Obama Administration – Page 21 – immigrationcourtside.com

NPR: Sessions Out To Destroy US Immigration Court System — “All the more reason why we need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court removed from the political shenanigans and enforcement bias of Sessions and his DOJ!”

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/597863489/sessions-want-to-overrule-judges-who-put-deportation-cases-on-hold

Joel Rose reports for NPR:

The Trump administration has been trying to ramp up deportations of immigrants in the country illegally. But one thing has been standing in its way: Immigration judges often put these cases on hold.

Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering overruling the judges.

One practice that is particularly infuriating to Sessions and other immigration hard-liners is called administrative closure. It allows judges to put deportation proceedings on hold indefinitely.

“Basically they have legalized the person who was coming to court, because they were illegally in the country,” Sessions said during a speech in December.

Sessions is using his authority over the immigration court system to review a number of judicial decisions. If he overturns those decisions, thousands of other cases could be affected. In this way, he is expected to end administrative closure, or scale it back.

The attorney general may also limit when judges can grant continuances and who qualifies for asylum in the United States.

This could reshape the nation’s immigration courts, which are overseen by the Justice Department, and make them move faster. Sessions says he is trying to clear a massive backlog of cases that is clogging the docket.

But critics say he is weighing changes that would threaten the due process rights of immigrants, and the integrity of immigration courts.

“What he wants is an immigration court system which is rapid, and leads to lots of deportations,” said Nancy Morawetz, who teaches the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law.

“It’s really just an unprecedented move by the attorney general to change the way the whole system works,” she said.

It’s rare for an attorney general to exercise this power, but Sessions has done it four times in the past three months.

Separately, for the first time, the Justice Department is setting quotas for immigration judges, pushing them to resolve cases quickly in order to meet performance standards.

It’s not just immigration lawyers who are worried about the effect of any changes. The union that represents immigration judges is concerned, too.

“A lot of what they are doing raises very serious concerns about the integrity of the system,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, “judges are supposed to be free from these external pressures.”

The attorney general insists he’s trying to make sure that judges are deciding cases “fairly and efficiently.” And says he is trying to clear a backlog of nearly 700,000 cases.

That is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of cases in administrative closure. Nearly 200,000 immigration cases have been put on hold in this way in the past five years alone.

“Far and away, administrative closure was being abused,” said Cheryl David, a former immigration judge who is now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.

He says many of those cases should have ended in deportation. “But rather than actually going through that process, the Obama administration simply administratively closed them. And took them off the docket to be forgotten,” he said.

Sessions has chosen to personally review the case of an undocumented immigrant named Reynaldo Castro-Tum who didn’t show up for his removal hearing. The judge wondered whether the man ever got the notice to appear in court and put his deportation proceedings on hold.

In a legal filing in January, Sessions asked whether judges have the authority to order administrative closure and under what circumstances.

Immigration lawyers and judges say there are legitimate reasons to administratively close a case. For instance, some immigrants are waiting for a final decision on visa or green card applications.

There is a backlog for those applications, too. They’re granted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is separate from immigration court. And that can take months, if not years.

Immigration lawyers and judges are worried that undocumented immigrants could be deported in the meantime.

“You know this is not the private sector where you pay extra money and you can get it done in two days,” said Cheryl David, an immigration lawyer in New York.

David represents hundreds of undocumented immigrants who are facing deportation. She often asks judges to put the proceedings on hold.

“It gives our clients some wiggle room to try and move forward on applications,” she said. “These are human beings, they’re not files.”

Immigration lawyers say these changes could affect immigrants across the country.

Brenda DeLeon has applied for a special visa for crime victims who are undocumented. She says her boyfriend beat her up, and she went to the police.

She came to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador in 2015, fleeing gang violence, and settled in North Carolina.

“If I go back, then my life is in danger,” DeLeon said through a translator. “And not only mine, but my children’s lives too.”

For now, a judge has put DeLeon’s deportation case on hold while she waits for an answer on her visa application.

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Get the full audio version from NPR at the above link.

Haste makes waste! Gimmicks to cut corners, deny due process, and cover up the Administration’s own incompetent and politically driven mal-administration of the Immigration Courts is likely to cause an adverse reaction by the “real courts” — the Article III Courts of Appeals — who ultimately have to “sign off” on the railroading of individuals back to potentially deadly situations.

I also have some comments on this article.

In Castro-Tum, on appeal the BIA panel corrected the Immigration Judge’s error in administratively closing the case. Consequently, there was no valid reason for the Attorney General’s “certification” and using the case for a wide ranging inquiry into administrative closing that was almost completely divorced from the facts of Castro-Tum.
I also question Judge Arthur’s unsupported assertion that “Far and away administrative closing was being abused.”
- According to TRAC Immigration, administrative closing of cases as an exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” by the DHS Assistant Chief Counsel accounted for a mere 6.7% of total administrative closings during the four-year period ending in FY 2015.
- In Arlington where I sat, administrative closing by the Assistant Chief Counsel was a very rigorous process that required the respondent to document good conduct, length of residence, family ties, employment, school records, payment of taxes, community involvement, and other equities and contributions to the U.S. With 10 to 11 million so-called “undocumented” individuals in the U.S., removing such individuals, who were actually contributing to their communities, would have been a complete waste of time and limited resources.
- The largest number of administrative closings in Arlington probably resulted from individuals in Immigration Court who:
  - Had been granted DACA status by USCIS;
  - Had been granted TPS by USCIS;
  - Had approved “U” nonimmigrant visas as “victims of crime,” but were waiting for the allocation of a visa number by the USCIS;
  - Had visa petitions or other applications that could ultimately have qualified them for permanent legal immigration pending adjudication by the USCIS.
- Contrary to Judge Arthur’s claim, the foregoing types of cases either had legitimate claims for relief that could only be granted by or with some action by the USCIS, or, as in the case of TPS and DACA, the individuals were not then removable. Administrative closing of such cases was not an “abuse,” but rather eminently reasonable.
- Moreover, individuals whose applications or petitions ultimately were denied by the USCIS, or who violated the terms under which the case had been closed by failing to appear for a scheduled interview or being picked up for a criminal offense were restored to the Immigration Court’s “active docket” upon motion of the DHS.

There are almost 700,000 cases now on the Immigration Courts’ docket — representing many years of work even if there were no new filings and new judges were added. Moreover, the cases are continuing to be filed in a haphazard manner with neither judgement nor restraint by an irresponsible Administration which is allowing DHS Enforcement to “go Gonzo.” To this existing mess, Sessions and Arthur propose adding hundreds of thousands of previously administratively closed cases, most of which shouldn’t have been on the docket in the first place.

So, if they had their way, we’d be up over one million cases in Immigration Court without any transparent, rational plan for adjudicating them fairly and in conformity with due process at any time in the foreseeable future. Sure sounds like fraud, waste, and abuse of the system by Sessions and DHS to me. All the more reason why we need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court removed from the political shenanigans and enforcement bias of Sessions and his DOJ. We need this reform sooner, rather than later!

PWS

03-30-18

ROBIN UREVICH TAKES US INSIDE THE DEADLY “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” OPERATED BY THE DHS — “Civil Detainees” Are Dying At A Rate Of About One Per Month In The Hands Of Our Government — Many Think Some Of These Deaths Were Preventable!

The fabulous investigative reporter Robin Urevich with continuing coverage from Capitol & Main’s “Deadly Detention Series:”

https://capitalandmain.com/deadly-detention-self-portrait-of-a-tragedy-0314

“Deadly Detention: Self-Portrait of a Tragedy

Co-published by International Business Times
The missteps and errors of ICE and its contractors have led to concerns about the safety of immigrant detainees with mental health issues.

Published

on

March 14, 2018

By

Robin Urevich

Photo: Robin Urevich

A suicidal detainee never got the mental health care he needed and was placed in a cell that contained a known suicide hazard,
a ceiling sprinkler head.

Co-published by International Business Times

Sometime after midnight in mid-May of 2017, 27-year old JeanCarlo Jimenez Joseph fashioned a noose from a bed sheet and hanged himself in his solitary confinement cell at the Stewart Detention Center, located in the pine woods of southwest Georgia. Stewart’s low-slung complex lies behind two tall chain-linked fences, each crowned with huge spirals of glinting barbed wire. Beginning in 2006, the facility began to house undocumented immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Jimenez’s fall sounded like a sledgehammer blow, said 20-year-old Abel Ramirez Blanco, who was also in segregation at Stewart that night. Another detainee, Miguel Montilla, had peered through the metal grate on his door and saw guard Freddy Wims frantically knocking at Jimenez’s cell door. “He got on the walkie-talkie and started screaming,” Montilla said.

“I looked in the door and I didn’t see him,” Wims would later remember. Wims scanned the small cell until, he said, “I looked over in the corner by the commode and he was hanging there by the sheet.”

Within hours, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents descended on Stewart, about 140 miles south of Atlanta, to find out if foul play had been involved in Jimenez’s death. It wasn’t. But the investigation, which generated audio interviews of Stewart staff and detainees, along with recordings of Jimenez’s personal phone calls and official documents, revealed that CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that operates Stewart for ICE, and ICE Health Services Corps, which provides health care at Stewart, cut corners and skirted federal detention rules. The organizations’ missteps and errors have led to concerns about the safety of immigrant detainees with mental health issues.

Also Read: “Hell in the Middle of a Pine Forest”

The probe disclosed that Jimenez repeatedly displayed suicidal behavior, but never got the mental health care he needed. He was also placed in a cell that contained a known suicide hazard, a ceiling sprinkler head, upon which he affixed his makeshift noose. Freddy Wims was assigned to check Jimenez’s cell every half hour, but didn’t do so. Instead, he falsified his logs to make it appear he had, and he was later fired. Stewart’s warden, Bill Spivey, retired after Jimenez’s death; a CoreCivic spokesman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the two events were unrelated. Spivey couldn’t be reached for comment for this article.

Psychiatrist: Placing a suicidal prisoner in solitary confinement is like placing someone with bad asthma in a burning building.

CoreCivic’s spokesman, Jonathan Burns, didn’t respond to questions about Jimenez’s death and detention. Instead, he wrote in an email, “CoreCivic is deeply committed to providing a safe, humane and appropriate environment for those entrusted to our care, while also delivering cost-effective solutions to the challenges our government partners face.” ICE spokeswoman Tamara Spicer wrote in an email that she couldn’t answer questions about the case because it is “still undergoing a comprehensive review that has not been released.”

Jimenez had been in solitary for 19 days at the time of his death — punishment for what his sister would tell investigators was an earlier suicide attempt. He had leapt from a second-floor walkway in his dormitory, and later repeatedly told detention center personnel, “I am Julius Caesar for real.” He was physically unhurt, but Stewart staff were aware he was suffering from mental illness and had a history of suicide attempts, documents show. Still, after his jump, Jimenez saw a nurse who quickly cleared him for placement in a 13-by-7-foot segregation cell alone for 23 hours a day. After that, his suffering seemed to intensify.

“Placing a suicidal prisoner in segregation is like placing someone with bad asthma in a burning building,” Terry Kupers, a Bay Area psychiatrist who has studied solitary confinement and who reviewed some of the documents in Jimenez’s case, noted in an email. He added that half of successful prison suicides occur among the three to eight percent of prisoners in solitary confinement.

Jimenez wasn’t put on suicide watch, or even ordered monitored more frequently than the normal half-hour checks. He continued to display alarming behavior. Montilla told the GBI that he and a guard had heard Jimenez screaming and banging on his cell wall two weeks before his death. “Man, I’m suffering from psychosis and I hear voices talking to me and they’re bothering the shit out of me,” Montilla recalled Jimenez saying.

Registered Nurse Shuntelle Anderson told a GBI agent that some five days before his death, she saw Jimenez banging the metal mirror in his cell. He told her, “These fucking voices, they won’t leave me the fuck alone …They’re telling me to commit suicide…but I don’t want to harm myself.”

See Interactive Map of U.S. Detention Deaths

Jimenez asked Anderson for a higher dose of the anti-psychotic drug Risperidone, which he’d previously been prescribed at a North Carolina mental health facility. It was at least the second such request he’d made at Stewart — where he received only a fourth of his normal dosage.

Anderson told investigators she left a note for the facility’s behavioral health counselor, Kimberly Calvery, saying that Jimenez wanted more medication. Calvery arranged for him to speak with the detention center’s psychiatrist but Jimenez didn’t live long enough to keep the appointment, which was scheduled later in the morning he died. Calvery later told investigators that Jimenez “never showed any suicidal tendencies at the Stewart Detention Center.”

Homeland Security reported that at the Stewart Detention Center solitary confinement, which isn’t supposed to be punitive, appeared to be sometimes used to punish trivial offenses.

“He was such a good kid,” Anderson told investigators in the hours after Jimenez’s death. Earlier that night, she’d given him medication and he’d shared a self-portrait he’d been working on. “It was very nice, very detailed and last night, when I went down there, he said, ‘Look, I finished it.’” Anderson said. Guards and detainees also described Jimenez as mostly lucid and friendly, despite his occasional outbursts, quirky comments and a propensity to call himself Julius Caesar.

In a December 2017 report, “Concerns about ICE Detainee Treatment and Care at Detention Facilities,” the Homeland Security inspector general wrote that at Stewart and three other facilities (which are operated by county governments), “We identified problems that undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment.” The IG’s staff wrote that immigration detention isn’t supposed to be punitive, and noted that at three of the facilities, including Stewart, segregation or solitary confinement appeared to be sometimes used to punish trivial offenses. At Stewart, the inspectors also found that showers were moldy and lacked cold water in some cases, and some bathrooms had no hot water, and that medical care, even for painful conditions, had been delayed for detainees.

Since 2003, 179 immigrant detainees have died in custody, many from preventable causes, like pneumonia and alcohol withdrawal.

Additionally, despite Jimenez’s nonviolent crimes, he was classified as a high-risk detainee. He had been convicted of marijuana possession, petty theft and an assault charge that arose from an unwanted hug he gave a woman in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was issued a red jumpsuit to signal his danger level and housed with others who were similarly classified. The inspector general’s report flagged misclassification of detainees as a problem at Stewart. While there, Jimenez wavered between wanting to wage a court battle to stay in the U.S., and paying for his own return to Panama through a process called voluntary departure. But, before he could take the first steps to fight his case, he ran into roadblocks, including the failure of the detention center to send a set of documents that Jimenez’s attorney had requested.

Since 2003, 179 immigrant detainees have died in custody, many from preventable causes, like pneumonia and alcohol withdrawal. Human rights groups point to dozens of others who endure painful medical conditions and must wait for care or never receive it at all.

Like Jimenez, they’ve been dropped into a ballooning system whose rapid growth and diffuse nature would make it hard for the government to closely monitor, even if it attempted to do so.

ICE had fewer than 7,500 detention beds in 1995. Now the system is 500 percent bigger, with nearly 40,000 beds nationwide in 200 facilities that operate under three different sets of government standards. The Trump administration plans to add 12,000 more beds this year alone even as vulnerable detainees currently fall through the cracks.

JeanCarlo Jimenez completed his self-portrait and tied knots in a white bed sheet to shorten it. A guard observed him jumping rope with it.

