"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Category: FRIDAY ESSAY — FROM MONTICELLO TO TRUMP MILLER SESSIONS AND THE GOP WHITE NATIONALISTS
APPLETON – Heritier Muhorana talks to his wife and daughter every day.
He can hear their voices on the phone. He can look at their faces on a screen. But for more than three years, he hasn’t seen them in person.
In 2000, Muhorana fled horrific violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the relative safety of crowded refugee camps in Burundi, a neighboring country in central Africa.
Muhorana met his wife, Chantal, in one of those refugee camps. That’s where they got married. But in late 2014, Muhorana was approved for resettlement in the U.S. — a process that took nearly two years and began before he was married.
He came alone to the U.S. in 2015, expecting his wife would be able to join him soon after. That didn’t happen. His daughter, Deborah, will be 3 years old in December. He has never met her in person.
His wife and daughter left the refugee camps and now live in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. They’re working with World Relief Fox Valley in an effort to get to the U.S., but so far haven’t been successful.
The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. The number of refugees being allowed to settle in the U.S. has sharply fallen in the last two years.
In September, the Trump administration announced a plan to limit the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. this fiscal year to 30,000, down from a limit of 45,000 set last fiscal year — already the lowest since Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980. The limit during the final year of the Obama administration was 110,000.
Despite the limit of 45,000 last fiscal year, the U.S. only admitted 22,491 refugees, which is the lowest number in decades, according to State Department records.
The number of refugees arriving in northeast Wisconsin has also significantly declined in the last two years. World Relief Fox Valley, which has offices in Appleton and Oshkosh, had 209 arrivals in fiscal year 2016. That fell to 70 in fiscal year 2017 and 57 in fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30.
Phil Stoffel, immigration manager for World Relief Fox Valley, said the situation for refugees trying to bring close relatives to the U.S. has gotten more difficult recently.
“People all across the nation in networks and affiliates that we work with are telling me they’re not getting any answers for any of these cases right now,” he said.
Many refugees have started to lose trust in the system they’re relying on to help them, Stoffel said. World Relief Fox Valley has at least 50 cases of refugees trying to bring close relatives to the U.S., but it doesn’t appear anything is going to change in the near future, he said.
“There’s no other way to explain what’s going on,” he said. “The politics in this are really bad right now.”
Stoffel has one piece of advice to anyone unsure whether the U.S. should welcome refugees at all: meet one.
“Once you meet one, it changes,” he said.
‘A very tough moment’
In 1998, Muhorana fled with his family from their village in Katanga, a former province in the southern part of Congo. The country was descending into war. He was just 12 years old.
He still remembers the night they left. It was about 6 p.m. That’s when they started walking. They didn’t stop until about 2 p.m. the next day. And his family wasn’t alone.
“Thousands of people moving at one time, just walking,” he said. “It was very painful.”
Muhorana didn’t bring much with him, other than what he could carry. He remembers a cousin asking him to hold a bottle for her baby, to help her as they were walking.
They walked for weeks without enough food to eat and in constant danger of being caught up in the violence unfolding around them.
“At that time, what mattered was just to save our lives,” he said.
But they couldn’t always avoid the fighting. The exposure to violence left many people traumatized — or worse, Muhorana said.
“I saw some people who were hurt or shot, some other people were killed on the way,” he said. “It was a very tough moment.”
Muhorana, though, safely found his way to Kalemie, a town on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, where a relief organization provided food to the crowd of refugees. He stayed there for more than a month, but safety was still a concern.
He eventually continued north to South Kivu, a province near the border with Burundi, and stayed there for almost two years, despite treacherous living conditions. He stayed in churches or schools, often in close quarters with thousands of other people.
“We didn’t have enough food to eat. We didn’t have medical assistance,” he said. “So, everything was just a little bit. It wasn’t enough.”
Disease was a problem, too. Many people got sick. Some died. But safety from the violence remained the primary concern, Muhorana said.
“People were still being killed there,” he said.
He couldn’t think about his plans for the future. The situation didn’t allow it. So, in an effort to find peace and a place he could think about his goals in life, he and his family decided to flee for Burundi.
‘We were limited’
Muhorana was a teenager by the time his family crossed the border into Burundi and arrived at their first refugee camp. They stayed for more than a year, then were forced to move to another camp in the northeast part of country.
The violence unfolding in Congo was behind them. But in the camps, his family encountered other problems. Sickness, mostly.
“I would see people dying every month, every year,” Muhorana said. “You bury a lot of people.”
Their camp was packed with about 10,000 people, he said. And it wasn’t the only camp around. Burundi had multiple refugee camps set up for those fleeing across the border.
