Legislation – Page 29 – immigrationcourtside.com

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

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

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

Supreme Court Syllabus:

Syllabus

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

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syllabus

the litigation then continued in the District Court.

In June 2017, following a change in Presidential administrations,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syllabus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Plain English: Cutting Through The Legalese:

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

06-28-20

IMAGINE: How Would YOU Like To Be Judged in America’s Star Chambers?

IMAGINE: How Would YOU Like To Be Judged in America’s Star Chambers?

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Special to Courtside

June 14, 2020

Imagine yourself in a foreign land. You don’t speak the language, and you don’t know the rules. You’re arrested for a minor crime. You think you have a plausible defense. But, it could result in capital punishment. You are detained in squalid conditions. You’re hauled before a court. The bond is ludicrously high, set by the prosecutor and judge under rules they make up as they go along. You don’t have a lawyer because you can’t afford one. The “judge” is appointed by the chief prosecutor. The judge herself is a former prosecutor. The prosecutor makes the rules.

If you win, the prosecutor can appeal to a body stacked in his or her favor. If you lose, you can appeal to a tribunal hand-selected by the chief prosecutor because of their harshness and votes to convict more than 90% of the time. If, against those odds, you still win acquittal, the chief prosecutor can take over the case, rewrite the rules, and change the verdict to guilty. In the meantime, you’ll remain imprisoned in the “Gulag.”

Doesn’t sound like much fun does it? Am I describing something out of a third-world dictatorship or a Kafka novel? Absolutely not! This system operates right here in our United States of America, right now.

It’s chewing up and spitting out the lives of men, women, and even children who are supposed to receive due process and fundamental fairness and instead get the exact opposite. It’s enabled by Supreme Court Justices, Federal Judges, legislators, and public officials who won’t stand up for the legal and Constitutional rights of migrants and asylum seekers in the face of grotesque Executive abuses.

It’s called the U.S. Immigration Court. It exists in a “Constitution & humanity-free zone.” It’s run by Chief Prosecutor Billy Barr and his subordinates at the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”). It’s not really a “court” at all, by any rational definition.

No, it’s a national disgrace and an intentional perversion of the constitutional right to due process, fundamental fairness, and human dignity. It’s also an unmitigated management disaster where DOJ-promoted “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) has built an astounding 1.4 million case backlog with cases stretching out beyond the next Administration, even after doubling the number of “judges.” More judges means more backlog in this wacko system.

In the words of my friend and fellow panelist, Ira Kurzban, “this is not normal.” Yet complicit public officials, legislators, and life-tenured Federal Judges continue to “normalize” “America’s Star Chambers” and their biased, race-driven nativist attack on our Constitution and our humanity!

It needs to change. But, all three branches of our government currently lack the courage, leadership, and integrity to make “equal justice under law” a reality rather than just a slogan.

The three things I would do right up front are:

First, remove the Immigration Courts from the DOJ and create an independent, Article I U.S. Immigration Court as recommended by ABA President Judy Perry Martinez, the FBA, the NAIJ, AILA and almost all other true experts in the field.

Second, return the Immigration Courts to their previous noble mission of “through teamwork and innovation, be the world’s best tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” End the disgraceful, unlawful, unconstitutional use of the Immigration Courts as a tool of DHS Enforcement, a deterrent, and a weaponized enforcer of a nativist, anti-human-rights agenda.

Third, replace the current highly-biased, one-sided judicial hiring system with a merit-based hiring process that properly weighs and credits demonstrated fairness, scholarship in immigration and human rights, experience representing asylum seekers and other migrants, and involves meaningful public input in judicial selections. Since 2000, the current skewed system has favored prosecutors and other “government insiders” by a ratio of more than 9-1, and has totally excluded private sector candidates from appellate judgeships at the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”).

Our Constitution requires “equal justice for all.” To achieve it, we need public officials, legislators, Supreme Court Justices, and other Federal Judges who actually believe in it. That means real change in all three branches of our failing (and worse) Federal Government. Due Process Forever; Corrupt Officials, Feckless Legislators, and Complicit Courts, Never!

This is derived from my virtual panel presentation before the ABA Section on International Law on June 8, 2020.

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

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

Rebecca Press Esquire — Rebecca Press, Esquire
Legal Director
UnLocal

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

Dan Kowalski reports for Lexis/Nexis Immigration Community:

Daniel M. Kowalski

10 Jun 2020

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

Martinez, 2d Cir.

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

[Hats off to Rebecca Press!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever. Complicity in Racist Abuses, Never!