Federal officials largely maintain a hands-off approach, leaving it to private prison companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to run day-to-day affairs. The companies tend to run them like prisons and not as the civil detention facilities that the law says they are.

Photo: Robin Urevich

“Contractors operating facilities for ICE typically have backgrounds in corrections, and this shapes how they administer their ICE detention facilities,” said Kevin Landy, who led the Obama administration’s immigration detention reform efforts as the head of ICE’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning.

“Problems such as medical care, the way disciplinary proceedings are administered, the lack of sensitivity to detainee needs, and conditions generally reflect the problems writ large in our correctional system,” Landy said.

At Stewart, these problems have been particularly acute, said attorney Azadeh Shahshahani, whose group, Project South, monitors conditions at Stewart. “The facility needs to be shut down. It’s beyond redemption.”

Jimenez had come to the United States from Panama when he was 10, graduated from high school in Kansas, and considered himself American, even though he lived in the U.S. without documents most of his life. Public records show he even registered to vote in North Carolina — as a Republican.

“When I heard what happened, it blew my mind,” said Matt Schott, who was about four years older than Jean Jimenez and now works for an oil and gas exploration company in Kansas. Jimenez was 19 when he and his sister, Karina Kelly, came to Matt’s church, and they became friends 12 years ago. “He brought a lot of laughter to everybody,” Schott said, recalling Jean’s huge open smile. In photos, he’s beaming, showing a mouthful of teeth and wearing a big afro.

“Jean would just show up at the house. We’d play Christian worship music, and be up till 3 or 4 in the morning. We would get a bunch of food and go to a park,” Schott remembered. A video on Jean’s Facebook page shows him executing expert dance moves as friends play instruments outdoors.

Schott said when they began to share more of their lives, Jean tearfully told Matt he was undocumented and had to hide in plain sight. “He had big dreams. He wanted to start an architecture firm and had already named it — Eyes Design.”

Except for a few Facebook messages they exchanged, Schott lost track of Jimenez after the latter moved to North Carolina with his mother and stepfather about eight years ago. While there, Jimenez had obtained protection from deportation through the Obama administration’s DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

But, in the six months before he was detained, his mental health declined. He was hospitalized twice for psychotic episodes and lost his DACA status. Jimenez also had the misfortune of being arrested just as President Trump took office. The new administration had declared that anyone in the country illegally was fair game for immigration enforcement, even if they’d committed no crime or if their crimes were as minor as Jimenez’s. He was transferred to ICE custody.

For Jimenez the prospect of deportation to Panama, a country he had left behind as a child, was scary, his sister Karina wrote in a chronology of conversations with her brother that she sent to the family’s attorney. “Game is over,” Kelly recalled Jimenez saying. But before being shipped to Panama, he would be held at Stewart, arguably one of the most troubled detention centers in the country.

About six weeks into his detention a fellow detainee punched Jimenez in the groin and busted his lip. Jimenez was punished with his first stint in solitary — even though he was the victim in the attack and the detention center’s camera shows he didn’t fight back.

“I’m tired of this life,” Jimenez told his stepfather Gilberto Rodriguez in a recorded phone call soon after, his voice sounding uncharacteristically weary.

“Don’t give up, you can start over,” Rodriguez counseled. “In God’s name you’re getting out…we have to do this together.”

Just two days before his death, Jimenez’s mother, Nerina Joseph, and Rodriguez made the trip from Raleigh, North Carolina, to visit him. “She reported that he was so happy to see them, and they had the best 60 minutes a mother in her shoes could ever ask for,” Karina Kelly wrote.

Still, Jimenez’s mother was concerned about his well-being, and stopped by El Refugio, a hospitality center in Lumpkin, Georgia, where detention center visitors can find a meal and place to sleep. El Refugio volunteers also visit detainees, and Joseph requested that someone check on Jimenez. A volunteer attempted to see him the next day, but was turned away because Stewart personnel mistakenly said Jimenez couldn’t receive visitors. Records show there were no such restrictions on Jimenez’s visits.

Later that night, Jimenez completed his self-portrait, and tied knots in a white bed sheet to shorten it. A guard even observed him jumping rope with the sheet a few hours before he died and asked him about it. Jimenez replied he was staying in shape and the guard took no further action.

Ten days after Jimenez’s suicide, a fellow detainee, Abel Ramirez Blanco, told GBI investigator Justin Lowthorpe that he had listened in his cell as guards, nurses and finally paramedics labored over Jimenez’s lifeless body, and an automatic defibrillator blared robotic CPR instructions.

A videotape of the scene inside Jimenez’s cell shows nurses Shuntelle Anderson and Davis English desperately trying to resuscitate Jimenez. Anderson yells for guards to call 911. “I’m calling an ambulance,” a voice answers. Records from a regional 911 center show paramedics were called six minutes after Wims radioed a medical emergency, and arrived in Jimenez’s cell some seven minutes after they were called.

ICE inspectors haven’t yet weighed in on Jimenez’s case. But in studying a 2013 suicide, ICE reviewers criticized staff at a Pennsylvania facility for waiting four minutes to call 911, writing that the Mayo Clinic and the American Heart Association recommend calling 911 before beginning CPR.

Jimenez was eventually taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead less than 15 minutes after his arrival.

Red caution tape was placed in the shape of a large X on Jimenez’s cell door. Inside the cell, steel shelves held his art supplies, his artwork and a plastic instant-noodle soup bowl with some of the broth still in it. On his wall Jimenez had written, “The grave cometh. Halleluyah.”

A death like Jimenez’s “could have happened to me,” Ramirez told GBI agent Lowthorpe, because of his own anxiety and depression. Ramirez said Stewart staff didn’t help him when he reported those symptoms. Instead, he was thrown in segregation where he witnessed Jimenez’s suicide, and began to feel even more desperate.

Matt Schott struggled to reconcile his friend’s death with his Christian faith. “People believe you commit suicide and you go to hell,” Schott said. “I can’t believe that about Jean because I knew who he really was. I love the guy and I believe one day I’ll see him again.”

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https://capitalandmain.com/deadly-detention-hell-middle-pine-forest-0314

“DEADLY DETENTION

Deadly Detention: Hell in the Middle of a Pine Forest

Immigrant detainees represent more than $38 million a year for CoreCivic, a for-profit prison company that is the largest employer in one of Georgia’s poorest counties.

Published

on

March 14, 2018

By

Robin Urevich

Photo: Robin Urevich

Former ICE Guard: “They’re always putting them in the hole — in segregation. And they manhandle people.”

Deep in a Georgia pine forest, two hours south of Atlanta, early morning mist rises in wisps over the Stewart Detention Center, a facility run by CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies. The bucolic scene clashes with the tall, barbed wire-topped chain-link fences surrounding the center, and the echoing shouts, crackling radios and slamming doors inside the walls. Technically, the roughly 1,700 men here aren’t prisoners, but civil detainees being held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they plead their cases to remain in the United States, or as the government prepares their deportations.

Also Read: “Self-Portrait of a Tragedy”

The detainees represent more than $38 million a year for CoreCivic — the government pays the company nearly $62 a day per man. It is the largest employer in Stewart County, one of Georgia’s poorest.

Immigrant rights groups have charged that the conditions here are not only indistinguishable from those in prison, they are downright abusive. In fact, a December 2017 Homeland Security Inspector General’s report expressed concerns about human rights abuses and, last month, Joseph Romero, a retired ICE officer who served as a guard, told Capital & Main that he resigned a supervisor job at Stewart in 2016 because he didn’t like the way people were treated.

Guatemalan Asylum Seeker: “It is hell in here. I wouldn’t even recommend it to a person I hate.”

“They’re always putting them in the hole — in segregation,” Romero said. “And they manhandle people. They think they can take care of their problems like that.” Romero noted that few officers speak Spanish, so there is little understanding or communication between guards and detainees.

JeanCarlo Jimenez Joseph’s suicide by hanging while in solitary confinement last May and 33-year-old Cuban national Yulio Castro Garrido’s death from pneumonia last December have brought these concerns to the fore.

Jimenez was mentally ill and had been in solitary for 19 days when he died — four days longer than the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture considers torture.

See Interactive Map of U.S. Detention Deaths

“It is hell in here. I wouldn’t even recommend it to a person I hate,” said Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a 23-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker who has been in detention — at Stewart, the Atlanta Detention Center and at the Irwin Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia — since 2015.

In addition to many other abuses that he alleges — rotten food, forced work and abuse by guards — Hill has also served 60 days in isolation. He said it was retaliation for a grievance he’d filed. He was placed in solitary, ostensibly because he’d been exposed to chickenpox; however, other detainees who, like Hill, reported they’d had the disease as children were released.

CoreCivic documents show that detainees were in isolation for such offenses as “horse playing.”

ICE detention standards specify that isolation is to be used only to punish the three most serious categories of rule violations, and only “when alternative dispositions may inadequately regulate the detainee’s behavior.”

But CoreCivic documents released after Jimenez’s suicide show that on the day that he died, detainees were in isolation for such offenses as “horse playing,” “refusal to obey staff” or “conduct that disrupts.” Four men had been in solitary for more than 60 days. One of them, Sylvester Smith, who was deported to Sierra Leone at the end of 2017, served at least four months in isolation. His charges were variously listed as “being found guilty of a combination of th…” (the word is cut off on CoreCivic’s restricted housing roster) and “failure to obey.”

After Jimenez died, however, then-warden Bill Spivey held weekly meetings aimed at reducing the number of people in solitary. By October 2017, documents show, there were just 10 people in isolation, but when Spivey retired and an assistant warden took over, the census more than doubled. CoreCivic spokesman Jonathan Burns didn’t respond to emailed questions about the current number of men in segregation.

Joseph Romero, the former ICE officer who worked at Stewart, is tall and graying with a full mustache and beard. He is proud of his ICE career but thinks the for-profit detention model the government has adopted has to go.

“They should go back and have these detention centers run by Immigration, not by private contractors,” Romero said. ICE officers treat people better, because they value their careers, Romero said. “You’re making a lot more money, you have retirement and better benefits. After 20 years, you can retire. At CCA [now known as CoreCivic], you have nothing.”

A detainee says guards call detainees “wetbacks” and “dogs,” and have greeted each other with Nazi salutes.

What’s more, Romero said, Stewart was understaffed: It wasn’t uncommon for officers to work double shifts and return to work eight hours later. “That’s why they’re so irritated,” he said. Equipment was also substandard, Romero claimed. He describes gun holsters that lack the safety snap that prevents a gun from being snatched by a thief or would-be attacker.

Romero said he wanted to try to change conditions for the better at Stewart, but found resistance from a tight, insular group that ran the place, and realized he could do little. Then he witnessed an incident that convinced him it was time to leave.

He saw two guards walking a handcuffed detainee to segregation. One of them “got in the guy’s face,” Romero recalled, and the detainee head-butted the guard. “The next thing you know the guard starting punching on the guy,” Romero said. He later watched a video of the beating with his co-workers, and Romero was taken aback by their reaction. “They said he asked for it, and I’m like wait a sec… If you’re in handcuffs why would I hit you? I have total control of you.”

The guard who threw the punch got fired, and a training session followed. But Romero doesn’t know if it had any effect because he left shortly thereafter.

Hill Barrientos said from his vantage point as a detainee, Stewart is worse than it was in 2016 when Romero was there. He believes Trump’s election signaled to detention officers that they could disrespect detainees with impunity.

Guards call detainees “wetbacks” and “dogs,” Hill Barrientos charged. He said that he’s even seen white detention officers greet each other with a Nazi salute. Health care is hard for detainees to obtain, Hill Barrientos said. He worked in the kitchen with Castro Garrido, who, he said, grew increasingly sicker because he was required to work instead of being allowed time to seek medical attention. ICE initially reported in its news release about Castro’s death that he had refused medical attention, an account that was widely reported. But the agency later corrected its news release to say that Castro’s case “was resistant to some forms of medical intervention.”

Hill’s lawyer, Glenn Fogle, thinks poor detention conditions are part of the government’s aggressive deportation strategy. “That’s the whole idea — to hold people in those horrible places to make them give up,” Fogle said.

Hill said he cannot give up — he would be killed by gang members who had threatened and extorted him if he is returned to Guatemala. His case is virtually identical to that of his two brothers and a sister, all of whom have already been granted asylum, Fogle said. Still, his case has been denied. Judges at Stewart grant asylum in few cases, so Hill Barrientos now pins his hopes on the Bureau of Immigration Appeals, which is currently considering his case.

“The people that give me strength are my mother and my daughter,” Hill Barrientos said. “So I keep fighting.”

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Please hit the above links to get the great graphics accompanying Robin’s articles at Capital & Main! Many thanks, Robin, for your courageous and timely reporting!

This is the “New American Gulag” (“NAG”)!

It certainly had its antecedents in prior Administrations of both political parties. But, the Trump/Sessions/Miller/Kelly/Nielsen/Homan crew have taken it to new depths!

What kind of country does this to individuals whose only “crime” is to want to exercise their statutory and constitutional rights to a fair hearing and a fair adjudication of claims that their lives and safety will be endangered if returned to their native countries?

Is the NAG really how we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? If not, get out there and vote for politicians who have the backbone and moral courage to end this kind of Neo-Nazi, Neo-Stalinist approach to human rights! And, send those who have helped fund and promote these affronts to American values into permanent retirement.

Also, don’t forget this, in part, is the disgraceful result of the Supreme Court majority’s failure to step up and defend our Constitution in Jennings v. Rodriguez. What if it were their relatives dying in the NAG? Time for judges at all levels of our justice system to get out of the “Ivory Tower” and start applying the law in the enlightened HUMAN terms that the Founding Fathers might have envisioned.

PWS

03-16-18

DACA: IS THE ADMINISTRATION ON THE VERGE OF ANOTHER BIG COURT DEFEAT? — US District Judge Bates Signals He Might Order Restart Of Program!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/federal-judge-in-dc-weighs-ordering-administration-to-restart-dreamers-program/2018/03/14/883b5178-27a7-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.b70de8a39e92

Spencer Hsu reports in the Washington Post:

“A federal judge said Wednesday that he is considering ordering the Trump administration to restart the “dreamers” program and accept new applications for protection from deportation by undocumented immigrants brought here as children.

Such a ruling by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates in Washington would go further than federal district judges in California and New York have when they issued nationwide injunctions blocking the government’s plan to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, this month.

The injunctions, issued after lawsuits by several states and organizations, require the Department of Homeland Security to continue to accept DACA renewal requests from about 800,000 people in the program but not to process new applications.

Bates spoke near the end of a two-hour-long hearing Wednesday on two lawsuits seeking to overturn the administration’s ending of DACA in cases brought by the NAACP, Microsoft, Princeton University and a student.

The judge’s remarks came as White House officials told key Republican leaders that President Trump is open to cutting a deal in an upcoming spending bill to protect the dreamers in exchange for border-wall funding.

[Trump is open to short-term DACA deal, White House tells GOP leaders]

No appellate court has reviewed the earlier court decisions, and the Supreme Court last month declined to enter the national controversy for now when it turned down a Trump administration request to immediately consider the decisions.

