"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Watch this video clip from CCN:
https://apple.news/A5fldUh3pTnWBhjhXUz6QOg
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Thanks for speaking out Andrea! Andrea is a former Arlington Immigration Court intern and one of the “charter members” of the NDPA. As captured on this video, she was assaulted by ICE while trying to assist her child client in reuniting with his mother! A civil suit against the agent involved is pending.
PWS
02-27-21
NBC News reports:
Feb. 15, 2021, 7:40 PM EST
By Geoff Bennett, Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff
The Biden administration and Hill Democrats are expected later this week to release an immigration reform bill, multiple sources familiar with the planning tell NBC News.
The legislative text of the “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021” will reflect the immigration priorities that President Joe Biden unveiled on his first day in office. His proposal includes an earned pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, expands the refugee resettlement program and deploys more technology to the Southern border. There are additional protections that are being considered in the legislation, such as asylum processing in home countries for minors, expanded benefits for DREAMers and ending the public charge rule.
While previous attempts at massive immigration reform have failed under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the Biden White House has signaled support for breaking the legislation into pieces.
As a potential secondary path, lawmakers would work to pass bills legalizing farmworkers and Dreamers right away, and then move toward a more expansive overhaul. The main objective, officials and advocates say, is progress.
. . . .
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Sounds like modest expectations. But, any meaningful immigration legislation would be a major achievement that has eluded the last two Administrations.
Unfortunately, based on the the GOP’s impeachment performance, it’s hard to see 60 votes for any substantive legislation in the Senate.
PWS
02-17-21
Feb. 10, 2021, 1:12 PM EST
By Julia Ainsley, Jacob Soboroff and Geoff Bennett
WASHINGTON — The White House is expected to select Michelle Brané of the Women’s Refugee Commission as the executive director of the task force to reunite migrant families separated by the Trump administration, three sources familiar with the decision tell NBC News.
The selection of Brané, director of migrant rights and justice programs at the Women’s Refugee Commission, is welcome news to the immigration advocate community, as most of the task force is made of government officials.
“If selected, Michelle would be a fantastic choice. She would bring deep expertise on the issues and the perfect mixture of passion and common sense,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
Good news indeed!
Michelle was an Attorney Advisor at the BIA during part of my tenure as Chair, before moving on to a distinguished career in the NGO sector.
She is brilliant, tough, practical, humane, a leader, and a true pro who has been getting the job done for refugees and the most vulnerable among us for years. Michelle is just who America needs to bring expertise, organizational skills, and moral as well as intellectual leadership to a Government that has been missing those essential qualities for far, far too long!
Always satisfying to see the “best and brightest” whom I’ve worked with over my career rise to the leadership positions they deserve where they can use their skills to lead America to a better future!
PWS
02-15-21
Seung Min Kim reports for WashPost:
President-elect Joe Biden will roll out a sweeping overhaul of nation’s immigration laws the day he is inaugurated, including an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status and an expansion of refugee admissions, along with an enforcement plan that deploys technology to patrol the border.
Biden’s legislative proposal, which will be sent to Congress on Wednesday, also includes a heavy focus on addressing the root causes of migration from Central America, a key part of Biden’s foreign policy portfolio when he served as vice president.
The centerpiece of the plan from Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris is the eight-year pathway, which would put millions of qualifying immigrants in a temporary status for five years and then grant them a green card once they meet certain requirements such as a background check and payment of taxes. They would be able to apply for citizenship three years later.
. . . .
The focus on Central America reflects the message that Biden has relayed to senior officials in the region: that he will advocate for policy changes aimed at what drives scores of migrants there to come to the United States illegally to seek safe harbor.
“Ultimately, you cannot solve problems of migration unless you attack the root causes of what causes that migration,” one official said, pointing to the various reasons — from economic to safety — that drive migrants to flee their home countries. “He knows that in particular is the case in Central America.”
Transition officials are aware of recent reports of the increased numbers of migrants at or heading to the border in anticipation of the end of Trump’s presidency, and urged them to stay in their home countries. They emphasized that newly arriving immigrants would not qualify for the legalization program that Biden proposes.
Biden wants to move the refugee and asylum systems “back to a more humane and orderly process,” the official said. But “it’s also been made clear that that isn’t a switch you flip overnight from the 19th to the 20th, especially when you’re working with agencies and processes that have been so gutted by the previous administration.”
Biden hopes to reinstate a program granting minors from Central America temporary legal residence in the United States. The Trump administration terminated the program in August 2017, officials said. The administration also wants to set up a reunification program for Central American relatives of U.S. citizens that would allow those who have been already approved for U.S. residency to be admitted into the country, rather than waiting at home for an opening. The program would be similar to ones that existed for Cubans and Haitians but also were ended by the Trump administration.
The Biden proposal also would put in place a refugee admissions program at multiple processing centers abroad that would better help identify and screen those who would qualify to be admitted as refugees into the United States.
As for border enforcement, the plan calls on the Department of Homeland Security to develop a proposal that uses technology and other similar infrastructure to implement new security measures along the border, both at and between ports of entry. Biden has long vowed not to expand the border wall Trump has marginally extended.
“This is not a wall; this is not taking money from [the Department of Defense],” a transition official said, referring to how Trump helped to finance his wall after pledging Mexico would pay for it. “It’s a very different approach.”