The camp was not a good place to live, Muhorana said. He felt trapped, unable to go anywhere without asking permission first.
“When you are young, you have dreams. You have goals. You have ambition. You have something in your heart you desire to achieve,” he said. “In the camp, we were limited.”
Still, despite the limitations, Muhorana found a way to work toward a better life. He left the camp after a few years and made his way to Rwanda, a country to the north of Burundi. There, he was able to finish high school and get a college scholarship, which he used to earn a bachelor’s degree in business.
Then, in 2013, Muhorana returned to the camp, where his family still lived. That’s when he met the woman who later became his wife. She had fled a similar situation in Congo and was already living in the camp when he returned.
He found a lot to like about her, Muhorana said, but her generosity stood out to him. The prospect of getting married in the camp wasn’t ideal, he said. But, in 2015, without other options, that’s exactly what he did.
He hadn’t specifically planned on coming to the U.S. — he simply wanted to find a country where he could live a normal life. But when he was approved for resettlement in the U.S., the prospect excited him.
“We were thinking that maybe life was going to be different than what we have here,” he said.
The process of getting approved for resettlement took nearly two years. And when it was over, Muhorana didn’t get to choose where he was sent. His wife, who hadn’t yet been approved, wouldn’t be able to join him.
“We couldn’t travel together because I was already at the final step,” he said. “I was already ready to come.”
So, with no other choice, he left on his own.
‘Change will come’
Muhorana didn’t speak English — not much, at least — when he arrived in the U.S. in 2015. And that was far from the only challenge he faced.
He was thrilled to arrive, but those first few years weren’t easy at all, he said. The culture was entirely new to him and it took time to adjust.
“I couldn’t imagine that I would have friends and I would get familiar with people here,” he said.
World Relief Fox Valley has services meant to help refugees acclimate to life in the U.S., said Tami McLaughlin, the organization’s executive director.
The organization recruits volunteers who spend time with refugees and serve as companions and valuable sources of information, McLaughlin said.
“Those friendships make the difference in how well somebody transitions into a completely new culture and community,” she said.
To do basic things, such as apply for a job, enroll a child in school, or get health care, can be overwhelming at first for refugees who are often simply relieved to be safe, McLaughlin said.
“You celebrate the little wins and take the little steps,” she said.
As much as Muhorana tries to remain optimistic about his future, it’s difficult not to be upset with his wife and daughter living thousands of miles away, he said.
The conversations he has with them tend to focus, almost inevitably, on when they might see each other again.They’re still working hard to have a life together, despite the distance between them.
“I try to share my life, my experience here, so I can tell them the difference,” he said.
Muhorana has been working with Stoffel, the immigration manager, for about two years to get his wife and daughter to the U.S., but it’s unclear how much progress they’ve made.
“I can’t begin to tell you how much paperwork we’ve had to file and go through,” Stoffel said. “It’s just a constant back-and-forth with no clear answers from the government.”
Any refugee trying to enter the U.S. has to go through exhaustive background checks, according to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. Muhorana’s wife and daughter both have passed those checks, but attempts to get updates on the status of their case have gone unanswered, Stoffel said.
But despite the frustration and the length of time the couple has spent apart, his wife is still excited by the idea of coming to the U.S., Muhorana said.
“She can dream of a bright future too,” he said.
For now, Muhorana will wait. It’s all he can do.
“In life, nothing is permanent,” he said. “Everything is subject to change. So, change will come.”
President Donald Trump has ramped up his inflammatory racist rhetoric in the final days before the pivotal midterm elections that will determine if his corrupt administration will face any oversight from Congress.
Betting that fears of racial minorities will drive Republican voters to the polls, he has centered his closing pitch on a caravan of Central American migrants fleeing violence and poor crop yields in their home countries. He said, without evidence, that the caravan is filled with “many gang members” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” dropping the previous pretense (“terrorists”) to reveal a fear of all members of a minority group. “Women don’t want them in our country,” he added, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the migrants are rapists (similar to a claim he made upon launching his presidential campaign).
Guests on Fox News have speculated that migrants are carrying diseases like leprosy and that the caravan is a plot conceived of by rootless Jewish financiers seeking global domination like George Soros — the latter a paranoid conspiracy the president has also entertained. The president followed this up with a blatantly racist advertisement blaming Democrats for murders committed by an undocumented immigrant.
President Donald Trump rallies his fans in Columbia, Missouri, by blaming unknown forces for organizing the migrant caravan that he deems “an invasion.”
