NY TIMES: David J. Bier @ CATO Tells How Trump is Skirting Congress & The Law To Destroy Legal Immigration & Darken The Future Of America!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/trump-legal-immigrants-reject.html

David J. Bier writes in the NY Times:

At his postelection news conference, President Trump said of immigrants traveling to the United States, “I want them to come into the country, but they need to come in legally.” Yet newly released government data show that so far in 2018, the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016.

This makes no sense: Depriving immigrants of legal immigration options works against the president’s stated goal of increasing economic growth.

A new analysis for the Cato Institute has found that the Department of Homeland Security rejected 11.3 percent of requests to the immigration agency, which include those for work permits, travel documents and status applications, based on family reunification, employment and other grounds, in the first nine months of 2018. This is the highest rate of denial on record and means that by the end of the year, the United States government will have rejected around 620,000 people — about 155,000 more than in 2016.

This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.

In 2018, the D.H.S. turned away 10 percent of applicants for employment authorization documents compared with 6 percent in 2016, and it rejected applications for advanced parole — which gives temporary residents the authorization to travel internationally and return — at a clip of 18 percent, more than doubling the rate in 2016. Even skilled workers are being rejected at higher rates. The denial rate for petitions for temporary foreign workers shot to 23 percent from 17 percent. The application for permanent workers saw denials rise to 9 percent from 6 percent.

The largest increase in the denial rate for family-sponsored applications, for petitions for fiancés, rose to 21 percent from 14 percent.

Greg Siskind, a Memphis-based immigration attorney with three decades of experience, told me that these numbers back up the anecdotes that he has been hearing from colleagues across the country. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

So what is going on?

Last year, the Trump administration increased the length of immigration applications by double, triple or even more, making them more time-consuming and complicated than ever. This made mistakes far more likely. This year, it also made it easier to deny applicants outright without giving them an opportunity to submit clarifying information. The agency has also made moves to police caseworkers who may be, in its view, too lenient.

Mr. Trump’s political appointees to the D.H.S. have also seized on his rhetorical attacks on immigrants, as well as executive orders like the “Buy American and Hire American” order and another mandating extensive vetting of foreigners, as a justification for a crackdown on legal immigration.

As a result of all this, total immigration to the United States has declined under President Trump, and fewer foreign travelers have been entering the country. These trends are surprising, because the economies of the United States and almost all other countries are growing, which usually generates more travel and immigration. The best explanation for this discrepancy is that the president’s policies are having their intended effect: reducing legal immigration to this country.

This is happening at a time when there are more job openings than job seekers in the United States. This month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell stated that fewer immigrants and foreign workers would slow economic growth by limiting the ability of businesses to expand.

On some level, President Trump appears to understand this reality, but his policies are making the situation worse.

David J. Bier is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

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

The answer is actually pretty simple, David. Trump lies, particularly when he repeats the racist restrictionist disingenuous claim that he “just wants legal immigrants.” I call BS! His pejorative use of the term “chain migration” and his bogus proposals for a fake “merit based” (read “no”) immigration system clearly belies any such claim.

In addition to being a congenital liar and proudly ignorant in an intellectual sense, Trump is a White Nationalist racist who hates all immigrants except, perhaps, his current wife and a few White Christian guys from Europe with PhDs. (Although, he really doesn’t like Europeans, Canadians, or any other type of “foreigner” who isn’t a human rights violating despot, leading to the conclusion that he truly despises human rights of any kind.)

His policies are driven by a toxic combination of intentional ignorance, hatred, White Nationalism, and political opportunism. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that policies driven by such evil and irrational motives are going to produce irrational and highly counterproductive results.

Welcome to the Age of Trump & His GOP, David! Where’ve you been? What have you and your colleagues at CATO been doing to insure that Trump and the GOP are sent packing and replaced with leaders (e.g., Democrats, at least at present) who both understand and are willing to stand up for the national interest?

CATO is supported to a large extent by the Koch Bros. While I actually agree with some of their ideas, respect that they actually employ folks producing useful goods and apparently treat them reasonably well, and I occasionally attend CATO seminars, the “Bros” generally have been supporters and enablers of Trump, Pence, and the current GOP kakistocracy.

They helped prop up the truly reprehensible Scott Walker who wasted money, divided Wisconsin, demeaned education, tanked the infrastructure, screwed the environment, and diminished the state in almost every way. It turned what had been a fairly progressive, “midwest friendly,” and cooperative state into a leader in the “race to the bottom.” And, their support for the ugly and unprincipled opposition to Senator Tammy Baldwin was beyond despicable!

I think you and your CATO colleagues largely see where history is going. But, until you get out there and actively work for the Constitutional removal of Trump (and his toady Mike Pence), the defeat of the “Trump GOP,” and the return of “government for all the people” you will remain on the “wrong side of history.” Your dream of an economically prosperous and powerful America continuing to lead the world into the future will be just that — a dream that will never be fulfilled as long as racism and White Nationalism overrule reason!

America needs a two party system (or more). And, I believe there’s plenty of room and a need for a fiscally conservative, pro business, labor friendly, non-racist, non-White-Nationalist, non-homophobic party that challenges the idea that we can solve all problems by just throwing money at them. Not saying I’d join it, but I can see the need for it. But, the current GOP is nothing of the sort — talk about disingenuous rhetoric and total fiscal irresponsibility!

PWS

11-16-18

JULIA PRESTON @ THE MARSHALL PROJECT: Unfinished Business – Sessions Leaves Behind An Unprecedented Man-Made Human Rights Disaster & A Demoralized, Rapidly Failing U.S. Immigration Court — “I’ve never seen an attorney general who was so active in the immigration sphere and in a negative direction,” said Daniel Kowalski!”

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/11/07/the-immigration-crisis-jeff-sessions-leaves-behind

Julia writes:

ANALYSIS

The Immigration Crisis Jeff Sessions Leaves Behind

Assessing the ousted attorney general’s legacy on President Trump’s favorite issue.

By JULIA PRESTON

Graphic by YOLANDA MARTINEZ

“I don’t have an attorney general,” President Donald Trump said in an interview recently, venting his frustration with Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

But anyone who was following Sessions’ actions on immigration had no doubt that he was working hard. Before he was forced to resign on Wednesday, Sessions was exceptionally aggressive as attorney general, using his authority to steer the immigration courts, restrict access for migrants to the asylum system and deploy the federal courts for immigration enforcement purposes.

Under American law, the attorney general has broad powers over the immigration courts, which reside in the Justice Department not in the independent federal judiciary. Sessions, who made immigration a signature issue during his two decades as a Republican senator from Alabama, exercised those powers to rule from on high over the immigration system.

While Trump complained about Sessions, on immigration he was an unerringly loyal soldier, vigorously executing the president’s restrictionist policies.

Sessions made it his mission to reverse what he regarded as a failure to enforce order in the system by President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, despite plunging numbers of illegal border crossings and record deportations under the previous administration.

“No great and prosperous nation can have both a generous welfare system and open borders,” Sessions told a gathering of newly-appointed immigration judges in September. “Such a policy is both radical and dangerous. It must be rejected out of hand.”

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A primary goal he declared was to speed the work of the immigration courts in order to reduce huge case backlogs. But according to a report this week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, the backlogs increased during his tenure by 49 percent, reaching an all-time record of more than 768,000 cases. That tally doesn’t include more than 330,000 suspended cases, which justice officials restored to the active caseload.

“I’ve never seen an attorney general who was so active in the immigration sphere and in a negative direction,” said Daniel Kowalski, the editor of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin, a widely-used reference for lawyers. Kowalski said he’s been practicing immigration law for 33 years.

Here are some of Sessions’ measures that shaped the crisis the next attorney general will inherit:

He imposed case quotas on immigration judges, which went into effect Oct. 1, demanding they complete at least 700 cases a year. With compliance becoming part of a judge’s performance evaluation, the immigration judges’ association has said the quotas impinge on due process.

He made frequent use of the attorney general’s authority to decide cases if he doesn’t like opinions coming from the immigration courts. Sessions used that authority to constrain judges’ decision-making. He made it more difficult for them to grant continuances to give lawyers time to prepare, and he limited judges’ options to close cases where they concluded deportation was not warranted, as a way to lighten overloaded court dockets.

Sessions discouraged immigration judges from allowing prosecutors to exercise their discretion to set aside deportations for immigrants with families or other positive reasons to remain in the United States.

He issued decisions that made it far more difficult for migrants, like those coming in recent years from Central America, to win asylum cases based on fears of criminal gang violence, sexual abuse or other persecution by “private actors,” rather than governments.

In a policy known as zero tolerance, in April Sessions ordered federal prosecutors along the southwest border to bring charges in federal court against migrants caught crossing the border, for the crime of illegal entry. The policy resulted in parents being separated from their children, in episodes last summer that drew outrage until Trump ordered the separations to stop. But the prosecutions continue for illegal crossers who aren’t parents with children, swelling federal dockets and making it harder for prosecutors to pursue other border crimes, like narcotics and human trafficking, weapons offenses and money-laundering. In September, according to TRAC, 88 percent of the prosecutions in the Southern District of Texas were for an illegal entry misdemeanor; 65 percent of the cases in the Southern District of California were for the same minor crime.

Zero tolerance at the border

Under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, federal prosecutors in five border districts significantly ramped up the number of misdemeanor cases they filed against migrants crossing illegally this year, particularly in south Texas.

Sessions took the position that a program initiated by Obama, which gave protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants who came here as children, was an overreach of executive authority. He declined to defend the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and praised Trump’s decision last year to cancel it. After federal courts allowed the program to continue, the Justice Department fought to bypass the appeals courts and get a hearing before the Supreme Court for its efforts to terminate the program.

Even though his relations with Trump soured early in his tenure, Sessions maintained a line of communication to the White House through Stephen Miller, a senior adviser. Miller was a senior staff member for Sessions in the Senate, and the two share similar views and goals for clamping down on immigration.

Lawyers and advocates say Sessions’ actions have politicized immigration court proceedings. “He stripped the judges of the authority to ensure due process and demonstrated how susceptible the courts are to the whim of politics,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, based in Chicago.

Advocates for immigration reform said a new attorney general should restore the flexibility of immigration judges to manage their own dockets to find efficient ways to reduce their caseloads. But they said Sessions’ tenure provided new arguments for Congress to move the immigration courts out of the Justice Department to the federal judiciary.

Gregory Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said, “The aggressive nature of his actions infringing on the independence of the courts has made the need for a new court system even more urgent.”

ORIGINALLY FILED Wednesday, November 7, 2018 at 9:35 p.m. ET

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

Go to Julia’s article at the above link to get the accompanying graphics and pictures.

The Immigration Court backlog reported by TRAC now is over 1.1 MILLION cases, with no end in sight. More disturbingly, there is no coherent plan for addressing these cases in anything approaching a rational manner, nor is there a plan for restoring some semblance of due process and functionality to the Immigration Courts. Like most Trump/Sessions initiatives, it’s “we’ll create the problem, make it much worse, then hinder the efforts of others to fix it.”

Three “no-brainers ” that Sessions wouldn’t do:

Working with the private bar, NGOs, states, and localities to make legal representation available to everyone in Immigration Court who wants it;
Letting U.S. Immigration Judges control their own dockets and make independent decisions, free from political interference; and
Removing hundreds of thousands of older cases of individuals eligible to apply for “Cancellation of Removal For Non-Lawful Permanent Residents” from the Immigration Courts’ active dockets and having them adjudicated by USCIS in the first instance.

Of course an independent Article I Immigration Court is an absolute necessity. But, that will take legislation. In the meantime, the foregoing three administrative steps would pave the way for an orderly transition to Article I status while promoting Due Process, fairness, and efficiency in the system.