PWS

06-13-20

🏴‍☠️☠️👎🏻BIA KICKS OFF VOLUME 28 WITH BIG-TIME BEATDOWN OF HAPLESS CAMEROONIAN ASYLUM SEEKER — Matter of F-S-N-, 28 I&N Dec. (BIA 2020)

https://lnks.gd/l/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJidWxsZXRpbl9saW5rX2lkIjoxMDAsInVyaSI6ImJwMjpjbGljayIsImJ1bGxldGluX2lkIjoiMjAyMDA2MTIuMjI4Nzg3MzEiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy5qdXN0aWNlLmdvdi9lb2lyL3BhZ2UvZmlsZS8xMjg0ODc2L2Rvd25sb2FkIn0.MlFeLjL3rhv-CztQ06DfqLriAPpnSh2HoL0CN1w84xQ/br/79800749996-l

Matter of F-S-N-, 28 I&N Dec. 1 (BIA 2020)

BIA HEADNOTE:

To prevail on a motion to reopen alleging changed country conditions where the persecution claim was previously denied based on an adverse credibility finding in the underlying proceedings, the respondent must either overcome the prior determination or show that the new claim is independent of the evidence that was found to be not credible.

PANEL: Board Panel: MALPHRUS and HUNSUCKER, Appellate Immigration Judges; GEMOETS, Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge.

OPINION BY: GEMOETS, Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge

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Just what this totally dysfunctional system needs: More ideas on how to deny asylum! The only question: Will Respondents lose every case in Volume 18? Don’t bet against it!

PWS

06-13-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮TWO NEW ITEMS FROM IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG SHOW A MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT TRUMP REGIME IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY THAT BELIEVES AND FUNCTIONS LIKE IT IS ABOVE THE LAW, ACCOUNTABILITY, & HUMAN MORALITY!

TWO NEW ITEMS FROM IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG SHOW A MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT TRUMP REGIME IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY THAT BELIEVES AND FUNCTIONS LIKE IT IS ABOVE THE LAW, ACCOUNTABILITY, & HUMAN MORALITY!

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/06/gao-says-customs-and-border-protection-spent-migrant-medical-funds-on-dirt-bikes.html

Friday, June 12, 2020

GAO Says Customs and Border Protection Spent Migrant Medical Funds on Dirt Bikes

By Immigration Prof

McCord Pagan for Law360 reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) violated the law by taking funds designated by Congress for consumables and medical care for migrants and instead used some of the money for its canine program, dirt bikes and upgrades to its computer system, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

While CBP spent some of the designated funds on baby products, food, defibrillators, and masks, CBP violated the law by spending certain funds meant for such migrant care on canines, boats, dirt bikes, ATVs, a vaccine program for its employees, and upgrades to its computer network, sewer system, as well as janitorial services, according to the GAO report.

The 2019 law providing supplemental funds to CBP to help address a surge of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border designated about $112 million to CBP for “consumables and medical care.”

“We conclude that CBP violated the purpose statute when it obligated amounts expressly appropriated for consumables and medical care and establishing and operating migrant care and processing facilities for other purposes,” according to the GAO opinion. The Congressional watchdog is conducting an audit of CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the care of the adults and children in its custody, it said.

In response to GAO’s findings, a CBP spokesperson sent Law360 a statement calling the violations “technical in nature” and said it will take prompt remedial action.

Nick Miroff for the Washington Post also reports on the story.

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Thursday, June 11, 2020

District Court Halts ICE Enforcement Operations at New York Courthouses

By Immigration Prof

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff

For several years, the Chief Justice of California has sought to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) away from the California courts. Last year, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked ICE courthouse arrests there.

CNN reports the latest skirmish between the state courts and federal immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued an order yesterday blocking ICE from making arrests in New York courts, finding that the practice is illegal. The introductory paragraph of his ruling reads as follows:

“Recent events confirm the need for freely and fully functioning state courts, not least in the State of New York. But it is one thing for the state courts to try to deal with the impediments brought on by a pandemic, and quite another for them to have to grapple with disruptions and intimidations artificially imposed by an agency of the federal government in violation of long-standing privileges and fundamental principles of federalism and of separation of powers.”

State and local officials argue that when ICE officers apprehends immigrants at courthouses — where they are making appearances as defendants, witnesses or victims — it endangers public safety by making it harder to prosecute crimes.

ICE has defended the arrests, saying apprehending people in controlled settings is safer than arresting them on the streets.

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Baby jails, stealing from kids, interfering with the administration of justice. Just another day in the Disunited Kakistocracy of Trump.

These situations result in part from a feckless Congress led by Mitch and a failed Supremes led by Roberts who won’t stand up for our Constitutional rights and restrain an obviously corrupt and lawless Executive with a racist agenda.

It’s no surprise that much of Trump’s wrongdoing is exposed by the Government’s own ”watchdogs.” Unlike GAO, which works for Congress, those in the Executive Branch often are then unethically fired by Trump as Congress and the Supremes fail to stand up for honesty in Government. Worse yet, they fail to protect public employees who courageously expose corruption.

And, the high ranking legislators and judges who have watched and enabled Trump’s scurrilous attacks on our Constitution and human values ultimately bear much of the responsibility! As my friend Ira Kurzban would say, “this is not normal.” “Normalizing” and “enabling” illegal, unethical, and racist-driven behavior is obscene. If “watchdogs” and U.S. District Court Judges can speak out against lawless actions and corruption, how is it that Mitch, Roberts, and the rest of the GOP have “swallowed the whistle?”