In all of this, Trump has emulated the outrageous, bigoted and violence-encouraging campaign waged by President Andrew Johnson in the 1866 midterms. In his “Swing Around the Circle,” the first time a sitting president campaigned around the country for candidates, Johnson made the election a referendum on himself, with unprecedented barnstorming speeches featuring paranoid conspiracy theories, racist demagoguery and incitement to violence.
Johnson, an accidental president who came to power after an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln and another failed to kill him, was a boorish drunk, a former slaveowner and a racist who held sympathies with the now-defeated Confederates. He vetoed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposed the 14th Amendment, opposed giving freed black people voting rights in the South and mass-pardoned most Confederate soldiers and officials and offered them property while denying it to freed black people. All of this brought the ire of the Republican Congress, which overrode his many vetoes and passed the 14th Amendment.
And so Johnson took to the campaign trail to defeat congressional Republicans and replace them with proponents of white supremacy. Johnson’s tour began on the East Coast. As he moved westward and faced Republican-heavy districts in the Midwest that opposed his policies, he became increasingly unhinged.
He began by comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery leader of the Republicans in Congress, to Judas Iscariot. He attacked Sen. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, two abolitionists turned advocates for black suffrage. Then, at a stop in Cleveland, a heckler yelled out, “Hang Jeff Davis!,” a call to execute the former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Johnson could not resist a reply, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips? … Having fought traitors at the South, I am prepared to fight traitors at the North.”
The “Swing Around the Circle” degenerated from there. Johnson continued to call for the execution of his political opponents Stevens, Phillips and Sumner. He defended recent riots in Memphis and New Orleans where white mobs killed dozens of black Americans in a racist fury by claiming that his political opponents had radicalized black Americans. They had it coming, essentially.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was a white supremacist drunk who called for the execution of his political enemies.
“If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and trace it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the riot at New Orleans was substantially planned,” Johnson said at a stop in St. Louis.
Johnson roped in the famed and beloved Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to support him on his “Swing Around the Circle.” Grant, disgusted by Johnson’s speeches, fell ill and excused himself from the tour. According to a biography of Grant written by his aide Adam Badeau, the general believed the president “fostered a spirit that engendered massacre, and afterward protected the evil-doers.”
President Johnson’s defense of white massacres of black people as the product of his opponents supporting black civil rights only encouraged more violence — violence that would ultimately overtake the country and re-establish official white supremacy over the former Confederate states until the 1960s.
Much as Johnson’s rhetorical leniency toward white mobs killing black Americans inspired further violence, Trump’s racist midterm campaign has done the same.
The constant drumbeat of fear-mongering news about the Central American migrant caravan from the president’s mouth and amplified by conservative media triggered a virulent anti-Semite, who believed that Jews like Soros and the refugee resettlement nonprofit HIAS were funding the caravan, to take up arms and attack a synagogue, killing 11 people. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States.
That same week, police arrested a Florida man for mailing bombs to a litany of political figures that Trump claims as his enemies and, in some cases, promised to jail, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and, of course, Soros.
The president and his supporters claim to be outraged by assertions that their rhetoric and policies have in any way incited violence from right-wing terrorists. That same week, the lawyers for a Trump-loving right-wing terrorist who planned to bomb mosques in 2016 filed a brief asking for leniency from the court because their client was seduced into terrorism by Trump’s bigoted rantings.
GUILLERMO ARIAS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Two children who are part of the migrant caravan of Central American refugees that the president claims are attempting to invade the U.S. The caravan is currently stuck in southern Mexico.
“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions,” the lawyers wrote. “A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’ See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government’s case.”
None of this is pushing Republicans away from Trump. If anything, they are drawing closer to his brand of paranoid racist incitement. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared on Friday that his Democratic opponent Rep. Beto O’Rourke may be funding the caravan with his campaign funds. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is running campaign ads fear-mongering about the “invasion” of migrants in an election in Tennessee, which is further away from the U.S.-Mexico border than the migrant caravan is currently.
Johnson’s campaign of racist incitement didn’t work in 1866. Instead, it became a referendum on the president’s reactionary encouragement of white supremacists in the South and the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Republican Party increased its congressional majorities and, having seen the worst of the president, impeached him after further fights over the future of black civil rights in 1868.
But Johnson survived impeachment, and the white supremacist regimes he helped foster in the South ultimately won full control and acceptance from the national government after a wave of terrorism and murder. “You will not replace us!” the white supremacists promised. A century and a half later, they marched on Charlottesville chanting the same thing. The president of the United States must’ve thought it sounded nice and decided to run on it.