But, I wouldn’t count on anyone in the “Current Kakistocracy” doing the right thing or actually implementing “good government.” If the Article IIIs don’t put an end to this travesty, it will continue to get worse and pull them down into the muck until we get “regime change.”

Ironically, Trump isn’t the only one who “hasn’t had an Attorney General over the past two years.” The majority of Americans haven’t had one either; while he might be on the verge of getting “his” Attorney General, the rest of us can only look forward to more pain and misery!

PWS

11-12-18

GONZO’S WORLD: Racist AG Takes Parting Shot At Civil Rights, African-Americans, People Of Color, & DOJ Career Lawyers

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/us/politics/sessions-limits-consent-decrees.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Katie Benner reports for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

In a major last-minute act, Mr. Sessions signed a memorandum on Wednesday before President Trump fired him sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions.

The move means that the decrees, used aggressively by Obama-era Justice Department officials to fight police abuses, will be more difficult to enact. Mr. Sessions had signaled he would pull back on their use soon after he took office when he ordered a review of the existing agreements, including with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., enacted amid a national outcry over the deaths of black men at the hands of officers.

Mr. Sessions imposed three stringent requirements for the agreements. Top political appointees must sign off on the deals, rather than the career lawyers who have done so in the past; department lawyers must lay out evidence of additional violations beyond unconstitutional behavior; and the deals must have a sunset date, rather than being in place until police or other law enforcement agencies have shown improvement.

The document reflected Mr. Sessions’s staunch support for law enforcement and his belief that overzealous civil rights lawyers under the Obama administration vilified the local police. The federal government has long conducted oversight of local law enforcement agencies, and consent decrees have fallen in and out of favor since the first one was adopted in Pittsburgh more than two decades ago. The new guidelines push more of that responsibility onto state attorneys general and other local agencies.

Mr. Sessions conceded in his memo that consent decrees are sometimes the only way to ensure that government agencies follow the law. But he argued that changes were necessary because agreements that impose long-term, wide-ranging obligations on local governments could violate their sovereignty.

By setting a higher bar for the deals, Mr. Sessions limited a tool that the Justice Department has used to help change policing practices nationwide.

Mr. Sessions’s new guidelines make it nearly impossible for rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers to use the agreements, warned Jonathan M. Smith, a former official in the department’s civil rights division and the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

“This memo will make the Justice Department much less effective in enforcing civil rights laws,” Mr. Smith said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the memo.

A consent decree is a type of injunction that allows federal courts to enforce an agreement negotiated between two parties — say, the Justice Department and a local police department — to address a violation of the law. The department started enforcing them during the Clinton administration, after a statute was enacted in 1994 allowing the attorney general to use court agreements to remedy systemic, unconstitutional behavior.

The agreements gained a higher profile as the Obama administration entered into 14 of them as part of its efforts to improve relationships between the police and their communities. They became even more prominent after the killings of black men at the hands of the police captured headlines and set off the Black Lives Matter movement.

In March 2017, a month after he took office, Mr. Sessions ordered a review of the use of consent decrees to ensure that they “advance the safety and protection of the public.” He said that the pacts should also ensure that the police are safe and respected and that they should not interfere with recruiting efforts by the local police.

Mr. Sessions, who has long championed local sheriffs and police officers, maintained that the agreements “reduce morale” among police officers and lead to more violent crime. Academics and researchers have contested his assertions about the links between consent decrees and crime rates.

Under Mr. Sessions, the department also dropped Obama-era investigations into the police in Chicago and Louisiana.

Last month, Mr. Sessions opposed a consent decree between the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois attorney general enacted after a Justice Department report unveiled in the final days of the Obama administration found rampant use of excessive force aimed at black and Latino people. Under Mr. Sessions, the Justice Department said the deal placed too many restrictions on Chicago’s police superintendent.

“When Jeff Sessions intervened in the locally negotiated consent decree in Chicago, it belied the love of federalism that he professes and uses to justify this effort to effectively end the use of consent decrees,” said Vanita Gupta, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

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The agreements enacted after high-profile police killings in recent years would likely not exist if Mr. Sessions’s restrictions had been in place.

“The need for consent decrees and the oversight they guarantee,” she said, “has not disappeared.”

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

Ah, “Courtsiders,” you might have thought that my regular “Gonzo’s World” feature column would disappear with the eagerly awaited departure of Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions from the office he never should have held in the first place. But, alas, as other commenters and I have said on numerous occasions, the pernicious influence of, and damage to nation and our Constitution by, Gonzo in less than two years in office will remain with us for years, if not decades to come!

Between Gonzo and Trump, the reputation and role of the DOJ as a credible organization and fair and unbiased protector of citizens’ and residents’ Constitutional and legal rights has been totally trashed; rebuilding it might prove to be “mission impossible.” After all, the true damage can’t even be objectively assessed until we get “regime change.”

Indeed, it might be time to think about a totally different structure and safeguards for “America’s Law Department” — certainly, removal of the U.S. Immigration Courts from this disastrous mix of improper influence, incompetence, and unethical behavior has to be “Priority I” if and when we return to a system of responsible government.

With respect to Katie’s report, pretty sleazy move by a really sleazy guy. But, “Black Lives” and the lives of immigrants and other folks of color have never mattered much to Sessions and his White Nationalist Nation.

He claims he might run for Senate again in Alabama. Having gotten this morally corrupt and incompetent individual off the public dole, it’s important to America’s future to pull out all the stops to insure that he remains “retired” from public office.

Fox News deserves him. I doubt he actually knows any law; certainly many Federal Judges have expressed skepticism about that. But, reading off the “cue cards” and false narratives that various White Nationalist groups have prepared for him ought to keep the “Trump crazies” happy and well fed.

Sure, Whitaker is a totally unqualified and unprincipled “acting successor.” But nobody except committed White Supremacists should mourn the departure of Sessions.

One of many, many horrible things about Trump is that when he inevitably turns on his former loyalists, he is so vicious and demeaning that he actually creates undeserved sympathy for these clowns. Nobody was forced to become a Trump supporter. They all went into it with open eyes. And, Trump’s lack of character, loyalty, manners, ethics, and human decency have always been on public display.

The folks we really should feel sorry for is African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, Asian Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, refugees, children, journalists, civil servants, civil rights and immigration lawyers, judges, state and local officials, career diplomats, and all of the other many groups of Americans that Sessions, Trump, and their White Nationalist cronies have abused. The stain of Gonzo’s tenure will not be easily or quickly erased.

PWS

11-09-18

RECREATING 1939: Led By Trump’s Brand Of Selfish “It’s All About Me” Racially Charged Nationalism, Prosperous Western Democracies Are Abandoning Their Legal & Moral Commitments To Refugees! – Are We On The Verge Of A “New Holocaust” While The Free Word Looks Inward? — “[M]illions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to go without the protections once promised by a world that had agreed ‘never again.'”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/world/europe/trump-asylum.html

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub in the NY Times:

LONDON — President Trump’s promise to stop a caravan of Central American migrants from reaching the United States border, if necessary through military force, might seem like just another effort by the president to unilaterally dismantle international laws and accepted practices.

But there is one important difference between this and Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone defiance of climate change agreements, trade deals or arms control treaties. In attacking the long accepted means of protecting refugees and upholding stability in times of mass displacement, he’s got company. Lots and lots of company.

There is no shortage of countries that also skirt, and therefore undermine, global refugee rules. The European Union and Australia are two of the biggest offenders. Peru and Ecuador are restricting Venezuelan refugees, while Tanzania is working to push out Burundians.

Image
Stateless Rohingya migrants passing food supplies dropped by a Thai Army helicopter to others on a boat drifting in Thai waters in the Andaman Sea in 2015.CreditChristophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In 2015, as Rohingya refugees fled Myanmar on overcrowded boats, the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — in a move that might make even Mr. Trump blush — pushed the boats out to sea, stranding them, to prevent them from reaching safe shores.

Still, countries tend to hide their violations by presenting themselves as following the letter of the law, or by dressing up anti-refugee measures in humanitarian terms. But Mr. Trump is selling his harsh treatment of asylum-seekers as deliberate. And even if he is not the first to breach the rules, he is contributing to their breakdown in ways that could have global consequences.

“The more brazen you get, like Trump, and the more frequent you get, you can easily imagine a norm being completely torn down,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a migration expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who added that Mr. Trump was “taking an ax” to “one of the strongest norms we’ve got in international law” — the right of a refugee to seek asylum.

To consider how that would happen and what it would mean, it helps to understand the basics of asylum and how Mr. Trump fits into its erosion.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link for a clear understanding of how refugee and asylum law is supposed to work and how immoral scofflaws like Trump, Sessions, and Miller are intentionally perverting and subverting it to satisfy their racist White Nationalist agenda.

Their final paragraph should send chills down the spine of every decent human being

The resurgence of populist and nationalist politics also bodes poorly. Us-vs-them movements, skeptical of international agreements and immigration, have little interest in asylum’s foundational concepts of global burden-sharing or universal rights.

If asylum rights were declining even in the era of sunny 1990s global liberalism, it is hard to imagine their doing much better in the era of Donald J. Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir V. Putin.

“It takes a really, really long time to build these norms, especially when they restrict government actions in some way,” Ms. Schwartz said. “It’s so much easier to take them down.”

If that happens, the consequences will be most felt far away from the United States-Mexico border, in places like Honduras, Myanmar, Jordan or Burundi, where millions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to go without the protections once promised by a world that had agreed “never again.”

PWS

11-03-18

APPROXIMATELY 700,000 TRANSGENDER HUMAN BEINGS LIVE IN THE U.S. – The Trump Administration Seeks To “Define” Them Out Of Existence!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Image
, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity.CreditAaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the department confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.

Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, which presses for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they’ve opted to turn their back on transgender people.” After this article was published online, transgender people took to social media to post photographs of themselves with the hashtag #WontBeErased

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

Image

A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.CreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

Health and human services officials said they were only abiding by court orders, referring to the rulings of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Tex., a George W. Bush appointee who has held that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

A 2016 ruling by Judge O’Connor concerned a rule that was adopted to carry out a civil rights statute embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

But in recent discussions with the administration, civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal, have pointed to other court cases. In a legal memo presented to the administration, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote, “The overwhelming majority of courts to address the question since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent in 1998 have held that antitransgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.”

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

“Courts and the previous administration took advantage of this circumstance to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a multitude of agencies, and under a multitude of laws,” the memo states. Doing so “led to confusion and negative policy consequences in health care, education and other federal contexts.”

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

One of the Trump administration’s first decisive policy acts was the rescission by the Education and Justice Departments of Obama-era guidelines that protected transgender students who wanted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive governmentwide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, like sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student’s sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student’s failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2018 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump May Limit How Government Defines One’s Sex. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Historical footnote: At one point in our “respective prior incarnations,” circa late 1970s, early 1980s, Robert Pear was the “immigration beat” reporter for the NY Times, and I was the Deputy General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.” I was sometimes asked by the Commissioner and the Public Information Office to respond to Robert’s telephonic inquiries. Smart, knowledgeable, incisive, and a “straight shooter” was how I would have described him in those days.

Moving on, I had a number of transgender individuals appear before me in Immigration Court. Almost all of them had been damaged by rejection, abuse, intentional cruelty, and humiliation inflicted by family, governments, teachers, and other community members who should have known better. The majority had either attempted suicide or admitted to having suicidal impulses. Yet, many appeared to have found the courage and determination to persevere.

