"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Just happened to be reading this item about trying to combat gangs in our local newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette Packet:
Carr said one of the biggest challenges facing the police department’s anti-gang work is backlash from the national level rhetoric on immigration. “Whenever we show up in Arlandria, people worry we’re there to enforce immigration law,” said Carr. “Having difficulty building up that trust. We’re a local police department looking for people breaking local law.”
Seldom, if ever, do I read or see a TV report on gang violence where the victim is Anglo or Black. No, virtually 100% of the victims of gang violence in this area are Hispanic.
It wouldn’t take a “rocket scientist” — just somebody other than a 70-or-so-year-old Anglo White Nationalist with a history of anti-Hispanic racism — to understand that you can’t effectively combat or prevent gang violence without the trust of the local Hispanic community — in Alexandria, VA or anywhere else. It also doesn’t take much “smarts” to recognize that combatting gang violence with threats to arrest law-abiding, productive members of the community who happen to be without documents is going to discourage victims and witnesses from cooperating, destroy trust between the local community and the local police, and make enforcement ineffective.
No wonder gang leaders, particularly recruiters, literally “jump for joy” every time Gonzo opens his mouth to utter another anti-Hispanic , anti-immigrant rant. Not only does that give the gangsters “a free shot” at their victims in the Hispanic community, but it’s also is a prime recruiting tool. It demonstrates that Sessions and his restrictionist cronies in the Anglo community aren’t going to give any respect to “Dreamers” or any other law-abiding undocumented individuals. So, why not join up with the folks who wield some power and demand respect — and who obviously have been able to create a climate of fear in the Anglo community just by victimizing Hispanics?
“Message to Republicans: You can be pro-growth. You can be anti-immigration. But, honestly, you can’t be both.
Now, within the immigration debate, there are a lot of questions with no obvious right answers.
What’s the right balance of immigrants admitted for their skills and those allowed in because they have relatives here?
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How much effort should be devoted to tracking down the undocumented, and how much to punishing companies that hire them?
What should we do about the millions of immigrants who came here illegally a decade or more ago and have become established members of their communities?
And — what is the right number of legal immigrants every year from now on?
Big, complicated questions — which is why Congress shouldn’t try to solve them all between now and Feb. 8, its self-imposed deadline for resolving the issue of the “dreamers.” In the few days that remain, the best it could do would be to, well, resolve the issue of the dreamers — the undocumented immigrants who were brought here as young children through no fault of their own, who obey the law and who go to school or work or serve in the military.
They are American in all but legal status. Give them a path to citizenship, as President Trump has proposed. Give Trump the money for his wall (until he gets that check from Mexico). Punt on the big, complicated questions, something Congress certainly knows how to do. Everyone declares victory, and the government doesn’t shut down.
Of course, that would leave us still facing the big questions. Ideally, Congress would schedule a serious debate on them for the spring. Ideally, it would be conducted in a constructive spirit — acknowledging, for example, that reasonable people can disagree on skills vs. family.
But ideally, also, it would also be conducted with an understanding that those who favor a drastic, absolute drop in the level of immigration, as many Republicans do, would be making a choice about America’s future.
They would be turning us into Japan.
Now, to be clear, Japan is a wondrous nation, with an ancient, complex culture, welcoming people, innovative industry — a great deal to teach the world.
But Japan also is a country that admits few immigrants — and, as a result, it is an aging, shrinking nation. By 2030, more than half the country will be over age 50. By 2050 there will be more than three times as many old people (65 and over) as children (14 and under). Already, deaths substantially outnumber births. Its population of 127 million is forecast to shrink by a third over the next half-century.
Japan is a pioneer and an extreme version of where much of the First World is headed as longevity increases and fertility declines. The likely consequences are slower economic growth, reduced innovation, labor shortages and huge pressure on pensions. If you think our entitlement politics are fraught, think about this: In Japan in 2050, the old-age dependency ratio — the number of people 65 and over as a percentage of the number who are 15 to 64 — is projected to be 71.2 percent.
The comparable figure for the United States is 36.4 percent, up from 25.7 percent in 2020. Still high, but if it proves manageable, we will have immigration to thank. America still attracts dynamic, hard-working people from around the world, and they and their offspring help keep our population and our economy growing, as recent Pew Research Center and International Monetary Fund papers explain.
The wave of immigration over the past half-century also has changed the face of the nation, reducing the share of the white population from what it would have been and increasing the share of Asians and Hispanics. It’s not surprising that some people find this disorienting.
But as so often with such debates, perceptions lag reality. Nearly half (48 percent) of immigrants these days have college degrees, as a fact sheet from the Migration Policy Institute last year showed. A quarter of technology company start-ups between 2008 and 2012 included at least one foreign-born founder. As incomes and education levels rise around the world, in other words, the skills mix of U.S. immigration is already changing, without any changes in our laws.
Here’s the bottom line: I think we should remain open to immigrants because it’s part of who we are as a nation, because every generation of newcomers — even, or maybe especially, the ones who come with nothing but moxie and a tolerance for risk — has enriched and improved us.
But you don’t have to buy into any of that Statue of Liberty stuff to favor immigration, because naked self-interest leads to the very same conclusion. A vote to choke off immigration is a vote for stagnation and decline.”
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Hiatt clearly “gets it!”
But, maybe the GOP restrictionists do too. Their opposition to legal immigration is grounded in racism, White Nationalism, and xenophobia — none of which have anything to do with rationality, facts, the common good, or even “enlightened self-interest.”
Therefore, neither an appeal to “who we are as a nation” nor “naked self-interest” is likely to change their highly emotional, but essentially irrational anti-immigrant views.
“IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS Enforcement, the federal agency whose deportation agents have been unshackled by the Trump administration, has intensified its efforts to such a degree that cruelty now seems no impediment to its enforcement decisions, and common sense appears to play a diminishing role.
Recent months have brought news of one senseless detention and deportation after another. From all appearances, the agency seems to have embraced the idea that it is just to sunder established families and separate immigrant parents from their U.S.-born children — even in cases involving garden-variety technical violations of immigration rules.
Yes, the Obama administration also deported some longtime residents who had committed no serious offenses, but its deportation efforts were focused on criminals. By contrast, detentions of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled in the first year of President Trump’s administration — to 13,600 in 2017 from 5,498 in 2016. Evidently seized by a vainglorious notion of its mission, ICE too often discounts basic decency as a guiding tenet.
How else to explain the detention and imminent deportation of a 27-year-old Ohio man, arrested for driving without a license, who is the only means of financial support, and one of just two trained medical caregivers, for a 6-year-old paraplegic boy (who also happens to be a U.S. citizen)? How else to explain the deportation of a construction worker in Michigan, the father of 10- and 3-year-old U.S.-born boys, who provided critical help to police in Detroit in their investigation of a shooting?
How else to explain the airport arrest and deportation of a 22-year-old female college student from Spain, visiting the United States for a vacation at the invitation of a librarian at Oregon State University, on grounds that she would give Spanish lessons to the librarian’s young son for a few weeks — work for which she lacked the right visa? How else to explain the deportation of a 39-year-old landscaper living in the Detroit suburbs, a father and husband of U.S. citizens, who had lived in the United States since age 10 and whose record was so unblemished that it didn’t even feature a traffic violation? How else to explain the Israeli undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego, a “dreamer” studying legally in the United States, who was detained upon trying to cross back into the United States minutes after his roommate made a wrong turn on the highway, unintentionally driving into Mexico?
In its boilerplate communiques, the agency defends its actions by insisting that it prioritizes bona fide threats to national security and public safety but exempts no category of “removable alien” from enforcement. Which raises a question: Have discretion and humanity been dropped from the attributes that Americans can expect of their law enforcement agencies?”
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In answer to the Post’s question: YES, thanks exactly what has been happening in America since the very beginning of the Trump regime — starting with the “Muslim Ban” and continuing with a consistent White Supremecist agenda! Many of us have been saying that all along!