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Donald Trump, the ugliest of Americans, and the leader of the kakistocracy, has brought out all the worst in contemporary America. He diminishes each of us and our country every day he is in office.
Start the democratic process for regime change by voting the GOP out of every office on Tuesday!
From the LA Times Editorial Section for Nov. 3, 2018:
Re “Who’s really an American?” editorial, Oct. 31
Questions over who ought to be considered American are complicated for those who do not look white. Ethnically and culturally, I am numerous things, which is a huge bonus because it helps me understand others. Because I have a significant amount of indigenous American heritage, I can honestly state that some of my people have been in North America for thousands of years.
However, within the last year, I have been told to go back where I came from. Since I don’t speak Spanish, being dumped in Mexico, presumably where these people want me to go, would be a challenge. Regardless, not one of my ancestors arrived here any later than the early 1800s.
On the other hand, President Trump’s mother, both of his paternal grandparents and two of his wives were not born in the United States. Trump’s present wife, who is our first lady, speaks English well enough to hold a casual conversation. In other words, the president’s family is a family of immigrants, and they have been welcomed here.
However, Trump’s rhetoric has people expressing hatred toward Americans like me, whose ancestors have been here for generations, and now he preaches against migrants who want to come here now. Perhaps Trump should learn more about the customs of his family’s adopted homeland so he can become a leader rather than a divider of people.
Marcella Hill, Los Angeles
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Pretty much says it all about Trump’s lack of character, morality, and qualifications to serve as President.
Regime change can start on next Tuesday! Get out the vote! Take our “country of immigrants” back from the White Nationalists (who, ironically, also are immigrants themselves, notwithstanding their ingratitude, lack of decency, and lack of any sense of REAL history — not the White Nationalist version peddled by Trump, Sessions, Miller, Bannon, Kobach, Steve King, etc.).
LONDON — President Trump’s promise to stop a caravan of Central American migrants from reaching the United States border, if necessary through military force, might seem like just another effort by the president to unilaterally dismantle international laws and accepted practices.
But there is one important difference between this and Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone defiance of climate change agreements, trade deals or arms control treaties. In attacking the long accepted means of protecting refugees and upholding stability in times of mass displacement, he’s got company. Lots and lots of company.
There is no shortage of countries that also skirt, and therefore undermine, global refugee rules. The European Union and Australia are two of the biggest offenders. Peru and Ecuador are restricting Venezuelan refugees, while Tanzania is working to push out Burundians.
Image
Stateless Rohingya migrants passing food supplies dropped by a Thai Army helicopter to others on a boat drifting in Thai waters in the Andaman Sea in 2015.CreditChristophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In 2015, as Rohingya refugees fled Myanmar on overcrowded boats, the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — in a move that might make even Mr. Trump blush — pushed the boats out to sea, stranding them, to prevent them from reaching safe shores.
Still, countries tend to hide their violations by presenting themselves as following the letter of the law, or by dressing up anti-refugee measures in humanitarian terms. But Mr. Trump is selling his harsh treatment of asylum-seekers as deliberate. And even if he is not the first to breach the rules, he is contributing to their breakdown in ways that could have global consequences.
“The more brazen you get, like Trump, and the more frequent you get, you can easily imagine a norm being completely torn down,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a migration expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who added that Mr. Trump was “taking an ax” to “one of the strongest norms we’ve got in international law” — the right of a refugee to seek asylum.
To consider how that would happen and what it would mean, it helps to understand the basics of asylum and how Mr. Trump fits into its erosion.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link for a clear understanding of how refugee and asylum law is supposed to work and how immoral scofflaws like Trump, Sessions, and Miller are intentionally perverting and subverting it to satisfy their racist White Nationalist agenda.
Their final paragraph should send chills down the spine of every decent human being
The resurgence of populist and nationalist politics also bodes poorly. Us-vs-them movements, skeptical of international agreements and immigration, have little interest in asylum’s foundational concepts of global burden-sharing or universal rights.
If asylum rights were declining even in the era of sunny 1990s global liberalism, it is hard to imagine their doing much better in the era of Donald J. Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir V. Putin.
“It takes a really, really long time to build these norms, especially when they restrict government actions in some way,” Ms. Schwartz said. “It’s so much easier to take them down.”
If that happens, the consequences will be most felt far away from the United States-Mexico border, in places like Honduras, Myanmar, Jordan or Burundi, where millions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to go without the protections once promised by a world that had agreed “never again.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP has based his midterm election campaign on the specter of an “invasion” by immigrants marching from Central America to the southern border. His demagoguery is disgusting and irresponsible. But there is a real problem of migrants — one that his administration is failing to address.