PWS

06-12-20

EX-US JUDGE UNLOADS TRUTH IN USDC FILING ABOUT BILLY BARR’S ATTEMPT TO SUBVERT JUSTICE BY UNDOING FLYNN PROSECUTION: Corrupt, Dishonest, Unethical, Unprofessional – DOJ’s Request to Dismiss Flynn Prosecution is “Preposterous” – Our Police Departments Aren’t The Only Part of Our Foundering, Rudderless, & Disturbingly Ineffective, Racially & Morally “Tone-Deaf” Justice System That Needs Substantial & Meaningful Reform!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/preposterous-court-appointed-lawyer-michael-flynn-case-slams-doj-attempt-n1229336

Pete Williams reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — The retired judge appointed to act as a friend of the court in the Michael Flynn case strongly urged the court Wednesday not to let the Justice Department abandon the prosecution.

In a scorching 83-page submission, John Gleeson said the government’s move to drop the case was “riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact,” which were contradicted by the positions it has taken in other false statement cases and by its own previous court filings about Flynn’s conduct as well as his decisions to plead guilty twice.

“Even recognizing that the Government is entitled to deference in assessing the strength of its case, these claims are not credible,” the retired judge wrote. “Indeed, they are preposterous. For starters — and most unusually — they are directly and decisively disproven by the Government’s own briefs filed just months ago in this very proceeding.”

Gleeson said judges must ordinarily defer to the wishes of the Justice Department about whether to pursue a prosecution, but not when the motives of the government are suspect. In Flynn’s case, the government’s move to dismiss the case “is based solely on the fact that Flynn is an ally of President Trump.”

Federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan of Washington appointed Gleeson to submit arguments about why the government should not be allowed to drop the case, so that Sullivan could consider both sides.

The appointment came after the Justice Department last month asked the judge to dismiss the case, having determined that even if Flynn lied to FBI agents in early 2017 about his phone calls with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., his lies were not “material” to any investigation and did not, therefore, violate the false statement law at the heart of his case.

Flynn told the FBI that he did talk to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition but denied that they talked about Russia’s response to the latest Obama sanctions or about a forthcoming UN vote. He later admitted that both those statements were untrue.

Those statements, Gleeson said, were clearly important to the FBI’s investigation into potential connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“It is hard to conceive of a more material false statement than this one,” Gleeson said.

Gleeson said without any firm legal basis for wanting to drop the case, the only other reason must be Flynn’s relationship with Trump. Wednesday’s brief noted that the president tweeted or re-tweeted about Flynn at least 100 times since March 2017.

Clearly the president is personally invested in ensuring that Flynn’s prosecution ends, Gleeson said, adding, “Everything about this irregular.”

. . . .

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

Add this to the absolute legal, ethical, constitutional, and management disaster going in in the U.S. Immigration Courts under Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” management, and the case for removing him from office is overwhelming. Won’t happen. But, it should!

Actually, filing a “preposterous motion” backed by clearly untrue assertions is a clear violation of an attorney’s role as an “officer of the court” owing “candor to the tribunal.” If Barr were a private practitioner, it would likely earn him a referral to his state bar authorities for possible discipline or license revocation.

But, in Federal Courts these days the “undue deference” and unfairly favorable treatment of DOJ attorneys continues. It has actually been institutionalized, and even unjustly rewarded, by the Supremes. Talk about encouraging worst practices and highlighting “negative role models!”

The whole ethical debacle of the Trump Administration DOJ and the overall feckless performance of our Federal Courts, particularly the Supremes and certain Circuit Courts of Appeals, at halting clear Executive abuses and requiring honesty and professionalism (including rejecting racist or religiously bigoted agendas) from the Federal Government before tribunals cries out for a serious re-examination of: 1) who should be sitting on the Federal Bench; 2) what ethical standards they should be held to; and 3) the undue favoritism and leniency traditionally shown by Federal Courts to Government lawyers engaging in misrepresentations, sloppy work, promoting pretexts for overtly racist agendas, and constantly using dilatory litigation tactics intended to punish individual litigants for asserting their legal rights.

The last three years have shown that better Federal Judges and much more courageous, effective judicial leadership committed to guaranteeing due process and fairness for all is absolutely necessary for our nation to achieve “equal justice under law.” The current sorry state of the Article III Judiciary shows that police departments are not the only part of our broken justice system that needs reform and some “different faces” to achieve equal justice under law. As a nation, we can’t achieve social and racial justice with the gang that promoted, enabled, and in some cases even encouraged injustice in charge. And, that goes for all three failed branches of our Federal Government.

George Floyd’s death should never have happened; nor should families be separated, kids put in cages, legal asylum applicants told to rot in Mexico, and Billy Barr be allowed to operate unconstitutional “Star Chambers” masquerading as “courts” (when they are nothing of the sort). The problems in our justice system go much deeper than the Minneapolis Police Department!

Yes, they can be solved! But, not without some new faces, new approaches, and some progressive thinking and input from all of society, particularly our younger generations! You have to believe in equal justice to achieve equal justice! We can’t get there with the current gang of “non-believers” in charge and promoting their failed, and all too often overtly or covertly racially biased, agendas.

Due Process Forever!