[Supreme Court declines to enter controversy over ‘dreamers’]

In Washington on Wednesday, Bates appeared skeptical of Justice Department arguments that he dismiss the lawsuits because immigration authorities have discretion and do not need a court review when it comes to deciding to halt a “non-enforcement” policy.

Bates said, “You have been unsuccessful in three other courts with this argument, correct?”

“Yes, your honor,” Justice Department trial attorney Brinton Lucas replied.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in January that challengers to the administration probably were correct in their contention that ending DACA violated the Administrative Procedure Act, because it is arbitrary and capricious. A federal judge in Brooklyn reached a similar finding in February. Both judges issued injunctions.

[With three months left in medical school, her career may be slipping away]

Justice Department trial attorney Kathryn Davis told Bates that the administration ended the program because of the threat of legal challenges from a coalition of states led by Texas and a belief that the program created in the Obama administration could not be successfully defended in court.

Noting that explanation, Bates then asked why the change was presented to the government as a policy shift and not a legal conclusion by the Homeland Security and Justice departments. Bates questioned that legal conclusion given a 2014 Justice Department decision.

Noting the Washington court’s expertise in federal regulatory law, Bates sounded skeptical about whether issuing another nationwide injunction would be appropriate.

Local Crime & Safety Email Alerts

Breaking news about public safety in and around D.C.

Rather, Bates said it might be better to strike down or vacate DHS’s attempt to end the program — which would oblige the government to continue to accept new DACA applications while the administration decides whether to try again to cancel DACA but with a fuller justification for the change in position.

Davis, the Justice attorney in court, opposed taking that course of action, saying it would create “undue chaos.”

Lindsay C. Harrison and Joseph M. Sellers, the plaintiff’s attorneys, said allowing new applications would not be disruptive because it would simply restore the status quo.”

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

The Administration’s legal problems here start, not surprisingly, with AG Jeff Sessions.

Sessions told then Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke that the Obama Administration’s DACA program “an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch.” Without any meaningful legal analysis, he summarily concluded that the program inevitably would be successfully challenged in Federal Court by some of his White Nationalist cronies serving as state Attorneys General.

The problem is that the DACA program had never been invalidated on legal grounds. The Fifth Circuit’s order invalidating the different although somewhat related “DAPA Program” was affirmed without opinion by an “equally divided Supreme Court” (a decision having no precedential effect).

There certainly was a strong legal basis for defending DACA that was totally ignored by Sessions. This includes a lengthy DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memorandum prepared during the Obama Administration that certainly was more thoughtful and thorough than the “Sessions letter.” Indeed, even the single U.S. District Judge who upheld the Administration’s DACA termination found that the legal issue was one upon which reasonable minds could differ.

So, basically, Sessions was arguing that the Federal Courts should hold that the Executive Branch is legally without authority to exercise so-called “prosecutorial discretion” in immigration cases. That’s facially absurd as a legal proposition, and a stunningly dumb argument for an Executive Branch official to make. This Administration, like all others, exercises large-scale “prosecutorial discretion” daily. How many actions is Scottie “Make Me AG If You Don’t Fire Me First” Pruitt at EPA taking to enforce existing environmental laws and regulations? How’s Ol’ Gonzo himself doing on enforcing those Civil Rights laws to protect minorities? How about the enforcement of those ethics laws applicable to Cabinet members and other Trump politicos?

Realizing the problem, it appears that in defending the Administration’s actions the DOJ lawyers “subtly switched” their argument to say that the Administration had “discretion” to terminate the DACA program. That’s actually a better argument than the one Sessions made to Duke. After all, if the Obama Administration had essentially unreviewable prosecutorial discretion to institute DACA, why can’t the Trump Administration exercise the same prosecutorial discretion negatively to terminate the program?

But, that position also raises some big problems.

First, it requires the Administration to admit, at least inferentially, that DACA was a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion by the Obama Administration. That’s hard for them to do, since Sessions’s position was based on a bogus White Nationalist political argument and Trump campaign rhetoric that DACA was “unconstitutional” rather than on any careful objective analysis of the law (something that as far as I can tell, Jeff Sessions has never engaged in during his public career).
Second, it ignores the facts of the case. The “Sessions letter” to Duke did not purport to be based on a different “policy determination” regarding DACA. Rather it contained typical unsupported disingenuous Sessions’ pontificating about the law and his duty to uphold it. This is a joke on its face from probably the most “lawless” Attorney General since John Mitchell.
Third, no Federal Court to date has found that this exercise of prosecutorial discretion is totally unreviewable. And, given that almost everybody in America except Jeff Sessions has acknowledged the merit of the “Dreamers” as a group, it’s doubtful that the Administration could come up with even a “minimally rational” reason for terminating the program.

Several weeks ago, Judge Roger Titus of the US District Court in Maryland basically “tossed the Administration a lifeline.” He effectively “re-jiggered” the facts to find that the Sessions letter combined with Duke’s reaction constituted a “reasonable discretionary determination” to terminate DACA in light of the possible legal difficulties it might face in court.

The only problem with Judge Titus’s ruling is that’s not what Sessions and Duke actually did. We should also remember that even in upholding the Administration, Judge Titus basically found that the Administration had probably chosen the least palatable of the policy choices available to it. Hardly a “ringing endorsement,” despite the “favorable spin” put on the ruling by the DOJ.

So, stay tuned! But, don’t be shocked if Judge Bates hands the Administration another DACA defeat — this time one with potentially larger impact since it would require the Administration to allow new DACA registrations, not just adjudicate renewals of existing ones.

PWS

03-16-18

PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP — PROFESSOR LAILA HLASS @ TULANE LAW TAKES ON “GUILT BY ASSOCIATION” AND “IMPLICIT BIAS “ IN IMMIGRATION ADJUDICATIONS INVOLVING GANG ALLEGATIONS!

HERE’S PROFESSOR HLASS:

HERE’S THE “ABSTRACT:”

The School to Deportation Pipeline

Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2018

Tulane Public Law Research Paper No. 18-1

60 Pages Posted: 8 Mar 2018

Laila Hlass

Tulane University – Law School

Date Written: 2018

Abstract

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes. Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system, over-policing within schools, and law enforcement, all of which can be compounded by racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime. The confluence of these systems results in a trajectory that has been referred to as “the school to deportation pipeline.”

Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are an emerging practice in this trajectory. Using non-uniform and broad guidelines, law enforcement, school officials, and immigration agents may label immigrant youth as gang-affiliated based on youths’ clothes, friends, or even where they live. These allegations serve as the basis to detain, deny bond, deny immigration benefits, and deport youth in growing numbers. This Article posits that gang allegations are a natural outgrowth of the convergence of the criminal and immigration schemes, serving as a means to preserve racial inequality. This Article further suggests excluding the consideration of gang allegations from immigration adjudications because their use undermines fundamental fairness. Finally, this Article proposes a three-pronged approach to counter the use of gang allegations, including initiatives to interrupt bias, take youthfulness into account, and increase access to counsel in immigration proceedings.

Keywords: Immigration, Children, Deportation, Immigration Representation, migrant youth, school-to-deportation-pipeline, race, gangs

Suggested Citation:

Hlass, Laila, The School to Deportation Pipeline (2018). Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2018; Tulane Public Law Research Paper No. 18-1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3132754

HERE ARE SOME “KEY QUOTES:”

“To be sure, the problem of gang violence in this country is a serious one. It is a problem that requires sustained attention to the complex (and diverse) sociological and neurological reasons that young people decide to associate with gangs or, as the case may be, disengage from them.27 Those concerns, however important, are beyond the scope of this Article. Instead, the goal of this Article is to shed light on the practical realities faced by immigrant youth caught in the school to deportation pipeline, where entrenched biases and insufficient procedural safeguards virtually guarantee their removal based on gang affiliation, no matter how flimsy the evidence supporting that label.28”

. . . .

“Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are part of the immigration regime’s long and ignoble history of explicit and implicit racism. Immigrant children, particularly youth of color, increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system and subject to over-policing within schools and by law enforcement. These factors converge with existing racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime, creating a perfect storm. To address this problem, gang allegations and related evidence should be excluded from immigration adjudications due to their unreliability and prejudicial nature. Furthermore, safeguards must be implemented to address this phenomenon, particularly as gang allegations appear to be on the rise. The immigration agency should attempt to interrupt adjudicator bias through education, improved decision-making conditions, and data collection. Secondly, youth should explicitly be a positive factor in discretion and bond decisions. Finally, to stall the school to deportation pipeline, children should have access to representation in immigration adjudications.”

AND, HERE’S A LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW:

Hlass-Gangs

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

Laila was my colleague at Georgetown Law when she was a Fellow at the CALS Asylum Clinic. In fact, she was a “Guest Lecturer” in my Immigration Law & Policy class.

Although Laila takes the much more scholarly approach, I have been saying consistently that this Administration’s harsh rhetoric and strictly law enforcement approach to diminishing the power of gangs is not only likely to fail, but is almost guaranteed to make the problems worse. Indeed, it’s basically an “on rhetorical steroids” version of the gang enforcement policies that have consistently been failing since the Reagan Administration.

But, we now have folks in charge who glory in their ignorance and bias. Consequently, they refuse to learn from past mistakes and will not embrace more effective community-based strategies that over time would deal with the causes of gang membership and help reduce gang violence.

PWS

03-14-18

WNYC’S BETH FERTIG FERRETS OUT FOOLISHNESS BEHIND THE SESSIONS/DHS ATTACK ON ADMINISTRATIVE CLOSING AND PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION – I’m Quoted and Pictured!

https://www.wnyc.org/story/trump-administration-reviewing-thousands-deportation-cases-once-put-pause

Beth reports:

“Last year, a young mother who came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico as a child thought she’d essentially won her fight against deportation.

Twenty-four year old Jenny isn’t eligible for DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. She was in the midst of immigration court proceedings when she told her attorney that she was a victim of domestic violence, which is why WNYC agreed not to use her real name.

In May, Jenny reported her boyfriend to police for allegedly beating and trying to choke her. That action suddenly changed the course of her immigration case.

Jenny was able to apply for what’s called a U visa that would allow her to stay in the U.S. It’s for immigrant victims of crime who cooperate with law enforecement.

The waiting list for a U visa is about three years. But because Jenny met the criteria, and got the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office to sign off on her documents, the immigration judge agreed to put her cause on hold. The legal term for this is administrative closure. The government would no longer seek to deport her while she waited for her special visa.

But a month later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked the same judge to recalender Jenny’s case and put it back on the docket — meaning she’d have to fight against deportation all over again.

The reason? ICE wrote that Jenny’s U visa was “speculative” and “not available within a reasonable period of time.” The agency said three years was too long to wait — even though they’re controlled by another governmental agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (both are within the Department of Homeland Security). ICE said she could wait for her U visa while in Mexico.

The agency also noted that Jenny had been convicted of petit larceny when she was 18. Though it’s not considered a crime that could lead to an immigrant’s removal, it brought her to ICE’s attention a few years ago, and her unlawful presence in the U.S. triggered the deportation proceedings.

For Jenny, the about face was extremely upsetting after suffering domestic abuse and moving into a women’s shelter. “I seek help and I’m still kind of being, you know, bullied,” she said.

Her attorney, Kendal Nystedt of the immigrant rights group Make the Road New York, said ICE seemed to mischaracterize immigration law and said its arguments “were also insulting given the humanity of my client.”

The judge apparently agreed. Late last year, in a one page memo, he denied the government’s request and let Jenny remain in the U.S. But data obtained by WNYC shows that Jenny wasn’t the only immigrant who thought they could stay, only to have the government give their case a second look.

In Fiscal Year 2017, ICE asked to recalendar almost 9400 cases that were administratively closed, or put on pause. That’s an increase of almost 74 percent from the year before President Trump took office. In response, it appears immigration judges may be applying more scrutiny to the government’s requests. They granted 85 percent of those motions to put the cases back on their dockets in 2017, compared to 96 percent in 2016.

When asked why the government is revisiting more cases, ICE spokewoman Jennifer Elzea said the agency generally reviews cases that were administratively closed “to see if the basis for prosecutorial discretion is still appropriate.”

But it’s clear this legal strategy also lets the Trump administration try to deport more immigrants. Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur said there’s a good reason. “Under the Obama Administration, administrative closure was treated as a form of amnesty,” he explained.

Arthur is a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports more restrictive immigration policies. Without commenting on Jenny’s situation he said some cases that were administratively closed involved immigrants who may never qualify for whatever benefit they thought they were likely to receive. But he said the previous administration didn’t act because there were “not deemed a priority for removal.”

In other words, he Obama administration had made criminals the top priority for removal, letting too many others remain.

Retired immigration judge Paul Wickham Schmidt

Beth Fertig/WNYC

Another former immigration judge said that Obama era policy made sense, however. Paul Wickham Schmidt granted administrative closures when he worked in the Arlington, Virginia court.

“An example of a type of case that gets closed quite a bit are cases of individuals who have relatives petitioning for them. And there’s a big backlog of petitions,” Schmidt explained. “So rather than continuing the case time after time, sometimes for years, judges were saying ‘look I’m going to take this case off the docket.'”

He said this management strategy was necessary. The immigration courts have a backlog of 670,000 thousand pending cases. “You’re not even going to complete 670,000 cases probably within my lifetime. You’ve got to decide which cases really belong at the front of the line and which cases you’re not going to prioritize,” he said. “Wasting time in immigration court just doesn’t make sense.”

Despite concerns about further burdening an immigration court system that’s already bursting at the seems, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering a much more dramatic step than simply seeking to recalendar the 9400 cases that were reviewed last year. He’s looking into recalendaring all cases that were administratively closed – and there are estimates there could 350,000 of them.”

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

Go to the link to hear the audio from WNYC!

Putting cases like “Jenny’s” back on the already overcrowded dockets is cruel, counterproductive, and wasteful of judicial time. She’s established the qualifications for a U visa, for Pete’s sake. There really isn’t any “uncertainty” — if she stays out of trouble with the law, she’ll get a U visa when her number comes up. No reason on earth for her to “occupy space” on the Immigration Court’s docket.

If she were unwise enough to get into legal trouble before then (seldom happens, in my experience), then that would be the time to 1) revoke her U visa approval, and 2) put her back on the docket. With dockets stretching out for years, why would an Immigration Judge do anything other than keep putting a case like Jenny’s at the end of the docket until her “U number” is reached?

Just because somebody is “removable” doesn’t mean that it makes any sense to put them on already overcrowded Immigration Court dockets. That’s particularly true of an individual who meets the requirements for a legal status (albeit one that because of the arcane structure of the Federal Regulations, an Immigration Judge can’t actually grant).

It’s analogous to the local prosecutor jamming a judge’s docket with jaywalking, littering, and unleashed dog cases so that there isn’t time to hear felony rape and robbery cases! No other law enforcement agency in America that I’m aware of operates without any real prosecution priorities the way Sessions and the DHS are trying to do in this Administration.

And, of course, one large class of “Administratively Closed” cases involves those who had their DACA applications approved by USCIS after Removal Proceedings had been initiated. What would be the point of putting such cases “back on the docket” if DACA were actually terminated?

Even the DHS claims that “Dreamer” cases would not be an “enforcement priority.” (Although, during the Trump Administration such claims by DHS have often proved to be “not credible.”) Therefore, it would literally be years before they could be heard. And many of them have strong cases for other forms of immigration relief such as Cancellation of Removal. I want to believe that the fate of the Dreamers will be resolved long before then.