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
This is a welcome change from the poorly conceived, often ill-informed approach to immigration by the Obama Administration. It appears that Biden and Harris have actually “listened to the experts” and acted a accordingly.
The concentration on addressing the reality of Central American migration and dealing honestly and constructively with its root causes in a sensible and humane way is also refreshing. Using intelligence and technology to address real border security issues (as opposed to squandering resources on politically manufactured ones) also shows promise.
NBC star reporter Julia Edwards Ainsley just broke a story on how under the Trump regime, DHS wasted lots of time and money “beating up on” and denying the legal rights of migrants and asylum seekers and ripping apart families while ignoring or mishandling the real threats to our national security presented by right wing domestic terrorists. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/capitol-riot-exposed-flaws-trump-s-dhs-focused-immigration-not-n1254464
Many of the latter were energized by the Trump/DHS program of White Nationalist racist fear-mongering and intentionally false anti-immigrant, anti-due-process narratives. That’s what “applied malicious incompetence” looks like — DHS and EOIR are two of the most egregious examples in a regime that raised it to an “art form.” It will take an aggressive and far-reaching “house cleaning” to get these agencies that have abandoned the common good and now operate “on the dark side” back on track.
The immediate “knee-jerk opposition” to rational, practical, fact-based immigration reform by notorious White Nationalist racist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-ARK) shows that Team Biden is on the right track to disavow the toxic institutionalized racism and biased policies of the Trump regime and move America along the path to racial justice and realistic, progressive immigration policies that will further the national interest and lead to a better future for all!
It’s a great, if long overdue, start to getting beyond Jim Crow and “Dred Scottification” and saving and enhancing our democracy! But, the proof will be in the results!
Biden, of course, will also face the formidable challenges of dealing with the human carnage left behind by the Trump regime’s disastrous mis-handling of COVID-19, economic inequality, the environment, racial justice, and foreign policy where American “prestige” has plummeted to levels not seen since the days of the Barbary Pirates.
He also must address a failing Federal Justice System that, particularly at its appellate levels, did not effectively stand up to the Trump regime’s unrelenting assault on human decency and American democracy. Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a consistently competent and courageous Justice among our failing Supremes, offered this final harsh but true assessment of her GOP colleagues’ malfeasance in a death penalty case: “This is not justice.”https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/not-justice-justice-sonia-sotomayor-offers-fierce-dissent-death-penalty-n1254554
You could say that about almost everything in the departing, defeated White Nationalist regime!
I’ll note for the record that among other things, the Supremes’ tone-deaf majority has been responsible for letting bona fide asylum seekers rot in squalor in camps in Mexico while waiting for non-existent “due process,” and also authorized the imposition of potential death sentences and torture on asylum seekers within our jurisdiction without any whit of due process.
The GOP majority’s disgraceful failure to stand up for voting rights of African Americans, Latinos, and other voters of color has also deepened racial injustice in America and helped usher in a horrible “Jim Crow Revival” pushed, incited, and enabled by the GOP, “The Party of the Failed Insurrection.”
Any competent first-year law student might ask “How could this happen in America?” That’s a question that Roberts and his gang of fellow Trump enablers and apologists will have to answer before the “court of history!”
PWS
01-19-21
Peter Wade Reports for Rolling Stone:
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd pulled no punches during an interview with staunch Trump ally Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Sunday morning.
After an explainer of Johnson’s and other officeholders’ planned attempt to subvert democracy by opposing the certification of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday, the host laid into the Trump sycophant for pretending to try to fix a problem that the president and lawmakers, like Johnson, duped supporters into believing in the first place.
“You made an allegation that there was widespread fraud. You have failed to offer specific evidence of that widespread fraud. But you’re demanding an investigation on the grounds that there are allegations of widespread fraud,” the host said.
Todd continued, “So essentially, you’re the arsonist here. President Trump is the arsonist here. You’ve started this fire. And now you’re saying, ‘Woah, look at this. Oh my God. All these people believe what we told them,’ because you didn’t have the guts to tell the truth that this election was fair.”
The Republican senator responded as all Trump defenders do, by blaming the media.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
There is no excuse for Ron Johnson.
But, there is also no excuse for Chuck Todd giving this vile, dim-witted, total hack a forum for his lies, conspiracy theories, and “Putinesque” anti-American propaganda! Not like he hasn’t demonstrated his toadiness and dishonesty on MTP before!
A disgrace to the Badger State!
Hey, when even former Veep Dick “Dr. Strangelove” Cheney says it’s over, joining a bipartisan group of 10 former Defense Secretaries, it’s over!https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-defense-secretaries-rebuke-trump-election/2021/01/03/1c708f64-4de5-11eb-b2e8-3339e73d9da2_story.html
PWS
01-04-21
Jacob Soboroff reports for NBC News:
Inside the effort to provide mental health care to migrant families
- SHARE THIS –
- COPIED
Seneca Family of Agencies provides mental health care to migrant families separated by the Trump administration. NBC News’ Jacob Soboroff reports on the obstacles faced by the nonprofit in locating families.
Dec. 22, 2020
Watch Jacob’s report here.
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Jacob and his terrific NBC News colleague Julia Edwards Ainsley have been at the forefront of exposing the irreparable human carnage and lasting trauma caused by the regime’s unlawful, racist, White Nationalist immigration policies (some of which were unconscionably “greenlighted” by an immoral and irresponsible Supremes GOP majority that views themselves and their rotten to the core, inhumane, right-wing ideology as above the needless human suffering they further and encourage).