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

PWS

06-11-20

⚖️🗽👍🏼⚔️NDPA NEWS: LAW YOU CAN USE: “Immigrants’ Access to Federal District Court: The Narrowing of § 1252(b)(9) Post-Jennings” — By Adam Garnick @ Penn Law

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623142

Immigrants’ Access to Federal District Court: The Narrowing of § 1252(b)(9) Post-Jennings

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Forthcoming

62 Pages Posted:

Adam Garnick

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: May 15, 2020

Abstract

Congress has long sought to limit immigrants’ access to federal district court. This was most evident in the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA), which channeled any judicial review of a final order of removal away from federal district courts and into courts of appeals through a petition for review (PFR). But IIRAIRA channeled more than just review of final orders into courts of appeals. With the addition of 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9), all claims “arising from” the immigration process would likewise be consolidated into a PFR in the court of appeals. Seemingly a wide range of claims—including many urgent challenges to potentially unconstitutional government action—would be swallowed by § 1252(b)(9) and thus precluded from immediate review in federal district court. However, when the Supreme Court first construed the provision, it did so narrowly. Indeed, in circuits that adopted the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the provision, immigrants were able to evade the strictures of § 1252(b)(9) and bring immigration-related claims directly to federal district court. But not all lower courts adhered to the Court’s reading of the provision. The First Circuit—and eventually the Ninth Circuit—adopted a far broader view of § 1252(b)(9), describing it as “breathtaking in scope” and finding it to channel an extensive set of claims. Against this backdrop, the Court, nearly two decades after its first in-depth discussion of the provision, revisited § 1252(b)(9). Though the result was a fractured opinion that explicitly failed to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the provision, the decision offered several important clues on the proper scope of § 1252(b)(9). First, it undercut the expansive interpretation of the provision offered by the First Circuit and adopted by the Ninth Circuit. Second, and relatedly, it altered several of the considerations lowers courts use when determining whether § 1252(b)(9) swallows an immigrant’s claims, which has led to a substantive narrowing of the provision’s scope. As such, the lower courts that previously adopted the broad view of § 1252(b)(9) should revisit and narrow the scope of the provision in accordance with Court precedent. This will ensure that immigrants who bring urgent claims challenging government action with potentially grave consequences are not categorically barred from immediate access to federal district court.

Keywords: 1252(b)(9), Jennings, jurisdiction, immigration, INA, district court

Suggested Citation:

Garnick, Adam, Immigrants’ Access to Federal District Court: The Narrowing of § 1252(b)(9) Post-Jennings (May 15, 2020). University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

Download This Paper

Open PDF in Browser

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You can download Adam’s complete article from SSRN, with much helpful research and many helpful strategic suggestions, at the link in the above abstract.

Thanks for being such an important part of the “New Due Process Army” (NDPA), Adam!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-11-20

🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️AS U.S. JUSTICE SYSTEM FAILS, BARR & DHS GO FOR “ADMINISTRATIVE REPEAL” OF DUE PROCESS & REFUGEE ACT IN 156-PAGE SCREED OVERFLOWING WITH B.S. & FALSE CLAIMS! — A White Nationalist “Manifesto of Lies & Misrepresentations” Masquerading As “Proposed Regulations”

Bigoted Bully Billy Barr Brutalizes Justice as Federal Courts Fail

Here they are:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-12575.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

When the rule of law disappears, courts fail, and institutions disintegrate, bad things happen.

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

PWS

06-10-20

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

Dana Milbank
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

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

Milbank writes in WashPost:

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

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

If so, you are not wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-10-20

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

Tal Kopan reports for the SF Chron:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Meanwhile, over at Roll Call, Tanvi Misra reports:

DOJ ‘reassigned’ career members of Board of Immigration Appeals

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

By Tanvi Misra

Posted June 9, 2020 at 4:55pm

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

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

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

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

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

Volume 0%

[DOJ memo offered to buy out immigration board members]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EOIR has repeatedly denied that accusation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever! Institutional Complicity Never!

PWS

06-10-20

🏴‍☠️BIA DENIES DUE PROCESS AGAIN! — 9th Cir. Exposes Gross Abuses by EOIR in Effort to Deprive Armenian Refugees of Legal Asylum Status! — Grigoryan v. Barr

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca9-on-due-process-grigoryan-v-barr

Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:

CA9 on Due Process: Grigoryan v. Barr

Grigoryan v. Barr

“Our government granted asylum to Karen Grigoryan (“Petitioner”), his wife, and two of their children (collectively, the “Grigoryans”) in 2001. Beginning in 2005, the Grigoryans were subjected to a protracted immigration ordeal triggered by the government’s allegations of fraud in Petitioner’s asylum application. The Grigoryans’ bureaucratic nightmare culminated when, after they had resided in the United States for nearly fourteen years, an immigration judge (“IJ”) terminated their asylum status, denied their renewed requests for deportation relief, and ordered them removed to Armenia. The IJ terminated the Grigoryans’ asylum status by relying almost exclusively on a single-page “report” introduced by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) that purportedly revealed that Petitioner’s original asylum application contained fraudulent documents. Although the Grigoryans were not allowed to examine any of the documents or the individuals referred to in the report, they ultimately proved that half of the fraud allegations in the report were unfounded. The IJ also relied on adverse credibility findings entered against Petitioner at an earlier hearing that never should have taken place. The question before us is whether, in light of this series of missteps, the agency erred in terminating the Grigoryans’ asylum status. We have jurisdiction over the Grigoryans’ petition for review pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1252. We hold that the government violated the Grigoryans’ due process rights by failing to provide them a full and fair opportunity to rebut the government’s fraud allegations at the termination hearing. We therefore grant the petition, vacate the decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) and the IJ’s order of deportation, and remand to the BIA for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

[Hats off to Catalina Gracia and Areg Kazaryan!]