PWS

03-07-18

WHEN EVERYTHING & EVERYBODY IS A PRIORITY, THERE ARE NO PRIORITIES — WHAT “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IS REALLY ABOUT!

At CNN, the “Amazing Tal” has it all for you:

Happy Friday!
Hope you’re battening down the hatches during this Nor’easter.
You may have already seen, but wanted to send you my latest story this morning, a deep dive into immigration arrests.
Have a great weekend and stay safe!
Tal

http://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/politics/ice-immigration-deportations/index.html

How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A businessman and father from Ohio. An Arizona mother. The Indiana husband of a Trump supporter. They were unassuming members of their community, parents of US citizens and undocumented. And they were deported by the Trump administration.
It’s left many wondering why the US government is arresting and deporting a number of individuals who have often lived in the country for decades, checked in regularly with immigration officials and posed no danger to their community. Many have family members who are American citizens, including school-aged children.
President Donald Trump famously said in a presidential debate that his focus is getting the “bad hombres” and the “bad, bad people” out first to secure the border, but one of his first actions after taking office was an executive order that effectively granted immigration agents the authority to arrest and detain any undocumented immigrant they wanted.
Where the Obama administration focused deportation efforts almost exclusively on criminals and national security threats, as well as immigrants who recently arrived illegally, the Trump administration has also targeted immigrants with what are called final orders of removal — an order from a judge that a person can be deported and has no more appeals left.
In Trump’s first year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 109,000 criminals and 46,000 people without criminal records — a 171% increase in the number of non-criminal individuals arrested over 2016.
The Trump administration regularly says its focus is criminals and safety threats, but has also repeatedly made clear that no one in the country illegally will be exempted from enforcement.
“We target criminal aliens, but we’re not going to exempt an entire class of (non)citizens,” Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton told reporters Wednesday.
“All of those in violation of immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States,” ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez added in a statement.
Critics say including people with decades-old final orders of removal as priorities is more about boosting numbers by targeting easily catchable individuals than about public safety threats.
“A final order of removal is absolutely not indicative of a person’s threat to public safety,” said former Obama administration ICE chief and DHS counsel John Sandweg. “You cannot equate convicted criminals with final orders of removal.”
Sandweg said that people with final orders, especially those who are checking in regularly with ICE, are easy to locate and can be immediately deported without much legal recourse. Identifying and locating criminals and gang members takes more investigative work.
There are more than 90,000 people on so-called orders of supervision who check in regularly with ICE officials, according to the agency. And there are more than 1 million who have removal proceedings pending or who have been ordered to leave the country but have not.
As a result of the change in ICE policy, headlines about heart-wrenching cases of deportation separating children from parents or caregivers have been a regular occurrence.
The story of Amer Adi, an Ohio businessman who lived in the US nearly 40 years, and has a wife and four daughters who are all American citizens, drew national media coverage last month. Through a complicated dispute about his first marriage, Adi lost his status and was ordered deported in 2009, but ICE never opted to remove him from the country. His congressman even introduced a bill to protect Adi, saying he was a “pillar” of the community, but last fall, ICE told Adi to prepare to be deported.
At a check-in on January 15, he was taken into custody and not allowed to see his family before being put on a plane back to his home country of Jordan on January 30.
“We shouldn’t spend one penny on low-hanging fruit,” said Sarah Saldana, the most recent director of ICE before Trump’s inauguration. “What we should be spending money is on getting people who are truly a threat to public safety.”

‘ICE fugitives’
The Trump administration has subtly blurred the distinction between criminals and those with final orders of removal, which is a civil, not criminal charge.
ICE has combined “ICE fugitives” — people who have been ordered to leave the country but haven’t yet — with convicted criminals who have pending criminal charges and reinstated final orders of removal, allowing the agency to say 92% of those arrested under Trump had criminal convictions or one of the other factors — when the number with criminal records is closer to 70%.
With an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, ICE has typically had resources to arrest and deport only roughly 150,000-250,000 individuals per year — requiring the agency to make choices about who to prioritize to proactively seek out for arrest.
ICE says its mission is carrying out the law and that it “must” deport these individuals.
“The immigration laws of the United States allow an alien to pursue relief from removal; however, once they have exhausted all due process and appeals, they remain subject to a final order of removal from an immigration judge and that order must be carried out,” said Rodriguez. “Failing to carry out final orders of removal would be inconsistent with the entire federal framework of immigration enforcement established by Congress, and undermine the integrity of the US immigration system.”
Administration officials also argue the publicizing of these cases sends a message to would-be border crossers that undocumented immigrants are never safe in the US, even when sympathetic.
“If we don’t fix these loopholes, we’re going to entice others to make that dangerous journey,” ICE Director Tom Homan told the President at a roundtable earlier last month. “So it’s just not about law enforcement, it’s about saving lives.”

Limited resources
But Saldana and other former immigration officials question the prudence of going after that population indiscriminately, saying it diverts resources from more serious security concerns.
If 20 officers are assigned to identify targets with final orders, “those are 20 officers who won’t be out focused on finding gang members or criminals,” said Bo Cooper, a career official who served as general counsel of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
“When there are a finite amount of resources, choices you make come at the expense of other choices,” Cooper said. “It really is a significant policy choice.”
Sandweg said the Obama administration in 2014 changed its priorities to move away from those with old removal orders in order to give itself more resources to pick up targets from jails, which can be hours away from ICE offices, when they get word that a criminal could be detained on immigration charges.
Sandweg and Cooper noted that other law enforcement agencies also prioritize — the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn’t bother with low-level marijuana possession, but focuses on cartels, Sandweg said — and it’s a part of agency culture.
“Setting enforcement priorities is not micromanagement, that’s what every law enforcement agency does,” agreed Cooper.
As for whether ICE was handcuffed during the Obama era, Saldana said that even in Trump’s executive order, there is room for discretion.
“That’s silly,” Saldana said. “Can you imagine having 11, 12 million in the system? The cost would be extraordinary, so you have to make priorities and work that way. … You can’t sweep everybody into one category. Not everyone is a contributor to society, and not everyone is a criminal.”

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

Homan’s shtick about “saving lives” is as preposterous as it is insulting! The “dangers” of seeking to come to the US actually are well known by those making the journey. Whether they are educated or not, they are smart, brave, resourceful people — the kinds of folks we actually could use more of in America.

What Homan and others (including some of the jurists at all levels hearing these cases and getting the results wrong) fail to recognize is that the dangers of remaining in failed states controlled by gangs and corrupt politicos is much greater than the dangers of the journey and the chance of being returned. That being the case, folks have been coming and will continue to come, no matter how nasty and arbitrary we are and no matter how much we mock our Constitution, our own laws on asylum and protection, and the international standards to which we claim adherence.

Too many of those being returned were denied relief under arcane legal standards even when the judges hearing the cases acknowledged that they had established a likelihood of persecution or death upon return. But, they failed to show a “nexus to a protected ground” or “government acquiescence” as those terms are often intentionally restrictively defined by the BIA and some courts.

I know that I had such cases, and I can’t say as anyone ever understood why I was sending them back to possible severe harm or death. Homan and others like him don’t actually have to pronounce such judgments on other human beings face to face as do U.S. Immigration Judges. Neither do the Appellate Immigration Judges sitting in the “BIA Tower” in Falls Church, VA for that matter!

But, the DHS always has discretion as to whether to execute such an order. How on earth does sending productive members of our society and others who have committed no crimes back to be killed, extorted, raped, or forced to join gangs “save lives.” What total hypocrisy!

Indeed, the only “message” we’re actually sending to such folks is that they might as well join the gangs because their lives don’t matter to us. There will be a reckoning for such attitudes for Homan and others some day, even if its only that the judgement of history and the shame of future generations for their lack of empathy, intellectual honesty, common sense, and humanity!

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won‘t stop human migration!

PWS

03-03-18

SPLINTERED SUPREMES PROVISIONALLY OK “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — Trump/Sessions Successfully Fight To Preserve Obama Legacy Of Never-Ending “Civil” Immigration Detention — Case Remanded To Lower Court, But Alito & Fellow GOP Justices Show Scant Concern For Human (Non-Economic) Rights & Freedom Under Constitution!

Jennings v. Rodriguez, O2-27-18

MAJORITY: Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch

CONCURRING OPINION: Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch

DISSENTING OPINION: Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor

NOT PARTICIPATING: Justice Kagan

HERE’S A COPY OF THE COURT’S FULL DECISION:

15-1204_f29g

ANALYSIS BY ERIC LEVITZ @ NEW YORK MAGAZINE:

“For much of his presidency, Donald Trump has appeared more committed to nullifying his predecessor’s legacy than to any affirmative political principle. The president campaigned on a promise to repeal Obamacare and expand access to affordable health insurance — but when these goals came into conflict, he opted for the former. Trump argued vociferously that rogue regimes must be blocked from acquiring nuclear weapons — then “decertified” an Obama-era nuclear agreement that did just that. He claimed to believe in regulatory policies that protect “clean air and clean water,” then rolled back Obama-era rules aimed at that objective. Trump praised Janet Yellen’s economic management — but still took the precedent-defying step of refusing to grant the Obama-appointed Federal Reserve chair a second term.

Nevertheless, for all his policy nihilism, the president can still occasionally put substance over spite, and admit that on this or that specific issue, Barack Obama actually had a point. Thus, on Tuesday the Trump administration celebrated the preservation of one piece of Obama’s legacy.

In 2014, a federal district court ruled that immigrants detained while awaiting deportation proceedings were entitled to periodic bond hearings. The lead plaintiff in the case was a legal permanent resident of the United States, Alejandro Rodriguez, who was arrested as a teenager for joyriding and misdemeanor drug possession – and then jailed for three years, without ever receiving a bond hearing, as his lawyers (successfully) contested his deportation. The federal judge ruled that Rodriguez had a legal right to request to await trial outside of a detention facility. The Obama administration disagreed, arguing that the federal government has the authority to decide whether any individual immigrant should be afforded that right – or whether he or she is simply too dangerous for such due process – even if the person in question is a legal permanent resident or asylum-seeker.

Upon his election, Trump set aside his differences with Obama, and continued his predecessor’s appeal. Even when the Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling, Jeff Sessions & Co. persisted in their defense of the Obama Justice Department’s position.

And on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided with the government in a narrow ruling: The justices did not rule that detained immigrants have no right to bond hearings under the Constitution; rather, they merely ruled that immigrants had no such rights under federal immigration law. As the New York Times explains:

The Ninth Circuit had ruled that bond hearings are required after six months to determine whether detainees who do not pose flight risks or a danger to public safety may be released while their cases proceed. The court based its ruling on an interpretation of the federal immigration laws, not the Constitution, though it said its reading was required to avoid constitutional difficulties.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority on Tuesday, said that this interpretive approach, called “constitutional avoidance,” was unavailable here, as the words of the immigration laws were plain. “The meaning of the relevant statutory provisions is clear — and clearly contrary to the decision of the court of appeals,” Justice Alito wrote.
This ruling will send the case back to the Ninth Circuit, which will have the opportunity to assess whether the Constitution requires bond hearings for detained immigrants.

Three of the court’s liberals opposed the decision, while Elena Kagan recused herself (due to relevant work she had performed as Obama’s solicitor general). In an impassioned dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer insisted that the court should have reached a determination on the underlying Constitutional question – and ruled that all human beings in the United States are entitled to our founding document’s basic protections.

“[W]ould the Constitution leave the Government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries?” the Justice asked. “If not, then, whatever the [legal] fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the Government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States?”

“We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and that among them is the right to ‘Liberty,’” Breyer wrote.

But thanks to the bipartisan efforts of the patriots in our Justice Department, the Trump administration will remain free, for the moment, to indefinitely imprison any legal immigrants and asylum-seekers it wishes to deport.

And Trump wishes to deport quite a few — although he’ll need to get much more aggressive on that front, if he wishes to preserve the pace of deportations set by his predecessor.

But, as Tuesday’s ruling demonstrated, with enough will and bipartisan cooperation, there’s little the American government cannot do.”

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

HERE’S WHAT JUSTICE ALITO, JUSTICE THOMAS & THEIR BUDDIES REALLY ARE SAYING BEYOND THE LEGAL GOBBLEDYGOOK:

The plaintiffs are neither corporations nor guns. They are mere human beings. Therefore, they are entitled to no Constitutional protections that we care to enforce.

FROM JUSTICE BREYER’S DISSENT:

The relevant constitutional language, purposes, history, traditions, context, and case law, taken together, make it likely that, where confinement of the noncitizens before us is prolonged (presumptively longer than six months), bail proceedings are constitutionally required. Given this serious constitutional problem, I would interpret the statutory provisions before us as authorizing bail. Their language permits that reading, it furthers their basic purposes, and it is consistent with the history, tradition, and constitutional values associated with bail proceedings. I believe that those bail proceedings should take place in accordance with customary rules of procedure and burdens of proof rather than the special rules that the Ninth Cir cuit imposed.

The bail questions before us are technical but at heart they are simple. We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have “certain unalienable Rights,” and that among them is the right to “Liberty.” We need merely remember that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause protects each person’s liberty from arbi trary deprivation. And we need just keep in mind the fact that, since Blackstone’s time and long before, liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail. It is neither technical nor unusually difficult to read the words of these statutes as consistent with this basic right. I would find it far more difficult, indeed, I would find it alarming, to believe that Congress wrote these statutory words in order to put thousands of individuals at risk of lengthy confinement all within the United States but all without hope of bail. I would read the statutory words as consistent with, indeed as requiring protection of, the basic right to seek bail.
Because the majority does not do so, with respect, I dissent.

ONE POINT THAT ALL EIGHT JUSTICES AGREED ON:

The 9th Circuit was without authority to rewrite the statute to require bond hearings at 6 month intervals with the DHS bearing the burden of proof on continuing detention.

PWS

02-27-18

“GO POUND SAND” SUPREMES TELL TRUMP & SESSIONS ON DACA – HIGH COURT STIFFARMS DOJ’S FRIVOLOUS TRY TO END RUN LEGAL PROCESS!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/26/politics/daca-supreme-court/index.html

Ariane de Vogue and Tal Kopan report for CNN”

“Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court said on Monday that it will stay out of the dispute concerning the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for now, meaning the Trump administration may not be able to end the program March 5 as planned.

The move will also lessen pressure on Congress to act on a permanent solution for DACA and its roughly 700,000 participants — undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.

Lawmakers had often cited the March 5 deadline as their own deadline for action. But the Senate failed to advance any bill during a debate earlier this month, and no bipartisan measure has emerged since.

Originally, the Trump administration had terminated DACA but allowed a six-month grace period for anyone with status expiring in that window to renew. After that date, March 5, any DACA recipient whose status expired would no longer be able to receive protections.

Monday’s action by the court, submitted without comment from the justices, is not a ruling on the merits of the DACA program or the Trump administration’s effort to end it.

At issue is a ruling by federal District Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, who blocked the plan to end DACA and held that the Trump administration must resume accepting renewal applications. The action means the case will continue going through the lower courts.