We already have the “New American Gulag” — expanded “civil” immigration detention in substandard, potentially even deadly conditions, in obscure “out of sight, out of mind” locations. There, individuals, many deserving legal protection from the US under our laws, are denied fair access to counsel and railroaded out of the country in what essentially are “mock court” hearings conducted by “judges” controlled by notorious White Nationalist Jeff “Gono Apocalypto” Sessions.
Sessions and his minions encourage the judges to view individuals in removal proceedings as “production numbers, possible fraudsters, and potential terrorists,” rather than as vulnerable human beings deserving of fairness, respect, and due process.
To complement the “New American Gulag,” we now have the “New American Gestapo,” headed by Acting Chief ICEMAN Tom Homan. It’s an internal police force that operates without rules, rhyme, reason, or humanity — in other words arbitrary “Gonzo” enforcement intended to terrorize ethnic (primarily Latino) communities.
And, in case you haven’t read about it, ICE now has the capacity to electronically track the whereabouts and driving patterns of every license plate in America —- including YOURS! Of course they say that they will only use it for “legitimate” law Enforcement purposes.
But, for the “New American Gestapo” everything is “legitimate” — boundaries on law enforcement conduct and misconduct went out the widow when the Trumpsters crawled in. Remember, Gonzo essentially told local police forces he really didn’t care what they were doing to the civil rights of African-Americans and other minorities as long as they were enforcing the law and bringing crime rates down!
This is why ICE is well on its way to becoming the most hated, distrusted, and least respected police force in America.
Had enough of the Trump Administation’s trampling on Constitutional rights, civil rights, human rights, and just plain old human decency in America! Join the resistance!
The “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”) is out there every day fighting for the Due Process and the legal rights of everyone in America and standing up against the excesses of the Trump Administration. Join their effort today!
“. . . . So why don’t people correct these misconceptions? One reason is that people are loath to scrutinize statements that confirm what they already believe. People are particularly receptive to believe statements from trusted sources (the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, if not the president). If people already believe that immigrants pose a threat, they are unlikely to probe whether the White House is phrasing its statistics appropriately.
Confusing the inverse probabilities of terrorist acts and foreign-born individuals is not merely an academic issue. Proponents of restrictive immigration polices continue to use fear-based, inverse fallacy tactics. During the recent government shutdown, Trump released an ad promising to “fix our border and keep our families safe,” adding, “Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.”
Citing that “3 in 4” terrorists are foreign born implies, erroneously, that excluding the foreign born would substantially reduce a large threat to this country. But at what cost? How many of the 41 million lives of immigrants and refugees should be ruined to further reduce an already minuscule threat? Let’s not use statistical lies to destroy lives.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Under “Gonzo” the DOJ has become one of the leading purveyors of false, distorted, or otherwise misrepresented data to promote White Nationalism and unfairly target immigrants and ethnic groups. He couldn’t even get his story straight before Congress. There is good reason to disbelieve or be skeptical of everything coming out of Gonzo’s mouth and the DOJ.
And, it’s not just my observation. Gonzo consistently fails “Fact Checker” analyses on his pejorative statements about immigration and law enforcement. He’s just “not credible.” That”s a major problem for him, the DOJ, and our country.
“WASHINGTON — When he wants to get his 82-year-old father to exercise, Gianpaolo von Nacher baits him with a trip to his favorite place, Ross Dress for Less.
The ability to monitor his father’s health, cooking with him and having him build a relationship with his daughter are what von Nacher calls “blessings” of bringing his father, Sandro, to live with him in Los Angeles.
Gianpaolo von Nacher (middle) poses with his daughter, Alejandra, and his father Sandoro in this undated family photo. Courtesy Of Gianpaolo Von Nacher
“I am who I am, thanks to him,” said von Nacher, who is from Veracruz, Mexico, where his father migrated from Italy. “My mom passed when I was 13. He had to raise us himself. He was always a rock. He taught me what a man is supposed to be as far as being honest, a good husband, loyal, a good worker.”
Foreign national parents, children and siblings of American citizens and legal residents have become the latest target as President Donald Trump and Congress tangle over immigration.
While much of the focus of the immigration debate has been on 800,000 to close to 2 million undocumented immigrants, Trump has pushed family-based immigration into the debate.
Late Thursday, he offered up a path to citizenship for the population of undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers in exchange for a list of border security and immigration enforcement resources, a border wall and significant cuts in the visas reserved for parents, children and siblings of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 1 million green cards are given to immigrants each year, with about two-thirds of those green cards for family-based immigration. The law allows U.S. citizens to sponsor for green cards spouses, minor children and parents and there is no numerical cap on how many of those visas can be granted.
U.S. citizens can also sponsor adult children and siblings, and legal permanent residents can sponsor spouses, minor children and adult married children. Those visas do have numerical caps.
Specific details have yet to be drafted but if the White House’s proposal to cut legal immigration succeeds, that means U.S. citizens wouldn’t be able to bring certain family members to the states as von Nacher did.
Tammy Lin with members of her family, in a 2002 family photo. Bottom row from left to right, her father Cheng-Sen Lin, her mother Julia Lin. Top row, her cousin Ritchie Chen and Lin. Courtesy Tammy Lin
Von Nacher, 47, said he doesn’t see the logic in such a proposal. “I think having family close makes life easier. It makes us more productive. It makes us happier,” said von Nacher, who came to the U.S. on a tennis scholarship. “I don’t see any downside to being able to take care of our parents.”
Immigration attorney Tammy Lin, who was born and raised in Texas, can reel off a list of family members who are now in the United States thanks to family-sponsored visas. Her mother, born in China, became a U.S. citizen and then brought Lin’s grandmother and aunts to the states in the 1970s.
Lin’s father, one of 10 children, also brought his mother to America using the same type of visa. An uncle, who was also in the U.S., brought brothers and sisters who brought their children, Lin’s cousins, all whom earned college degrees.
Lin’s parents ran a restaurant, so her grandmother helped care for her while they worked.
“Being raised with my grandmother helped me realize a bit about my own history, my culture, my language skills, which helped my career,” said Lin, who learned Mandarin from her grandmother.
Von Nacher, an engineer, saw a similar bond grow between his father and his daughter, Alejandra, now 17. When she visited him in Los Angeles from the Midwest at the age of 10, she had the chance to bond with her grandfather, he said.
“Their relationship is beautiful,” he said. Alejandra has learned to speak Spanish and Italian from her grandfather, learned to cook and now she wants to go to Italy or Mexico, von Nacher said.
Rose Stanton of Glendale, Calif., poses with her daughter, Stephanie, at a concert they attended last year. Courtesy Rose Stanton
Rose Stanton, 49, met her husband, a U.S. citizen, in Jalisco, Mexico. They married in 1991 and are now living in California. There was no family on hand to help when her first two children of three were born.
“I felt lonely. I thought it was needed for my kids to get to know my parents. It’s kind of hard to grow up and not have [grandparents] around,” she said.
Stanton grew up in a family of 10 that was very close, she said. After she brought her parents over through legal immigration, her children were able to have some of that same family closeness with her parents, she added.
“I wanted them to have what I had when I was a kid. My mom’s cooking. My mom’s arms. My parents were so sweet and I wanted my kids to have that,” Stanton said.
Now she is petitioning for two brothers and a sister to relocate to the U.S., but she said she is nervous after hearing about Trump’s proposed plan to decrease legal immigration here.
Stanton added that the visas now under threat by the president’s policies are crucial to how families are reunited stateside.
“Isn’t that what America is about?” she asked. “First the father and then the mother and then the kids and then the brother. Isn’t America about people immigrating to America?”
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Family Immigration has always been overall good for America. The GOP’s disingenuously pejorative use of “chain migration” and the bogus attempt to shift to a so-called “merit-based system” is nothing but a subterfuge for a White Nationalist racist agenda. Just look at the type of folks pushing it — mostly GOP White males and a very few GOP right-wing White women. If it were in fact “good for America,” then Democrats and people of color would be among those supporting it.