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Circuit Courts continue to “out” constant failures of elementary due process by a BIA that has abandoned that concept to serve as an “rubber stamp” for their “partners” at DHS Enforcement. Wrongfully sending asylum seekers back to persecution based on bogus grounds and defective procedures can be a death sentence.

But, these systemic violations of due process and the essential “fraud” being perpetrated on the Article III Courts by imposters posing as “subject matter experts” and an enforcement body masquerading as a “court” remains unaddressed. It’s no secret that the corrupt Billy Barr is unqualified to serve as the chief legal official of the U.S. Nor is it “rocket science” to recognize that allowing him to run a “court system” violates Constitutional due process. So, what’s the justification for life-tenured Article III judges who fail to halt these grotesque, life-threatening abuses and require the long, long overdue constitutionally-required reforms to create an independent judiciary insulated from political control?

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-08-20

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

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

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the interview at the link.

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

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

But, was it really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-07-20

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

George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

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

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

IDEAS

Shouting Into the Institutional Void

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

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

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

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

[Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The double standard of the American riot]

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

06-06-20

DEBUNKING THE TRUMP REGIME’S WHITE NATIONALIST MYTHS☠️: Furthering & Protecting Immigrants’ Rights Benefits Society — Bogus “COVID-19” Visa Restrictions & Other Nativist Nonsense Enabled By Feckless Congress & Failing Courts Hurts America!

Gaurav Khanna
Assistant Professor of Economics
U.S. San Diego

https://apple.news/AtzkkrgAGThCSMutjCZCjAg

From SCIENMAG:

New Visa restrictions will make the US economic downturn worse

New research shows legal protections for immigrants improve lives and livelihoods of citizen workers

The Trump administration is expected to set limits on a popular program that allows international students to work in the U.S. after graduation while remaining on their student visas. The restrictions on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program are designed to help American graduates seeking jobs during the pandemic-fueled economic downturn; however, the move is likely to further hurt the economy, according to new University of California San Diego research on immigrant rights.

In a new research paper, economists find that immigrant rights enhance the lives and livelihoods of native-born workers in many ways. Drawing from a sweeping collection of studies on the U.S. labor market over the past century, the paper is the first of its kind to look at how legal protections for immigrants affect domestic workers of immigrant-receiving countries in terms of generating income, innovation, reducing crime and increasing tax revenues.

One in eight persons living in the United States was born in a different country. Therefore understanding the impact of migrant worker rights on receiving economies is crucial to immigration policymaking, especially with the White House’s immigration policies growing more exclusionary during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This time the political restrictions seem to be on high-skill foreign-born, like students, OPTs and those with H1B visas,” said Gaurav Khanna, co-author and assistant professor of economics at the UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS). “Many high-skill workers have lost their jobs, which means many will have to leave the country soon. When the U.S. crisis abates, there may be a scarcity of high-skill professionals, which could stall a robust recovery.”

Legal protections for immigrants aid entrepreneurship and innovation

About 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. These companies amass more than $6 trillion in revenue per year and include tech-giants like Google-Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla and Apple. With one in four of computer scientists born in a different country, the U.S. immigrant workforce comprises of many of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs, current CEOs or company founders.

As entrepreneurs know, starting a business requires a lot of money up front while the return on investment may take years, but the benefits to the local populations prove to be very positive from the start.

With the economy contracting at unprecedented levels, the White House’s decision to impose more visa restrictions is expected make economic recovery more difficult because the less confidence immigrants have in their status, the less likely they are to seed innovation and create businesses.

Providing legal permanence and stability to immigrants may help incentivize long-term local investments like businesses which lead to an increase in jobs and a larger tax base, Khanna and co-author Anna Brown, a graduate of GPS’s Master of Public Policy program write.

H1-B under fire, despite its well-documented economic benefits

Most technology workers enter the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are temporary work visas that are valid for three years and renewable up to another three years. At the end of the six-year period, these highly-skilled workers must either leave the country or apply for a costly green card that has a long waitlist, particularly for citizens of India and China.

“Extending the H-1B limit or making the green card process easier would provide immigrants with a longer legal work status in the U.S. and allow employers to retain high-skill talent, which could have downstream effects on other industries that use software, like banking, manufacturing and other sectors,” the authors write.

Since the H-1B visa was in introduced in 1990, it has yielded many economic benefits. For example, U.S.-born workers gained $431 million in 2010 as a result of the H-1B, according to previous research from Khanna. Moreover, another study of his revealed that hiring H-1B workers was strongly associated with firms introducing newer products.