Sadly, the attempt to deny the legal existence and humanity of transgender individuals seems to be something right out of the “Third Reich Playbook.” Using the law to “pick on,” target, and “legitimize” the dehumanization of already marginalized minorities was a “Hitler specialty.” And, in too many cases, lawyers and the judiciary were more than happy to help out. Some were even eager to “out-Hitler Hitler.”

History will deal harshly with the hate, racism, and intolerance being promoted by the Trump Administration. Where will YOU be recorded as standing! What have YOU done to remove these horrible individuals from public office and to resist their toxic and immoral programs and actions?

PWS

10/21/18

GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST A.G. PUTS IDEOLOGY ABOVE LAW & FACTS – How He’s Destroying the U.S. DOJ & Corrupting Our Government! –“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/politics/jeff-sessions-justice-department.html

Katie Benner reports for the NY Times:

Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach

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Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

By Katie Benner

Oct. 19, 2018

WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.

Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

President Trump has exacerbated the dynamic, they said, by repeatedly attacking Mr. Sessions and the Justice Department in baldly political and personal terms. And he has castigated rank-and-file employees, which career lawyers said further chilled dissent and debate within the department.

The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.

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“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.

A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.

“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.

Driven by Ideology

Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.

Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.

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The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.

In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.

Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.

To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.

Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.

In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.

The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.

Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.

“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.

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To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.

During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?

After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.

Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.

During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.

When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.

Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”

Without directly addressing the department’s positions on transgender rights or the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Flores noted that its reversals on workplace arbitration, voting rights, labor unions and the appointments of federal officials were validated by wins at the Supreme Court.

Trump’s Shadow

Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.

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President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

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The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.

More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.

Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.

“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.

As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.

Empty Spots

Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.

DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.

Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.

“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”

Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.

Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.

Correction: October 18, 2018

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.

Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

Follow Katie Benner on Twitter: @ktbenner.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

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I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)

Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.

Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”

PWS

10-21-18

NY TIMES EXPOSES TRUMP AS LIFETIME GRIFTER!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/opinions/trump-family-lies-expose-fraud-dantonio/index.html

Author Michael D’Antonio writes on CNN:

Michael D’Antonio is author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” (St. Martin’s Press). The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)Remember how then-candidate Donald Trump talked about how the “system is rigged”? He really knew what he was talking about.

In breathtaking detail and with exacting precision, The New York Times has confirmed that for much of his life, though he claimed to be a brilliant businessman, Trump was benefiting from a rigged system, which his family manipulated to transfer enormous wealth from his father to him.

This truth, long suspected by those who have peered into Trump’s finances, included questionable and potentially fraudulent practices that were used so the Trump clan could avoid paying the kind of taxes ordinary people pay every day.

Donald Trump and the Ministry of Truth

Trump’s lawyer vehemently denies the allegations against his client, telling the Times they are “100% false, and highly defamatory.”

And yet, the Times story is quite persuasive. According to the Times, by age 3, Trump was receiving $200,000 per year in today’s dollars from his father’s operations. By 8, he was a millionaire. And his wealth only grew from there.p

Talk about rigged.

Overall, the picture the Times paints comports with much that could be surmised about the family over the years. By the 1960s, his father, Fred, was one of the wealthiest men in New York. His financial prowess backed his son’s first big project, a hotel renovation at Grand Central Terminal, and his signature Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Although the back story about the hotel project and Trump Tower were well established, the facts assembled by the Times show Donald Trump used deception, not just in carrying out those projects, but throughout the course of his career.

The Times notes he profited from his father’s largess to the tune of more than $400 million. Much of this money was given to him though business entities, trusts and employment schemes that permitted him to accept multiple salaries at the same time.

The President who cried wolf

This manipulation included schemes that made Trump into his father’s employee, landlord, property manager and lender. One example, according to the Times, was Fred Trump’s development of Beach Haven Apartments. After building the sprawling complex with federal loans, he made his children the landlords — creating a stream of income that grew over decades.

But Beach Haven was just one of scores of schemes that Fred Trump devised, and his son was complicit in. In one key passage of the Times report, the authors explain that Fred and his wife, Mary, paid a little more than $52 million in taxes on payments of $1 billion given to their children. Under the law, though, they should have paid 55% tax on gifts — a figure that $52 million doesn’t even come close to.

The evidence the Times explored as this financial X-ray was assembled included more than 100,000 pages of documents. The data gleaned from these papers, some of which came from tax returns, show how nearly 300 streams of revenues, including receipts from coin laundries in apartment buildings, were funneled to the man who would eventually become president.

How to prepare for ex-President Trump

All the evidence gathered by the Times conflicts directly with the message Trump has long promoted. From his early days in Manhattan, when he marketed himself as a young tycoon, Trump insisted he had succeeded on the basis of his own ingenuity, creativity and grit.

This myth is the chief takeaway from his famous best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal,” and it was the backdrop for the development of his TV show “The Apprentice.” In the opening montage for the program, he falsely declared he was “the largest real estate developer in New York, by far.” Real estate insiders, of course, knew this claim was rubbish.

Not surprisingly, much of Trump’s rhetoric was seen as hyperbole in the service of a public image that was playful and ridiculous. However, once his business acumen became one of the pillars of his presidential campaign, it became fair game for intense examination. Trump has impeded the process by refusing to honor the tradition of releasing his tax returns. However, with impressive legwork and number-crunching, the Times has made the picture much less opaque.

Follow CNN Opinion

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Yup! No real surprise to most of us.

PWS

10-03-18

MAWA IS DOOMED: Demographics & Mutual Dependency Make Trump’s White Nationalist Racist Assault On Minorities Both Economically Stupid & Ultimately Futile – “Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/opinion/trump-cant-win-the-war-on-demography.html

William H. Frey writes in the NY Times:

Opinion

Trump Can’t Win the War on Demography

A proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census reveals the dependency between older white voters and America’s growing young minority population.

By William H. Frey

Mr. Frey, a demographer, is the author of “Diversity Explosion.”

Sept. 30, 2018

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A press conference held last April, when New York State filed suit against the Trump administration over the proposed changes to the 2020 census form.CreditCreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images

Since the early days of his campaign, from his proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border to his discredited committee on voter fraud, President Trump has declared war on America’s changing demography. His administration has followed through on that strategy with a proposal to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship. If the question remains on the form, millions of households, particularly Hispanic and Asian-American, could skip the census, leading to an overrepresentation of white Americans during this once-a-decade count.

Six lawsuits seeking to remove the proposed question are moving through the federal courts, with the first trial likely to take place this fall.

If it is added to the census form, the citizenship question will distort our understanding of who resides in the country. What this selective underenumeration will not do is make America’s growing racial minority populations disappear. The losers from this undercount include members of Mr. Trump’s older white base, who will suffer from lost investments in a younger generation, whose successes and contributions to the economy will be necessary to keep America great.

The demographic trends make this plain. America’s white population is growing tepidly because of substantial declines among younger whites. Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is a result of both low fertility rates among young whites and modest white immigration — a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.

The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others — most of whom are born in the United States.

Indeed, the only part of the white population that is growing appreciably is older people, the same group to whom Mr. Trump is appealing. Thanks to aging baby boomers, the older retirement-age white population will grow by one-third over the next 15 years and, with it, the need for the government to support Social Security, Medicare, hospitals and the like. Revenue for these programs will have to come from the younger minority population. If the census does not accurately count this population, then all the services that support children and future workers, such as public education, Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid, will be shortchanged.

Although the slowly growing, rapidly aging white population will be accurately counted, the fast-growing minority school-age and young adult populations that represent the nation’s future will not get their due — demographically, politically or economically.

An in-house Census Bureau analysis based on 2010 survey data found that the inclusion of a citizenship question reduced the response rate among households that have at least one noncitizen individual. While 7 percent of United States residents are themselves noncitizens, 14 percent live in households that include one or more noncitizens. The latter figure rises to 46 percent among all Hispanics and to 45 percent among Asian-Americans, compared with just 8 percent among blacks and 3 percent among whites.

Let’s assume that one in three people in Hispanic and Asian noncitizen households refuses to answer the census. If that’s the case, the Hispanic share of the United States population would drop by 2.1 percentage points (from 17.3 to 15.2 percent) and the total white population share would rise by 2.2 percentage points (from 62 to 64.2 percent).

This imbalance would influence congressional reapportionment, hurting large, immigrant-heavy states. It will also shape how congressional and state legislative districts are drawn, favoring rural and small areas at the expense of large metropolitan areas, since noncitizen households are far more prevalent in the latter.

The underenumeration of racial minorities would also misallocate billions of dollars in state and federal funds for housing assistance, job training, community development and a variety of social services that should be distributed on the basis of census counts. It would provide a faulty framework for surveys that will inform thousands of policy and business decisions, such as where to locate schools, hospitals, employment sites or retail establishments catering to different population groups, over the next decade.

Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities. Forcing an inaccurate accounting of who resides in the nation will have long-term negative consequences for everyone.

William H. Frey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”

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Yup! Racist bias and bigotry are always the enemies of truth, justice, and intelligent actions.

As Willie Nelson says “Vote ‘Em Out!”

PWS

10-01-18

NIGHT MOVES: Immigrant Kids Rousted From Their Beds & Taken To The “New American Kiddie Gulag!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html

Caitlin Dickerson reports for the NY Times:

Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City

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Migrant children at a detention facility in Tornillo, Tex.CreditCreditMike Blake/Reuters

By Caitlin Dickerson

Sept. 30, 2018

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.

To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.

The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.

“It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.

Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.

“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”

But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.

The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.

The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.

Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.

At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.

The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.

The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.

Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.

Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.

The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.

“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.

“This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”

The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.

Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.

Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.

“Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.

Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.

The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.

Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.

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If you don’t want to turn back the clock to 1939, get out the vote to remove this scofflaw, White Nationalist, racist Administration from power before it’s too late!

PWS

09-30-18

HON. JEFFREY CHASE & OTHERS: No Matter What The FBI Reports, Judge BKavs Has Already Shown That He Is An Angry, Belligerent, Political Partisan Unfit To Serve On High Court!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/9/28/kavanaugh-and-judicial-impartiality

Sep 28 Kavanaugh and Judicial Impartiality

The standard to keep in mind regarding the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice is found in 28 U.S.C. section 455(a): “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Let’s set aside for now the fact that as drafted, the statute seems to apply only to men (did Congress really not envision women judges?). Comments have been made recently about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh being “innocent until proven guilty.” That’s actually the standard for a defendant in a criminal trial. Because we as a society recognize how terrible it would be to send an innocent person to jail, possibly for many years, our legal system has established a standard that is willing to allow many who are guilty of crimes to go free, because we find that result preferable to ruining the life of an innocent person through wrongful conviction. Therefore, where the evidence establishes, for example, an 85 percent likelihood that the defendant committed the crime, a finding of not guilty is warranted, as the remaining 15% constitutes “reasonable doubt.” Of course, wrongful convictions still happen in practice, but nevertheless, the theory behind a presumption of innocence and a standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal proceedings remains a noble one.

Not being allowed to serve as a Supreme Court justice is a far, far cry from being convicted of a crime and sent to prison. Realize that there are only nine people in the whole country who are Supreme Court justices. Many who have never been appointed to the Supreme Court have nevertheless gone on to lead happy, productive lives; some have amassed significant wealth, others have even held positions of trust and respect in society.

In choosing a Supreme Court justice, the ideal candidate is not someone who hasn’t been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of some horrible act. Rather, it’s someone whose impartiality is beyond questioning. This is because in a democracy, faith in our judicial institutions is paramount. Society will abide by judicial outcomes that they disagree with if they believe that the “wrong” result was made by impartial jurists who were genuinely trying to get it right. Abiding by unpopular judicial decisions is the key to democracy. It is what prevents angry mobs from taking justice into their own hands. In the words of Balzac, “to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.”