Many people are crossing the border with their children and applying for asylum, overwhelming existing mechanisms for dealing with asylum seekers. They are feeding what the president calls a “catch-and-release” revolving door for migrants freed as they await hearings to adjudicate their cases, and contributing to a backlog of some 750,000 cases in immigration courts.
A rational response would be to add substantially to the approximately 350 immigration judges, who cannot handle the tens of thousands of asylum claims flooding the immigration courts annually. The administration this year hired a few dozen new judges, a fraction of what is required. As the caseload has more than quadrupled since 2006, the number of judges has not even doubled, according to congressional testimony in April by Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
Despite that, Mr. Trump has sneered at the idea of hiring more, even after aides pressed him to do so. “Who are these people?” he raged, before suggesting darkly that adding many new judges would somehow corrupt the system. “Now can you imagine the graft that must take place?” he said.
Granted, the hiring could be challenging, in vetting and cost. But any major challenge involves scaling up resources and personnel, and it’s hard to see why that’s beyond the government’s capabilities.
On the other hand, maybe Mr. Trump prefers having an issue to a solution. He has made it clear he believes the immigration question propelled him into the White House. Now, by ramping up his inflammatory rhetoric, and by advancing over-the-top measures such as sending thousands of troops to the border to fulfill a mission for which they are not trained — Congress has barred troops from law enforcement duties — it seems apparent Mr. Trump has opted for crisis instead of constructive improvements to what he rightly calls a broken system. Instead of deploying thousands of troops, why not hire hundreds of judges?
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Certainly on the right track here!
But here’s what really needs to happen to address the issue in a rational way:
Send more Asylum Officers to do credible fear interviews at the border;
Send enough private attorneys to represent all arriving migrants before both the Asylum Office and the Immigration Courts;
Allow Asylum Officers to grant temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) to the many applicants who have a probability of torture upon return, which clearly happens with “government acquiescence” — or in many cases actual participation or connivance — in the Northern Triangle;
Put the asylum claims of those granted CAT withholding on the “back burner” (thus keeping them from clogging the Immigration Courts) while working with the UNHCR and other counties in the Hemisphere (including, of course Mexico and Canada) on a more durable solution for those currently fleeing the Northern Triangle;
Otherwise, individuals who pass credible fear should be released on minimal bonds and allowed to go to locations where they will be represented by pro bono lawyers (thus avoiding the money wasted on “tent cities” and other types of expensive and arguably illegal detention) — contrary to the Trump Administration lies, almost all represented asylum applicants show up faithfully for their Immigration Court Hearings;
If the Administration wants to “prioritize” the cases of recent arrivals before the Immigration Courts, this can and should be done without creating more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.” Not “rocket science.” Here’s how:
Hundreds of thousands of those now unnecessarily clogging the Immigration Court dockets are long-time residents eligible to apply for “Cancellation of Removal for Non-Lawful Permanent Residents.” Take those with no serious criminal records off the Immigration Court docket and send them to USCIS Adjudications for initial processing. No rush, since only 4,000 “numbers” are available each year for grants;
Those granted can be put in a line for green card numbers maintained by USCIS;
Those denied who have committed serious crimes should be referred back to the Immigration Courts;
For others who don’t qualify for cancellation of removal, the Administration should sponsor bipartisan legislation to provide legal status to such long-term residents. With Administration support, such legislation clearly could pass both Houses and be enacted into law.
The Immigration Courts could then return to real priorities: detained cases; cases of recently arrived individuals with or without asylum claims; cases of immigrants who have committed crimes; and cases of other individuals who don’t fit within our legal system, as properly administered.
Sure, this doesn’t match the “White Nationalist game plan.” But, it’s a practical, legal solution that would be good for immigration enforcement, the legal system, and the country as a whole. And, until the final step of legalization of long-term residents, it can be achieved under the current law.
And, I’ll bet you the overall cost would be much less than some of the “designed to fail” and perhaps illegal schemes now being pursued by the Administration. That’s particularly true because applications to USCIS and legalization programs actually “pay their own way” through application fees — perhaps even turning a slight profit for the Government.
RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:
COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.
On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.
“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.
The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.
Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.
“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”
He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”
Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.
Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.
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“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”
Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.
The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.
The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”
Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.
“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”
Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.
“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”
Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.
Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”
Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.
Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.
“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”
David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”
“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”
As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.
In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”
An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.
A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”
And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.
“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”
The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.
After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”
Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.
Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”
Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”
“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”
Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.
Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.
Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.
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I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.
Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!
As immigrants and their families continue to grapple with Donald Trump’s intent to end birthright citizenship, one Chinese-American’s 1898 case makes the prospect of such a move not so simple.