“A few times a week, I visit the 7-Eleven in my mid–city neighborhood to pick up a six-pack or a bag of snacks. What I see there looks to me like a pretty pure portrait of America. The place is open all hours and it serves all kinds: Parents buying after-school snacks for their children, laborers getting cold drinks on hot afternoons, neighbors stopping in for a few items before the evening meal. A family from India owns the franchise — mother, father, son and daughter, all of whom work long hours in the store.
On Jan. 10, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents descended on 98 7-Elevens in 17 states, including California. It was a show of force that must have played well with the president’s anti-immigrant base. Although my mid-city outpost wasn’t targeted, a store in Culver City and three in Koreatown were. ICE didn’t detain anyone in Los Angeles, but 21 workers suspected of being in the country illegally were arrested nationwide.
“Today’s actions,” declared acting ICE director Thomas D. Homan, “send a strong message to U.S. businesses that hire and employ an illegal work force: ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable.”
Oh, come on. The raids were nothing but political theater, intended to terrify the most vulnerable.
I’ll keep supporting my local 7-Eleven, and any other franchise that gets raided.
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According to news reports, 7-Eleven owners will be “audited” for immigration offenses, but such audits don’t require dramatic predawn raids and rarely result in successful prosecution anyway. Business owners have access to lawyers, and it’s hard to prove they knowingly hired undocumented workers. Workers, on the other hand, can be deported with little or no due process.
It’s not that 7-Eleven owners and the company’s corporate leadership are without their issues. During the Obama administration, several franchisees in New York and Virginia were indicted for running a scheme in which, according to then-Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch, “immigrant workers were routinely forced, upon threat of job loss or deportation, to work upwards of 100 hours a week.”
Closer to home, a group of Southern California franchise owners sued 7-Eleven in 2014 for “aggressive and discriminatory” practices, which included taking away stores for minor violations and turning them over to new owners for higher fees. Late last year, the National Coalition of Associations of 7-Eleven Franchisees filed another suit in California alleging additional coercive attempts at corporate control.
Still, 7-Eleven stores have long offered a positive vehicle for immigrants — especially South Asians — to ascend into the middle class. Franchise costs are relatively affordable, and in 2013, the National Minority Franchising Initiative reported that 57% of the chain’s stores were minority-run. The result — as my neighborhood store illustrates — can be a vivid demonstration of the American dream.
It seems incredible to have to remind ourselves, at this point in the history of the Republic, that immigration and immigrants — with and without papers — are the backbone of the American economy. Again and again, research shows immigration’s net positive economic effect. “Immigrants, we get the job done,” Lin-Manuel-Miranda exults in the musical “Hamilton,” whose hero emigrated from the Caribbean island of Nevis on his way to helping found the United States.
Just two days before the 7-Eleven raids, the Trump administration announced it would do away with Temporary Protected Status for 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. — “part of what appears an effort …,” argued a Baltimore Sun editorial, “to go nationality-by-nationality to show the door to Latino and Latina immigrants, legal or illegal.”
The day after the raids, the president made his blatantly racist comments denigrating Haiti, El Salvador and countries in Africa while torpedoing a fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
That none of this is particularly surprising — the president, remember, kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans criminals and rapists, then began his presidency with the Muslim “travel ban” — makes it no less troubling, especially in California, which is, as of Jan. 1, a sanctuary state. The California Values Act prevents police from asking about immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration authorities, with some exceptions. A related law allows employers to be prosecuted if, in state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra’s words, they “voluntarily start giving up information about … or access to their employees” without a warrant.
When Gov. Jerry Brown signed the laws, Homan responded that “ICE will have no choice but to conduct at-large arrests in local neighborhoods and at worksites, which will inevitably result in additional collateral arrests.”
We have every reason, then, to see the recent raids as a signal of what’s to come — ICE agents swooping down on restaurants, car washes, convenience stores and construction sites.
Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that “U.S. immigration officials have begun preparing for a major sweep in San Francisco and other Northern California cities in which federal officers would look to arrest more than 1,500 undocumented people while sending a message that immigration policy will be enforced in the sanctuary state.”
Theater again, although not for those who are arrested. For them, this is all too real.
I never thought going to a convenience store would become a political act, but here we are. I’ll keep supporting my local 7-Eleven, and any other franchise that gets raided. It would be un-American — or un-Californian — to do otherwise.
David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion.”
When your policies are based on latent racism and White Nationalism, common sense, economic reality, and human decency cease to matter. That’s why ICE is well on its way to becoming America’s most hated and least trusted police force. That’s going to be a problem for the ICEMEN long after Trump, Gonzo, and the White Nationalist Gang have been removed from power.
“In 2006, Arizona passed a ballot initiative that barred students without legal immigration status from receiving in-state tuition rates at public universities and colleges.
Dulce Matuz, an electrical-engineering major at Arizona State, ran to find her professor.
Bursting into tears, she told him something she had only ever shared with her closest friends. She was undocumented.
“It felt good to tell my story,” she told the Guardian this week. “It was like a weight had been lifted.”
The law meant Matuz would have to pay the out-of-state tuition rate, which she could not afford. But the next day, her professor gave her a flier advertising scholarships for “people in your situation”.
Matuz had thought she was the only undocumented student on one of the largest campuses in the country. She was wrong.
At an informational meeting, she met dozens of young people with stories similar to hers. Their discussion grew into a statewide coalition, the students rallying with organizations across the US to declare themselves “undocumented and unafraid”.
One by one they shed their anonymity, in effect daring law enforcement to target them.
It was a risky move, especially in a state which was then a cauldron of anti-immigrant sentiment. But the students weren’t alone. Thousands of young immigrants came forward to demand a future in the country where they were raised. Each had a name and a story.
Collectively, they are known as Dreamers, young people without immigration status who were brought to the US as children. Over the last decade, they’ve gone from the “shadows” to the center stage of US politics, and their fate now dangles before an irascible president and a gridlocked Congress.
‘Trump Dreamers’
In September, Donald Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), an Obama-era program that lifted the threat of deportation for Dreamers.
The administration argued that Obama had overstepped his authority. But Trump did give Dreamers a six-month grace period and called on Congress to pass legislation.
“If the Dreamers are able to lead a fight that results in a radical, nativist administration signing into law their freedom, it would be a testament only to how much moral and political power the Dreamers have built,” said Frank Sharry, a long-time advocate of immigration reform and executive director of America’s Voice.
Conservatives suggest Trump is uniquely qualified to succeed where predecessors have failed, to achieve immigration reform, precisely because of his credibility among fierce opponents of illegal immigration.
At a meeting earlier this month, for example, Trump promised to “take the heat” if Republicans passed legislation.
“President Obama tried and couldn’t fix immigration, President Bush tried and couldn’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who is pushing bipartisan immigration reform.
Timeline
Donald Trump and Dreamers: a timeline of mixed messages
“I believe President Trump can. Today’s Daca recipients can be tomorrow’s Trump Dreamers.”
Polling has consistently shown that a large majority of Americans – 87% in one recent survey – support protections for Dreamers. But general anti-immigrant fervor has stalled efforts to pass legislation and conservatives remain divided over whether Dreamers should ever be allowed to be citizens.
Rounds of negotiations have yielded no solution, only a brief shutdown of the federal government during which Democrats tried to force lawmakers to extend legal status to the Dreamers.
Depending on the day, lawmakers and the president are either on the verge of striking a deal or as far apart as ever. Trump was elected after championing hard-line immigration policies but he has demanded both a “bill of love” and a border wall.
This week, the White House released a proposal that offered a pathway to citizenship for up to 1.8 million undocumented young people – in exchange for a $25bn “trust fund” for a border wall, a crackdown on undocumented migrants and changes to the migration system.
The offer did not go down well, either with Trump’s base or with progressives ranged against him. Immigration hardliners crowned Trump “Amnesty Don”. Advocates for reform rejected the offer as an attempt to seal America’s borders.
In a statement issued on Friday, Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator, called the offer “a total non-starter” that “preyed on the worst kind of prejudice”, using Dreamers “as a bargaining chip to build a wall and rip thousands of families apart”.