A primary reason Republicans are so anxious to “plow through” (as Mitch McConnell, using the rapiest terminology imaginable, unfortunately phrased it) the nomination of Kavanaugh is because of how he might rule on abortion rights, an issue of great importance to the party’s base. Nearly all of the Republican Senators seem to believe that as long as Kavanaugh has not been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of attempted rape, then he is fully qualified to serve as the deciding vote in taking away a right that has been constitutionally guaranteed to women for the past 45 years.

However, the three Republican Senators who at the last second requested an FBI investigation into the charges against Kavanaugh may have realized that their colleagues were not applying the correct standard. Abortion rights involve a woman’s right to control her own body. Yesterday, the country heard very detailed and articulate testimony from a highly credible and courageous witness. What she described involved her being deprived of the right to control her own body, by a male who physically pinned her down, covered her mouth when she tried to scream for help, and tried to forcibly remove her clothing against her will. Her violator then added insult to injury by laughing at her in a way that still haunts her to this day. The credible witness stated that she was 100 percent certain that the male who violated her rights in this despicable way was Kavanaugh.

The evidence goes directly to the question of the candidate’s view of a woman’s right to control her own body. The question that Senators should be considering is how much public trust there will be in the impartiality of a decision that involves such right in light of the past actions of the justice casting the potential deciding vote.

Senators who will nevertheless vote for Kavanaugh will say that in spite of the testimony, they cannot be sure of his guilt. Or they may state that they are strongly convinced of his innocence. Regardless, many people might reasonably question Kavanaugh’s impartiality based on the evidence they have heard. (And remember, there have been two other women leveling similar accusations as well). Even those who believe him innocent should at this point realize that in light of public perception, the appearance of impropriety should disqualify Kavanaugh from consideration.

Should those Senators deciding the issue ignore the above, we will all likely live with the consequences for decades to come. Although it would not undo the damage, let us hope the public will respond quickly and decisively in voting the offenders out of office in November.

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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Others agree with Jeffrey:

Here’s what the NY Times Editorial board had to say:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/opinion/why-brett-kavanaugh-wasnt-believable.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable

And why Christine Blasey Ford was.

Sept. 27, 2018

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Pool photo by Saul Loeb

What a study in contrasts: Where Christine Blasey Ford was calm and dignified, Brett Kavanaugh was volatile and belligerent; where she was eager to respond fully to every questioner, and kept worrying whether she was being “helpful” enough, he was openly contemptuous of several senators; most important, where she was credible and unshakable at every point in her testimony, he was at some points evasive, and some of his answers strained credulity.

Indeed, Dr. Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was devastating.

With the eyes of the nation on her, Dr. Blasey recounted an appalling trauma. When she was 15 years old, she said, she was sexually assaulted by Judge Kavanaugh, then a 17-year-old student at a nearby high school and now President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Her description of the attack, which she said occurred in a suburban Maryland home on a summer night in 1982, was gut-wrenchingly specific. She said Judge Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, both of whom she described as very drunk, locked her in a second-floor room of a private home. She said Kavanaugh jumped on top of her, groped her, tried to remove her clothes and put his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. She said she feared he might accidentally kill her.

“The uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense,” she said, was her strongest memory.

Judge Kavanaugh, when it was his turn, was not laughing. He was yelling. He spent more than half an hour raging against Senate Democrats and the “Left” for “totally and permanently” destroying his name, his career, his family, his life. He called his confirmation process a “national disgrace.”

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” Judge Kavanaugh said, sounding like someone who suddenly doubted his confirmation to the Supreme Court — an outcome that seemed preordained only a couple of weeks ago.

Pool photo by Erin Schaff

Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.

We share the sorrow of every sensible American who feels stricken at the partisan spectacle playing out in Washington. Judge Kavanaugh was doubtless — and lamentably — correct in predicting that after this confirmation fight, however it ends, the bitterness is only likely to grow. As he put it in his testimony, “What goes around, comes around,” in the partisan vortex that has been intensifying in Washington for decades now. His open contempt for the Democrats on the committee also raised further questions about his own fair-mindedness, and it served as a reminder of his decades as a Republican warrior who would take no prisoners.

Go beyond the headlines and behind the curtain with Frank Bruni’s candid reflections on politics, culture, higher education and more every week.

Judge Kavanaugh’s biggest problem was not his demeanor but his credibility, which has been called in question on multiple issues for more than a decade, and has been an issue again throughout his Supreme Court confirmation process.

On Thursday, he gave misleading answers to questions about seemingly small matters — sharpening doubts about his honesty about far more significant ones. He gave coy answers when pressed about what was clearly a sexual innuendo in his high-school yearbook. He insisted over and over that others Dr. Blasey named as attending the gathering had “said it didn’t happen,” when in fact at least two of them have said only that they don’t recall it — and one of them told a reporter that she believes Dr. Blasey.

Judge Kavanaugh clumsily dodged a number of times when senators asked him about his drinking habits. When Senator Amy Klobuchar gently pressed him about whether he’d ever blacked out from drinking, he at first wouldn’t reply directly. “I don’t know, have you?” he replied — a condescending and dismissive response to the legitimate exercise of a senator’s duty of advise and consent. (Later, after a break in the hearing, he apologized.)

Judge Kavanaugh gave categorical denials a number of times, including, at other points, that he’d ever blacked out from too much drinking. Given numerous reports now of his heavy drinking in college, such a blanket denial is hard to believe.

In contrast, Dr. Blasey bolstered her credibility not only by describing in harrowing detail what she did remember, but by being honest about what she didn’t — like the exact date of the gathering, or the address of the house where it occurred. As she pointed out, the precise details of a trauma get burned into the brain and stay there long after less relevant details fade away.

She was also honest about her ambivalence in coming forward. “I am terrified,” she told the senators in her opening remarks. And then there’s the fact that she gains nothing by coming forward. She is in hiding now with her family in the face of death threats.

Perhaps the most maddening part of Thursday’s hearing was the cowardice of the committee’s 11 Republicans, all of them men, and none of them, apparently, capable of asking Dr. Blasey a single question. They farmed that task out to a sex-crimes prosecutor named Rachel Mitchell, who tried unsuccessfully in five-minute increments to poke holes in Dr. Blasey’s story.

Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield. Doubtless seeking to ape President’s Trump style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr. Blasey.

Pressed over and over by Democratic senators, Judge Kavanaugh never could come up with a clear answer for why he wouldn’t also want a fair, neutral F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against him — the kind of investigation the agency routinely performs, and that Dr. Blasey has called for. At one point, though, he acknowledged that it was common sense to put some questions to other potential witnesses besides him.

When Senator Patrick Leahy asked whether the judge was the inspiration for a hard-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in a memoir about teenage alcoholism by Mr. Judge, Judge Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”

Asking Mr. Judge would be a great idea. Unfortunately he’s hiding out in a Delaware beach town and Senate Republicans are refusing to subpoena him.

Why? Mr. Judge is the key witness in Dr. Blasey’s allegation. He has said he has no recollection of the party or of any assault. But he hasn’t faced live questioning to test his own memory and credibility. And Dr. Blasey is far from alone in describing Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge as heavy drinkers; several of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates have said the same.

None of these people have been called to testify before the Senate. President Trump has refused to call on the F.B.I. to look into the multiple allegations that have been leveled against the judge in the past two weeks. Instead the Republican majority on the committee has scheduled a vote for Friday morning.

There is no reason the committee needs to hold this vote before the F.B.I. can do a proper investigation, and Mr. Judge and possibly other witnesses can be called to testify under oath. The Senate, and the American people, need to know the truth, or as close an approximation as possible, before deciding whether Judge Kavanaugh should get a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court. If the committee will not make a more serious effort, the only choice for senators seeking to protect the credibility of the Supreme Court will be to vote no.

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Emily Bazelon of the NY Times Sunday Magazine wasn’t convinced by BKavs either:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/opinion/kavanaugh-blasey-ford-investigation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Senate’s Failure to Seek the Truth

It is impossible to justify the lack of a neutral investigation into the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Sept. 28, 2018

By Emily Bazelon

Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Twice as a reporter, I’ve interviewed women who have accused men of sexual assault and the men they accused. In both cases, the women looked me in the eye and told me about how they’d been raped, and then the men looked me in the eye and told me they’d never raped anyone. All four people spoke with force and emotion. In the moment, I wanted to believe each one. It’s uncomfortable to imagine that someone who seems wholly sincere is not. It’s confusing — it seems unfeeling — to turn away from someone who makes a vehement claim of truth.

If you watched Thursday’s hearing, in particular Christine Blasey Ford’s opening statement and Brett Kavanaugh’s, maybe you know what I mean. So then what? As a reporter, I looked for corroborating evidence as a means of assessing each person’s veracity. What else could I find out, and how did their accounts stack up against that? This is how investigators do their work. They find out as much as they can about the surrounding circumstances. Then it’s up to judges to weigh the facts and decide which account is most credible.

Judge Kavanaugh didn’t sound as if he was thinking like a judge. His partisan attack on Democrats wasn’t judicial, in any sense of the word. His approach to evidence wasn’t either.

The difficulty for holding Judge Kavanaugh accountable for what Dr. Blasey says was her assault is the lack of a certain kind of corroboration for her account. The other people she has named who were at the small gathering where she says the assault took place don’t remember such a gathering. Two of them are Judge Kavanaugh’s high school friends. One of them is Dr. Blasey’s friend.

But there’s no reason any of them would have remembered such a gathering. She says it was a spur-of-the-moment get-together, after swimming and before a party to come. And it took place 36 years ago. The gathering she describes is also consistent with one of Judge Kavanaugh’s calendar entries about drinking with his friends.

We also have more than Dr. Blasey’s word. Years ago, she talked about this assault, and named Judge Kavanaugh, with her husband and her therapist, and at a later time, she told a few close friends. They back her up on this. One memorable detail from her testimony has the ring of truth, in its specificity: Her assault came up in couples therapy with her husband because the traumatic memory triggered anxiety and claustrophobia, and that made her insist on adding a second front door to her house, to his understandable confusion. This is not the kind of fact a person makes up.

Dr. Blasey was firm about closing a door that would allow us to reconcile her accusation and Judge Kavanaugh’s denial. She is not mixed up about the identity of her assailant, she said. She is “100 percent certain” it was Judge Kavanaugh. The comfortable path for the judge’s supporters — believe she was assaulted, disbelieve he committed the assault — is gone. Her certainty was a pillar of the testimony she put the full weight of herself behind — her professional identity, her character, the careful consideration and precision about facts that was evident as she spoke.

Judge Kavanaugh refused to open another door that would allow the public, and the Senate, to reconcile these accounts of accusation and denial. He ruled out the possibility that he could not remember assaulting Dr. Blasey because he blacked out or was otherwise incapacitated by drinking. He was just as adamant about categorically denying the other sexual misconduct he has been accused of by two other women.

Judge Kavanaugh also didn’t much back off his denials of being a hard drinker or an aggressive drunk. This is his big weakness, stacked against other facts that have been gathered. Several classmates from his college days at Yale paint an entirely different picture of him as a drinker than the innocent one he offered of being a person who “likes beer.” So do his own yearbook entries and speeches. If you’re a judge who believes in strictly reading a text for its plain meaning, as Judge Kavanaugh says he is, his dismissals and wispy explanations aren’t persuasive.

If you’re thinking like a judge aiming to discover the truth, it’s also hard (impossible?) to justify the lack of a neutral investigation and the absence of other witnesses, beginning with Mark Judge, the friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, whom Dr. Blasey says saw and participated in the assault, but not ending with him.