Alsup said a nationwide injunction was “appropriate” because “our country has a strong interest in the uniform application of immigration law and policy.”

“Plaintiffs have established injury that reaches beyond the geographical bounds of the Northern District of California. The problem affects every state and territory of the United States,” he wrote.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has generally allowed nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration actions from lower court judges under this President to stand, meaning the DACA program could be spared a year or more until the Supreme Court could take up the case in next year’s term, given the likely realities of the calendar.

Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley said the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court was an uphill climb, given it came before the 9th Circuit ruled.

“While we were hopeful for a different outcome, the Supreme Court very rarely grants certiorari before judgment, though in our view, it was warranted for the extraordinary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain DACA,” O’Malley said. “We will continue to defend DHS’s lawful authority to wind down DACA in an orderly manner.”

University of Texas professor law and CNN legal analyst Stephen Vladeck said justices normally don’t weigh in at this stage.

“The justices have not granted such a request since 2004, but the government claimed that the urgency of settling the legal status of DACA, and the potential for nationwide confusion, justified such an extraordinary measure,” Vladeck said.”

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

Good news for America on a number of fronts:

DACA immigrants get to keep their status and work authorization for now. While the Administration claimed (disingenuously) that removal of DACA recipients would not be a “priority,” loss of DACA status would mean loss of work authorization (and therefore jobs) for many and loss of in-state tuition eligibility for college for others. Thus, they would have been driven “into the underground.” Honest employers who insisted on following work authorization laws would have been penalized by loss of important, talented workers. Meanwhile, unscrupulous employers willing to overlook lack of work authorization or pay “under the table” at substandard wages would have been empowered by the Administration’s bone-headed actions to exploit Dreamers and U.S. workers alike.
Supremes rebuffed the arrogant Trump/Sessions attitude of entitlement. Whatever their disingenuous explanations might be today, in attempting to circumvent the Courts of Appeals to the Supremes, the Administration basically was touting that the GOP had “bought and paid for” five seats on the Supremes and that they expected their “wholly-owned Justices,” including of course the recently appointed Justice Gorsuch, to deliver on their demand for unprecedented special treatment. By forcing the Administration to follow the rules like everyone else, at least for now, the Supremes maintained some degree of dignity and judicial independence in the context of an Administration that publicly holds itself above the law and states that the only acceptable role of Federal Judges (particularly GOP appointees) is to “rubber stamp” Administration positions.
Litigation in the Courts of Appeals will further expose the absurdity of Session’s “legal position” on DACA. In the DACA litigation, the DOJ is incredibly asking the Federal Courts to invalidate the Executive’s own legal authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion on a consistent and disciplined basis. While courts have acknowledged that there are likely ways in which the Administration could go about terminating DACA, claiming that it is “illegal” isn’t one of them. Session’s bogus claim that an Administration doesn’t have authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion on a widespread basis is both disingenuous and absurd on its face. Obviously, this Administration has already chosen to exercise lots of prosecutorial discretion not to enforce environmental, health care, civil rights, ethics, and other “laws on the books” when it suited their purposes.
If the lower court rulings stand, Trump will have difficulty coming up with a “rational reason” to terminate DACA “on the merits.” Trump himself, as well as other Administration officials and politicos from both parties have widely and publicly praised DACA youth and their contributions to the United States. There is neither a legal nor a rational basis for terminating DACA. While Trump & Sessions might well attempt to do so, those attempts are also likely to be tied up in the Federal Courts for a long time. DACA created “settled expectations” on the part of the recipients, their employers, their schools, and even their U.S. families of continuing ability to, at a minimum, remain, work, and study in the United States, assuming continued “good behavior.” In my long experience in Government, Federal Courts have more often than not been anxious to find ways to protect such “settled expectations.”
Congress was going to “punt” on DACA anyway. I detected little if any interest on the part of GOP “leadership” in the House and Senate to fix DACA on a temporary or permanent basis for now. It’s going to take “regime change” — eventually replacing recalcitrant GOP legislators with Democrats more interested in governing in the public interest, including solving the Dreamer issue on a long-term basis (without otherwise damaging our permanent immigration system or further enabling lawless behavior by DHS). That’s going to take time, just like the litigation. In this case, time is the Dreamer’s and the bulk of America’s friend.

PWS

02-26-18

DESTROYING AMERICA, ONE PRECIOUS, TALENTED LIFE AT A TIME — “Can something that irrational happen in America?” — In The Trump/Sessions/Miller White Nationalist Regime? — You Betcha!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/with-three-months-left-in-medical-school-her-career-may-be-slipping-away/2018/02/22/24a7a780-10f3-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_dacadoctors-830pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.ed15d711fa8f

Maria Sacchetti reports for the Washington Post:

MAYWOOD, Ill. — Rosa Aramburo sailed into her final year of medical school with stellar test scores and high marks from professors. Her advisers predicted she’d easily land a spot in a coveted residency program.

Then President Trump announced the end of the Obama-era program that has issued work permits to Aramburo and nearly 700,000 other undocumented immigrants raised in the United States.

“Don’t be surprised if you get zero interviews,” an adviser told her.

She got 10, after sending 65 applications.

But as she prepared to rank her top three choices last week, Congress rejected bills that would have allowed her and other “dreamers” to remain in the United States, casting new doubt on a career path that seemed so certain a year ago.

Employers and universities that have embraced DACA recipients over the past six years are scrambling for a way to preserve the program. They are lobbying a deeply divided Congress, covering fees for employees and students to renew their permits, and searching for other legal options — perhaps a work visa or residency through spouses or relatives who are citizens. Some companies have considered sending employees abroad.

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They are also awaiting the outcome of a court challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted the young recipients a temporary reprieve and allowed them to continue renewing work permits for the time being. The Supreme Court could decide as soon as Friday whether to intervene in the case.

Nationwide, more than 160 DACA recipients are teaching in low-income schools through Teach For America. Thirty-nine work at Microsoft, 250 at Apple and 84 at Starbucks. To employers, the young immigrants are skilled workers who speak multiple languages and often are outsize achievers. Polls show strong American support for allowing them to stay.

Based in part on that data, many DACA recipients say they believe that the United States will continue to protect them, even as a senior White House official has indicated that Trump and key GOP lawmakers are ready to move on to other issues.

Human-resources experts warn that employers could be fined or go to jail if they knowingly keep workers on the payroll after their permits have expired. And while the White House has said that young immigrants who lose DACA protections would not become immediate targets for deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says anyone here illegally can be detained and, possibly, deported.

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“I’ve gotten emails saying, ‘Oh, we loved you,’ ’’ Aramburo, 28, said one recent morning as she hurried to predawn rounds at a neurology intensive-care unit. “But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘What if I can’t finish?’ ”

Dreams and disbelief

Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine has 32 DACA recipients enrolled in its medical program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)

Cesar Montelongo is a third-year student in the school’s MD-PhD program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
Nearly 100 DACA recipients are medical students enrolled at schools such as Harvard, Georgetown and the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago, which this May will graduate its first five dreamers, including Aramburo.

Loyola, a Catholic school, changed its admissions policies to allow DACA recipients to apply soon after President Barack Obama — frustrated by Congress’s failure to pass an immigration bill — declared in 2012 that he would issue the young immigrants work permits. Trump and other immigration hard-liners criticized the program as executive overreach.

Thirty-two students with DACA are enrolled at Stritch, the most of any medical school in the country, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Most are from Mexico, but there are also students brought to the United States as children from 18 other countries, including Pakistan, India and South Korea.

The school helped the students obtain more than $200,000 apiece in loans to pay for their education. Some agreed to work in poor and rural areas with acute physician shortages to borrow the money without interest.

Mark G. Kuczewski, a professor of medical ethics at Loyola, said the school was inspired to launch the effort after hearing about Aramburo, a high school valedictorian who earned college degrees in biology and Spanish and yearned to study medicine but could find work only as a babysitter because she was undocumented.

He said it is unthinkable that Congress may derail the chance for her and the other DACA recipients at Loyola to become doctors and work legally throughout the United States.

“We just can’t believe that that will happen,” Kuczewski said. “Can something that irrational happen in America?”

2:52
This nurse found hope in DACA, now his life is in limbo

Jose Aguiluz is a 28-year-old registered nurse who may face deportation from the United States if Congress doesn’t come to an agreement on DACA recipients. (Jorge Ribas, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
Teach For America said its lawyers have pored over immigration laws to find ways to sponsor workers who lose their DACA protections. But the process often requires workers to leave the United States and return legally, a risk many young teachers are unwilling to take. The organization also offered to relocate teachers close to their families in the United States.

“They’re desperate. They’re stressed,” said Viridiana Carrizales, managing director of DACA Corps Member Support at Teach For America. “They don’t know if they’re going to have a job in the next few months.”

A spokesman for a major tech company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of political negotiations, said it asked DACA employees whether they would like to be transferred to another country where their work status would not be in jeopardy.

“It fell completely flat,” he said. “The employees were polled, and with virtual unanimity, the resounding answer was a ‘No, thank you.’ They considered it giving up.”

The Society for Human Resource Management said companies can defend workers and lobby Congress on behalf of DACA recipients. But the group, which has 240 member organizations, is also urging employers to consider what might happen if their employees’ work permits expire.

“The bottom line is, if people don’t have documents that allow them to work in the United States, they have to be taken off the payroll,” said Justin Storch, a federal liaison for the society.

Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student and a DACA recipient. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
‘Not just farmworkers or housekeepers’
On the snow-covered campus at Loyola University Chicago, medical students with DACA permits say they are continuing with their studies and renewing their work permits even as they keep one eye on Washington.

Cesar Montelongo, 28, a third-year medical student who attended the State of the Union address last month, spent part of one recent day examining bacteria in petri dishes in a school laboratory. His family fled a violent border city in Mexico when he was 10.

He is earning a medical degree and a PhD in microbiology, a high-level combination that could land him plenty of jobs in other countries. But he said he prefers the United States, one of “very few places in this planet you can actually achieve that kind of dream.”

Less than a mile away, Alejandra Duran, a 27-year-old second-year medical student who came to the United States from Mexico at 14, translated for patients at a local clinic for people with little or no insurance.

With help from teachers in Georgia, she graduated from high school with honors. She wants to return to the state as a doctor and work to help lower the rate of women dying in childbirth.

“A lot of things have been said about how illegal, how bad we are; that’s not the full story,” Duran said. “We’re not just farmworkers or housekeepers. We’re their doctors. We’re their nurses, their teachers, their paramedics.”

Alejandra Duran, a second-year student who intends to practice obstetrics and gynecology, translates for Dr. Matt Steinberger at the Access to Care clinic. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)

Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student, examines Petri dishes in which he conducted an experiment looking at interactions of viruses with bacteria in the bladder. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)
During rounds at the Loyola University Medical Center, Aramburo studied computer records, then examined stroke victims and patients with spinal and head injuries. Some may never regain consciousness, but she always speaks to them in the hope that they will wake up.

“That’s my dream: to make a difference in people’s lives,” she said. “I hope I can do it.”

In the glass-walled neurology intensive care unit, she and two physicians stood before a 45-year-old stroke victim who spoke only Spanish. The woman struggled to grasp what the two doctors were saying.

Aramburo stepped forward.

“You’ve had a small stroke,” she explained in Spanish, as the woman listened. “It could have been a lot worse. Now we’re going to figure out why.”

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

Some of the WASHPOST comments on this article were predictably idiotic ands racist., Really, what’s happening to our country that folks have such perverted, ill informed, anti-social, and inhuman views?

These are American kids. Raised, educated, and residing in our country. They aren’t “taking places” from anyone, except, perhaps those of their classmates who are less talented or less ambitious. But, why would we want to reward mediocrity over merit just because someone was born here? Other American kids have the same opportunities that Dreamers have. If some chose not to take advantage of them, so be it!

When the Arlington Immigration Court was located in Ballston, Virginia, the kids from nearby Washington & Lee High would come over to the Mall for lunch. Undoubtedly, some of them were undocumented.

But, I couldn’t tell you who. They were just American kids. Even when they showed up in my courtroom, I couldn’t tell you who was the “respondent” and who was the “support group” until I called the case and the respondent came forward. Contrary to the White Nationalists, folks are pretty much the same.

As usual, Trump and his White Nationalist cronies have taken a win-win-win and created a lose-lose-lose! When Dreamers get screwed, they lose, US employers lose, and our country loses, big time! But, that’s what happens when policies and actions are based on bias, ignorance, and incompetence.

PWS

02-23-18

PRESIDENTS’ DAY: MOVE ON OVER JIMMIE BUCHANAN!– THERE’S A NEW “WORST PRESIDENT IN U.S. HISTORY” IN TOWN – You Might Have Thought That Sitting On Your Behind While The US Dissolved Into A Bloody Civil War Would Insure You A Lasting Last Place In History – BUT NO, IN ONLY A LITTLE OVER A YEAR, “PUTIN’S PUPPET” & “CON-MAN-IN-CHIEF” DONALD TRUMP HAS BEAT YOU OUT FOR THE “WORST PRESIDENT IN U.S. HISTORY” ACCORDING TO A BIPARTISAN PANEL OF EXPERTS!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/19/opinion/how-does-trump-stack-up-against-the-best-and-worst-presidents.html

BRANDON ROTTINGHAUS and JUSTIN S. VAUGHN report for the NY Times:

“Where does Donald Trump rank on the list of American presidents?

We surveyed presidential politics experts to sketch out a first draft of Trump’s place in presidential history.

Since our previous survey in 2014, some presidential legacies have soared (Barack Obama’s stock has climbed into the Top 10), while others have fallen (Andrew Jackson toppled to 15, out of the Top 10).

And President Trump? Let’s say that, according to the 170 members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section who filled out our survey, he has at least three years to improve on an ignominious debut.

Presidential Greatness Rankings

James Buchanan, who was at the helm as the United States careened into civil war, was dislodged from his position as our nation’s worst president by our current president, Trump.

His Oval Office predecessor, Barack Obama, shot into the Top 10, up from 18th in the previous survey. Ulysses S. Grant also got a bump, up seven places from 2014, perhaps owing to a strong assist from Ron Chernow’s recent masterpiece.

The biggest declines were for Bill Clinton, arguably the result of contemporary scorn for his treatment of women, and Andrew Jackson, for evolving attitudes on his treatment of Native Americans.

Overall rankings.

Presidents since World War II in boldface.