Trump, meanwhile, tweeted that Daca reform had “been made increasingly difficult by the fact that [Senate minority leader] Cryin’ Chuck Schumer took such a beating over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration!”
Dreamers say the fight is only beginning.
Matuz became a US citizen in 2016, a decade after she “came out of the shadows”. But she still identifies strongly with her fellow Dreamers.
“We still haven’t achieved what we set out to achieve,” she said.
’They’re speaking up’
The Dreamer movement came of age during the Obama administration. But legislation to build a path to citizenship was introduced to Congress in 2001.
Two senators – Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican – introduced the first Dream Act in August that year, a month before 9/11.
But after the attacks, as concerns over national security and terrorism dominated public life, the immigration debate shifted sharply. The bill stalled. It was reintroduced several times, without success.
Nonetheless, the Dreamers continued to galvanize public support. They escalated their tactics, staging sit ins and actions that risked arrest.
“There was a time when they used to be very quiet,” Durbin said recently at a rally. “Not any more. They’re speaking up and we’re proud that they are.”
The Dreamers’ fight for citizenship, Durbin has said, is the “civil rights issue of our time”.
In December 2010, the Dream Act was brought to the floor. It failed again. In 2012, months before the presidential election, Barack Obama established Daca.
Recipients had to have entered the US before their 16th birthday, which means the oldest beneficiaries are now 35.
The most common age of entry to the US was three while the median age was six, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
Quick guide
What is Daca and who are the Dreamers?
Eight hundred thousand people qualified, the vast majority of them Latino, according to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Nearly 80% were born in Mexico.
The largest numbers of recipients now live in California and other border states such as Texas and Arizona. They are more likely than their ineligible counterparts to hold a college degree and a higher-skilled job, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute.
“What you’re seeing in the Dreamers is a reflection of the American ideals,” said Daniel Garza, president of the conservative Libre Institute, a free-market Latino advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers.
“When one breathes freedom it manifests itself. And now that these kids have a shot at directing their own future or setting a path toward their own future, let’s remove those barriers and allow them that opportunity.”
‘I’m not alone’
Over the last several months, Dreamers have been in Washington, walking the halls of Congress.
They wear light orange shirts with a comic book POW! bubble with the words: “Clean Dream Act Now.”
They sleep on church floors and friends’ couches; a few missed final exams to join protests in December, when there was a flicker of hope that legislation might receive a vote.
Greisa Martínez Rosas, 29, has been among them, leading members in song at rallies on the lawn in front of the capitol building, in between meetings with members of Congress.
She was eight when she and her father staked out a spot on the Rio Grande river and crossed from Mexico into Texas. She laid seashells to mark the place. The next day, her family swam into the United States.
Profile
Who are the Dreamers?
Martínez Rosas grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood of Dallas and attended Texas A&M University. But the life she was building begin to unravel when her father was deported. Her mother died in 2016.
Fighting for a Dream Act has given her purpose, she said, and she is now advocacy and policy director at United We Dream, a national organization that campaigns for migrant rights. She has three younger sisters, one of them also undocumented.
“I am really lucky to be doing this,” she said. “It gives meaning to a lot of the pain and helps me deal with a lot of the trauma growing up undocumented.
“The reality is that I’m not alone. My story isn’t special. That’s why it’s so important that we wage this fight.”
The Dreamers rejected Trump’s latest proposal, even though it would allow a pathway to citizenship for more than twice the number of Daca recipients.
“We are not willing to accept an immigration deal that takes our country 10 steps back no matter how badly we want reprieve,” Martínez Rosas said. “That’s how much we love this country.”
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The problem isn’t the Dreamers. It’s the 13% of so of White Nationalist citizens who have forgotten their own immigrant heritage and have abandoned human decency, compassion, and common sense in the process. Unfortunately, this minority has, and continues to wield, a disproportionate share of political power.
Forget the wall, Trump’s plan would reshape US legal immigration dramatically
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
The eye-popping numbers of potential new citizens and billions for border security got most of the attention when President Donald Trump’s immigration proposal landed Thursday.
But while the noise about the “amnesty” for “wall” trade was the loudest, it obscured what actually would be a much more difficult fight: the President’s proposed sweeping changes to the immigration system.
The Trump administration briefed reporters and supporters on its proposal Thursday: offering a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children and asking for $25 billion for border security including infrastructure.
If that were all that was on the table, a deal might already be at hand. In fact, Democrats were mostly prepared to agree to such a proposal, which could have lined up some moderate Republicans as well.
But the deal also included two other “pillars,” as the White House has called them: family-based migration and the diversity visa lottery. In addition, the administration proposal included a number of “legal loopholes” it wants to close in the border security pillar beyond physical security — a repackaged effort to expand federal immigration authorities.
Taken together, those efforts would amount to a dramatic reshaping of the legal immigration system — one that will be far more complicated to negotiate on Capitol Hill.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas agreed Thursday before the White House announcement that the elements of the deal beyond pure border security were arguably more complicated.
“I think they probably are,” he said, adding that with more understanding he thought they could be negotiable.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who is part of a bipartisan Senate group working to find common ground on the issue, had said earlier Thursday that while a full border wall is not acceptable, a major investment in border security is.
“I trust big investment. I’ve voted for that already,” Kaine said. “When you can patrol a border better with drones and sensors, the wall may not be the best way. But that we would make a big investment in it? The Dems are there already.”
GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said the issue of family migration comes up if the undocumented population covered by the bill is granted citizenship — and that leads down a difficult road.
“if you do that, you have to address the issue of chain migration, and that’s where it becomes a lot more complicated. So we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Rounds said upon leaving the morning bipartisan meeting.
Thorny proposals
The White House proposal would limit family sponsorship to spouses and minor children, eliminating a number of existing categories including adult children, both married and unmarried; parents of adult US citizens; and siblings of adult US citizens. Experts have estimated that cutting these categories would reduce the roughly 1 million green cards given out yearly by 25% to 50%.
At first, the Trump proposal would use the green cards from the eliminated categories — plus the 50,000 from the eliminated diversity visa lottery — to work through a backlog of millions of people waiting in a line upward of 30 years long for their green cards. The bill does extend an olive branch to the left in not making the cuts retroactive — meaning anyone already in line would still be eligible. Groups on the right are outraged that the plan would mean potentially 10 to 20 years before cuts to immigration begin.
But Democrats are unlikely to accept such a sweeping cut in legal immigration at all. And cutting the diversity visa lottery is not as straightforward as some believe — especially to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other affinity caucuses, who are vocal about the importance of immigration from lesser represented countries.
And the framework includes vague references to closing “legal loopholes,” as a White House official put it on a briefing call, as part of the border security pillar — perhaps one of the biggest poison pills of the deal.
The White House released only a top-line overview of what it was seeking — what it characterized as “closing the loopholes” to more easily detain and deport immigrants. But a document obtained by CNN that goes into more detail, which the Department of Homeland Security has been providing to lawmakers in meetings, and the descriptions released by the White House suggest it will pursue aggressive changes.
In addressing “catch-and-release,” as the White House put it, the framework could allow detaining individuals indefinitely as they await deportation for months and years — something that has been curtailed as the result of constitutional concerns from courts. The proposals could also vastly expand the definitions of criminal offenses that could subject an individual to deportation.
All the efforts to more aggressively deport and reject undocumented immigrants could be anathema to Democrats and some moderate Republicans.
“I am a lot less interested in things that have the effect of distorting family relationships or splitting up families, and border security is less likely to do that,” said Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado, who has long pursued an immigration compromise.
“It’s crazy,” said Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. “This is not an easy negotiation, but we should move on the things we all agree on.”
Support for a simpler deal
The realities of trying to sort through the complicated issues the White House is looking to attach to a deal on the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are leading lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to suggest paring down the negotiations to just two pillars: DACA and physical border security.