The “perps” like,”Gonzo” Sessions, Grauleiter Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan, Noel Francisco, Rod Rosenstein, et al, walk free while the victims continue to suffer and others, like the Christ-like folks at Seneca Family of Agencies, are left to pick up the pieces! How is this “justice?”
Our national policies have truly abandoned Christ’s values of self-sacrifice, mercy, generosity in spirit and deed, courage in the face of oppression, human compassion, justice, and assistance for the most vulnerable among us under the perverted and immoral “leadership” of a man and his party without humane values or respect for truth who stand for absolutely nothing that is decent in the world.
As Americans suffer and die from the pandemic he mocked, downplayed, and mishandled; unemployed Americans are dissed and shortchanged by his party of underachieving, out of touch fat cats, liars, cowards, and truth deniers; asylum seekers needlessly suffer in squalid camps in Mexico; refugees scorned, unlawfully and immorally abandoned and abused by the world’s richest country face persecution, torture, despair, and death; and non-criminals rot in DHS’s “New American Gulag,” the immoral Grifter-in-Chief lives it up at taxpayer expense for one last Christmas at his Florida resort; fumes about a fair and square election that he lost big time; savors a rash of holiday executions; delays bipartisan COVID relief; ferments treason against our republic; and pardons a wide range of scumbags, felons, war criminals, family members, cronies, fraudsters, and other totally undeserving characters.
But, there is hope for our world at Christmas: 27 days and counting to the end of the kakistocracy, expulsion of the unqualified con-man and his motley crew of criminals and cronies, and the ascension of a real President and Vice President, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to lead us, and perhaps our world, out of the current mess to a kinder, brighter future. That might be the best present of all this Christmas.
PWS🎅🏻🎄😎
12-24-20
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/first-latino-tapped-head-dhs-signals-shift-trump-s-hard-n1248716
From Suzanne Gamboa @ NBC News:
Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latino chosen for President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet, will head a Department of Homeland Security that is expected to drastically overhaul President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, as well as put Mayorkas at the forefront of the new administration’s anti-terrorism strategy.
Mayorkas will be the first Latino and first immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security, if confirmed by the Senate. The highest-ranking Cuban American in the Obama administration, Mayorkas was deputy secretary of DHS under then-Secretary Jeh Johnson, and before that was the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, a part of DHS that oversees granting citizenship and other immigration benefits.
Mayorkas, if confirmed, will take over the nation’s third-largest agency in terms of employees, one that was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that oversees several smaller agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security, the Coast Guard and the Secret Service.
President-elect Biden names Alejandro Mayorkas for Homeland Security Chief
NOV. 23, 202003:15
The Trump administration has drastically transformed the nation’s immigration system with over 400 executive actions — including refusing entry to asylum-seekers, taking children from parents at the border and restricting travel to the U.S. by Muslims.
There will be pressure on the Biden administration to act quickly on immigration and uphold pledges he made on the campaign trail, such as ending travel bans and protecting young immigrants, known as Dreamers, and to take such actions in the first 100 days of his administration.
Much of Trump’s immigration policy was the work of his adviser Stephen Miller, who cited and promoted white nationalist beliefs in emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center last year.
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Read the rest of Suzanne’s report at the link.
Al Cardenas has been one of very few Republicans to appear on “Meet the Press” over the past four years who has 1) dealt with facts, and 2) said something worthwhile. The normal GOP guest on MTP is either a Trump toady or a disingenuous apologist for the worst and most corrupt Administration in U.S. history.
I do suggest that Al needs to sit down and have a “heart to heart” with his Senate buddies Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as lots of Cuban-Americans in Florida about the future of America. They don’t seem to be on the same page, or indeed even in the same universe, as Al and the substantial majority of American voters.
This also illustrates the vital importance to DHS reform of a strong, due process, human rights, efficiency oriented, “best practices” EOIR with expert judges from the NDPA in leadership positions and on the BIA (and eventually the Immigration Courts). In the past, true reform at DHS has often been inhibited by refusal of supervisors and line officials to follow “policies sent out from Washington” specifically designed to enhance individual justice, insert reality, and promote docket and litigation responsibility and efficiency. In other words, the type of practical, reasonable, humane, experience-based prosecutorial discretion policies that every other law enforcement agency in the U.S., save DHS, routinely follows.
DHS reforms won’t be fully effective unless preceded by an EOIR under new leadership with an expert, courageous, independent due process committed BIA unswervingly dedicated to protecting the rights of asylum seekers and other migrants and effectively requiring DHS to operate within the law and conform to rational, practical, non-discriminatory policies. The talent is out there, just waiting be tapped!
A friend recently asked me what I expected to happen when the U.S. asylum system is reinstituted as President-Elect Biden and Vice President Harris have pledged. Here’s my answer:
[The Biden Administration] will get them [asylum applications] adjudicated in a timely and professional manner; more will qualify for protection, thereby allowing more of the work to be shifted to the Asylum Office; the refugee program will expand; America will prosper!
PWS
11-25-20
Following the “official” beginning of his transition, President-Elect Joe Biden showed why an impressive majority of Americans wisely called on him and his running mate Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris at this pivotal moment in history to preserve and rescue our nation, solve pressing problems, and return us to a positive leadership role in a world that needs and longs for it.