The task of a judge or a Supreme Court justice is to seek the truth. The most important qualities for the job are probity and veracity. Nobody was on trial at the Senate Judiciary Committee. But only one person — Judge Kavanaugh — was asking to be elevated to the highest court in the land.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion).

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the magazine and the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. She is also a best-selling author and a co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, a popular podcast.

@emilybazelon • Facebook

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Meanwhile, over at Slate, Will Saletan wasn’t buying BKavs performance either:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/kavanaugh-lied-senate-judiciary-committee.html

POLITICS

Kavanaugh Lied to the Judiciary Committee—Repeatedly

Thursday’s hearing didn’t prove whether Kavanaugh assaulted Ford. But we do know the Supreme Court nominee wasn’t honest in his testimony.

By WILLIAM SALETAN

SEPT 28, 201810:44 AM

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Jim Bourg/AFP/Getty Images

On Thursday, after listening to testimony from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, several Republican senators said they would vote to confirm the nominee because it’s impossible to determine which witness—Ford or Kavanaugh—is telling the truth. Actually, it’s easy. We don’t know for certain whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford. But we do know that Kavanaugh lied repeatedly in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here are some of his lies.

1. “It’s been investigated.” The White House has ignored multiple requests from Democratic senators to authorize FBI interviews with the alleged witnesses in the case. In particular, there has been no FBI or Judiciary Committee interview with Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s accused accomplice in the alleged assault. In fact, Judge has fled to a hideout in Delaware to avoid being called to testify.

During the hearing, several Democratic senators pleaded with Kavanaugh to call for FBI interviews so that the truth could be resolved. Kavanaugh refused. When Sen. Chris Coons pointed out that the FBI had needed only a few days to complete interviews in the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill case, Kavanaugh said even that was too much, because the Judiciary Committee had already examined his case. “It’s been investigated,” he told Coons.

No honest judge would say that. None of the alleged witnesses, other than Ford and Kavanaugh, has been interviewed. Instead, the alleged witnesses have issued short statementsof nonrecollection and have asked not to testify. The committee’s Republican majority, eager to brush the case aside, has accepted these statements and has refused to ask further questions. In his testimony, Kavanaugh falsely claimed that FBI interviews would add nothing. Agents would “just go and do what you’re doing,” he told the senators.

Kavanaugh claimed that a vague statement of nonrecollection from Judge’s lawyer was sufficient “testimony.” He dismissed calls for Judge to appear before the committee, arguing that his own testimony was adequate. But Kavanaugh also mocked the committee’s Democrats, who lack the power of subpoena, by telling them to go talk to Judge. When Sen. Patrick Leahy asked whether Bart O’Kavanaugh, a drunken character in Judge’s book, was meant to represent Brett Kavanaugh, the nominee passed the buck to his testimony-evading friend: “You’d have to ask him.”

2. “All four witnesses say it didn’t happen.” Each time senators pleaded for an FBI review or a more thorough investigation by the committee, Kavanaugh replied that it wasn’t necessary, since all the people Ford claimed had been at the gathering where the alleged assault occurred had rejected her story. Eight times, Kavanaugh claimed that the witnesses “said it didn’t happen.” Three times, he said the witnesses “refuted” Ford’s story. Four times, Kavanaugh claimed that “Dr. Ford’s longtime friend,” Leland Keyser, had affirmed that the gathering never occurred.

That’s a lie. Keyser has stated that she doesn’t recall the gathering—she was never told about the attack, and she was supposedly downstairs while it allegedly occurred upstairs—but that she believes Ford’s story. That isn’t corroboration, but it isn’t refutation or denial, either. During the hearing, Sen. Cory Booker pointed this out to Kavanaugh, reminding him that in an interview with the Washington Post, Keyser “said she believes Dr. Ford.” Kavanaugh ignored Booker’s correction. Ninety seconds later, the nominee defiantly repeated: “The witnesses who were there say it didn’t happen.”

3. “I know exactly what happened that night.”Kavanaugh made several false or widely contradicted statements about his use of alcohol. This is significant because Judge has admitted to drunken blackouts, which raises the possibility that Judge and Kavanaugh don’t remember what they did to Ford. During the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked about Kavanaugh’s participation in a night of drunken revelry at Yale Law School. Kavanaugh assured Blumenthal, “I know exactly what happened the whole night.” Later, Booker asked Kavanaugh whether he had “never had gaps in memories, never had any losses whatsoever, never had foggy recollection about what happened” while drinking. Kavanaugh affirmed that he had never experienced such symptoms: “That’s what I said.”

These statements contradict reports from several people who knew Kavanaugh. Liz Swisher, a friend from Yale, says she saw Kavanaugh drink a lot, stumble, and slur his words. “It’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess,” she told the Washington Post. And in a speech four years ago, Kavanaugh described himself and a former classmate “piecing things together” to figure out that they’d “had more than a few beers” before an alcohol-soaked banquet at Yale Law School.

4. “I’m in Colorado.” As evidence that the charges against him were ludicrous, Kavanaugh told the committee that he had been falsely accused of committing an assault more than 1,500 miles away. He claimed that according to his accusers, “I’m in Colorado, you know, I’m sighted all over the place.” But a transcript of Kavanaugh’s Sept. 25 interview with Judiciary Committee staffers shows no claim of an offense in Colorado. The transcript says that according to a woman from Colorado, “at least four witnesses” saw Kavanaugh shove a woman “up against the wall very aggressively and sexually” in 1998. But Kavanaugh was specifically told during the interview that the scene of the alleged incident was in D.C., where he was living at the time.

Kavanaugh also told other whoppers. He claimed that his beer consumption in high school was legal because the drinking age in Maryland was 18. In reality, by the time he was 18, the drinking age was 21. He claimed that his high school yearbook reference to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” referred in part to his difficulty in holding down “spicy food.” He claimed that the entry’s jokes about two sporting events he and his high school buddies had watched—“Who won that game, anyway?”—had nothing to do with booze. And he defended his refusal to take a polygraph test on the grounds that such tests aren’t admissible in federal courts—neglecting to mention that he had endorsed their use in hiring and law enforcement.

Maybe Kavanaugh is an honest man in other contexts. Maybe he’s a good husband, a loving dad, and an inspiring coach. And maybe there’s no way to be certain that he assaulted Ford. But one thing is certain: He lied repeatedly to the Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Some of his lies, about the testimony of witnesses and the integrity of investigations, go to the heart of our system of justice. Any senator who votes to put this man on the Supreme Court is saying that such lies don’t matter.

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Also at Slate, Yascha Mounk predicts lasting damage to our Republic if BKavs is confirmed:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-consequences-democracy-partisanship.html

THE GOOD FIGHT

The Kavanaugh Stakes Just Got Higher

To confirm him now would be dangerous to the survival of our democratic institutions.

By YASCHA MOUNK

SEPT 28, 20184:54 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Drew Angerer/Getty Images and Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images.

At this moment of feverishly intense partisanship, it takes a great deal of courage to tiptoe away from your own tribe. Sen. Jeff Flake has not yet announced that he is willing to part for good; in the end, he may yet betray his professed principles and cast his vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. And yet, we should not underestimate how much strength it took for him to demand an investigation into Christine Blasey Ford’s serious allegations of sexual assault and delay the judge’s confirmation by at least a week. For now, he has proved to be one of the few people in the Senate—and perhaps one of the few in the whole country—who have insisted on taking Ford’s allegations seriously even though he actually shares most of Kavanaugh’s judicial views.

For the sake of our country, all of us should now hope that the FBI manages to uncover conclusive evidence that either supports or dispels Ford’s accusations. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. So the big risk we now face is that the same hell we have lived through for the past 48 hours will be repeated in even more farcical form next week. And that is why it’s very important to use this time to reflect seriously on how judicious people—and perhaps especially senators like Flake who profess to be conscientious conservatives—should vote if they have not made up their mind about the allegations.

It is painfully obvious that most Republican senators will vote to confirm Kavanaugh if the allegations against him are anything short of iron-clad; indeed, one shocking poll suggests that a majority of Republicans voters, and nearly half of evangelicals, would support his confirmation even if they did believe that he is guilty. It is also obvious that most Democrats will vote against his confirmation even in the unlikely case that the FBI should somehow manage to disprove Ford’s allegations; indeed, Kavanaugh’s extreme views on executive power provide a strong reason for any defender of liberal democracy to oppose his nomination. And yet, I think that one very important consideration has largely been overlooked.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Kavanaugh is an innocent man. If that’s the case, the raw anger he displayed during Thursday’s confirmation hearing is certainly understandable. While we might wish for a public figure to keep his poise even when his reputation is being impugned, it is perfectly human to lose your countenance under such circumstances.

But even under that charitable interpretation, Kavanaugh’s performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee makes him eminently unfit to sit on the highest court of the land.

A justice on the Supreme Court has to rule on a whole host of issues that are of huge partisan significance: If he is confirmed, he will have to settle substantive questions of public policy—from abortion rights to the health care mandate—on which Democrats and Republicans have hugely differing preferences. Just as importantly, he will also help to set the parameters that are supposed to ensure that Democrats and Republicans can appeal for the votes of their fellow citizens on fair terms.

But how can somebody who has accused Democrats of a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” be seen as impartial when he rules on a gerrymandering case that could deliver a huge advantage to Republicans? How can somebody who describes serious allegations of sexual assault as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” be expected to give both sides a fair hearing if the outcome of a presidential election should once again be litigated in front of the Supreme Court? And how can somebody who denounces the “frenzy on the left” to derail his nomination be trusted to ensure that the left’s most vocal enemy, Donald Trump, does not overstep the bounds of his constitutional authority?

Because of Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings on the confirmation of Merrick Garland during the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the current composition of the Supreme Court is already tainted. Now, the confirmation of as nakedly partisan a jurist as Kavanaugh would go a long way toward destroying whatever remains of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. And this would not only tank the trust Americans have in the last branch of government that has, according to polls, consistently been more popular than secondhand car salesmen; it also significantly raises the likelihood that Democrats will engage in yet another round of tit for tat.

Precisely because partisans need to be able to trust that courts can enforce the rules for fair political competition between them and their adversaries, attempts by a political party to change the ideological makeup of the judiciary are extremely dangerous to the survival of democratic institutions. That’s why (direct or indirect) court-packing schemes have been key elements of the authoritarian takeovers in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. And it’s also why the current governments in Poland and Hungary are playing constitutional hardball to ensure that judges they appoint command a majority on the most important courts in their respective countries.

There can therefore be little doubt that any attempt by Democrats to pack the Supreme Court, for example, by expanding its size, would be another step in a tit-for-tat spiral at whose end autocracy awaits. And yet, recent events will make it very hard for those voices within the Democratic Party that recognize this danger to prevail. If one side is so willing to abuse precedent and decency to, as Kavanaugh might put it, screw the libs, it becomes very difficult for the other side not to reciprocate in kind.

This is why Kavanaugh’s confirmation would not just be a disaster in itself; it would also be a strong reason to become even more pessimistic about the future of American politics. The GOP and Trump are now more fully aligned than ever. Our country’s partisan divide is deeper than it has been in living memory. The mutual hatred and incomprehension is more acute than it has been in decades. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, it’s very, very difficult to envisage what path could possibly lead us out of this nightmare.

Jeff Flake has acted with much more courage and decency than most liberals care to admit. But the responsibility that now rests on his—and Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s and Sen. Susan Collins’—shoulders is even greater than he might realize.

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Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate is also no BKavs fan:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-hearing-fear-a-justice-brett-kavanaugh.html

JURISPRUDENCE

Fear a Justice Brett Kavanaugh

As his confirmation steamrolls ahead, Americans should be terrified.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

SEPT 28, 201812:16 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images and Gabriella Demczuk-Pool/Getty Images.

When Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh was over, it wasn’t quite clear what had hit those of us who’d been sitting in the room. The hearing room in Dirksen is tiny, and while the slammed binder and the escalating shouting of the nominee might have looked pretty dramatic on TV, inside the chamber, the effect was that of an out-of-control house party. Too loud, too scary, too close, too real. Like being locked inside something terrible with the music cranked up.

Anita Hill once told me that, in 1991, Clarence Thomas had race and she had only gender. But now, in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh had rage and Christine Blasey Ford had only gender. With the Senate Judiciary Committee moving on Friday to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate without any further inquiry around Blasey Ford’s damning and plainly credible testimony that Kavanaugh had gleefully and drunkenly sexually assaulted her at a 1982 house party as his buddy Mark Judge watched, it appears as though his rage alone will have been enough to earn him life tenure on the highest court in the land.

The dynamic of Thursday’s hearing was consistent: He had fury, and contempt, and seething threats that the republic would pay if he were thwarted. She had to functionally lie back and try not to infuriate anyone, as Republicans cowered behind the female prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, they had brought on to interrogate her. That was until it was Kavanaugh’s turn to speak, when they quickly jettisoned that paper-thin pretense of investigative “independence” and joined Kavanaugh to form a chorus of angry shouting men. They towered silently over Mitchell for the first half of the hearing, then summarily ignored her when she wasn’t offering questions fast or furious enough to protect their nominee.

At least Anita Hill was insulted, demeaned, and discredited to her face. Ford was patronized, thanked, and told that she was very, very credible. Over and over she was told she’d been given a “safe space” to tell her story; as if a safe space substitutes for reasoned process and investigation. She was given a safe space and then dismissed as though she were some character in a very sad French movie that had been very affecting indeed but had nothing to do with the great man and his destiny. After presenting an undeniable narrative—and one the nobody ever really attempted to specifically refute—she was told that her credibility didn’t count for anything because a man was bellowing and injured, that whatever had happened to her was not as important as his pain. And Senate Republicans—having tucked Mitchell back into her naughty chair—were delighted to bellow and yelp of horrid injuries they too had sustained alongside their guy.

Of course, the purported wrong was the process. Again, the villain of the piece was Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had kept Ford’s July letter outlining one of Kavanaugh’s alleged crimes in confidence at her request until eventually forwarding it to the FBI for inquiry earlier this month. Don’t be fooled, though: Feinstein would have been screamed at just as furiously had she come forward weeks or months earlier with Ford’s report, and another pretext for dismissing Ford and her witnesses would have been concocted.

As GOP rage gathered steam, we were told that this needed to be treated as a criminal proceeding—innocent until proven guilty—and the Republicans contended that there was no evidence of criminal conduct. But, of course there was evidence: compelling firsthand testimony and numerous supporting accounts. And of course, they refused to subpoena the key witness to the event, opting instead for the “we take his word for it” route of investigation by registered letter. The “hearing,” as expected, had been staged as a puppet show of “credibility.” And absent witnesses, or evidence, or any mechanism for fact finding, both sides could be called credible and Brett Kavanaugh could still be confirmed. On Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake—perhaps the Senate’s greatest profile in cowardice masquerading as courage—said that he would cast the key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination out of the committee. Despite the lack of anything resembling a meaningful investigation, which Ford and the other women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual violence have repeatedly requested, and the judge has repeatedly declined to request, it now appears Kavanaugh will be confirmed. His fate rests in the hands of Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Joe Manchin.* Given her mind-bending bravery and likely folk-hero status, one hopes that Ford will not now come to believe that her decision was made in vain. But it was impossible on Friday morning not to think of her own description of her reluctance to come forward out of fear that she would “just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway.”

Ultimately, he had rage and she had gender, and a “job interview” was recast as though it would result in a lifelong criminal conviction with a death sentence on the line for the man in the dock. Calling no witnesses and accepting no supporting testimony were a perfect way to ensure that he would be innocent of all charges. She had gender. They were sorry for her loss.

Brett Kavanaugh is never going to understand that women don’t sort themselves into those upon which he bestows his munificence (clerks, girls in plaid skirts) and those he can shout at, and bully, like Feinstein and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Feminism doesn’t mean you get to pick which women you patronize and which you can insult. Brett Kavanaugh is also unlikely to understand that justice doesn’t mean demanding your lifetime appointment because it’s your time.

Put aside whether any sane litigant can have any confidence in the justice system after the man who will be the decisive vote on the court made it manifestly clear that he believes half the country, and the media, and liberal dark money were all in on a conspiracy to take him out. Because of the Clintons. This wasn’t ultimately a hearing about whether Kavanaugh deserved to be elevated to the high court. It was a blind partisan tantrum in which he dragged the judicial branch down to a place of ugliness and rancor from which it will not soon recover.

Others have detailed the incomplete answers, the fact that he wasn’t questioned correctly about his calendar, the ways in which his claims that he had been exonerated by other witnesses were absolutely distorted, and the laughable claims about his well-documented and widely known drinking and his “sensitive stomach.” While Ford offered exacting answers, Kavanaugh repeated half-truths and conspiracy theories and sneered and slammed through a fog of rage. It was a perfect contrast not just to Ford’s conduct, but to that of Merrick Garland, who never said a word when the seat to which he was entitled was yanked away.

There were two distinct moods in the Kavanaugh hearing: Ford evoked undistilled sadness and vulnerability; Kavanaugh evoked raw fear that if he were ever crossed, he would lose control. Do. Not. Make. Him. Angry. is the new judicial temperament. It is the perfect metaphorical springboard to the highest court in the land, where he will say he’s calling balls and strikes while he froths with contempt at those he believes coordinated against him: Be very afraid. This is what we will call “justice” now.

Correction, Sept. 28, 2018: Due to an editing error, this post originally misstated that Collins, Murkowski, and Manchin were said to be voting in a bloc with Flake.

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Think that a Justice BKavs won’t be a threat to the Constitution, precedent, Due Process, abortion, and women’s rights? Check out my earlier post from “Courtside” on how BKavs “swallowed the whistle” on a clear constitutional violation by the Administration directed at a vulnerable migrant girl. http://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/10/24/goin-down-again-dc-cir-rejects-trump-administrations-position-orders-usg-to-permit-undocumented-teens-abortion/

At the time, I surmised (quite correctly in retrospect) that BKavs’s willingness to distort the law was motivated to some extent by his desire to burnish his reactionary credentials for the Supreme Court appointment for which he was groomed by the GOP right wing and to which he and his supporters have always believed he is entitled. Nothing comes through from BKavs and the GOP Senators supporting him more than an arrogant sense that he is absolutely entitled to this appointment.

So, how do I come down on the BKavs mess? Well, I suspect that the results of the FBI investigation will be inconclusive. That being the case, the GOP will confirm him and he will become Justice Kavanaugh.

That being said, I thought that his emotional partisan attack on Democratic Senators, his overt rudeness to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and his unsupported “conspiracy theory” re the Clintons showed that he is exactly what his critics have been saying all along: an injudicious and disingenuous partisan.

No matter what really happened with Ford, he is “damaged goods” who can’t credibly serve on the Supremes. A decent person would withdraw at this point for the good of the country.

Certainly, Trump can find a reactionary GOP female judge with no personal baggage to carry the flag. He was actually pretty stupid to nominate BKavs in the first place rather than a female vetted by the Heritage Foundation whom the Dems couldn’t have touched.

I assume that Senator L. Graham is auditioning for Gonzo’s job after the midterms. He seems to forgotten what he and his GOP buddies did to Judge Merrick Garland — a very decent person and good jurist who never even got a chance to be heard at all. The GOP just decided that “advice and consent” meant “stonewall if you don’t like the President.” And as a moderate and polite “center left” jurist, Judge Garland certainly would have been a more appropriate pick for the Supremes than BKavs! But, power is power, and the GOP has it right now — the Dems don’t.

Nothing is likely to stop Judge’s Kavanaugh’s elevation at this point. But, as Jeffrey suggests, getting to the ballot box could make BKavs the last such appointment for some time.

Best,

PWS

09-30-18

NPR: “THIS AMERICAN LIFE” – HEAR ABOUT HOW THE WHITE NATIONALIST RESTRICTIONISTS IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ARE GOING ABOUT SYSTEMATICALLY AND DISINGENUOUSLY PERVERTING US IMMIGRATION LAWS – Useless, Counterproductive, & Expensive Prosecutions Of Asylum Seekers – When The Facts Don’t Support Your Decisions, Just Delete Or Misrepresent Them!

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/656/let-me-count-the-ways

Yes, youʼve heard about the family separations. Youʼve heard about the travel ban. But there are dozens of ways the Trump administration is cracking down on immigration across many agencies, sometimes in ways so small and technical it doesnʼt make headlines. This week, the quiet bureaucratic war that’s even targeting legal immigrants.

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Long, but highly documented, compelling, and well worth the listen if you really want to know about the ugly, depraved policies of Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, Cissna, Gene Hamilton, and the rest of the White Nationalist Racist Brigade.

Regime Change, Regime Change, Regime Change; Vote, Vote, Vote!

PWS

09-29-18

HERE’S WHAT A RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION POLICY LOOKS LIKE, AS TRUMP ATTACKS LEGAL IMMIGRATION! — “[C]ultivating xenophobia, as President Trump has done from the beginning of his campaign, and then trading on that fear to drum up votes, does not create much of a foundation for rational dialogue.”

As usual, CNN’s Tal Kopan and her colleague Tami Luhby give us one of the best summaries of what’s happening:

How Trump’s new definition of ‘public charge’ will affect immigrants

By Tami Luhby and Tal Kopan, CNN

The Trump administration is seeking to give itself broad latitude to reject immigrants from the US if they have too little income and education, which could effectively impose a merit-based immigration system without an act of Congress.

The change is put forth in a proposed regulation, which would dramatically reshape how the government defines an immigrant likely to be dependent on the government.

President Donald Trump has long touted what he calls a merit-based system of immigration, backing a legislative proposal that would have heavily favored English-speaking, highly educated and high-earning immigrants over lower-skilled and lower-income applicants.

Quietly announced Saturday night, the proposed regulation could give the administration the authority to reshape the population of US immigrants in that direction without legislation.

The rule would mean many green card and visa applicants could be turned down if they have low incomes or little education because they’d be deemed more likely to need government assistance — such as Medicaid or food stamps — in the future.

The proposal applies to those looking to come to the US and those already here looking to extend their stay. And even if immigrants decide not to use public benefits they may be eligible for, the government could, under the proposed rule, still decide they are likely to do so “at any time in the future” and thus reject them from the US.

The administration says the proposed revamp of the so-called public charge rule is designed to ensure immigrants can support themselves financially.

“This proposed rule will implement a law passed by Congress intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Saturday.

But immigration advocates say it goes far beyond what Congress intended and will discriminate against those from poorer countries, keep families apart and prompt legal residents to forgo needed public aid, which could also impact their US citizen children.

They also say it will penalize even hard-working immigrants who only need a small bit of temporary assistance from the government.

“(The proposed rule) would radically reshape our legal immigration system, putting the wealthy at the front of the line, ahead of hardworking families who have waited years to reunite,” a coalition of more than 1,100 community advocacy groups wrote in a statement this week. “No longer would the US be a beacon for the world’s dreamers and strivers. Instead, America’s doors would be open only to the highest bidder.”

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/politics/immigration-public-benefits/index.html

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Meanwhile, editorials in the NY Times and the LA Times blasted the Administration’s latest anti-immigrant actions:

The NY Times says:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/opinion/editorials/immigrants-welfare-benefits-trump-administration.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20180925&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=2&nlid=79213886emc%3Dedit_ty_20180925&ref=headline&te=1

An Unhealthy Plan to Drive Out Immigrants

Denying green cards or visas to those on Medicaid or food stamps will only cost the United States more later.