However, new restrictions to the H-1B, the same type of visa the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, used to begin working in the U.S., could be released soon as the White House recently indicated it is reevaluating the program. This could yield another roadblock for the legalization of immigrants with entrepreneurial ambition.

“Unless immigrants are certain they will be allowed to remain within a country, they may not invest in developing a business in that country,” Khanna and Brown write. “This highlights a problem faced by many migrants who have ambitions to start businesses but will not because they know they may not be able to stay in the country for long.”

More protections for immigrants increases the likelihoods of jobs going to native born-workers, over immigrants

In addition to analyzing how immigrant rights aid entrepreneurship, Khanna and Brown also looked at how these policies impact the competition between native-born and immigrant workers. Immigrant worker rights protect migrant workers from employer exploitation; an indirect benefit of these laws is that they even the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants.

“Migrant workers, who are not legally protected, face much lower wages compared with their native counterparts,” according to Khanna. “This is detrimental to U.S. born workers, who are less likely to be hired. Ensuring migrant workers have substantial rights inadvertently helps U.S. born workers as well.”

The study points to exclusionary immigration policies over the course of U.S. history, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ policies targeted at farmworkers, all of which were driven by fear of low-skill laborers from other countries depressing wages of native-born workers in the U.S.

However, economist all over the world have been unable to find evidence that proves these theories. Rather, in each of these cases throughout U.S. history, employers adjusted to the missing workers in ways other than substantially bidding up wages, such as by shifting to production technologies that use less labor.

“Often, such policies have been motivated by resentment against foreign workers; however, this fear may be based on false perceptions and lack of evidence,” the authors of the paper, which appeared in the UCLA Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, write. “This resentment may also be driven by racial prejudices and xenophobia.”

Rights for immigrants also lower crimes in receiving countries

Even as the discussion on the impact of immigration has predominantly focused on wages and employment, the current U.S. President has strongly alluded to a link between immigrants and crime, propelling growing discourse on the subject.

Between 2001 and 2017, Gallup polls consistently reflected that roughly half (45 percent to 58 percent) of American respondents believe immigrants make the crime situation worse. These assumptions are false. The authors cite ample research that sheds light on incarceration rates being lower for immigrants, and far lower for newly arrived immigrants, revealing the baseline for criminal activity among immigrants is lower than native-born workers.

In addition, the authors point to previous studies that revealed a correlation between immigrant rights with decreased crime over the course of four decades (1970 to 2010).

“This is because the less protection and work opportunities immigrants have, the more likely they are to turn to criminal activity, as an act of desperation,” said Khanna. “Criminal behavior is widely understood to be a result of necessity and when given legal employment opportunities at livable wages, crime is reduced.”

For example, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of was implemented in 1986, which gave legal status to three million immigrants in the U.S., it led to a marked decrease in crime up to 5 percent.

Legal protections lower the fiscal burden and reduce deficits

Contrary to popular belief, undocumented migrant workers pay taxes, mostly income taxes, which are estimated to at $11.7 billion. Yet the number would be higher (by $2.2 billion) if undocumented migrants were granted legal status, an important consideration as the national deficit mounts in the wake of COVID-19.

Additional ways more protections for migrants would help domestic populous could be lower health care costs. Undocumented migrants may not be eligible for insurance, adding to healthcare costs in times of emergency.

“We find that the fiscal burden can be greatly reduced if immigrants are given working status and allowed to contribute to the tax base,” the authors wrote. “In conclusion, we find there are several areas where strengthening migrant worker rights benefits native-born workers, outweighing any costs borne by them.”

To read the full paper, go to the UCLA Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs website.

Media Contact
Christine Clark
ceclark@ucsd.edu
https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/new-visa-restrictions-will-make-the-u.s-economic-downturn-worse

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

The fear mongering, racist lies, anti-scientific BS, and White Nationalist false narratives pushed by the Trump regime and enabled by a feckless Congress and complicit Article III Courts that refuse to give meaning to our Constitution and statutes while failing to require honesty and candor from the Administration are destroying America.

No, everything can’t be changed overnight. Sadly, the damage inflicted by Trump, his corrupt cronies, and his supporters on America and on our democratic institutions is huge; it will take years if not decades to repair. That’s what makes the exceptionally poor performance of Congress and the Federal Judiciary as a whole under the defective leadership of the Supremes so reprehensible. Far, far too many of the wrong people in the wrong jobs at the worst time in our history for fecklessness, lack of courage, and absence of integrity, not to mention empathy and compassion for “the other.” Disgraceful!

But regime change and appointing Federal Judges who demonstrate “community creds,” a commitment to due process, fundamental fairness, equal justice under law, human rights, and human decency would be an important necessary step to making social justice in America a reality rather than just a slogan. It would also help protect us against any future “Trump-style, neo-fascist regime.”