Biden praised the recent sincere cooperation from the outgoing Administration. He vowed to make his top priorities controlling the pandemic and getting the American economy and the now bleak jobs picture back on track to success. He promised to focus on the hardest hit communities — primarily minority communities who have disproportionately borne the brunt of COVID-19 while providing essential services to all Americans. In that respect, he has already been listening to the advice and input of state governors, mayors, and local officials of both parties. Helping hard pressed state and local governments will be high on his “to do” list.
The President-Elect vowed to push forward with sound immigration, environmental, and climate change policies in the early days of his Administration. To assist in the effort, he initially tapped a group of acknowledged Government experts and veteran public servants to help and advise him and Vice President Harris in their Cabinet. Professionalism, demonstrated excellence in public service, and expertise were the common qualities of the nominees.
So far, Biden’s Cabinet choices, apparently also reflecting Vice President-Elect Harris’s influence, look like the nation they will be serving. They come from a variety of backgrounds and embody the gender and racial diversity of America.
While some commentators have expressed concerns of an “Obama IIIl” look to the Cabinet, Biden scotched that idea. He correctly pointed out that America is a much different nation facing a much different world than when he left the Vice Presidency four years ago. We face a new range of problems that must be solved. He promised to provide the type of unifying, empirically based, empathetic, and forward-looking leadership that will allow us to surmount the current challenges and move forward together to greater heights!
Significantly, Biden told Holt he would eschew political vendettas and appeared determined to restore integrity, professionalism, and independence to a broken and dysfunctional Justice Department.
The proof will be in the governing and the actions, although Biden noted the important role played by a President’s rhetoric and universal leadership qualities. Undoubtedly, things will not be perfect. But, so far, Biden appears to be on the right track and setting the correct tone for what is likely to be the most important Presidency since Abraham Lincoln (and arguably, the most important in American history).
Come January 20, 2021, the circus will be pulling up stakes and leaving town. Let the governing begin!
PWS
11-25-20
https://apple.news/ArL5plP9FQyK97AL4pqU-Tw
From NBC News:
by Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley and Geoff Bennett | NBC NEWS
WASHINGTON — The Trump White House blocked the Justice Department from making a deal in October 2019 to pay for mental health services for migrant families who had been separated by the Trump administration, two current and two former senior administration officials told NBC News.
Three sources involved in the discussions who requested anonymity said the Office of White House Counsel made the decision to reject the settlement of a federal lawsuit after consultation with senior adviser Stephen Miller, the driving force behind many of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including family separations.
“DOJ strongly, and unanimously, supported the settlement, but not all agencies involved were on the same page,” an administration official said. “Ultimately, the settlement was declined at the direction of the White House counsel’s office.”
Another administration official said: “Ultimately, it was Stephen who prevailed. He squashed it.”
The White House’s refusal to accept the deal ended up costing taxpayers $6 million.
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Read the full article at the link.
The cost of the immoral misconduct of Miller in number of human lives, futures, and wasted taxpayer funds is probably incalculable.
My thanks to this dynamic trio at NBC News whose fearless reporting has helped keep Miller’s crimes in the public spotlight!
PWS
011-19-20
From NBC News:
Alex Trebek, who presided over the beloved quiz show “Jeopardy!” for more than 30 years with dapper charm and a touch of school-master strictness, died Sunday. He was 80.
Trebek, who announced in 2019 that he had advanced pancreatic cancer, died at his California home, surrounded by family and friends, “Jeopardy!” studio Sony said.
The Canadian-born host, who made a point of informing fans about his health directly, spoke in a calm, even tone as he revealed his illness and hope for a cure in a video posted March 6, 2019.
In the video, Trebek said he was joining the 50,000 other Americans who receive such a diagnosis each year and that he recognized that the prognosis was not encouraging.
Pancreatic cancer is currently the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the U.S., with an overall five-year survival rate of just 10 percent.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rep. John Lewis also succumbed to the disease this past year.
But Trebek said he intended to fight it and keep working, even joking that he needed to beat the disease because his “Jeopardy!” contract ran for three more years. Less than a week later, he opened the show with a message acknowledging the outpouring of kind words and prayers he’d received.
“Thanks to the — believe it or not — hundreds of thousands of people who have sent in tweets, texts, emails, cards and letters wishing me well,” Trebek said. “I’m a lucky guy.”
“Jeopardy!” bills itself as “America’s favorite quiz show” and captivated the public with a unique format in which contestants were told the answers and had to provide the questions on a variety of subjects, including movies, politics, history and popular culture.
They would answer by saying “What is … ?” or “Who is …. ?”
Trebek, who became its host in 1984, was a master of the format, engaging in friendly banter with contestants, appearing genuinely pleased when they answered correctly and, at the same time, moving the game along in a brisk no-nonsense fashion whenever people struggled for answers.
He never pretended to know the answers himself if he really didn’t, deferring to the show’s experts to decide whether a somewhat vague answer had come close enough to be counted as correct.
“I try not to take myself too seriously,” he told an interviewer in 2004. “I don’t want to come off as a pompous ass and indicate that I know everything when I don’t.”
The show was the brainstorm of Juann Griffin, wife of the late talk show host-entrepreneur Merv Griffin, who said she suggested to him one day that he create a game show where people were given the answers.