Sept. 24, 2018

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

The Department of Homeland Security, headed by Kirstjen Nielsen, has proposed a new rule that would deny green cards or visas to immigrants here legally who have used public assistance.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Trump administration has taken another step in its program to use fear and cruelty to drive out legal, as well as illegal, immigrants.

On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule that would enable it to deny green cards and visas to immigrants here legally who have used public health and nutrition assistance, including Medicaid and food stamps.

The United States already denies green cards and visas to applicants likely to become “public charges.” But that designation has generally referred only to a narrow set of people who need cash assistance or long-term institutionalization.

The new rules would also offer some exemptions — participation in the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program would be excluded, for example, as would refugees and asylum seekers and minors with Special Immigrant Juvenile status, meaning they had been abused or neglected.

But it’s not clear that those exemptions would provide sufficient protection. The Kaiser Family Foundation has indicated that fear of being denied residency would most likely cause immigrants to withdraw from both the targeted and the exempted programs. As Politico has reported, even when the current proposal was just a rumor, immigrants began withdrawing from these programs in droves. What’s more, not everyone who should be able to seek asylum or obtain special juvenile status is able to do so.

The Department of Human Services estimates that as many as 382,000 people would be affected by the new rule each year. There is no estimate yet on how many of them would be deemed to be public charges, but that number is likely to be far higher than under the current rules.

Which, of course, is the point. In an announcement on Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said that she expected the rule to “promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”

That rationale is both callous and foolish: Scaring vulnerable populations off public assistance is likely to cost much more in the long run, in part because neglecting preventive health care and basic medical problems makes patients only more expensive to treat down the road. What’s more, Kaiser estimates that more than eight million children who are citizens but have at least one noncitizen parent will be caught in the cross hairs.

The Trump administration, however, is betting that a very public effort to crack down on immigrants, whether they’re here legally or not, will motivate its political base in time for the midterm elections. It’s just one more part of a package that has so far included an effort to detain indefinitely minors who have crossed the border and another to cap the number of refugees at its lowest level ever. It’s the border wall, without the wall.

There’s a real debate to be had over the criteria to decide who can stay in this country and who must go. What is the right way to manage family migration? Or evaluate asylum claims? Or weigh American labor needs against the skills of prospective visa holders? But cultivating xenophobia, as President Trump has done from the beginning of his campaign, and then trading on that fear to drum up votes, does not create much of a foundation for rational dialogue.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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Here’s what the LA Times had to say:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=b270b5ea-1b78-4f77-86a2-3aa238bcde0b

The ‘public charge’ pretext
In an effort to make it more difficult for legal immigrants to live and work in the United States, the Trump administration proposed new rules over the weekend giving officials the right to withhold green cards from applicants who take advantage of a wide range of government programs to which they are legally entitled, including food and housing aid.
And for prospective immigrants who apply for visas from overseas, government officials would have broad power to reject people whom they believe might someday in the future tap government programs for financial support. That change, experts say, will reduce the overall flow of immigration and skew it toward people seeking to emigrate from more advanced countries.
These are unnecessarily strict and hard-hearted rules aimed at solving a problem that social scientists say doesn’t exist.
The government has for decades rejected visa requests and green card applications from people who are likely to become “public charges,” defined since 1999 as “ primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.” That has usually been interpreted, reasonably, to mean people who rely on cash support or people who would require institutional care. Furthermore, the Clinton-era welfare reforms already put major aid programs out of reach for most legal immigrants until they’ve been here for five years; undocumented immigrants are barred from nearly all public support.
Now, however, the administration wants to consider a legal immigrant a “public charge” if he or she receives government benefits exceeding $1,821 (15% of the federal poverty guidelines) over 12 months. The net effect, advocates for immigrants argue, will be a self-purging of people living and working here legally from the rolls of Medicaid, food subsidies and housing support, among other programs.
The government estimates that the new regulations would negatively affect 382,000 people, but advocates say that is likely an undercount. And the rules would keep people from coming to the country who economists say are vital for the nation’s economic growth . President Trump’s xenophobic view of the world stands in sharp contradiction not only to American values, but to its history. We are a country of immigrants or their descendants, and as a maturing society we will rely more and more on immigration for growth. Research shows that even those who start out in low-wage jobs, and thus are likely to get some financial help from the government, often learn skills that move them into higher income brackets and help the overall economy .
These proposed regulations would force immigrants in low-paying jobs to reject help to which they are legally entitled — and which could speed them along the path to financial security — or to jeopardize their ability to remain here. That’s a cruel Solomon’s choice.

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The “Trump GOP” has clearly abandoned the pretense that they are only against illegal immigration. By attacking refugees and other legal immigrants they are making it clear that immigrants no longer are welcome in our “Nation of Immigrants.” Sounds pretty stupid, not to mention unrealistic. But, that’s the essence of “Trumpism.”

PWS

09-25-18

HOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PUTS MIGRANTS IN HARM’S WAY!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/opinion/trump-has-it-backward-many-migrants-are-victims-of-crime.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Contributors

By Stephanie Leutert in the NY Times:

In June, Josue, a 21-year-old Honduran, reached a safe house in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas. He was there with 11 other Central American migrants. His family had spent the previous year scraping together the $3,800 necessary for this last part of his journey to the United States.

But the “safe” house was not so safe. Only miles from the border, his migration was interrupted as armed men burst into the house, kidnapping the migrants and demanding an additional $1,800 for their release. If their families couldn’t raise the money, the armed men warned, the migrants would be killed.

Every day, dramas and tragedies like this play out for the Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants traveling through Mexico. The Trump administration’s rhetoric has repeatedly linked migrants to gangs, violence and crime, and cast undocumented immigrants as a threat to public safety. But in fact, a majority of the Central Americans arriving at the United States-Mexico border are not perpetrators but rather victims of violence, both in their home countries and during their fraught transit through Mexico.

Over the past three decades, the risks and dangers on the journey from Central America to the United States border have increased — ramped-up United States and Mexican migratory enforcement has pushed migrants onto more invisible, risky paths, and impunity in Mexico for criminal perpetrators has kept them on the streets.

Yet however daunting the risks and challenging the policies, they have not significantly put a dent in the number of Central Americans traveling north. What has changed is that hundreds of thousands of migrants make the journey to the United States along more clandestine and treacherous routes.

For Central American migrants, there is no single transportation method or route to travel through Mexico to reach the United States. Travel experiences are influenced by a migrant’s nationality, gender, age and income. If a Central American migrant hires a smuggler for transiting through Mexico — and 60 percent report hiring these guides in surveys conducted by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte — then the routes will also be determined by the smugglers’ contacts and methods. But they all have at least one thing in common: Not one is safe, and each comes with a series of risks.

As soon as migrants near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, the dangers begin. To reach Mexico’s southernmost cities, migrants with a bit of money can take local buses or hire taxis. Those with empty wallets must walk. This may include hiking for days on the sides of highways, often at night to avoid detection and the strong tropical sun. Mexican officials have focused their enforcement attention less at the physical border and more at highway checkpoints set up around 30 or 100 miles into Mexican territory, where migration authorities attempt to identify individuals transiting through the country without the appropriate documents.

Migrants fleeing violence in Central America may travel distances equivalent to that between Chicago and Miami (about 1,400 miles) or Chicago and the West Coast (more than 2,000 miles). Many are subject to crime along the way. The map shows some of the most-traveled routes.

In these desolate areas in the south of Mexico, migrants may be set upon by criminals like corrupt authorities, opportunistic local groups and members of the gangs MS-13 or Barrio 18 — the very groups that migrants may be fleeing and who have a presence in this part of Mexico.

That was the case for Josue, who was robbed by local criminals as he hiked the 40-mile stretch of remote highway between a Guatemala border city, El Ceibo, and Tenosique, a southern Mexican city. The thieves slipped out of the nearby ranch land and stripped him of his possessions, even taking his sneakers and leaving him with one of the robbers’ decrepit, fungus-covered pair. According to prosecutors in the southernmost states of Chiapas and Tabasco, these robberies and assaults are fairly common. Women are also singled out for other forms of violence, with Doctors Without Borders reporting that one-third of female migrants suffer sexual abuse while in Mexico.

To advance north, the poorest Central Americans climb aboard Mexico’s train cars (nicknamed “La Bestia,” or the Beast) and ride exposed through rain, heat and frigid wind, and with the constant fear of slipping off the sides. They also travel on high alert for the gang members or train security guards who sometimes board the trains to extort or rob the riders. Given these extreme risks — along with Mexican officials’ 2014 crackdown on migrants riding the train through the Southern Border Plan (Programa Frontera Sur) — only 12 percent of Central American migrants in 2017 reported to Colegio de la Frontera Norte researchers that they had taken the trains at any point in their journey.

Migrants with a little more money use private cars, buses or trailers and move along Mexico’s major north-south highways; they pass through the Mexican migration checkpoints by passing as locals or paying off corrupt officials. Some avoid the checkpoints altogether and hike around them. Traveling in vehicles is generally safer for migrants, but there may still be hardships from the varying quality of food, abysmal sleeping arrangements or mistreatment from their guides or fellow migrants.

At the United States border, patrol agents and a range of radars, sensors and other technology seek to block the migrants’ irregular crossing into the United States. In response, some Central Americans may attempt to cross in the remote areas in the vast California or Arizona deserts or near the border city of Ciudad Juárez. Others ask for asylum at ports of entry. But most travel up Mexico’s Gulf Coast to reach Reynosa, Tamaulipas. This city shares a border with McAllen, Tex., within the southern Rio Grande Valley. In fiscal 2017, the United States Border Patrol reported that it apprehended two-thirds of all irregular Central American migrants (104,305 in total) in this 320-mile section of the border.

On the Mexico side of the border near Reynosa, drug trafficking organizations, particularly the Gulf Cartel and the splinter groups of the Zetas, control the territory and the smuggling routes and act as unofficial tax agents. These groups offer the Central American migrants’ final security challenge and engage in their signature crime, kidnapping. Their presence gives this area the nefarious distinction of having the highest number of migrant kidnappings. Since 2011, data from Mexico’s National Migration Institute has documented 1,034 kidnapping victims in Tamaulipas — 75 percent of all migrant kidnapping victims in the country. Women and minors each account for more than a quarter of the victims.

But official numbers barely scratch the surface of the crimes committed against migrants in Mexico. Central Americans rarely report the crimes to Mexican authorities because of a lack of trust, fear of repercussions or limited knowledge of the country’s justice system. Josue is a good example. He was able to escape his captors after the Federal Police intercepted a car that was taking him to a second safe house, but he decided not to report the kidnapping given concerns over his safety.

When migrants do report these crimes, few are ever investigated or prosecuted. In July 2017, the Washington Office on Latin America reportedthat only 1 percent of crimes against migrants in Mexico ever reach a conviction.

What could push people to knowingly face these conditions or, worse, to bring their children along? For Central Americans, there is a deep chasm between migrants’ desires for safety, work and family reunification and their ability to fulfill these dreams within their own countries or legally in the United States.

In Reynosa, Josue was gearing up to try to make the hike from the border to Houston. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Central American migrants taking these same routes and escaping violence at home or in transit, he was confident that the journey would be worth it. The hope of a better and safer life in the United States was stronger than the fear of any dangers along the way.

Stephanie Leutert is the director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion).

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As I always say, “we can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration.”