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

PWS

06-06-20

KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: FRAUD, WASTE, & ABUSE UNDER THE EOIR BIG TOP 🤡🎪🤹‍♂️ — TRAC DECLARES EOIR’S BOGUS STATISTICS TO BE NATIONAL DISASTER! ☠️— “The EOIR’s apparent reckless deletion of potentially irretrievable court records raises urgent concerns that without immediate intervention the agency’s sloppy data management practices could undermine its ability to manage itself, thwart external efforts at oversight, and leave the public in the dark about essential government activities.”🤮 — WHERE’S THE OVERSIGHT? WHERE’S THE ACCOUNTABILITY?

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/611/

EOIR’s Data Release on Asylum So Deficient Public Should Not Rely on Accuracy of Court Records

TRAC has concluded that the data updated through April 2020 it has just received on asylum and other applications for relief to the Immigration Courts are too unreliable to be meaningful or to warrant publication. We are therefore discontinuing updating our popular Immigration Court Asylum Decisions app, and will take other steps to highlight this problem[1]. We also wish to alert the public that any statistics EOIR has recently published on this topic may be equally suspect, as will be any future reports the agency publishes until these major data deficiencies are explained and rectified[2].

The EOIR’s apparent reckless deletion of potentially irretrievable court records raises urgent concerns that without immediate intervention the agency’s sloppy data management practices could undermine its ability to manage itself, thwart external efforts at oversight, and leave the public in the dark about essential government activities. Left unaddressed, the number of deleted records will compound each month and could trigger an expensive data crisis at the agency. And here the missing records are the actual applications for asylum, and how the court is handling them. This is a subject on which there is widespread public interest and concern.

EOIR Data Irregularities Approaching Point of No Return

Despite TRAC’s appeals to the EOIR, Immigration Court records continue to disappear each month. TRAC initially reported 1,507 missing applications for relief in our October 2019 report, which grew to 3,799 missing applications the following month. We wrote EOIR Director James McHenry providing a copy of the 1,507 missing applications asking for answers on why these records were missing from their files. We wrote again when the number of missing applications more than doubled the following month. These letters were met with silence. Not only have these cases disappeared entirely, they have not been restored in any subsequent data releases and the number of missing relief applications continue to grow. (See the final section for a short explanation of TRAC’s methodology.)

Alarmingly, the number of relief applications that were present in the March 2020 data release but were missing in the April release jumped to 68,282. This is just the number of records that disappeared over a single month. It does not include the ever growing number of applications that had previously disappeared month-by-month. As was true in past months, roughly four out of five of the records in the March 2020 release that disappeared from April’s release concerned applications on which the court had rendered its decision, including many cases in which the immigration judge had granted asylum as well as other forms of relief.

To put that into perspective, the number of missing cases just last month is more than the 63,734 asylum applications received by the Immigration Courts during all of FY 2015. If these applications are missing because they have been deleted from the Court’s own master files, the magnitude of the task of restoring just this single month’s destruction—assuming this is even possible—is enormous. To go back and restore the cumulative number of relief applications that went missing during previous months will obviously be even greater.

In fact, so many asylum decisions were dropped from EOIR’s April release that the cumulative number of asylum decisions went down, not up, despite asylum decisions continuing to be made. The volume of disappearing records has reached a scale that little faith can be placed in the factual accuracy of reports published by the EOIR based on its data.

The EOIR’s escalating data problems should raise dire concerns for Congress, policymakers and the public who routinely put their faith in federal agencies to provide complete and accurate information about their work. Indeed, the management of the court system itself, including the quota system recently imposed on immigration judges, presupposes the accuracy of the court’s own records. It is deeply worrisome that the EOIR and the Department of Justice appear unconcerned with ensuring that their own records are accurate and uncommitted to providing the public with accurate and reliable data about the Court’s operations.

TRAC Urges EOIR to Take Immediate Action

To date, the EOIR has not responded to TRAC’s requests for an explanation of these disappearances, nor has the EOIR responded to TRAC’s FOIA requests for records that would shed light on this matter.

Therefore, TRAC has written a third letter to Director McHenry reporting our findings of 68,282 new disappearances and we are again seeking a commitment from him to take the steps needed to address the problem. More urgently, we are asking that the EOIR immediately preserve—rather than destroy—all back-up tapes or other media in the hopes that records apparently improperly deleted from the Court’s master files might be restored. We assured Director McHenry that we would be more than happy to work cooperatively with the agency to help them better ensure that going forward the public is provided with more accurate and reliable data about the Immigration Court’s operations.

How EOIR’s Data Mismanagement Impacts TRAC’s Immigration Court Tools

TRAC’s mission is to provide the public with accurate, reliable, unbiased, and timely data on the operations of the federal government, and to ensure that the public is informed about changes that impact our data.

The EOIR’s disappearing records fall under the data related to applications for relief. The record on the existence of the court case itself is present, but for a growing number of these cases there now is no record that the immigrant ever applied for relief, or the court’s decision on that application. One of the key moments in the life of the case—including applications for asylum—is missing entirely. As a direct consequence TRAC does not have the information needed to provide reliable or meaningful updates on the court’s handling of applications for asylum and must therefore discontinue updating its asylum decision app.