“Jeopardy!” debuted on NBC in 1964 with Art Fleming as emcee and was an immediate hit. It lasted until 1975, then was revived in syndication with Trebek.
Long identified by a full head of hair and trim mustache (though in 2001 he startled viewers by shaving his mustache, “completely on a whim”), Trebek was more than qualified for the job, having started his game show career on “Reach for the Top” in his native country.
Moving to the U.S. in 1973, he appeared on “The Wizard of Odds,” “High Rollers,” “The $128,000 Question” and “Double Dare.” Even during his run on “Jeopardy!”, Trebek worked on other shows. In the early 1990s, he was the host of three — “Jeopardy!”, “To Tell the Truth” and “Classic Concentration.”
“Jeopardy!” made him famous. He won five Emmys as its host, and received stars on both the Hollywood and Canadian walks of fame. In 2012, the show won a prestigious Peabody Award.
He taped his daily “Jeopardy!” shows at a frenetic pace, recording as many as 10 episodes (two weeks’ worth) in just two days. After what was described as a mild heart attack in 2007, he was back at work in just a month.
He posted a video in January 2018 announcing he’d undergone surgery for blood clots on the brain that followed a fall he’d taken. The show was on hiatus during his recovery.
It had yet to bring in a substitute host for Trebek — save once, when he and “Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak swapped their TV jobs as an April’s Fool prank.
In 2012, Trebek acknowledged that he was considering retirement, but had been urged by friends to stay on so he could reach 30 years on the show. He still loved the job, he declared: “What’s not to love? You have the security of a familiar environment, a familiar format, but you have the excitement of new clues and new contestants on every program. You can’t beat that!”
Although many viewers considered him one of the key reasons for the show’s success, Trebek himself insisted he was only there to keep things moving.
“I’m introduced as the host of ‘Jeopardy!,’ not the star,” he said in a 2012 interview. “My job is to provide the atmosphere and assistance to the contestants to get them to perform at their very best,” he explained. “And if I’m successful doing that, I will be perceived as a nice guy and the audience will think of me as being a bit of a star.”
Trebek is survived by his wife Jean and his two adult children, Emily and Matthew.
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Alex has long been a part of our family. Most evenings at our house are NBC Nightly News followed by Jeopardy!
A number of years ago, we were lucky enough to see Alex in person during a live recording of “Celebrity Jeopardy” at DAR Constitution Hall. He spent lots of time chatting with the audience and answering questions during the “off camera” breaks.
In tribute to Alex, the “Zoom Edition of Immigration Law & Policy” at Georgetown Law this summer was “Immigration Jeopardy” — 100 “answers” in the familiar “you supply the questions” Jeopardy format!
Alex has actually been “grooming” his successor Jeopardy G.O.A.T. Ken Jennings over the past months. So the show will carry on the “Alex tradition.” Nevertheless, as Ken and all Jeopardy fans know, there will never be another Alex Trebek!
Thanks for all the great entertainment and knowledge over the years! R.I.P. Alex.
PWS
11-08-20
Sahil Kapur reports for NBC News:
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump‘s senior adviser Stephen Miller has fleshed out plans to rev up Trump’s restrictive immigration agenda if he wins re-election next week, offering a stark contrast to the platform of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
In a 30-minute phone interview Thursday with NBC News, Miller outlined four major priorities: limiting asylum grants, punishing and outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, expanding the so-called travel ban with tougher screening for visa applicants and slapping new limits on work visas.
The objective, he said, is “raising and enhancing the standard for entry” to the United States.
Some of the plans would require legislation. Others could be achieved through executive action, which the Trump administration has relied on heavily in the absence of a major immigration bill.
Examining Trump’s immigration campaign promises four years later
AUG. 25, 202005:51Some of the plans would require legislation. Others could be achieved through executive action, which the Trump administration has relied on heavily in the absence of a major immigration bill.
“In many cases, fixing these problems and restoring some semblance of sanity to our immigration programs does involve regulatory reform,” Miller said. “Congress has delegated a lot of authority. … And that underscores the depth of the choice facing the American people.”
Miller, who serves in a dual role as an adviser in the White House and to Trump’s re-election campaign, stressed that he was speaking about second-term priorities only in his capacity as campaign adviser.
Immigration has been overshadowed by surging coronavirus case numbers and an economy shattered by a nearly yearlong pandemic, but it was central to Trump’s rise to power in the Republican Party, and Miller has been a driving force for the administration’s often controversial policies to crack down on illegal migration and erect hurdles for aspiring legal immigrants.
Miller has spearheaded an immigration policy that critics describe as cruel, racist and antithetical to American values as a nation of immigrants. He scoffs at those claims, insisting that his only priority is to protect the safety and wages of Americans.
And he said he intends to stay on to see the agenda through in a second term if Trump is re-elected.
In the near term, Miller wouldn’t commit to lifting the freeze on new green cards and visas that’s set to expire at the end of the year, saying it would be “entirely contingent” on governmental analysis that factors in the state of the job market.
Asked whether he would support reinstating the controversial “zero tolerance” policy that led to families’ being separated, Miller said the Trump administration is “100 percent committed to a policy of family unity,” but he described the policy as one that would keep families together in immigration detention by changing what is known as the Flores settlement agreement.