Wong Kim Ark, a restaurant cook who was born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after a trip to visit his parents in China. Ark was arrested, and his case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, where judges ruled that under the 14th Amendment, anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen.
Though Trump claimed he could sign an executive order to revoke the current birthright citizenship policy, Ark’s case set a precedent that’s remained the law of the land for more than a century. In fact, the policy could likely only be changed through a constitutional amendment.
“The bigger issue for us as a country is how do we create more pathways to citizenship, not whether we should cut it off,” Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice ― Asian Law Caucus, told HuffPost. We have a lot of people who already call America home who should have the opportunity to become citizens.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Wong Kim Ark, a cook born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after visiting his parents in China.
Ark’s parents had arrived in the U.S. from China during a time of fierce anti-Chinese sentiment. The era had birthed the Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. The act also barred courts from granting Chinese immigrants citizenship.
Ark’s parents came to the country seeking U.S. citizenship but eventually left after the act had cut off any pathway to citizenship status. They had also feared the vigilante violence that often targeted Chinese immigrants at the time. In fact, the largest lynching in American history occurred in 1871. Hundreds had descended upon Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and the mob lynched an estimated 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants.
But Ark himself had a life in the United States, and, though he had traveled to China before and had been readmitted into the U.S. without any issues, his 1895 trip presented a host of problems. Authorities ordered the Chinese-American to return to the ship.
Chinese immigrant aid organization Six Companies stepped in to provide Wong legal help. Wong’s lawyer, Thomas D. Riordan, argued that the cook’s reentry into the U.S. was protected under the 14th Amendment. As the case escalated to federal court, immigration hard-liners fought back, claiming Ark’s “accident of birth” didn’t mean citizenship.
In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ark.
“If the Trump administration issued an executive order, it would be immediately challenged in the courts, and judges would likely rely on Wong Kim Ark to find the executive order unconstitutional,” Kohli said.
Many conservatives and even officials appointed by Trump himself disagree with the president’s stance on birthright citizenship.
“The plain meaning of this language is clear,” James Ho, whom Trump appointed as a federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2011 of the 14th Amendment.
Ho, then a solicitor general of Texas, wrote that “a foreign national living in the United States is ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ because he is legally required to obey US law.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) addressed Trump’s comments, telling a Kentucky radio station earlier this week that “you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order” ― to which Trump responded that Ryan “knows nothing about” birthright citizenship.
Kohli pointed out that those who oppose birthright citizenship are in the minority.
“It’s clear that most Americans have embraced birthright citizenship and believe that anyone who is born here should have the right to be a citizen. A few political leaders are trying to further a white supremacist agenda and create a ‘fix’ to a problem that doesn’t exist,” she said.
What’s more, “Many scholars have noted that birthright citizenship has helped the U.S. integrate each new wave of immigrants as their children are recognized as U.S. citizens.”
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While some have made the specious argument that Wong Kim Ark didn’t resolve the question for all time because his Chinese parents were legally residing in the U.S. at the time of his birth, that particular fact was not found to be significant or determinative by the Court. The sole exception they carved out was for foreign diplomatic officials and occupying enemy aliens in time of war, neither of whom were subject to the jurisdiction of the US. But, as former DOJ immigration litigator Leon Fresco has pointed out elsewhere, undocumented residents of the U.S. are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system in the numerous ways — most notably, they can be arrested, detained, removed, convicted, imprisoned, and are required to comply with all other laws applicable to persons in America. Indeed, most of them pay taxes in some form or another. Moreover, the absurdist arguments advanced by Trump and his White Nationalist restrictionists would effectively deprive the U.S. of jurisdiction to enforce immigration and criminal laws against undocumented residents!
When Wong Kim Ark returned from China to San Francisco, the city of his birth, in August 1895, he was denied entry into the United States on the grounds that even though he had been born in America, the chief immigration official of the United States didn’t believe you could be both Chinese and American. That immigration official, John H. Wise, a prominent Democrat and a son of the South, had been appointed to his position as collector of the customs a few years earlier. Wise called himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration” and set out to vigorously enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 1882 law that banned from America all Chinese laborers. It was the first law ever to block a specific ethnic group from entry into the United States.
Democrats and union leaders were solidly behind the Exclusion Act, seeing as a threat to the white working class the industrious Chinese miners, grocery store owners, vegetable growers and traveling doctors who had populated the West. The Democrats were supported by California’s Workingmen’s Party, founded by a firebrand Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, who organized raucous and often violent rallies around the state where the crowd would howl “The Chinese Must Go” and call for building a wall on the southern border (sound familiar?) because they believed Chinese immigrants were sneaking in from Mexico, according to archival material.