“We all need to understand that there are two things that are critical,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, said as she was leaving the bipartisan group. “Dealing with the Dreamers, because we’re up against (a) March deadline, and dealing with border security. We all agree we need border security. We need more definitional work done on border security.”
Kaine agreed, saying there’s a need to be realistic.
“There’s all kinds of issues I want to fix, I just think it’s probably going to be easier to start with the two pillars,” he said.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, one of the leading forces in the bipartisan group, was also vocal about a narrow approach.
“We don’t have to solve the entire problem of legal immigration in this bill,” Alexander told CNN. “All we really have to do is focus on the young people who were brought here illegally through no fault of their own, and border security. Sometimes taking small steps in the right direction is a good way to get where you want to go.”
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Here’s my “Quick & Dirty” Analysis:
I’ve been saying all along that Dreamers for Wall is the logical trade. Yes, money gets wasted; but unlike the rest of the GOP White Nationalist proposal, nothing gets broken, nobody gets hurt. And Trump gets to gloat about his “signature item.”
I’m just not sure it would pass the House where the GOP’s White Nationalist/Bakuninist Block is strong and Paul (“Spine-Free”) Ryan has never shown an inclination to stand up to them.
It’s possible that a “Skinny Dreamers” (protection w/o citizenship) could work for now, with the Dems figuring that they will fix things for the Dreamers when they are next in power.
But, what do I know about such things? I’m just a retired Judge.
“At his inauguration, President Trump promised to renew the unity of the American people, claiming that “through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.” Then, Trump seemed intent on creating a reborn civic and social consciousness, and on empowering ordinary people against big government and big money.
And yet, Trump’s administration has ushered in a virulently antisocial politics that dissolves the most basic bonds and leaves individuals powerless against both market and state. Trump, like many populists of the right, gained a foothold by promising that a resurgent nationalism could make people feel cohesive, trusting and strong again. But like his right-leaning populist predecessors, he has offered only the imaginary bonds of nationalism — the illusion of fellow-feeling and homogeneity — even as his policies destroy the real and foundational bonds of family and community in the arenas of health care, immigration, labor and more.
. . . . In its amicus brief in support of unions, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops points out that the destruction of unions based on the loose interpretation of money as speech will render workers weaker than ever before. “Ironically then,” the bishops observe, “a misguided effort to protect one individual from government coercion would leave only individuals to stand against government (or economic) coercion.”
If only that world were really so far away. In reality, it is already here. What unites workfare, the annihilation of DACA and the war on unions is a totalizing individualism — the belief that people are essentially isolated individuals. That we are alone before we are together. That we are more and not less ourselves in total isolation. From that view flow policies that disregard or deny that people are, in fact, embedded in families, communities and industries, and that their bonds and obligations are powerful and ought to be respected and protected by the state. No politics issuing from that view can ever cultivate unity.
What Trump offered as an answer to the aching aloneness of Americans was nationalism, the exchange of an imagined community for actual ones, the promise of a mystic bond with people you’ll never meet even while the ones you know and love are deported, abandoned, dying. It was supposed to bring us together, supposed to make us strong. But his policies stand to leave us more alone than we’ve ever been, and in our solitude, weak.
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Read the rest of Elizabeth’s op-ed at the link.
First, it was Mexicans, Muslims, and undocumented workers. Then came Legal Immigrants, Latinos, African-Americans, LGBTQ individuals, demonstrators, the sick, the poor, women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to abortion, unionists, Liberals, and Democrats. Don’t see YOUR GROUP on the “hit list.” Just wait. It keeps expanding, Folks like Trump and his White Nationalist buddies can’t live without an “enemy of the day” to rally their “base.”
When the GOP White Nationalists decide that YOU no longer fit their image of America, who will be left to stand up for YOUR rights. Harm to the most vulnerable members of our community, and failure to stand up for them, harms and ultimately diminishes the humanity of all of us. And, that’s how free societies are “deconstructed and destroyed.” Stand up for everyone’s rights! Just say no to Trump and his White Nationalist Cabal!
“(1) An applicant seeking asylum or withholding of removal based on membership in a particular social group must clearly indicate on the record before the Immigration Judge the exact delineation of any proposed particular social group.
(2) The Board of Immigration Appeals generally will not address a newly articulated particular social group that was not advanced before the Immigration Judge.”
PANEL: BIA Appellate Immigraton Judges MALPHRUS, MULLANE, and LIEBOWITZ
The Impact of the BIA’s Decision in Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B-
In Matter of W-Y-C-& H-O-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 189 (BIA Jan. 19, 2018), the Board of Immigration Appeals held that “an applicant seeking asylum…based on membership in a particular social group must clearly indicate on the record before the Immigration Judge the exact delineation of any proposed particular social group.” My question is: “why?”
Delineating a particular social group is very complicated, even for experienced immigration lawyers. When I put together the advanced asylum panel for the 2016 Immigration Judges’ legal training conference, an asylum specialist from the Department of Justice’s Office for Immigration Litigation (“OIL”) chose to lecture the immigration judges on a common error in the crafting of proposed social groups. It is worth noting that OIL (which defends immigration judge decisions when they are appealed to the U.S. circuit courts) felt that immigration judges needed such instruction. Prior to this decision, the BIA had issued 8 precedent decisions defining particular social groups since 2006. Two of those decisions (issued in 2014) were required in order to clear up confusion caused by the language of the previous four decisions on the topic.
When describing the concept of asylum to non-attorney clients, I have completely given up on trying to explain to them what a particular social group is. I’ve noticed that during asylum interviews, the DHS asylum officers have reached the same conclusion; they simply ask the asylum applicants if they were a member of “a group,” with no attempt to explain the unique properties of particular social groups. Let’s also remember that there are many unaccompanied children applying for asylum, and that some are not represented because EOIR has opposed efforts to require the agency to assign them counsel.
The impact of requiring asylum applicants to clearly delineate such a complex term of art is significant. Many of the “surge” cases filed by individuals fleeing violence in Central America are asylum claims based on membership in a particular social group. With some 660,000 cases presently overwhelming the immigration court system, the decision in W-Y-C- & H-O-B- should help speed adjudication by allowing immigration judges and the BIA to issue boilerplate denials where social groups are not clearly delineated, and further prevent time-consuming remands where better defined groups are proposed on appeal (perhaps after a pro se respondent was able to obtain counsel). But at what cost is this efficiency achieved?
Our adversarial system presents court decisions as entailing a winner and loser. However, there are no winners when someone entitled to asylum is nevertheless denied and ordered deported. This point was underscored by a recent article in The New Yorker, documenting that for many, deportation is truly a death sentence (Sarah Stillman, “When Deportation is a Death Sentence,” Jan.18,2018 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/when-deportation-is-a-death-sentence).
In a recent blog post concerning the treatment of children in immigration court, I referenced Matter of S-M-J-, a BIA precedent decision from 1997 (21 I&N Dec. 722). The decision contains the following words of wisdom: “Although we recognize that the burden of proof in asylum and withholding of removal cases is on the applicant, we do have certain obligations under international law to extend refuge to those who qualify for such relief.” Noting the shift from the non-adversarial nature of affirmative Asylum Office interviews (then a part of the INS, now within DHS) to the adversarial immigration court proceedings, the Board concluded that “a cooperative approach in Immigration Court is particularly appropriate.”
This approach underscores a major difference between asylum and other types of legal status. A person applying for lawful permanent status through, for example, cancellation of removal or via an immigrant visa is not an LPR until they are granted such status by an immigration judge or DHS. However, as the UNHCR Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status states at paragraph 28, “A person is a refugee within the meaning of the 1951 Convention as soon as he fulfills the criteria contained in the definition…Recognition of his refugee status does not therefore make him a refugee but declares him to be one. He does not become a refugee because of recognition, but is recognized because he is a refugee.”
Paragraph 205 of the UNHCR Handbook delineates the duties of the asylum applicant and the adjudicator. While the applicant’s duties involve truthfully providing detailed facts, supporting evidence where available, and “a coherent explanation of all of the reasons invoked” in his asylum application, the adjudicator, in addition to ensuring that the applicant presents his or her claim as fully as possible and then assessing credibility and evaluating the evidence, must also “relate these elements to the relevant criteria of the 1951 Convention, in order to arrive at the correct conclusion as to the applicant’s refugee status.”