Over the past year, the administration has sought to amend the Flores agreement, which says children can’t be held over 20 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. If it succeeds, immigrant families could be detained indefinitely as they await their day in immigration court.
On Trump’s watch, asylum grants have plummeted. Miller wants to keep it that way. He said a second-term Trump administration would seek to expand “burden-sharing” deals with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that cut off pathways to the U.S. for asylum-seekers.
“The president would like to expand that to include the rest of the world,” Miller said. “And so if you create safe third partners in other continents and other countries and regions, then you have the ability to share the burden of asylum-seekers on a global basis.”
. . . .
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Read the complete report at the link.
Kids in cages, refugees returned to torture and death, ethnic communities terrorized, lives destroyed, an economy and a society (make no mistake about it, immigrants will be essential to America’s recovery, future prosperity, and competitiveness) in tatters, tens of millions wasted on unnecessary and counterproductive Gulags, walls, and cruel enforcement while the Gruppenfuherer and his fellow human rights criminals remain at large and and an existential threat to our nation and our world!
To state the obvious, this has little or nothing to do with protecting American workers. Trump has shown that he couldn’t care less about the health, safety, and welfare of American workers (or frankly anybody except himself) except at election time. Immigration and immigrants create jobs and economic prosperity for America.
Also, even Miller couldn’t possibly believe that the Democratic House will pass any part of this racist manifesto. Truth is, Trump failed to pass any meaningful immigration legislation in four years, even when the GOP controlled all the political branches! In fact, Miller’s nativist legislative game-plan “poisoned the well” and was soundly defeated in both Houses of Congress! So, he intends to use Executive misrule, bureaucratic corruption, and a fascism-enabling, racially tone-deaf GOP Supremes’ majority to rule without Congress (as has been the case for the last four years.)
But make no mistake: the real “Reichsplan” here is directed at further institutionalizing racism, spreading hate, and targeting Americans of color. That’s what the regime’s “Dred Scottification” is really about. Reducing or eliminating YOUR Constitutional rights! Immigrants are the “usual suspects.” But, by no means will they be the only victims of Gruppenfuhrer Miller’s White Nationalist, racist, hate extravaganza.
As reported at the link above, The Biden-Harris campaign immediately and forcefully condemned the Gruppenfuhrer’s plans for “ethnic cleansing:”
“We are going to win this election so that people like Stephen Miller don’t get the chance to write more xenophobic policies that dishonor our American values,” Molina said. “Unlike Trump, Vice President Biden knows that immigrants make America stronger and helped build this country.”
PWS
10-30-20
Here’s an array of reports on how America under the Trump regime has joined the ranks of dictatorships, torturers, child abusers, persecutors, and human rights criminals!
Eugene Robinson @ WashPost:
What kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show “toughness” by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has come to? Or are we better than that?
This election demands we answer those questions. The choice between President Trump and Joe Biden is not just political. It is also moral. And perhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision than the Trump administration’s policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump’s warped vision of American strength.
We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.
These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1,500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.
Please think about that. The shocking scenes we saw two years ago did not result from a sudden spasm of presidential anger. They didn’t stem from a Fox News segment Trump might have seen one evening. Rather, the administration rehearsed this form of cruelty.
What the administration did not plan for was how to reunite the children taken in 2017 with their families. Many of the parents were deported, and their children were placed in shelters around the country, then ostensibly released to parents or guardians, placements that the ACLU is still trying to confirm.
[Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term]
The ACLU and other organizations have sent investigators to towns and villages in Central America in an attempt to find the kidnapped children’s families — an effort complicated not just by time and distance, but also by the covid-19 pandemic. Parents of 545 children have not been found, the ACLU reported this week.
Disturbingly, the Department of Homeland Security suggested that some of the parents declined to get their children back so they could remain in the United States. Keep in mind that most of these families were seeking asylum from deadly violence in their home countries. The Trump administration changed immigration guidelines to make it unlikely that the families would ultimately be allowed to stay in the United States, but federal law gives them the right to apply for asylum and to have their cases heard. They did nothing wrong. They should never have been asked to choose between parenting their children and getting them to safety — not by their home countries, and not by the United States.
Trump’s racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks of his presidency from the beginning, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he would preside over such an outrage. But he didn’t do this by himself. He had plenty of help.
Former attorney general Jeff Sessions seized an opportunity to make his rabid antipathy toward Hispanic immigration into policy. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide in the Senate, was the architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2018 that the children taken would be “taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.” Former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last year that she regretted that “information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place” — but not the separations themselves.
. . . .
Read the rest of Eugene’s article here:
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Elise Foley @ HuffPost:
President Donald Trump’s administration started and carried out a policy that took more than 4,000 children from their parents, at least 545 of whom are still split apart years later. But at Thursday’s debate, the president insisted that he did nothing wrong at all ― blaming his Democratic predecessors and even insisting the kids are doing fine.
“They are so well taken care of,” Trump said of the children taken from their parents by his administration. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”
Trump’s first term was marked by a full-out assault on immigration, both legal and unauthorized. The most dramatic was his “zero tolerance” policy on unauthorized border-crossing, used in a 2017 pilot program and expanded more broadly in 2018, that led to criminal prosecution of parents and locking up their kids separately. Splitting up families was intentional and calculated, according to multiple reports.