In San Francisco, Wise embraced all sorts of tactics to stop the Chinese from entering the United States. When confronted with Chinese American citizens, he demanded they provide two white witnesses who could attest to their citizenship. His agents gave English-language tests, history quizzes and geographical exams to those wishing to return to America. Wise took sadistic pleasure in denying Chinese entry, penning poems about court victories to the immigration lawyers he had beaten. “So just to make this poor Wong Fong / feel very good and nice,” went one ditty, “I’ve sent him back to China, where he can eat his mice.”
Wise opposed the idea that Chinese people should be allowed to become Americans in part because the Naturalization Act of 1870 had barred Asians from becoming naturalized Americans, reserving that right only for whites, Native populations and blacks. In 1884, Wise and his agents blocked a Chinese American man from reentering America but lost the case in district court. In August 1895, Wise got his chance again when 21-year-old Wong Kim Ark arrived in San Francisco. Wise claimed that even though Wong had been born in San Francisco in 1873, he was not really a citizen.
The fight for birthright citizenship in America
In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship belonged to everyone born on American soil.(The Washington Post)
To defend Wong, the Chinese Benevolent Association hired one of the city’s best attorneys. The U.S. government turned to Henry S. Foote, a former Confederate soldier who had served time as a prisoner of war during the Civil War. Foote asked whether any Chinese “by accident of birth” could ever become citizens if their parents were not and could never become naturalized citizens of the United States.
Trump’s rant about immigrants from “shithole countries” echoed Foote’s argument. Foote noted that Wong’s “education and political affiliations” were “entirely alien” to the United States. He was not and never could become an American, Foote said, but rather a “Chinese person and a subject of the Emperor of China.” Indeed, allowing Wong, who spent five months incarcerated on various steamships off the U.S. coast, into the United States would be dangerous, Foote argued, because Asians “must necessarily be a constant menace to the welfare of our country.”
Foote lost the case in district court, but the government decided to appeal, losing in the Supreme Court in a 6-to-2 decision in March 1898. Following the case, local worthies in San Francisco worried that the decision would tempt America’s minorities to angle for more rights. Two days after the verdict, the San Francisco Chronicle frettedthat Japanese and Native Americans might even demand the right to vote. Perhaps, the paper suggested, an amendment to the Constitution to limit “citizenship to whites and blacks” might roll that back.
Things would not improve for decades for Chinese Americans and for Asian Americans in general. By 1924, the United States had constructed a web of legislation that effectively barred any Asian immigration. It would stay in place until World War II, when the United States was shamed into dismantling the ban by its ally China. Still, Trump and his advisers look to the time when the United States locked its doors to immigration as a golden era. No wonder his rhetoric sounds so familiar.
Leave it to Trump, his supporters, and those who enable him to pump life into a toxic argument has long been a rallying point for xenophobes, racists, restrictionists, and others happy to support an attack on racial minorities in the U.S. Today it’s Hispanics in the crosshairs of the haters; yesterday it was African-Americans and Asians. But, the ugly motivation and the legal manipulations to justify racism and xenophobia remain the same. And no, we can’t disconnect all of the legal arguments from their social context. These aren’t just legal questions; they are moral and political ones. Lending support to Trump and his campaign of hate and racism is what it is.
As Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez said in her excellent article “Born in the Americas: Birthright Citizenship and Human Rights,” published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal in 2012:
Furthermore, none of the legal, academic, and policy debates about
birthright citizenship should be separated from their clear context of attempting
to limit access to citizenship for the children of Latino immigrants.
Human rights law requires such an analysis. The historical context
must also be taken into account. As will be discussed herein, the Fourteenth
Amendment was enacted to prevent discrimination against people of color,
including immigrants of color. For many years, throughout different waves
of immigration, birthright citizenship was the law of the land. It is no
coincidence that birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immi
grants is being seriously challenged now that the 2010 Census found that
23% of children in the United States are Hispanic, and many of their parents
are immigrants. In addition, advocates for retracting birthright citizenship
frequently rely on negative stereotypes about immigrant women. [Citations Omitted].
“I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinkshe is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.
Opinion | Trump owns the Republican Party, and there’s no going back
Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history.(Adriana Usero, Danielle Kunitz, Robert Gebelhoff/The Washington Post)
I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.
I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.
I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.
I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.
I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.
I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hardand instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.
And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses.
I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.
I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.
Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.
If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.