It is this last requirement upon the adjudicator that is at odds with the Board’s decision in W-Y-C- & H-O-B-. Under the decision, an asylum applicant may already have satisfied all of the refugee requirements (which of course includes establishing a well-founded fear of suffering persecution if returned to their country of nationality), yet be denied asylum and ordered deported to suffer serious harm simply because they lacked the legal sophistication to articulate a very complicated formula for delineating a particular social group. Why wouldn’t the present Board invoke a cooperative approach as required by the nature of asylum and its international law obligations, as an earlier BIA did in Matter of S-M-J-? Why shouldn’t the immigration judge (perhaps with assistance from the DHS attorney) step in where the applicant is not able and analyze the facts presented pursuant to the relevant case law to help formulate a particular social group (as some IJs do at present)?
In summary, the Board’s recent decision will allow immigration judges to deny asylum to credible applicants who clearly meet the refugee criteria. By setting a nearly impossible standard for non-attorneys (including children) to meet, it can result in those deserving of protection being sent to countries where they may face rape, torture, or death.
Why?
Copyright 2017 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
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OK. Let’s make this real simple. As opposed to asylum, which is discretionary, withholding of removal based on fear on account of a “particular social group” is mandatory relief under the Act. The BIA is saying that even if the Respondent were entitled to mandatory withholding of removal based on a “particular social group,” they will refuse that mandatory protection if the respondent failed to articulate each and every specific element of the “PSG” before the Immigration Judge!
And, just how would unrepresented children and other unrepresented individuals, many in detention, be able to articulate all of the complex elements of a PSG? (And that’s even before the Trump/Gonzo/White Nationalist proposal to illegally strip undocumented children of any Due Process rights and let them be deported at will by CBP!)
Clearly, in Matter of W-Y-C-& H-O-B-, the BIA has abandoned any pretense its essential mission of “guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” I’m sure that becoming “Conductors on Gonzo’s Deportation Railroad” will be career enhancing for the BIA Judges. But, in actuality, they should be ashamed!
And, what are the views of the other dozen or so BIA Appellate Judges who weren’t on this panel. Do they all agree with this travesty of justice? Is there nobody in this “Gang of 15” willing to stand up for Due Process and fairness for vulnerable asylum seekers? It raises the question of “Why have a BIA at all if it can’t and won’t protect fairness and due process for asylum seekers?”
Professor Catherine Kerrison writes in the Washington Post:
“Many people know that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. But fewer know that they had four children, three boys and a girl, who survived to adulthood. Born into slavery, Sally’s daughter Harriet boarded a stagecoach to freedom at age 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Her father had given her $50 for her travel expenses. She would never see her mother or younger brothers again.
With her departure from Monticello in 1822, Harriet disappeared from the historical record, not to be heard of again for more than 50 years, when her brother told her story. Seven-eighths white, Harriet had “thought it to her interest to go to Washington as a white woman,” he said. She married a “white man in good standing” in that city and “raised a family of children.” In the half-century during which she passed as white, her brother was “not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.”So how did we lose a president’s daughter? Given America’s obsession with the Founding Fathers, with the children of the Revolution and their descendants, why did Jefferson’s child disappear? As it turns out, America has an even greater obsession with race, so that not even Harriet Hemings’s lineage as a president’s daughter was sufficient to convey the benefits of freedom. Instead, her birth into slavery marked her as black and drove her decision to erase her family history.
Harriet Hemings passed as white to protect her fragile freedom. Jefferson had not issued her formal manumission papers, so until the abolition of slavery in 1865, by law she remained a slave, which meant her children also inherited that condition. But in a society that increasingly associated blackness with enslavement, Hemings used her white skin not only to ensure her children’s freedom, but to claim for them all the rights and privileges of whiteness: education, the vote, a home mortgage, any seat they chose on a streetcar. To reveal herself as the daughter of Jefferson and his slave would have destroyed her plans for a better life for her descendants.
Since Harriet’s time, science has proved there is no difference in blood as a marker of “race.” As a biological category, racial difference has been exposed as a sham. Even skin color is not a reliable indicator of one’s origins. As one study calculated, almost a third of white Americans possess up to 20 percent African genetic inheritance, yet look white, while 5.5 percent of black Americans have no detectable African genetic ancestry. Race has a political and social meaning, but not a biological one.
This is why the story of Harriet Hemings is so important. In her birth into slavery and its long history of oppression, she was black; but anyone who saw her assumed she was white. Between when she was freed in 1822 and the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, she was neither free nor enslaved — yet she lived as a free person.
She does not comfortably fit any of the terms that have had such inordinate power to demarcate life in America. Her disappearance from the historical record is precisely the point. When we can so easily lose the daughter of a president and his slave, it forces us to acknowledge that our racial categories are utterly fallacious and built on a science that has been thoroughly discredited.
Yet as political, economic and social categories, racial difference and its consequences remain profoundly real. White privilege has been much on display in our own day, as armed white men proclaiming white supremacy marched unmolested in the streets, while unarmed black men are shot down by police who are rarely held to account. Politicians run successful campaigns on platforms of racial hatred.
This is why, by one estimate, between 35,000 and 50,000 black Americans continue to cross the color line each year.
As I poured through hundreds of family genealogies, searching for more details about the life of Harriet Hemings, I saw that all families have invented stories: details that have been embellished over time, or perhaps altered by accidental errors. Descendants of immigrants Anglicized their names; information in census records is inconsistent from one decade to another; genealogies are altered because of confusion with recurring favorite names over multiple generations.
Those families who pass as white most definitely have such invented stories. It is what they had to do to authenticate a white lineage, to be recognized as fully human and fully American, with all the rights and privileges thereto — rights and privileges not even a lineage as honored as Jefferson’s can match.
Nations, as well as families, invent stories about themselves. In both cases, we will run into characters we would rather not admit as being one of us, and stories we would rather not tell about ourselves. That the president’s daughter had to choose between her family and living a life with the dignity only whiteness can confer is one of those stories. But without them, we will never truly know where we’ve come from; and without them, we will never be able to chart out a path for a better family and national life.
FRIDAY ESSAY — FROM MONTICELLO TO TRUMP, MILLER, SESSIONS, AND THE GOP WHITE NATIONALISTS
BY PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT
Cathy and I recently visited Monticello. Unlike my first visit, decades ago, I found that the issue of slavery subsumed everything else. And, TJ as a person and a human being certainly got infinitely smaller during our time there.
How could someone like Jefferson, who understood human rights, actually “own” his common-law wife Sally Hemings and his own children as “property” — to be meticulously accounted for and “valued” (only in cash, not humanity) along with barrels of beer, cases of wine, hogsheads of tobacco, kegs of nails, books, and furniture?
What kind of “father” wouldn’t publicly acknowledge and show affection to his own children when they were living within a stone’s throw? How could a man who had a long-standing domestic relationship with a woman and fathered her children continue with the knowingly false narrative that African-American slaves were somehow “less than human” and therefore not entitled to freedom, dignity, education, fair compensation for their labor, or any of the other basic rights that Jefferson and his White upper class contemporaries took for granted?
Guys who got worked up about paying too much tax giving a “free pass” to their own exploitation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved individuals? (Remind you of any of today’s politicos of any contemporary party?)
And, no, Jefferson and the other slave-owning founding fathers don’t get a “free pass” as “products of their times.” That’s the type of “DAR sanitized non-history” we were fed in elementary and high school.
They were, after all, contemporaries of William Wilberforce who was speaking, writing, and fighting the (ultimately successful) battle to end slavery in England. We can also tell from the writings of Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Monroe that they realized full well that enslavement of African-Americans was wrong. But, they didn’t want to endanger their livelihood (apparently none of them felt confident enough in his abilities to earn an “honest living”) or their “social standing” in a racist society.