Thanks to mass public outrage and a court order, Trump was forced to stop his family separation policy. Most families were reunited, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which was part of the lawsuit against the government that stopped the policy, said this week that at least 545 kids are still away from their parents.
“Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said during the debate. “And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”
. . . .
Read the rest of Elise’s article here:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-debate-family-separation_n_5f924368c5b62333b2439d2b
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Ruth Marcus @ WashPost:
545.
That is the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is unimaginable and irreparable.
545.
Even one would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.
545.
That number represents an indelible stain on President Trump and every individual in his administration who implemented this policy, flawed at the conception and typically, gruesomely incompetent in the execution. It is, perhaps in the technical sense but surely in the broader one, a crime against humanity. It is torture.
545.
That number — I will stop repeating it, yet it cannot be repeated enough — represents a moral challenge and responsibility for the next administration. If Joe Biden is elected president, he must devote the maximum resources of the federal government to fixing this disaster. The United States broke these families; it must do whatever it takes to help them heal.
Nothing like that would happen in a second Trump term, because Trump himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t grasp the horror that he oversaw. He doesn’t comprehend the policy, and he is incapable of feeling the pain it inflicted.
Those truths could not have been clearer cut than during Thursday night’s debate.
Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News asked the president a simple question: “How will these families ever be reunited?”
First, Trump misstated the situation: “Their children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country.”
No. These are children separated from their families, not separated from smugglers. They are children brought by their parents in desperate search of a better life, desperate enough that they would take the risk of the dangerous journey.
Then Trump pivoted to the irrelevant: “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.”
Welker persisted: “But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”
Trump responded by pointing his finger at his predecessor: “Let me just tell you, they built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages, and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said look at these cages, President Trump built them, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”
This is typical Trumpian deflection, bluster undergirded by ignorance. The “cages” are ugly but irrelevant to the topic at hand: the deliberately cruel plan to deter border-crossing by separating children from parents. That was a Trump administration special, implemented with callous sloppiness and so extreme that even the Trump administration abandoned it.
Welker, for the third time: “Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?”
At which point Trump made clear that he did not: “We’re trying very hard, but a lot of these kids come out without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.” The children, he added later, “are so well taken care of, they’re in facilities that were so clean.”
. . . .
Read the rest of Ruth’s op-ed here:
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Bess Levin @ Vanity Fair:
The third and final presidential debate gave Donald Trump and Joe Biden the opportunity to make their final pitch to the American people before the 2020 election. For the Democratic nominee, that meant driving home the point that he believes in science, that he’ll take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, that climate change is real, and that systemic racism must be dealt with. For Trump, it meant making it clear that in addition to being a science-denying, QAnon-promoting dimwit, he’s also an actual monster who thinks separating small children from their parents, in some cases permanently, is absolutely fine. Asked by moderated Kristen Welker about the news that parents of 545 children separated at the border—60 of whom are under the age of five—cannot be located, Trump defended the policy and gave no explanation for how the government plans to find these people and reunite their families. “Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump said, which is objectively false, as they are brought here by their parents, which is why it’s called the family separation policy. “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers and we let people in but they have to come in legally.”
Noting that Trump hadn’t answered the question, Welker pressed: “But how will you unite these kids with their families?”
“They built cages, they used to say I built cages…that was him,” Trump said, pointing to Biden and referring to the fact that the Obama administration did build temporary enclosures but failing, naturally, to mention that his predecessor did not separate families.
“Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their parents?” Welker asked a third time. Again, Trump responded by claiming that the children “come without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.”
At this point, Joe Biden was given a chance to weigh in and used his time to describe the policy implemented by Trump as the horror show all non-sociopaths know it to be. “Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and they were separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”
Then Trump interjected with what he apparently believed was an important point that would cast his administration in a much more favorable light and perhaps might even win it some awards or sainthood by the Catholic church. “Kristen, I will say this,” he told the moderator, of the children stolen from their parents. “They’re so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that are so clean.
With regard to that claim, NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff weighed in on that after the debate, telling Rachel Maddow: “I was one of the reporters I guess the president mentioned, they invited me to go to the epicenter of this policy…what I saw was little children sitting on concrete floors, covered by mylar blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower, it makes me sick every time I recall it. And Physicians for Human Rights…called this torture…the American Academy of Pediatrics called this state-sanctioned child abuse, and the president of the United States I guess interprets that as children being well taken care of.”
Read the rest of The Levin Report here:
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Here’s a video from NBC New’s Jacob Soboroff, who has actually been inside “Trump’s Kiddie Gulag.” Surprise spoiler: It’s not “nice.” More like “torture” and “child abuse.”
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And, here’s another video from NBC News’s always incisive and articulate Julia Edwards Ainsley:
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PWS
10-25-20
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire
Sept. 27, 2020
- 1701
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.
. . . .
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Read the full report at the link.
Duh! According to NBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, an American who actually worked for a living and made $18,000 would pay $760 in taxes.
Not much of a surprise to those familiar with Trump’s endemic lies, corruption, and dishonesty. You can be sure that whatever lies and misdirection Trump spews forth about this report, it will have little or nothing to do with truth.
PWS
09-28-20
Dartunorro Clark is a political reporter for NBC News:
. . . .
Last year, advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City in the mid-1990s. She said the friendly encounter turned violent when Trump, then a businessman, pushed her up against a dressing room wall, unzipped his pants and forced himself on her. Carroll said she pushed him off and ran from the store.