And, that’s doubly true when you have a disingenuous Administration that intentionally misrepresents the causes of human migration. Of course, “doubling down” on “doomed to fail” policies is going to fail and produce more chaos without materially diminishing “extralegal migration.” And, slashing refugee programs and other avenues of legal immigration are sure to compound the problem.

But, then the Trumpsters try to shift the blame for their predictable failures to the victims — if walls, cruelty, detention, family separation, denials of Due Process, and hate speech won’t stop them, let’s have more walls, crueller and more inhumane detention, more family separation, less Due Process, and spew forth more hateful xenophobic rhetoric. It’s destroying our country and our reputation; but it isn’t having any real long-term effect on migration. Almost anybody outside the Administration and their White Nationalist cheerleaders could have told them that.

PWS

09-18-18

IMMIGRATION COURTS: MISSION FAILURE! – PROPOSED SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT GIVES A GLIMPSE OF HOW SOME U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES ABANDONED THEIR OATH TO UPHOLD CONSTITUTIONAL DUE PROCESS & “RUBBER STAMPED” DENIALS FOLLOWING SHOCKINGLY UNFAIR “REVIEW” PROCESS – “Exhibit A” In Why The Current Bogus Credible Fear Process As Manipulated By Sessions Needs Meaningful Review By Article III Judges! – A “Dependent Judiciary” Just Can’t Be Trusted To Do The Job In The “Age of Trump & Sessions!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/family-separation-asylum-settlement.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Caitlin Dickerson reports for the NY Times:

. . . .

Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg, who represented the plaintiffs, said that many parents were evaluated for “credible fear” after having their children removed, but before they were told where the children had been taken. He said his team submitted evidence showing that, during the interviews, the parents were “out of their minds with trauma, focused solely on the well-being and the whereabouts of their kids.”

In one piece of evidence included in the case, a recording of an immigration judge questioning a mother about her asylum claim, the mother can be heard crying too hard to answer the judge’s questions and says that she feels sick, Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said. After a few minutes, he said, the judge affirms an asylum officer’s finding that the woman’s fear of returning to her home country is not credible and asks that she be taken to see a doctor.

. . . .

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Read Caitlin’s full article concerning the recent proposed settlement at the above link.

Obvious question: Why would somebody like Jeff Sessions be given authority over a “court system” that is supposed to insure Due Process for asylum applicants? That’s even worse than having the fox guard the henhouse! The results are as horrible and unlawful as they are predictable.

PWS

09-14-18

WASHPOST, NYT, & LA TIMES EDITORIAL BOARDS “CALL OUT” TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S STUPID AND CRUEL CHILD ABUSE PROPOSAL! — “There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/first-they-separated-families-now-theyre-incarcerating-children/2018/09/07/affedb90-b21b-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html?utm_term=.90ac0917a68e

The Post’s View Opinion

First they separated families. Now they’re incarcerating children.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Washington on Wednesday. (Cliff Owen/AP)

By Editorial Board

September 7

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ripped more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents’ arms with no plan or procedures for reuniting them, resulting in some 500 children remaining effectively orphaned even today, five months after the fact. Now it proposes a new policy for jailing migrant children indefinitely, one that ensures they “are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”

That assurance, along with its rich irony, is offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has proposed the policy in a brazen attempt to escape the strictures of a two-decade-old court settlement forbidding the long-term incarceration of minors who cross the border seeking asylum in the United States.

Ms. Nielsen, who was instrumental in executing the zero-compassion policy that traumatized so many toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens this spring and summer, now would have Americans believe her department recognizes children as particularly vulnerable human beings, deserving of dignity and respect. How will that dignity and respect be meted out when those children are confined, along with their parents, in long-term detention facilities that the administration now proposes to build?

Ms. Nielsen, along with immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, are convinced that so-called catch-and-release policies are largely to blame for the flow of families across the southern border. Among the factors contributing to those policies is the 1997 court agreement known as Flores, which arose from abundant evidence that migrant children had been harmed by long-term detention, and forbade it.

The reality is that Flores has been in effect for more than 20 years, during which migrant flows have dipped and surged. When the Trump administration tried, just a few months ago, to amend the Flores agreement to permit long-term detention of families, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee rejected its argument that the agreement was to blame for a recent surge in border crossings. “Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge wrote.

The administration’s proposal sets up a new court fight, one that will test Homeland Security’s risible insistence that the new policy would “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores agreement while freeing the government to get tougher on migrants. The “basic purpose” of Flores was to protect children from harm; confining them defeats that mandate.

It is legitimate to take concrete steps to ensure that migrant families appear in immigration court when ordered to do so. Ankle bracelet monitors, bail and other means of achieving that have been effective, and their use can be expanded. What’s less effective, and at odds with American values, is the administration’s abiding faith in punitive measures where children are concerned. There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/opinion/editorials/dont-let-migrant-kids-rot.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

Opinion

Don’t Let Migrant Kids Rot

If the Trump administration gets its way, the government will be able to detain the children indefinitely.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Sept. 9, 2018

Image
Undocumented immigrants at a bus station in McAllen, Tex.CreditCreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

For all the human brain’s mysteries, its development is quite well understood. Early childhood and adolescence are crucial times of unparalleled neural growth. Just as trust and stability can enhance that growth, fear and trauma can impede it. Institutionalization, in particular, can have profound and deleterious effects, triggering a range of developmental delays and psychiatric disorders from which recovery can be difficult, if not impossible.

In light of that knowledge, the Trump administration’s latest move against immigrant children is especially troubling. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations that would allow the government to detain migrant children indefinitely. Officials are now prohibited from detaining such minors for more than 20 days by an agreement known as the Flores settlement, which has been in place since 1997. The new rules would end that settlement and would likely open the door to an expansion of detention centers across the country.

D.H.S. says that by eliminating Flores, officials will deter illegal immigration, reasoning that undocumented adults will be less likely to enter the country to begin with if they know they can’t avoid long-term detention simply by having a child in tow. Immigration activists say the proposed rule’s true aims are both simpler and more diabolical than that: “They want to strip away every last protection for detained immigrant children,” says Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Even with Flores in place, those protections have proved thin. Youth migrant shelters — there are roughly 100 such facilities housing more than 10,000 minors across the country — have been cited for a long list of abuses, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, blatant medical neglect, the forcible injection of antipsychotic medications, the unlawful restraint of children in distress and harsh rules that prohibit even siblings from hugging one another. The shelters in question, several of which are facing lawsuits, are part of a network that has received billions of federal dollars in the past four years alone. That money has continued to pour in even as abuse allegations have multiplied.

Related

For more on detained migrant children

Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers

Aug. 4, 2018

Opinion | The Editorial Board

The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children

Aug. 30, 2018

The administration bears unique responsibility for these violations, in no small part because its disastrous and short-lived separation policy has wreaked havoc on a system that was already rife with problems. Shame alone should have federal officials working hard to undo the damage of that policy and to prevent further harm to the children under their charge, never mind that it’s the right thing to do under any number of international agreements and norms.

But their latest plan is more likely to exacerbate existing problems than to resolve them. The proposed regulations would eliminate the standing requirement that detention centers submit to state inspections and would narrow the scope of relatives to whom children can be released to only parents and legal guardians — no aunts, uncles or other extended family members. It would also trigger a proliferation of new facilities: The administration projects that Immigration and Customs Enforcement-run family detention would increase from 3,000 beds to 12,000. The number of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors may also grow.

The proposals will be open to public comment for the next 60 days before they can be finalized. Readers who wish to register their concern can do so on the Federal Register’s website.

After that period, the issue is almost certainly headed to court. Observers say the same judge who has ruled against past attempts to undermine Flores is likely to thwart this attempt as well.

Which paints a stark reality for what’s motivating this move and what it ultimately means: The administration surely knows what a long shot this proposal is, but it will undoubtedly excite President Trump’s political base as the midterm elections approach. So while the administration plays politics, the well-being of thousands of children who came to America seeking protection and safety will be put at risk — today and, developmentally, for the rest of their lives.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=6656cffa-1bec-452b-a9de-dbba54a04ac1

From the LA Times Editorial Board:

It’s wrong to jail children

The Trump administration wants no limits on how long it can detain migrant kids and their parents.

Of all the appalling things the Trump administration has done, the cruelest has to be arresting and detaining asylum seekers, and separating them from their children. Seeking to deter desperate families from entering the United States by detaining parents for weeks or months apart from their children is so hard-hearted it shocks the conscience. The cruelty has been compounded by ineptitude, as hundreds of migrant children have been stranded in the United States without their parents, who have been deported.

Thankfully, the administration’s callousness has been held in check by a court order left over from President Clinton’s second term. The 1997 settlement agreement in Flores vs. Reno requires, among other things, that children facing deportation be held in detention for no more than 20 days, and in the least restrictive environment possible. Courts later extended the agreement to include families with minors in detention centers. (The government has been sued at least five times for allegedly violating the order.)

Now the Trump administration wants to scrap the agreement entirely by instituting even more draconian regulations that would allow it to detain families with minors as long as it may take to resolve their deportation cases. That’s beyond the pale.

Migrant children seeking permission to remain in the U.S. should not be detained regardless of whether they have a parent to accompany them in confinement. It’s especially troubling that one of the administration’s stated reasons for doing so is to send a threatening message to other families who might seek asylum in the U.S. from dangerous circumstances in their home countries.

Of course, the government has the right and duty to set immigration laws and enforce them. And we have a system for that, broken as it might be. Current U.S. law allows asylum to be granted to people facing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” If immigration courts rule that applicants don’t meet those requirements, or reject appeals by people seeking permission to stay on humanitarian grounds, the government is entirely within its rights to send them to their home countries. But it should not (and may not, under international agreements) incarcerate them — especially when they are children — unless there is good cause to think the migrants are a flight risk or pose a threat to public safety.

Remember, most of these families arrive seeking official permission to stay, so they have a powerful incentive not to skip their court hearings or break the law: doing so only leads to deportation orders. Advocates argue that most of the aslyum seekers who do miss court dates never received an appearance notice, often because the process takes so long that their addresses change and official records don’t catch up. As for public safety, a raft of studies has found that immigrants, regardless of their status, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

If no-shows truly are the administration’s concern, it inherited a new Family Case Management Program from the Obama administration that matched eligible asylum-seeking families with housing, healthcare, schooling for the children and legal advice to help navigate the immigration court system. Families in that program had a 99% show-rate for court hearings. But Trump killed it last year.

Under the Flores agreement, the government can hold minors only in state-licensed facilities. But states tend not to license facilities for families, which, the government argues, means that it must release the families while the deportation cases continue.

The new regulations would let the federal government do the licensing of facilities, paving the way for a massive expansion of the detention system. The government currently uses three family detention centers with a total of 3,500 beds. They are secured, dormitory-style facilities with shared bathrooms, common areas, play space and rooms for classes. Trump wants to add 15,000 more beds, but that may just be the start; border agents caught 77,674 people migrating as families in 2016 alone.

It is fundamentally inhumane to incarcerate children — with or without their parents — while immigration courts try to figure out what to do with them. Psychiatrists warn of the damage even from short-term detentions, and some of those who have been held for months have shown signs of severe emotional distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. So in its obsessive quest to stop migrants from seeking asylum, the Trump administration is willing to, in essence, commit child abuse. That’s a stain not just on the presidency, but on the nation.

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The White Nationalist Scofflaws are at it again! Even if were effective as a deterrent (which all reliable data and experience show it isn’t), detention for deterrence would still be illegal.

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to uphold our Constitution and true American values against the White Nationalism, racism, cruelty, xenophobia, and lawlessness of Trump, Sessions, and their cronies! Put an end to Sessions’s “New American Gulag” (“NAG”)!

PWS

09-10-18

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