Truth is that guys who had the courage to risk their lives on a “long shot” that they could win their political freedom from England, lacked the moral courage to stop doing what they knew was wrong. Yes, they founded our great country! And, we should all be grateful for that. But, we shouldn’t forget that they also were deeply flawed individuals, as we all are. It’s critical for our own well-being that we recognize, not celebrate, those flaws.
Those flaws also caused untold human suffering. Largely untold, because enslaved African-Americans were denied basic education, outside social contact, and certainly possessed no “First Amendment” rights. There were few first-hand written accounts of the horrors of slavery. Of course, there were no national news syndicates or “muckraking journalists” to expose the truth of what really was going on “down on the plantations.”
One of the things our guide at Monticello described was that “passing for White” wasn’t necessarily the “great boon” that “us White guys” might think it was. It meant leaving your family, friends, and ancestry behind and creating a new “fake” ancestry to appease White society.
For example, if Jefferson’s “White” daughter had a “not so White” husband and children at Monticello, they could never have accompanied her into the “White World.” Indeed, even if such family members were eventually “freed,” acknowledging them as kin would bring down the whole carefully constructed “Whitehouse of cards.”
For that reason, some light-skinned slaves who could have escaped and passed into White society chose instead to remain enslaved with their “dark-skinned” families and relatives.
The “Father of American Independence” only freed three slaves during his lifetime (none of them apparently family members). And he only freed five slaves upon his death.
The rest were sold, some “down the river,” breaking up families, to pay the substantial indebtedness that Jefferson’s irresponsible lifestyle had run up during his lifetime. Even in death, his enslaved workers paid a high price for his disingenuous life.
So, the next time our President or one of his White Nationalist followers plays the “race card,” (and that includes of course Latinos and other ethnic and religious minorities, not just African-Americans or African immigrants) think carefully about the ugly reality of race in American history, not the “sugar-coated version.”
While you’re at it, you should wonder how in the 18th year of the 21st Century we have elected a man and a party who know and acknowledge so little about our tarnished past and who strive so eagerly to send us backwards in that direction.
Michael D. Shear & Sheryl Gay Stolberg report for the NYT:
“WASHINGTON — President Trump proposed legislation on Thursday that would provide a path to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million young, undocumented immigrants in exchange for an end to decades of family-based migration policies, a massive border wall and a vast crackdown on other illegal immigrants already living in the country.
Describing the plan as “extremely generous” but a take-it-or-leave-it proposal by the president, White House officials said they hoped it will be embraced by conservatives and centrists in Congress as the first step in an even broader effort to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.
But the plan — drafted by Stephen Miller, the president’s hard-line domestic policy adviser and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff — was immediately rejected by Democrats, pro-immigration activists and some Republicans, with some describing it as nothing but an attempt to rid the country of immigrants and close the nation’s borders.
Republican and Democratic senators are working on a narrower immigration plan of their own, hoping that if it can pass the Senate with a strong, bipartisan majority, it would be Mr. Trump who would have the take-it-or-leave-it decision.
“We will oppose it. Most if not all Democrats will oppose it. Some Republicans will, too,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group. “We are not going to allow Stephen Miller to exploit a crisis that he and his boss created to take a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty and enact his nativist wish list.”
Eddie Vale, a Democratic consultant working with a coalition of immigration groups, described the president’s proposal as an effort to sabotage bipartisan talks and win passage of “a white supremacist wish list.”
Anti-immigration activists also assailed the plan, though for the opposite reason. The Breitbart.com website greeted word of the president’s plan with the headline: “Amnesty Don Suggests Citizenship for Illegal Aliens.”
Under Mr. Trump’s plan, described to reporters by senior White House officials, young immigrants who were brought into the United States as children, would be granted legal status, allowed to work legally, and could become citizens over a 10-to-12 year period if they remain out of trouble with the law.
Officials said that would include about 690,000 people who signed up for protection under an Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, but also for another 1.1 million undocumented immigrants who would have qualified for the program but never applied. Mr. Trump ended the DACA program last September.
In exchange, Congress would have to create a $25 billion trust fund to pay for a southern border wall, dramatically boost immigration arrests, speed up deportations, crack down on people who overstay their visas, prevent citizens from bringing their parents to the United States, and end a State Department program designed to encourage migration from underrepresented countries.
White House officials said that the list of enhanced security measures — which have been on anti-immigration wish lists for decades — were nonnegotiable parts of their plan. They warned that if no deal is reached, young DACA recipients will face deportation when the program fully expires on March 5.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Looks more like political grandstanding than a serious proposal geared to attract bipartisan support. About all you need to know is that it was put together by White Nationalist racist Steven Miller.
Tom Cotton’s lies make him a dangerous prospect to head the CIA.
By WILLIAM SALETAN
Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, is becoming President Trump’s right arm in the Senate. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and Cotton, a right-wing ideologue, is helping to steer the president. Either way, Trump’s behavior in the immigration debate—turning against a legislative compromise after Cotton was summoned to a White House meeting to oppose it—illustrates the young senator’s influence. In fact, Trump is said to be considering him as the next CIA director.
Cotton’s emergence is alarming. In part, that’s because what endears Cotton to Trump—and makes them particularly dangerous together—is Cotton’s unflinching willingness, in pursuit of an agenda, to say things that aren’t true.
Cotton is a veteran. He served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan. But when he came home, he brought back the psychology of war. He treats liberals and moderates as the enemy. In 2015, he blocked one of President Obama’s ambassadorial nominees over an unrelated issue—she eventually died waiting for approval—because Cotton knew she was Obama’s friend. He depicts Obama as a traitor. Last month, Cotton said of the Iran nuclear agreement: “Barack Obama was willing to give away anything to get that deal.”
On immigration, Cotton takes a hard line, and he savages anyone who doesn’t. He calls senators who seek an immigration compromise “the Gang of Amnesty.” He labels their ideas “preposterous” and “utterly ridiculous.” Last week, he scoffed that fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, an immigration moderate, “didn’t even make it off the kiddie table in the debates” during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. On Tuesday, after the government shutdown, Cotton crowed that Democrats had “capitulated entirely.”
Cotton is quick to charge others with lying. Two weeks ago, he accused colleagues of floating a “disingenuous” immigration compromise. He said Democrats had “misrepresent[ed]” immigration talks. On Friday, Cotton accused Graham of conspiring with Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin: “Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin are not adversaries in negotiating. They are allies strategizing.” That line has been used exactly once before, by an anonymous member of Congress—presumably Cotton—who accused House Speaker Paul Ryan of treachery on the same issue. Tucker Carlson reported the accusation last fall:
As one of their colleagues told us just this morning, when Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan sit down to talk immigration, they aren’t opponents negotiating, they are allies strategizing … Earlier this year we had Speaker Ryan on this show and he assured us Congress would be working hard on funding the border wall. That was a lie.
In the war at home, Cotton fights for Trump. Each time he’s faced with a choice between Trump and the truth, Cotton protects Trump. Two months ago on Face the Nation, John Dickerson asked Cotton about unresolved sexual misconduct allegations against the president. Cotton brushed the allegations aside, arguing that “the American people had their say on that” when they elected Trump. Last month, when an AP reporter asked Cotton about collusion between Trump and Russia, Cotton dismissed the question, claiming that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein had “said she’d seen no evidence of collusion.” Actually, what Feinstein had said was, “It’s an open question because there’s no proof yet that it’s happened, and I think that proof will likely come with [Special Counsel] Mueller’s investigation.”
Now Cotton is protecting Trump again. On Jan. 11, during an Oval Office meeting, Trump said he wanted fewer immigrants from “shithole” countries in Africa and Haiti and more from Norway and Asia. The president’s comments were leaked, and Durbin, who had witnessed the exchange, publicly recounted them the next day. Cotton, who had also attended the meeting, went on TV to defend Trump. He portrayed Durbin as a liar, saying Trump had never used the expletivereported by Durbin. Dickerson asked Cotton whether Trump, in the meeting, was in any way “grouping people based on the countries they came from.” Cotton denied it. He insisted that Trump had “reacted strongly against” such thinking and that “what the president said he supports is [to] treat people for who they are,” not “where they’re from.”