While each of the other files in EOIR’s monthly data releases also have the same problem of records disappearing, the magnitude of these disappearances has not reached the levels seen with applications for relief. While still worrisome, these levels have not yet climbed to where we believe we can no longer use the information we receive. Thus, we are continuing to update the rest of our other Immigration Court apps. We continue to closely monitor the situation, while we urge EOIR to explain why records keep disappearing. We further continue to ask the agency to take the steps needed to rectify the situation.

TRAC will continue to retain all previous and future EOIR data shipments for research purposes.

How did TRAC Identify the EOIR’s Data Irregularities?

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) oversees the nationwide Immigration Court system, including more than 60 physical Immigration Court locations (as well as many more remote hearing locations including teleconference sites and ad hoc “tent” courts), hundreds of Immigration Judges, and millions of immigration cases that pass through the court system. The EOIR records information on each case and tracks various proceedings, filings, hearings and other aspects of each case in a large database. This database is central to the Court’s ability to manage its workload, prepare and publish reports for the public, and respond to queries from Congress about its operations. It is also used in implementing new practices, including the recent decision to impose new evaluation criteria for Immigration Judges.

As a result of TRAC’s ongoing FOIA requests, the EOIR releases a large batch of anonymized Immigration Court data each month that provides a snapshot of a great deal of the information recorded in this database on the handling of each case. In short, TRAC does not create data on the EOIR; rather, TRAC’s uses the EOIR’s own data. This data is the foundation for TRAC’s Immigration Court data tools which help ensure transparency and accountability for the American public.

TRAC used this data to precisely identify deleted records. While the information TRAC receives does not identify individuals, EOIR’s computer system assigns a unique computer sequence number to each case that identifies it. Because TRAC receives comprehensive data shipments from the EOIR each month that include these unique computer-assigned tracking numbers, TRAC can match each record received in the previous month with the same corresponding record in the following month’s release. Each release is also cumulative. That means it should include every record from the previous month plus every new record that has been added to the database over the course of the current month. As a rule, records should therefore never disappear[3].

When a record that was present is not included in the next month’s release, TRAC refers to these as missing or disappearing records. Because humans maintain most databases including EOIR’s, mistakes will occur. Therefore no database is ever perfect. So a few disappearing records might be expected. However, as is the situation here, concern is warranted whenever significant numbers of records disappear. Indeed, alarm bells should ring as the number of disappearing records grow. This situation means the data can no longer be trusted to reliably track the court’s proceedings.

Footnotes

[1] EOIR monthly releases consist of a series of tables covering different aspects of its workload. While each of these tables continue to have disappearing records each month, the magnitude of these missing records varies by table. For example, in the table that tracks each case before the court there were 228 cases present in March that disappeared from the April release, compared with 41,233 new cases that were added. While the problem of disappearing case records remains very troubling for the case table along with each of the other EOIR tables, TRAC believes that their magnitudes do not rise to the same level as the problem for applications for relief where the data now are so unreliable and misleading that they do not warrant the public placing any trust in them. At this time, we therefore are continuing to update our other Immigration Court apps while alerting the public to this continuing serious problem that affects the reliability of EOIR data releases more generally.

[2] For an example of a recent EOIR publication that may contain significant data errors, see the graph and table reporting total asylum applications through March 2020, which was generated using data from April 2020: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1106366/download.

[3] Even when a data entry error is made, the database has special codes to indicate that a record should be disregarded because it was a data entry error so that rarely is it necessary to actually delete records.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University. For more information, to subscribe, or to donate, contact trac@syr.edu or call 315-443-3563.

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Read the rest of TRAC’s report at the link.

EOIR isn’t willing and able to do its only function: provide fair, impartial, and timely adjudications to asylum seekers and other migrants while following best judicial practices.

But they do have time to waste taxpayers’ money on nonsense like the chart at this link: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/file/1217001/download. This was obviously designed to further the Trump regime’s false narrative regarding the merits of asylum claims. While the chart is largely incomprehensible, misleading nonsense, what stands out is this:

At the end of an abusive process during which the law has been illegally skewed against asylum seekers and “judges,” most of whom are not experts in asylum law and who have never even represented an asylum seeker, are encouraged to deny meritorious claims for protection, against the odds, over 25% (12 of 47) of those who actually get through this biased dysfunctional mess still get asylum!

It’s reasonable to believe that under a fair system, with impartial decision makers who have expertise in asylum law, and without the interference of biased, overtly anti-asylum politicos like Sessions and Barr, asylum seekers would succeed the majority of the time, as they did before efforts by both the Obama and Trump Administrations to “ratchet down” asylum grants so that the EOIR system would serve DHS Enforcement as a “deterrent” to those seeking protection.

Obviously, the DOJ is afraid that under a fair, independent judicial system that actually employed judges who were experts in asylum law and who had real life experience representing asylum applicants, the majority of claims would be granted, thereby exposing the fraud, dishonesty, and misconduct involved in the present anti-asylum system.

It’s a national disgrace that is actually harming and sometimes killing those deserving of protection under our law.

Due Process Forever! Dishonest, Unethical, Incompetent, and Intentionally Biased “Courts” Never!

PWS

06-04-20

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

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