Trump has denied the claim, saying “she’s not my type” and it “never happened.” Carroll said no attendants were in the dressing room area at the time of the alleged assault, and she did not file a report with the New York Police Department.
Carroll filed a defamation suit against Trump in November after the president denied her allegation. The Justice Department argued that because the president denied the accusation in his official capacity, the agency can defend him against the suit. She is seeking unspecified damages and a retraction of Trump’s statements.
Carroll’s lawyers also served notice to Trump’s legal team this year for Trump to submit a DNA sample for “analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA” present on the dress she said she wore at the time of the alleged assault. A New York judge last month also denied Trump’s move to temporarily halt the suit.
“Sir, I and my attorney Robbie Kaplan, are ready! So is every woman who has ever been silenced! So is every American citizen who has been trampled by Bill Barr and the DOJ! BRING IT!” Carroll wrote.
Carroll and Kaplan released separate official statements Tuesday night calling the move by the Justice Department offensive.
Kaplan said: “Realizing that there was no valid basis to appeal that decision in the New York courts, on the very day that he would have been required to appeal, Trump instead enlisted the U.S. Department of Justice to replace his private lawyers and argue that when he lied about sexually assaulting our client, explaining that she ‘wasn’t his type,’ he was acting in his official capacity as President of the United States.
“Even in today’s world, that argument is shocking. It offends me as a lawyer, and offends me even more as a citizen. Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent, and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”
Carroll said in her statement that the Justice Department’s court filing shows that Trump “will do everything possible” to stop the case from going forward. She added, “But Trump underestimates me, and he also has underestimated the American people.”
Dartunorro Clark
Dartunorro Clark is a political reporter for NBC News.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Let’s see: Billy the Bigot has weaponized the Immigration Courts against those individuals whose rights it was supposed to protect. He denies the reality of “institutionalized racism” in the face of “indisputable video evidence” that it is alive and well in the U.S. today. He has failed to protect the rights of the LGBTG community. He has undermined the voting rights and political power of Americans of color. Now, he blatantly misuses DOJ resources to mount a personal defense of a corrupt and dishonest Prez in litigation arising out of his alleged private actions more than a quarter century before he was sworn into his Government office.
Who knows what else “Billy the Bigot” has up his sleeve in his never-ending quest to destroy the U.S. Justice System at your expense, in more ways than one! When the “people’s lawyers” become the personal lawyers of a corrupt would-be authoritarian head of state, you know that you’re well on your way to “failed state” status, no matter how high your GNP might be at present.
A more overriding observation: Trump and his corrupt cronies have managed to manipulate the U.S. Justice system over nearly four years to avoid accountability or public disclosure of his many acts of corruption, starting with hiding his tax returns. That’s a sure sign of systemic institutional failure!
PWS
09-09-20
Matthew Barakat reports for NBC News:
An outside expert who inspected an immigration detention center in Virginia that experienced a massive coronavirus outbreak is recommending that some high-risk inmates be released after finding flaws in the center’s screening procedures.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the inspection last month after several detainees filed a lawsuit with the help of legal activist groups. Brinkema faulted the detention complex in Farmville for an outbreak that affected more than 90% of the center’s nearly 300 detainees, including a 72-year-old detainee who died. Government officials fought unsuccessfully to block the inspection.
The expert, Homer Venters, inspected the site last month and filed a report made public Friday that says the center does a poor job of screening inmates for COVID-19 symptoms. He recommended that detainees at high risk for the disease be released.
The report cites “multiple and systematic deficiencies” in the complex’s health services and concludes that to be detained there “represents a significant health risk for high-risk patients.”
A report prepared by an expert hired by the detention center reached different conclusions. That expert, William Reese, said the biggest problem he saw was that detainees were refusing to wear masks. Given the inmates’ “lack of cooperation … it is remarkable that the facility has had no new positive tests among Detainees in nearly a month,” Reese wrote.
Venters, in his report, wrote that inmates dismissed staff entreaties to wear masks because they blamed the facility for getting them sick in the first place. The inmates also told Venters that they felt the masks were unnecessary since most everyone in the facility had already contracted the virus.
. . . .
At an earlier hearing, Brinkema criticized a “bureaucratic circus” for causing the outbreak, saying the center violated its own procedures by accepting 74 transfers from facilities in hot spot states Florida and Arizona without implementing any quarantine procedures.
A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined comment on the report, citing the ongoing litigation.
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Read the full report at the link.
Your taxpayer dollars at work, being used by DHS to abuse detainees and cover up Government wrongdoing.
We’ll see what Judge Brinkema makes of this absurdly dysfunctional, taxpayer funded mess. “Kakistocracy in action,” as veteran “DHS Watchers” say!
But, if the immigration justice system were functional, this problem would never have gotten to Judge Brinkema. A “real” Immigration Court, with fair, impartial, expert judges, free from political bias and interference, would have shut down most of the unnecessary and abusive DHS Gulag long ago. A real Appellate Division of that court would have established sensible nationwide precedents requiring release of vulnerable detainees to suitable placements.
Due process, fundamental fairness, and a truly independent and properly qualified judiciary that enforced them would save lives while promoting systemic efficiency. “Regime change” is an essential first step to saving our democracy. It starts in November!
PWS
09-09-20