Presidents whose rank changed since last survey

0 = FAILURE

50 = AVERAGE

100 = GREAT

2014 RANK

CHANGE

IN RANKING

UP OR

DOWN

TOP 10 IN 2018

1. Lincoln

95

2. Washington

93

3. F.D. Roosevelt

89

4. T. Roosevelt

81

5. Jefferson

80

6. Truman

75

7. Eisenhower

74

8. Obama

71

8. Clinton

–5

9. Reagan

69

9. Jackson

–6

10. L.B. Johnson

69

10. Wilson

–1

11. Wilson

67

11. Reagan

+2

12. Madison

64

12. L.B. Johnson

+2

13. Clinton

64

13. Madison

+1

14. J. Adams

63

14. Kennedy

–2

15. Jackson

62

15. J. Adams

+1

16. Kennedy

62

16. Monroe

–2

17. G.H.W. Bush

61

18. Monroe

61

18. Obama

+10

19. McKinley

55

19. Polk

–1

20. Polk

54

20. Taft

–2

21. Grant

53

21. McKinley

+2

22. Taft

52

22. J.Q. Adams

–1

23. J.Q. Adams

52

23. Cleveland

–1

24. Cleveland

51

24. Ford

–1

25. Ford

47

25. Van Buren

–2

26. Carter

45

27. Van Buren

44

27. Coolidge

–1

28. Coolidge

42

28. Grant

+7

29. Hayes

42

29. B. Harrison

–3

30. G.W. Bush

40

30. Hayes

+1

31. Arthur

40

31. Garfield

–3

32. B. Harrison

38

32. Arthur

+1

33. Nixon

37

33. Taylor

–2

34. Garfield

37

34. Nixon

+1

BOTTOM 10

35. Taylor

33

35. G.W. Bush

+5

36. Hoover

33

36. Tyler

–1

37. Tyler

31

37. Fillmore

–1

38. Fillmore

28

38. Hoover

+2

39. Harding

25

39. W.H. Harrison

–3

40. A. Johnson

25

40. Pierce

–1

41. Pierce

23

41. A. Johnson

+1

42. W.H. Harrison

19

42. Harding

+3

43. Buchanan

15

44. Trump

12

Methodology: Each expert was invited to rate each president on a 0-100 scale, with 0 = failure, 50 = average, and 100 = great. Scores were then averaged for each president, with presidents then ranked in order of highest average to lowest.

Greatness Rankings by Party

On partisan-votes lines, Democrats ranked Ronald Reagan nine places lower than Republicans, while Democrats place Obama 10 places higher.

Counting only Republican votes, William McKinley — best known for winning the Spanish-American war, for defeating William Jennings Bryan twice in contests for the White House and for being assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz — holds a spot in the Top 10.

Independents admire George H.W. Bush, ranking him higher than Obama.

Trump doesn’t get much of a lift from Republican-only vote: Even in their eyes, he’s a bottom-five president.

Democratic scholars

Independents/other

Republican scholars

Presidents since World War II in boldface.

These scholars skew somewhat to the right.

TOP 10

0

AVG.

100

0

AVG.

100

0

AVG.

100

1. Washington

94

1. Lincoln

96

1. Lincoln

94

2. Lincoln

94

2. F.D. Roosevelt

94

2. Washington

91

3. F.D. Roosevelt

83

3. Washington

93

3. F.D. Roosevelt

83

4. T. Roosevelt

77

4. T. Roosevelt

83

4. T. Roosevelt

79

5. Reagan

76

5. Jefferson

82

5. Jefferson

79

6. Jefferson

70

6. Obama

78

6. Eisenhower

77

7. Eisenhower

68

7. Truman

78

7. Reagan

75

8. Truman

67

8. L.B. Johnson

75

8. Truman

74

9. McKinley

64

9. Eisenhower

74

9. Madison

65

10. Jackson

64

10. Wilson

72

10. J. Adams

64

11. G.H.W. Bush

63

11. Madison

67

11. G.H.W. Bush

64

12. Wilson

61

12. Kennedy

67

12. Obama

63

13. Polk

60

13. Clinton

66

13. L.B. Johnson

63

14. Taft

60

14. Reagan

65

14. Clinton

62

15. Clinton

59

15. J. Adams

64

15. Wilson

62

16. Obama

57

16. Monroe

62

16. McKinley

61

17. J. Adams

57

17. Jackson

62

17. Jackson

61

18. Monroe

56

18. G.H.W. Bush

59

18. Monroe

60

19. L.B. Johnson

56

19. Grant

53

19. Kennedy

58

20. Cleveland

55

20. J.Q. Adams

53

20. Taft

56

21. Coolidge

52

21. Polk

52

21. Polk

56

22. Madison

52

22. McKinley

50

22. Grant

54

23. G.W. Bush

52

23. Cleveland

49

23. Cleveland

54

24. Kennedy

50

24. Carter

48

24. J.Q. Adams

52

25. Grant

49

25. Taft

48

25. Coolidge

50

26. Ford

49

26. Ford

46

26. Ford

49

27. J.Q. Adams

49

27. Van Buren

44

27. Van Buren

47

28. Hayes

44

28. Hayes

39

28. Hayes

45

29. Nixon

42

29. Arthur

39

29. Arthur

44

30. Hoover

41

30. G.W. Bush

37

30. Garfield

42

31. B. Harrison

39

31. Nixon

37

31. G.W. Bush

42

32. Carter

39

32. B. Harrison

36

32. Carter

41

33. Van Buren

38

33. Coolidge

36

33. B. Harrison

40

34. Arthur

36

34. Garfield

34

34. Taylor

37

Lighter circles = below average

BOTTOM 10

35. Garfield

36

35. Taylor

31

35. Hoover

37

36. Taylor

34

36. Tyler

31

36. Nixon

36

37. Tyler

33

37. Hoover

29

37. Tyler

32

38. Harding

32

38. A. Johnson

27

38. Fillmore

30

39. Fillmore

29

39. Fillmore

26

39. Harding

26

40. Trump

25

40. Pierce

24

40. Pierce

25

41. A. Johnson

21

41. Harding

23

41. A. Johnson

23

42. Pierce

19

42. W.H. Harrison

19

42. W.H. Harrison

19

43. W.H. Harrison

19

43. Buchanan

16

43. Trump

16

44. Buchanan

14

44. Trump

8

44. Buchanan

14

Methodology: Each expert was allowed to self-identify as either Republican, Democrat, Independent, or Other. The results of those who self-identified were later analyzed independently to allow comparisons across partisan groups.

Next on Mt. Rushmore

Which president deserves to have his likeness carved next into Mt. Rushmore’s granite cliff? Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the overwhelming favorite, selected by two-thirds of our respondents.

Franklin

Roosevelt

Barack

Obama

James

Madison

Lyndon

Johnson

66%

7

5

4

4

2

2

10

Others

Ronald

Reagan

Dwight

Eisenhower

William

McKinley

Methodology: Respondents were asked if they were to add one president to those currently represented on Mt. Rushmore, who would it be, and then allowed to select any past or current president. The number and percentage of times each president was selected was then calculated.

Mt. Rushmore by Party

It wasn’t just Democratic support that would carve F.D.R. on Mt. Rushmore: All groups, including Republicans, named him as most deserving of that honor.

Roosevelt, the godfather of presidential liberalism, received more than twice as many votes from Republicans as Ronald Reagan, his conservative counterpart.

Democratic scholars’ vote:

Barack

Obama

Lyndon

Johnson

James

Madison

Franklin

Roosevelt

75%

11

3

3

8

Others

Independent/others’ vote:

Ronald

Reagan

Dwight

Eisenhower

William

McKinley

Franklin

Roosevelt

57%

9

9

6

19

Others

Republicans’ vote:

Ronald

Reagan

James

Madison

Franklin

Roosevelt

43%

19

10

29

Others

Methodology: Using the previously discussed self-identified partisanship breakdowns, the number and percentage of times each partisan group selected each president was calculated in the same way as the overall results.

Trump’s initial rating places him in an ignominious category, but dozens of presidents have had slow starts and have course corrected to improve their public esteem. Beyond his reputation or ranking, Donald Trump’s very presidency may alter perceptions of presidential legacies as his unique approach to the office continues to surprise.

Brandon Rottinghaus is a professor of political science at the University of Houston. Justin S. Vaughn is an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Idaho History and Politics at Boise State University.

DREAMER DEBACLE: MY THREE “TAKEAWAYS”

Trump and the GOP aren’t going to help the Dreamers. While the majority of GOP voters are favorably disposed to Dreamers, it isn’t a priority for them. Unlike the Dems, GOP legislators aren’t getting pressure from their constituents to solve the Dreamer problem. Meanwhile, “the base” doesn’t like the Dreamers. Without Trump’s support, the GOP isn’t going to press the issue. With Trump’s active opposition and veto threats, the Dreamers are “dead meat” as far as the GOP is concerned.

The Democrats can’t help the Dreamers from their minority position. The minority doesn’t get to control the agenda, particularly over the President’s active opposition. No, it doesn’t make sense to blame Schumer for sacrificing “leverage” he never really had. The shutdown didn’t work. The Dems and the Dreamers were losing the public opinion battle. Since the GOP is basically out to destroy Government (other than the military) they didn’t feel much pressure to make concessions to the minority to get it reopened.

The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere. It’s a tossup whether the Supremes will intervene in Trump’s favor in the Dreamer case. We will probably find out within the next week. Even if the Supremes do Trump’s bidding, there is no way Trump can deport 700,000 Dreamers. Unlike the semi-helpless women and children detained at the border that Trump & Sessions like to pick on, the Dreamers have resources, community support, and access to good lawyers. They have lots of possible defenses to removal and some affirmative causes of action that should keep the legal system occupied for decades, or at least until we get regime change and wiser legislators finally put the Dreamers on the path to citizenship.

PWS

02-18-18

BLACK HISTORY MONTH: LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT TWO STORIES FROM THAT “GREAT ERA OF AMERICA” THAT TRUMP, SESSIONS, MILLER, COTTON, AND THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST PALS LOVE SO MUCH – When White Men Were Supreme, The Law Was There To Keep African Americans in Their Place, Blacks Who Stood Up For Their Rights Were Murdered By The White Police, And Latinos & Women Were “Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind!”

From “John Kelly’s Washington” in the Washington Post:

Stuck on a shelf or locked in a safe, D.C.’s ‘Lost Laws’ still packed a punch

Before the Supreme Court upheld the District’s “Lost Laws” in 1953, activists such as Mary Church Terrell (center) picketed in front of segregated restaurants.

By John Kelly Columnist February 14 Email the author

Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

He could have added: “eventually, and after plenty of detours.”

In 1872 and 1873, two laws were passed in Washington that forbade racial discrimination in the city’s restaurants. Then, somehow, the laws vanished.

Just imagine the reaction when they were “rediscovered” in the 1940s. It must have been as if someone had opened a vault sealed when Ulysses Grant was president and found an airplane inside, a television, penicillin … .

Could Washingtonians from 70 years ago really have been so advanced? What had happened to those people?

[Remembering the ‘Lost Laws’ of Washington]

What amazed me when I looked into the events of the 1870s and 1880s was how similar things were to the Jim Crow era. Restaurateurs used some of the same excuses for refusing to serve African Americans: Black customers were “boisterous,” white patrons would stay away, the government shouldn’t meddle.

To fight discrimination, black activists used methods that are familiar to us now. Lawyer E.M. Hewlett deliberately visited restaurants to see if he would be served. Hewlett looked to see if owners had posted price lists, as required by law to prevent black customers from being gouged. When he spotted a violation, he took the establishment to court.

In the end, none of it did any good. Why?

[In 1872, black Washingtonians started testing a new anti-discrimination law]

“During Reconstruction, D.C. was really on the leading edge of racial change in America,” said Chris Myers Asch, co-author, with George Derek Musgrove, of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”

Said Asch: “D.C. was a very progressive city. You had remarkable progress being made toward racial equality in a very brief space of time. Black men in D.C. were the first black men in the country to be granted the right to vote after the Civil War.”

Such efforts, Asch said, were a priority for radical Republicans in Congress.

[D.C. law said African Americans could eat anywhere. The reality was different.]

“The backlash from white conservatives is really substantial,” Asch said. “First you eliminate self government all together in 1874. Then you slowly roll back those Reconstruction-era gains. This is part of a regionwide effort to enforce white supremacy. By 1901, when city commissioners decide to compile the D.C. Code, they simply don’t include those Reconstruction-era statutes.”

They didn’t include them, but they didn’t repeal them. The Lost Laws were not dead. They were like a long-dormant seed, ready to spring to life after a refreshing rain.

I don’t know who found them. Asch thinks it was A. Mercer Daniel, who oversaw the library at Howard University’s law school. They gained fame in 1948 with the publication of “Segregation in Washington,” a scathing report that mentioned the laws.

Civil rights activists wondered: Could the laws be used to fight segregation?

Annie Stein, a white woman from Southwest D.C. who was a member of the Progressive Party, invited Mary Church Terrell to chair the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws of 1872 and 1873. When Terrell, the octogenarian co-founder of the NAACP, was denied service at a downtown cafeteria called Thompson’s in 1950, it set the stage for a test case.

District of Columbia vs. John R. Thompson Co. went first to the old Municipal Court, where Judge Frank Myers ruled that the Lost Laws had “been repealed by implication” and, thus, could no longer be enforced.

Terrell and company appealed. In May of 1951, the Municipal Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that the anti-bias laws were still valid. Among the points raised by Judge Nathan Cayton was that another so-called lost law had been enforced in 1908, even though it, too, had been omitted from the 1901 D.C. Code.

It was an animal cruelty law. Animals, it seemed, had more rights than black Washingtonians.

The game of legal ping-pong continued. The next stop was the U.S. Court of Appeals. In a 5-to-4 decision, it ruled that the laws of 1872 and 1873 could not be enforced.

One judge, Barrett Prettyman, wrote the statutes were “neither mentioned again nor enforced for a period of 75 years.” Thus the laws “must be deemed by the courts to have been abandoned.”

If you’ve been reading my columns this week, you know that wasn’t true. African Americans did mention them and did try to get them enforced.

In April of 1953, the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Chester H. Gray of the District’s corporation counsel’s office asked the court not to blame his staff. They hadn’t known of the laws until someone found them in the corporation counsel’s safe.

“You mean you have to go to a locked safe to find laws of the District of Columbia?” Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson joked.

In June, the court ruled unanimously that the laws were still in effect. Laws passed by long-dead Washingtonians had helped their descendants.

Five days after the Supreme Court ruling, Terrell went to eat at Thompson’s with the mixed-race group who had been denied a meal three years earlier. They were treated, Terrell said, with courtesy.”

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

Sound all too familiar? It should! The claptrap coming from yesterday’s racists is pretty much the same as the garbage coming out of the mouths of some GOP pols these days. Here’s my “rewrite” of a paragraph of Kelly’s account in “today’s context.”

The backlash from Sessions, Bannon, Kobach, Miller and their White Nationalist pals to the diversification of America and growing political power of African-Americans, Hispanics and other non-Whites was substantial. First, they used gerrymandering and intentional mis-constructions of Civil Rights and Voting Rights statutes intended to protect minorities to instead suppress and minimize the minority vote. This is part to a nationwide effort by the far right to restore White Supremacy and prevent African-Americans and Hispanics from eventually obtaining political power commensurate with their demographics and overwhelming contributions to America. Then, when supposedly in charge of administering the laws equally, they simply refuse to recognize the rights of African-Americans to be free from police violence and the rights of Hispanics and asylum seekers in the United States to be treated with respect and dignity and to be given full Due Process under our Constitution. They even invent false narratives, bogus statistics, and demonize hard-working law-abiding citizens, residents, and great and deserving young people known as “Dreamers” in a desperate effort to restore exclusive White (preferably “pseudo-Christian”) power. To add insult to injury, they carry out this anti-American, anti-Constitutional campaign under the boldly false rubric of “Restoring the Rule of Law.”

