws?

Assuming that our republic survives, the question for the future is what can we do to insure appointment of Federal Judges, at all levels, with integrity who possess the courage to stand up for the most vulnerable among us in the face of unconstitutional racism and White Nationalism.

PWS

11-13-19

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