I’ve seen Cotton at least twice on “Meet the Press.” Each time I was impressed by the number of lies, distortions, misrepresentations, and evasions he could pack into a relatively short interview with Chuck Todd. You could tell that even the perennially affable Todd was having a hard time keeping a straight face at some of Cotton’s antics and facially absurd answers.
That this is what passes for “leadership” in today’s GOP should give us all pause.
“The Justice Department on Wednesday escalated its attempt to crack down on so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions, threatening to subpoena 23 states, cities and other localities that have policies the department suspects might be unlawfully interfering with immigration enforcement.
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have long promised to target places with policies friendly to those in the country illegally — warning they might withhold federal money from some and trying to tie grant eligibility to cooperation with federal authorities on immigration matters. The Justice Department had previously contacted the 23 jurisdictions threatened Wednesday, raising worries they might be in violation of a federal law barring places from enacting policies that block communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In a new letter, Bureau of Justice Assistance Director Jon Adler said officials remained “concerned” that the places had policies that violate the law, even after their previous responses. He asked for a new bevy of documents — including “any orders, directives, instructions, or guidance to your law enforcement employees” — and said the department would subpoena the materials if necessary.
. . . .
Among those jurisdictions in the crosshairs are Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and the states of California, Illinois and Oregon. In total, the 23 jurisdictions received more than $39 million in fiscal year 2016 money from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program — which Sessions is now threatening to put at risk.
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Local leaders criticized the move. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D), president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said he would skip a planned White House meeting on infrastructure because of it. “An attack on one of our cities mayors who are following the constitution is an attack on all of us,” he said. His city was not among those targeted Wednesday.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio similarly wrote on Twitter he would skip the gathering after Trump’s Justice Department “decided to renew their racist assault on our immigrant communities. It doesn’t make us safer and it violates America’s core values.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said officers in his city endeavor to build trust with residents to reduce public safety threats, and “you cannot do that if you drive a wedge between any immigrant community and the law enforcement.” He said Sessions’s threats were “amazing” in that the attorney general seemed to “disregard what the court system has already said uniformly from coast to coast.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “The White House has been very clear that we don’t support sanctuary cities. We support enforcing the law and following the law, and that is the Department of Justice’s job is to do exactly that, and if mayors have a problem with that, they should talk to Congress.”
Much of this crackdown has been stymied by the courts. A federal judge in California last year blocked Trump’s executive order to cut funding to such places, and a federal judge in Chicago ruled that Sessions had exceeded his authority in imposing new conditions, such as requiring recipients to give immigration authorities access to jails and 48 hours notice when suspected illegal immigrants are to be released. A federal judge in Philadelphia also ruled that city was in compliance with the law and blocked the Justice Department from withholding money. The Justice Department has appealed all those cases.
. . . .
Sessions has long sought to tie crime to immigration — recently releasing data, which experts said was misleading, that said 73 percent of terrorism convictions in the U.S. involved individuals from other countries. Determining a link between illegal immigration and other crime is statistically difficult to do, though some research shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than those who are native born. Civil liberties and immigration advocates, too, note there is irony in Sessions threatening to withhold law enforcement grants in the name of fighting crime.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
On paper, Gonzo isn’t actually in charge of the DHS. That job is nominally in the hands of Lightweight Sycophant Kirstjen Nielsen.
Remarkably, what Sessions is actually supposed to be doing is administering a fair and unbiased U.S. Immigration Court System in a manner that guarantees the legal and Constitutional Due Process rights of each individual brought before those courts by the DHS. Yeah, right! Sessions never met a migrant he didn’t despise and want railroaded out of the country as part of his White Nationalist agenda. And, he’s clearly “in bed” with DHS Enforcement. That’s why the U.S. Immigration Courts under Gonzo Apocalypto are well on their way to becoming mere “Whistle Stops on the Deportation Railway.”
There was a time when what is now ICE worked hard to gain community support and be considered part of the “legitimate law enforcement apparatus.” But, those days are long gone.
Trump, Gonzo, and Tom Homan are well on the way to making ICE the most hated, distrusted, and despised police force in America — the “New American Gestapo” if you will. The aforenamed “nasty clowns” will be gone someday. But, I’m not sure that ICE will ever be able to undo the damage they are doing to its reputation and standing in the law enforcement community.
As one or more Federal Judges has noted in enjoining Gonzo’s illegal overstepping, “once lost, community trust is not easily, if ever, regained by the police.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday talks on immigration and border security as “starting over” after he and the White House have exchanged a series of blows about President Donald Trump’s border wall.
But even as the New York Democrat described a reset in talks, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn told reporters that he’d propose something similar to what Schumer was talking about moving on from.
“We’re starting over,” Schumer told CNN on Wednesday when asked about the latest on the standoff over the Congress’ plans for addressing the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. “I took our thing off — they took their thing off the table, I took our thing, we’re starting over.”
Schumer was referring to an offer he made Trump last week to authorize upward of $20 billion for his border wall, a signature campaign pledge for the President, in exchange for protecting recipients of DACA, young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. Trump decided last fall to end the program by March 5, 2018, and Congress has since failed to reach agreement with the White House about how to extend it.
But the White House rejected Schumer’s offer and after the government reopened from a weekend shutdown, Schumer rescinded the offer. That prompted Trump to jab back Tuesday night.
“Cryin’ Chuck Schumer fully understands, especially after his humiliating defeat, that if there is no Wall, there is no DACA. We must have safety and security, together with a strong Military, for our great people!” Trump tweeted.
A cheery Schumer nonetheless told CNN on Wednesday that work would continue, and as he entered an elevator with Sen. Lamar Alexander, he coaxed a fist-bump from the Tennessee Republican who has been working with a bipartisan group of senators to find common ground on immigration and other issues.
“We’re trying to make (Congress) function,” Schumer said, indicating Alexander, ignoring a question about whether he would meet with Alexander’s group.
Cornyn proposes ‘permanent for permanent’ framework
Earlier Wednesday, however, Cornyn told reporters that he would support a trade of border security for a DACA-type solution, putting him at potential odds with the White House.
The Texas Republican called his offer “temporary for temporary, permanent for permanent.” In essence, he said, if lawmakers want a “permanent” solution on DACA — a pathway to citizenship for the eligible immigrants — then they need to be prepared to pony up for a “permanent” border fix. And the inverse is also true.
“If you want an annual appropriation, then I think you’ll get a one-year extension of the DACA status,” Cornyn said. “If you want a permanent solution for the DACA recipients, you’re going to need a permanent solution — which means a plan and funding, something on the order of what Sen. Schumer initially offered, $25 billion, to the President last Friday, which he has now rescinded.”
Cornyn said funding in that range, which would cover 10 years, would need to be put together all up front, and likely put into a trust fund that can then be used flexibly by the Department of Homeland Security for what they need — infrastructure and wall, technology or personnel.
“I’d leave it to the experts to say what works best at any given location,” Cornyn said, adding later, “Different places will have different requirements, so I’d leave it flexible for the Department of Homeland Security.”
He said unlike a DHS proposal that was recently sent to the Hill and unlike a bipartisan proposal Trump rejected, Cornyn would not accept appropriating funds year-by-year.
“I disagree with that approach,” Cornyn said.
But Cornyn acknowledged his framework may not speak for everyone, including the White House, which has pushed for a DACA deal to include sweeping changes to the immigration system like slashing family-based and diversity visas and more aggressive enforcement authorities.
“Not everybody sees it the same way,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn said senators have agreed to negotiate further and clear ideas through himself on the Republican side and Senate No. 2 Democrat Dick Durbin on the other.
CNN’s Ted Barrett contributed to this report.”
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I’m exhausted just posting everything Tal sends out! Can’t imagine how exhausted she must be! Thanks for keeping us informed and up to date, Tal!