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

Now let’s move over to the Post’s Sports Section. Here’s an account of what happened to courageous African-American athletes who stood up for their rights and the rights of others during the “glory days” of White Supremacy that Trump, Sessions, & Co. so cherish and honor.

Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand

Two black demonstrators killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the ground at the edge of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 8, 1968. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

By Kevin B. Blackistone February 13

Robert Lee Davis found himself lying in blood next to his teammate Sam Hammond. At least one bullet had struck Davis in the back. Another went in Hammond’s neck.

Davis recalled in an oral history that Hammond, a running back at South Carolina State, asked him, “Do you think I’m going to live?” Davis, a linebacker, said he answered, “Sam, you are going to be all right, buddy.”

Hammond was the first of three young black men to die that night 50 years ago in Orangeburg, S.C. Davis was one of several football players at historically black South Carolina State to survive a hail of police fire with injuries.

What brought them together that Feb. 8, 1968, evening was not a team meeting or the training table. Instead, it was a call to confront a wrong, an affront, an act of overt racial discrimination in Orangeburg at a bowling alley that refused would-be black bowlers just like the state was denying black citizens their human rights.

As a result, Davis and Hammond became athlete-activists long before we created the suddenly ubiquitous, if not trite, alliterative phrase these days to describe football and basketball players, almost all of color, who have, by comparison, merely sported sloganeering T-shirts, or employed histrionics, to demonstrate against racial injustice.

It is a noble and laudable effort, of course. But what we’ve come to champion of athletes today pales juxtaposed to what so many did in the cauldron of the late ’60s civil rights movement. Davis and Hammond, for example, dared to physically confront the very embodiment of the South’s recalcitrant racists — scores of carbine rifle-toting, all-white state troopers — for which Hammond forfeited not just his career but his life.

They were among at least 30 victims of what became known as the Orangeburg massacre.

I was reminded of it three years ago as a presenter at the annual Media and Civil Rights symposium at the University of South Carolina. It included a mesmerizing panel featuring a demonstrator that night, civil rights icon and scholar Cleveland Sellers, and a reporter who became legendary for his fearless coverage of the massacre and other civil rights movement era violence, Jack Bass. With Jack Nelson, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the civil rights movement, Bass authored “The Orangeburg Massacre” in 1970.

And I took note that the panelists, particularly Oliver Francis, a one-time baseball player at Voorhees, another historically black South Carolina college, pointed out that black male athletes in particular stepped to the fore in Orangeburg’s deadly confrontation with white supremacy, and in others. Francis wound up convicted and sentenced to prison for 18 to 24 months as an organizer in an armed black student takeover in 1969 of the Voorhees administration building.

It all reminded that black athletes played not just pivotal roles in the civil rights movement, like the muscle North Carolina A&T football players provided for their classmates engaged in sit-ins to desegregate the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter. Or in Rock Hill, S.C., where 10 black Friendship College students were detained by police for trying to desegregate a town lunch counter in 1961 but became known as the Rock Hill Nine after one among them wasn’t booked so he could maintain his athletic scholarship. Chicago Bears running back Willie Galimore was the test black registrant at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla., that became a flash point for desegregation fights in 1964.

And as was evidenced in Orangeburg, black athletes sometimes were even in the vanguard of protests. Samuel Freedman underscored as much in recounting the Orangeburg massacre in his 2014 book, “Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”

Freedman wrote: “Shortly after the 1967 football season ended, many of the politically engaged members of the South Carolina State team joined in protests against a segregated bowling alley near the campus in Orangeburg.” On Feb. 6, 1968, Freedman reported, Davis and several of his teammates went on their own to the bowling alley and not only were denied admittance but were threatened with arrest by city police for disturbing the peace. Other students eventually joined the football players, objected to the police threats and wound up defending themselves from swinging billy clubs.

Two nights later, Freedman stated, “an all-white force of state troopers opened fire on the student demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight. Among the dead was one football player . . . Hammond. Several other players were injured by gunfire, one of them temporarily paralyzed.”

Davis was that temporarily paralyzed victim.

The student survivors of the massacre refused, however, to be deterred and allow the killings of Hammond, fellow student Henry Smith and high school football player Delano Middleton to be in vain. They organized a march from campus to the state capital 42 miles away to demand justice. Athletes decided to lead the march by running the distance.

“The four young men who approached me about the run were all track and field distance runners,” Willis Ham, a South Carolina State baseball player at the time, told the (Orangeburg, S.C.) Times and Democrat five years ago. “Three of the young men were not of American descent, and they simply wanted to express their disgust for the way Americans ‘treat their own,’ with the one tool that they had to their credit [the ability to run].

“We wanted our fellow students to know how deeply we felt about their determination to go to Columbia [S.C.], and express to state officials how they really felt about the lack of support in the days leading to the massacre.”

“It gave us a chance to say that our spirits and drive for freedom from depression would never be destroyed,” Ham explained.

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The white troopers who fired on the students were exonerated in a trial a year later. The lone conviction from the incident was of Sellers for incitement. He spent seven months in prison. He was pardoned in 1993.

But what Hammond, the football player, first fell for is forever remembered on South Carolina State’s campus. Its basketball arena that opened that fateful day, Feb. 8, 1968, was renamed the Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center.

Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Post.”

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

We should all be appalled that in the 21st Century, folks like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, and others who think that it’s “OK” and “permissible” to whip up false anti-Hispanic fervor with bogus narratives about rampant crime, imaginary “stolen” jobs, and phantom “adverse effects” of legal immigration have weaseled their way into positions of national power and prominence.

They seek to take America backwards to a bygone era of racial injustice and manufactured hate. Don’t let them get away with it! Ballot boxes were made to “retire” the Trumps, Sessions, and Cottons of the world and send them off to try to make an honest living.

PWS

02-16-18

CRIME/NATIONAL SECURITY/TRUMP: “NO DOUBTER” – ANYONE WHO THINKS THAT VALDI PUTIN DIDN’T HELP ELECT TRUMP IS BADLY MISTAKEN – Just Read Mueller’s Latest Indictment! – I’ve Got It for You!

Russian Indictment

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

So, now you know why:

Trump fears the truth;
Sessions runs around the country trashing Dreamers, asylum seekers, lawyers, empowering MS-13, and promoting his White Nationalist agenda while not lifting a finger to prevent Russian meddling in our elections;
DHS is headed by a lightweight sycophant who is more concerned about deporting gardeners and maids and “kissing up” to Trump’s racist agenda than about protecting our country from the active threat by Russia;
We’re standing by and letting Russia run all over us on the world stage;
Vladi is just delighted with the performance of his “Puppet President,” “Agent Devon,” and a host of GOP “Fellow Travelers;”
Trump and his cohorts are out to destroy the career civil service because career civil servants owe allegiance to our Constitution rather than to Trump and his corrupt minions.

Wake up, folks, and vote the GOP out of office, on all levels, before it’s too late for America!

PWS

02-15-18

JAMES HOHMANN @ WASHPOST DAILY 202 — TRUMP, GOP DON’T APPEAR SERIOUS ABOUT PROTECTING DREAMERS OR IMMIGRATION REFORM — RATHER, SEEK WAYS TO ADVANCE INTENTIONALLY DIVISIVE, RACIALLY BIASED, “FACT-FREE” WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA! — Plus, My Point By Point Analysis Of Why The Democrats Should “Hang Tough” On A Dreamer Deal!

Hohmann reports:

BY JAMES HOHMANN

with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Democrats are so eager to shield young foreign-born “dreamers” from deportation that they’re now offering to make compromises that would have been hard to imagine a year ago. Republicans, who feel like they have them over the barrel, are demanding more.

Showing his pragmatic side, for instance, Bernie Sanders says he’s willing to pony up big for border security if that’s what it takes. “I would go much further than I think is right,” the Vermont senator said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “Unwillingly. Unhappily. I think it’s a stupid thing to do. But we have to protect the dreamers. … I’m willing to make some painful concessions.”

Sanders said a wall is still a “totally absurd idea” and that there are better ways to secure the border with Mexico, but he also emphasized that there will be “a horrible moral stain” on the country if President Trump goes through with his order to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program next month.

— Anti-immigration hardliners are staking out a firm position because most of them are not actually concerned about the plight of the dreamers. They have never thought these young people, whose undocumented parents brought them to the United States as children, should be here anyway. They agitated for Trump to end the program.

This means they’ll be fine if no bill passes, and they know that gives them way more leverage to demand wholesale changes to the entire legal immigration system. “The president’s framework bill is not an opening bid for negotiations. It’s a best and final offer,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who has emerged as the leader of this group in the Senate. He made this comment yesterday on “Fox and Friends,” knowing the president watches. Sure enough, Trump echoed the same talking point on Twitter, calling this the “last chance” for action.

— Mitch McConnell wants to use this week’s immigration debate to force show votes that can be used to embarrass vulnerable Democratic senators from red states. For example, the majority leader introduced a measure yesterday that would penalize so-called sanctuary cities for not cooperating with federal immigration laws. This issue tests well in polls and focus groups in most of the 10 states Trump carried in 2016 where a Democrat is now up for reelection. GOP insiders on the Hill say that McConnell is mainly focused on doing whatever it takes to protect his majority now that 2018 has arrived, and he has a narrower majority after the loss in Alabama.

— Democrats stuck together to block the Senate from taking up the poison pill on sanctuary cities, but the fact that the debate has so quickly devolved into a fight over process offered another data point – if for some reason you needed one – of how dysfunctional the Senate has become.

Trump urges senators to back his immigration proposal

— “Most Republicans on Tuesday appeared to be rallying behind a proposal by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and six other GOP senators that fulfills Trump’s calls to legalize 1.8 million dreamers, immediately authorizes spending at least $25 billion to bolster defenses along the U.S.-Mexico border, makes changes to family-based legal immigration programs and ends a diversity lottery system used by immigrants from smaller countries,” Ed O’Keefe reports. Senate Minority Leader Chuck “Schumer said the Grassley plan unfairly targets family-based immigration and that making such broad changes as part of a plan to legalize just a few million people ‘makes no sense.’

“In a bid to soften Trump’s proposals and win over Democrats, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) unveiled a watered-down version of the GOP proposal — but had not won support from members of either party by late Tuesday. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime proponent of comprehensive immigration changes, said the Grassley proposal should be the focus of the Senate’s debate. … Schumer and other Democrats, meanwhile, voiced support for a plan by Sens. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would grant legal status to dreamers in the country since 2013 but would not immediately authorize money to build out southern border walls and fencing.”

— Democrats would like to pass a narrow bill that only protects DACA recipients, but they know that’s not possible with Republicans in control of Congress and the presidency. To get the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, they’re conceding on at least some of Trump’s demands related to security. Sanders said there are between 55 to 57 votes for a compromise that would save the dreamers and fund border protections. “We are scrambling now for three to five more votes,” he said.

— The Senate will convene at 10 a.m. to continue debate, as negotiations behind the scenes continue. Somewhat counterintuitively, conservative hardliners believe that Latinos will be less likely to turn out this November if nothing passes in Congress because activists will blame Democrats for not delivering.

Bernie Sanders heads to a Democratic caucus meeting in the Capitol. (Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post)

— Despite concerted efforts by Trump and McConnell to drive a wedge through the Democratic caucus, there remains a remarkable degree of unity. This highlights how much the terms of the immigration debate have shifted over the past decade. Every Democrat in Congress now wants to protect DACA recipients. It wasn’t always this way. The House passed a Dream Act in 2010 that would have allowed undocumented immigrants to apply for citizenship if they entered the United States as children, graduated from high school or got an equivalent degree, and had been in the United States for at least five years. Five moderate Democrats in the Senate voted no. If each of them had supported it, the bill would have become law, and DACA would have been unnecessary. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is the only one of those five Democrats still left. (The others retired or lost.) Now Tester speaks out against the president’s decision to end DACA. (I explored this dynamic in-depth last September.)

Sanders marveled during our interview at how much the polling has shifted in recent years toward protecting dreamers, with some public surveys showing that as many 90 percent of Americans don’t think they should be deported. The share who think they should also have a pathway to become U.S. citizens has also risen. “If we talked a year or two ago, I’m not sure I would have thought that would be possible,” he said.

Hillary Clinton relentlessly attacked Bernie during the debates in 2016 for voting to kill comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. Sanders – working closely with some of the leading unions – expressed concern back then that the bill would drive down wages for native-born workers by flooding the labor market with cheap foreign workers. This position caused him problems with Hispanics during his presidential bid.

Sanders rejects the idea that his views have changed since 2007, and he still defends his 11-year-old vote. He noted that the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) opposed that bill, as did the Southern Poverty Law Center, because it included a guest worker program that was “akin to slavery.” He said he remains just as concerned about guest worker programs as he was back then, but that he’s always favored a comprehensive solution that includes legal protections for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants who live here. “You can say you support immigration reform, but obviously the devil is in the details on what that means,” the senator explained. “I stood with progressive organizations who said you don’t want to bring indentured servitude.”

Sanders criticized a guest worker program in his home state that allows resorts to hire ski instructors from Europe instead of native Vermonters. “Now do you not think we can find young people in Vermont who know how to ski and snowboard? But if you go to some of the resorts, that’s what you would find,” he said. “When I was a kid, we worked at summer jobs to help pay for college. … So I think we want to take a hard look at guest worker programs. Some of them remain very unfair.”

— After coming surprisingly close to toppling Clinton and winning the Democratic nomination two years ago, Sanders is at or near the top of the pack in every poll of potential 2020 primary match-ups. He’s going to Des Moines next Friday for a rally with congressional candidate Pete D’Alessandro, his first visit to Iowa this year. Sanders will also go to Wisconsin for Randy Bryce, who is running against Speaker Paul Ryan, and Illinois, where he’ll boost Chuy Garcia’s bid for retiring Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s open seat. A few weeks after that, he plans a tour of the Southwest. “I’m going to do everything I can to help people in 2018,” Sanders said.

Lobbying for their lives

— Republicans have gone the other direction. Before Trump came on the scene, the party was divided but GOP elites agreed that, for the long-term survival of the party, they needed to embrace more inclusive policies. Losses in 2012 prompted many Senate Republicans to endorse a comprehensive bill the next year (Sanders voted for it too), but the legislation was doomed in the House after Majority Leader Eric Cantor went down in a Virginia primary partly because of his perceived softness on the issue.

Elected Republicans used to insist adamantly that they were not anti-immigration but anti-illegal immigration. That’s changed. At the behest of Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republicans are rallying around the idea of dramatic reductions in legal immigration. Two years ago, this was an extreme idea that most GOP senators would have quickly distanced themselves from. Now it’s considered mainstream and the centerpiece of the bill that McConnell has rallied his members behind.

To put it in perspective: By cutting the rate of legal immigration, Trump’s proposal – codified in Grassley’s bill — would delay the date that white Americans become a minority of the population by as many as five additional years, according to expert analysis.

“What’s very sad, but not unusual given the moment we’re living in, is that Republicans are more concerned about their right-wing, extremist, xenophobic base,” said Sanders. “You would think that, with 85 to 90 percent of people supporting protections for the dreamers, that it would not take a profile in courage to pass legislation to protect them.”

Kelly: ‘Dreamers’ who didn’t sign up for DACA were ‘too afraid’ or ‘too lazy’

— A dual-track fight over DACA is playing out in the courts. A federal judge in New York issued a preliminary injunction last night that keeps the program alive beyond Trump’s March 5 deadline so that legal challenges can play out. “A federal judge in California has issued a similar injunction, and the Supreme Court is expected this week to consider whether it will take up the fight over DACA,” Matt Zapotosky reports.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis recognized that Trump “indisputably” has the authority to end the program put in place by Barack Obama, but he also called the administration’s arguments that DACA was unconstitutional and illegal under federal law flimsy. “Because that conclusion was erroneous, the decision to end the DACA program cannot stand,” he wrote.

— Happy Valentine’s Day. Don’t forget to get a gift.

— What I’m especially excited about this morning is baseball. Pitchers and catchers are reporting for spring tr

Listen to James’s quick summary of today’s Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day:

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Contrary to most of the “chatter,” I think that the Dreamers and the Democrats have the upper hand in this one. I’ll tell you why below!

A “border security package,” could involve the Wall, technology and much needed management improvements at DHS (but certainly no additional detention money — stop the “New American Gulag” — or personnel for the Border Patrol until they full current vacancies and account for how they are currently are deploying agents).

Beyond that, the Dems probably could agree to a reallocation of diversity and some preference visas while maintaining current legal immigration levels. Cutting legal immigration levels, eliminating family immigration, or authorizing further denials of due process (the totally bogus and essentially evil claim that the current already inadequate protections for children and other vulnerable migrant’s are “loopholes”) should be “non-starters.”

If they can’t get the deal they want, the Dems can walk away and still win for the Dreamers in the long run. Here is why:

I doubt that Trump would actually veto a compromise bill passed by both Houses that protected Dreamers without his full “Four Pillars of White Nationalism” program.
- If he does, any Democrat who can’t make Trump and the GOP pay for such a dumb move in the next election cycle doesn’t deserve to be a Democrat.
- The “full Dreamer protection” trade for border security with no other changes should be a “no brainer.” If Trump or the GOP “tank” it over the restrictionist agenda, the Democrats should be able to make them pay at the polls.
Right now, the Administration is under two injunctions halting the repeal of the “core DACA” program.
- If the Supremes don’t intervene, that issue could be tied up in the lower Federal Courts for years.
  - It’s very clear that the Administration’s current position is ultimately a loser before the lower Federal Courts.
  - If the Administration tries to “short-circuit” the process by going through APA to promulgate a regulation to terminate DACA, that process also is likely to be successfully challenged in the Federal Courts.
    - The so-called “legal rationale” that Sessions has invoked for ending DACA has literally been “laughed out of court.”
    - Trump himself has said that there is really no reason to remove Dreamers from the U.S.
    - So, on the merits, an attempt to terminate DACA by regulation probably would be held “without any legal or rational basis” by the lower Federal Courts.
Even if the Supremes give the “green light” to terminate DACA, most “Dreamers” by now have plausible cases for other forms of relief.
- Many DACA recipients have never been in removal proceedings. If they have been here for at least 10 years, have clean criminal backgrounds, and have spouses or children who are U.S. citizens they can apply for “cancellation of removal.”
- “Former DACA” recipients appear to be a “particular social group” for asylum and withholding of removal purposes. They are “particularized, the characteristic of having DACA revoked is “immutable,” and they are highly “socially distinct.” Many of them come from countries with abysmal human rights records and ongoing, directed violence. They therefore would have plausible asylum or withholding claims, or claims under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”).
- If ICE tries to use information voluntarily given by the Dreamers during the application process to establish removability or for any other adverse reason, that is likely to provoke a challenge that will be successful in at least some lower Federal Courts.
Safety in numbers.
- There is nothing that Trump, Sessions, and the DHS can actually do to remove 700,000+ Dreamers.
- The U.S. Immigration Courts are backed up for years, with nearly 700,000 already pending cases! Sessions is doing everything he can to make the backlog even worse. Dreamers will go to the “end of the line.”
- Sure Sessions would like to speed up the deportation “assembly line” (a/k/a “The Deportation Railway”).
  - But, his boneheaded and transparently unfair attempts to do that are highly likely to cause “big time” pushback from the Federal Courts and actually “tie up” the entire system — not just “Dreamers.”
  - The last time the DOJ tied to mindlessly accelerate the process, under AG John Ashcroft, the Courts of Appeals remanded defective deportation orders by the basket-load for various due process and legal violations — many with stinging published opinions.
    - Finally, even former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (“Gonzo I”), hardly a “Due Process Junkie” had enough and slowed down the train. It took years for the “haste makes waste” Circuit Court remands to work their way back through the system. Some might still be hanging around.
  - Because the GOP White Nationalists and Trump read off of “restrictionist cue cards” that don’t take account of the law, facts, or history, the Dems should have a huge advantage here if and when individual “Dreamer” removal cases get to the Federal Courts.
- Each “Dreamer removal case” should present the Democrats with excellent example of the cruelty, stupidity, and total wastefulness of the Trump/Sessions/DHS enforcement policies. Wasting money to “Make America Worse.” Come on, man!
- Bottom Line: Trump and Sessions have created a “false Dreamer emergency” that they can’t escape without some help from the Democrats. If the Democrats see an opportunity to make a “good deal” for the Dreamers, they should take it. But, they shouldn’t trade the Dreamers for the harmful White Nationalist restrictionist agenda! Eventually, the problem will be solved in a way that is favorable for most Dreamers, regardless of what the White Nationalists threaten right now. The Dreamers might just have to hang on longer until we get at least some degree of “regime change.”

PWS

02-13-18

ENJOINED AGAIN: US DISTRICT JUDGE IN EDNY ALSO TEMPORARILY HALTS DACA REPEAL — FINDS GONZO’s “LEGAL” RATIONALE “PLAINLY INCORRECT!”

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/13/politics/federal-judge-daca/index.html

Ariane de Vogue Reports for CNN:

(CNN)A second federal judge Tuesday has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Success for Harvard medical students in DACA could mean their parents are deported
Success for Harvard medical students in DACA could mean their parents are deported
Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that DACA participants and states are likely to succeed in their challenge that the way President Donald Trump terminated the Obama-era program was arbitrary and capricious.
Trump last year announced his plan to end DACA, the policy that allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to stay in the country, effective March 5. That deadline has become central in the congressional debate over immigration, but Democrats and Republicans are nowhere near a breakthrough.
Tuesday’s ruling, combined with a ruling from a California judge last month, means the program could end up going beyond the March 5 date. The ruling means DACA recipients can renew their status, but the administration will not have to hold the program open to those who never applied.
“Defendants indisputably can end the DACA program,” Garaufis wrote, referring to the Trump administration. “The question before the court is thus not whether defendants could end the DACA program, but whether they offered legally adequate reasons for doing so. Based on its review of the record before it, the court concludes that defendants have not done so.”
The judge said that the decision to end the program was based in part on the “plainly incorrect factual premise” that the program was illegal.
“Today’s ruling shows that courts across the country agree that Trump’s termination of DACA was not just immoral, but unlawful as well,” said Karen Tumlin of the National Immigration Law Center.
This week the Supreme Court is set to meet behind closed doors to discuss whether to take up the Trump administration’s appeal of the related case.
The Justice Department said it maintains that the administration acted “within its lawful authority” in deciding to end DACA and will “vigorously defend this position.”
“DACA was implemented unilaterally after Congress declined to extend these benefits to this same group of illegal aliens. As such, it was an unlawful circumvention of Congress,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “Promoting and enforcing the rule of law is vital to protecting a nation, its borders, and its citizens.”
Impact on immigration negotiations
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, urged lawmakers to “focus” on March 5, despite the two district court rulings blocking the DACA drawdown, but acknowledged there will be more time.
“We should still focus on the March 5 date,” Tillis said on Fox News Tuesday afternoon. “The reality is, unless there’s any action by the Supreme Court, looks like we have some number of weeks following March 5 to solve the problem.”
Judge brought up “Norway” comments
In fiery oral arguments last month, Garaufis gave a blistering critique of what he called the President’s “recurring, redundant drumbeat of anti-Latino commentary.”
“It’s not just an ad hoc comment that was overheard on an open mic,” the judge said. “It’s not just that somebody at INS said something derogatory about Mexicans. This came from the top.”
Garaufis was responding to a question regarding Trump’s comments in a closed-door meeting with senators in which the President asked why people from Haiti and more Africans were wanted in the US and added that the US should get more people from countries like Norway.
CNN’s Laura Jarrett contributed to this report.

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

Who knows how this eventually will end if Congress doesn’t solve the problem? I certainly can imagine a conservative majority of the Supremes cooking up a way to empower Trump and dump on the Dreamers.

But, no matter how this comes out, it’s never been about the “rule of law,” border security, or protecting Americans. Indeed, every commentator who isn’t Jeff Sessions or one of his White Nationalist xenophobic buddies agrees that ending DACA and removing “Dreamers” would make America a worse place in every possible way.

No, it’s always been about White Nationalism, racism, xenophobia, dividing America, and the general alt right “agenda of hate and intolerance” which has been what Sessions and those like him are all about. And, he’s not even a very good lawyer, taking most of his bogus so-called “legal arguments” off of “cue cards” prepared for him by restrictionist interest groups.

And racist, xenophobic statements by Trump himself continue to undermine the DOJ attorneys’ arguments that there is some type of “rational basis” for Trump immigration policies.

PWS

02-13-17

Category: Obama Administration

NPR: Sessions Out To Destroy US Immigration Court System — “All the more reason why we need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court removed from the political shenanigans and enforcement bias of Sessions and his DOJ!”

ROBIN UREVICH TAKES US INSIDE THE DEADLY “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” OPERATED BY THE DHS — “Civil Detainees” Are Dying At A Rate Of About One Per Month In The Hands Of Our Government — Many Think Some Of These Deaths Were Preventable!

“Deadly Detention: Self-Portrait of a Tragedy

A suicidal detainee never got the mental health care he needed and was placed in a cell that contained a known suicide hazard,
a ceiling sprinkler head.

Also Read: “Hell in the Middle of a Pine Forest”

Psychiatrist: Placing a suicidal prisoner in solitary confinement is like placing someone with bad asthma in a burning building.

See Interactive Map of U.S. Detention Deaths

Homeland Security reported that at the Stewart Detention Center solitary confinement, which isn’t supposed to be punitive, appeared to be sometimes used to punish trivial offenses.

Since 2003, 179 immigrant detainees have died in custody, many from preventable causes, like pneumonia and alcohol withdrawal.

JeanCarlo Jimenez completed his self-portrait and tied knots in a white bed sheet to shorten it. A guard observed him jumping rope with it.

“DEADLY DETENTION

Deadly Detention: Hell in the Middle of a Pine Forest

Former ICE Guard: “They’re always putting them in the hole — in segregation. And they manhandle people.”

Also Read: “Self-Portrait of a Tragedy”

Guatemalan Asylum Seeker: “It is hell in here. I wouldn’t even recommend it to a person I hate.”

See Interactive Map of U.S. Detention Deaths

CoreCivic documents show that detainees were in isolation for such offenses as “horse playing.”

A detainee says guards call detainees “wetbacks” and “dogs,” and have greeted each other with Nazi salutes.

DACA: IS THE ADMINISTRATION ON THE VERGE OF ANOTHER BIG COURT DEFEAT? — US District Judge Bates Signals He Might Order Restart Of Program!

PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP — PROFESSOR LAILA HLASS @ TULANE LAW TAKES ON “GUILT BY ASSOCIATION” AND “IMPLICIT BIAS “ IN IMMIGRATION ADJUDICATIONS INVOLVING GANG ALLEGATIONS!

The School to Deportation Pipeline

Laila Hlass

Abstract

WNYC’S BETH FERTIG FERRETS OUT FOOLISHNESS BEHIND THE SESSIONS/DHS ATTACK ON ADMINISTRATIVE CLOSING AND PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION – I’m Quoted and Pictured!

WHEN EVERYTHING & EVERYBODY IS A PRIORITY, THERE ARE NO PRIORITIES — WHAT “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IS REALLY ABOUT!

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won‘t stop human migration!

“GO POUND SAND” SUPREMES TELL TRUMP & SESSIONS ON DACA – HIGH COURT STIFFARMS DOJ’S FRIVOLOUS TRY TO END RUN LEGAL PROCESS!

DESTROYING AMERICA, ONE PRECIOUS, TALENTED LIFE AT A TIME — “Can something that irrational happen in America?” — In The Trump/Sessions/Miller White Nationalist Regime? — You Betcha!

Presidential Greatness Rankings

Greatness Rankings by Party

Next on Mt. Rushmore

Mt. Rushmore by Party

DREAMER DEBACLE: MY THREE “TAKEAWAYS”

DREAMER DEBACLE: MY THREE “TAKEAWAYS”

Stuck on a shelf or locked in a safe, D.C.’s ‘Lost Laws’ still packed a punch

Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand

CRIME/NATIONAL SECURITY/TRUMP: “NO DOUBTER” – ANYONE WHO THINKS THAT VALDI PUTIN DIDN’T HELP ELECT TRUMP IS BADLY MISTAKEN – Just Read Mueller’s Latest Indictment! – I’ve Got It for You!

Wake up, folks, and vote the GOP out of office, on all levels, before it’s too late for America!

ENJOINED AGAIN: US DISTRICT JUDGE IN EDNY ALSO TEMPORARILY HALTS DACA REPEAL — FINDS GONZO’s “LEGAL” RATIONALE “PLAINLY INCORRECT!”

Related posts:

A suicidal detainee never got the mental health care he needed and was placed in a cell that contained a known suicide hazard, a ceiling sprinkler head.

Psychiatrist: Placing a suicidal prisoner in solitary confinement is like placing someone with bad asthma in a burning building.

Homeland Security reported that at the Stewart Detention Center solitary confinement, which isn’t supposed to be punitive, appeared to be sometimes used to punish trivial offenses.

Since 2003, 179 immigrant detainees have died in custody, many from preventable causes, like pneumonia and alcohol withdrawal.

JeanCarlo Jimenez completed his self-portrait and tied knots in a white bed sheet to shorten it. A guard observed him jumping rope with it.

Former ICE Guard: “They’re always putting them in the hole — in segregation. And they manhandle people.”

Guatemalan Asylum Seeker: “It is hell in here. I wouldn’t even recommend it to a person I hate.”

CoreCivic documents show that detainees were in isolation for such offenses as “horse playing.”

A detainee says guards call detainees “wetbacks” and “dogs,” and have greeted each other with Nazi salutes.

Related posts:

Related posts:

The School to Deportation Pipeline

Abstract

Related posts:

Related posts:

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won‘t stop human migration!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Presidential Greatness Rankings

Greatness Rankings by Party

Next on Mt. Rushmore

Mt. Rushmore by Party

Related posts:

DREAMER DEBACLE: MY THREE “TAKEAWAYS”

Related posts:

Stuck on a shelf or locked in a safe, D.C.’s ‘Lost Laws’ still packed a punch

Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand

Related posts:

Wake up, folks, and vote the GOP out of office, on all levels, before it’s too late for America!

Related posts:

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Related posts:

A suicidal detainee never got the mental health care he needed and was placed in a cell that contained a known suicide hazard,
a ceiling sprinkler head.