WaPo: The most recent postings on the Gab account believed to belong to Bowers specifically targeted the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known as HIAS, which is one of nine organizations that works with the federal government to resettle refugees in American communities.
Politico: Under the plan, the Trump administration would publish fast-track regulation that would restrict certain migrants’ ability to seek asylum. The regulation would be paired with a related proclamation from President Donald Trump.
USA Today: The Pentagon will deploy up to 5,000 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to prevent members of a migrant caravan from illegally entering the country, a U.S. official said Monday. About 2,100 National Guard troops are already fanned out across the border under an order from President Donald Trump earlier this year.
BBC: Mexico has offered temporary work permits to migrants who register for asylum, as a big caravan of Central American migrants makes its way through the country toward the US.
WRC: As President Donald J. Trump pursues new separation and detention policies for families fleeing violence and danger in their home countries, and threatens to arm the southern border, a new poll released today shows that the majority of likely voters—up to 70%—support allowing refugees to seek asylum in the U.S.
TRAC: More than a quarter (28%) of recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests of immigrants living and working in communities across America took place in just ten counties in the United States, along with their immediate surrounding locales…The county with the most arrests was San Bernardino County, California. In second place was DeKalb County, Georgia, where Atlanta is located. New York County, New York, and surrounding locales was in third place.
WaPo: The migrants coming today are increasingly Central Americans seeking asylum or some form of humanitarian protection, bearing stories of torture, gang recruitment, abusive spouses, extortionists and crooked police. They know the quickest path to a better life in the United States is now an administrative one — not through mountains or canyons but through the front gates of the country’s immigration bureaucracy.
Forbes: A new study from the National Foundation for American Policy finds that 55%, or 50 of 91, of the country’s $1 billion startup companies had at least one immigrant founder.
ImmProf: Amy Howe on SCOTUSBlog reports that the Supreme Court today “called for the views of the U.S. solicitor general in Swartz v. Rodriguez, a petition for review filed by Lonnie Swartz, a U.S. Border Patrol agent alleged to have shot and killed a 16-year-old Mexican boy who was walking on the Mexican side of that country’s border with the United States.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called for a moratorium, and filed a FOIA request with DHS, on the use of facial recognition technology for immigration enforcement and law enforcement purposes until Congress and the public debate, what, if any, uses of this technology should be permitted. AILA Doc. No. 18102500
USCIS announced that it helped initiate an investigation that led to guilty pleas from Veronica Perdomo, 43, for fraudulently practicing immigration law and impersonating an immigration officer. A USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security immigration officer in Charlotte received the original tip. AILA Doc. No. 18102240
In response to a comment request concerning UAC sponsorship review procedures, AILA noted its opposition to the proposed changes. Rather than improve the efficiently placement of unaccompanied children in suitable environments with safe caregivers, the proposed changes would impede such placement. AILA Doc. No. 18102633
Folks like Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, Cissna, and Kobach often falsely claim to be “speaking for the American people.” But, in reality, they aren’t, and never have been. They actually represent toxic, basically un-American views on immigration and migrants that are held by a vocal and active White Nationalist minority of Americans.
The rest of us need to take back our country at the ballot box — starting next Tuesday.
Migrants arriving at the U.S. border to seek asylum are routinely subjected to tactics that immigration rights advocates say are designed to drive them away in violation of their rights under federal law.
The tactics include forcing them to wait at the border indefinitely or sending them back into Mexico to join a backlogged list maintained by Mexican immigration officials.
The Trump administration says such measures are necessary because it is not equipped to deal with a large increase in the number of asylum seekers, many of them from Central America. Last year, U.S. immigration courts handled 120,000 asylum requests, a fourfold increase since 2013.
But immigrant advocates contend the government is violating the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, which says any foreigner who reaches the U.S. has the right to apply for asylum.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is violating the law and turning away asylum seekers on Texas bridges,” said Shaw Drake, an El Paso-based attorney with the Texas ACLU’s Border Rights Center.
He said forcing immigrants to join a long waiting list is tantamount to turning them away.
“To turn them away with some amorphous instructions is illegal,” he said.
The issue is likely to come to a head when a caravan of several thousand Central Americans now heading north through Mexico arrives at the U.S. border. Many are expected to claim asylum, which they can do based on fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
Trump, who has vowed to close the border, said in an interview Monday with conservative TV and radio host Laura Ingraham that the U.S. would allow migrants to file asylum claims but that they would be forced to live in “tent cities” while they await court rulings, a process that can take years.
“We’re not going to build structures and spend all of this, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Trump said. “We’re going to have tents. They’re going to be very nice and they’re going to wait and if they don’t get asylum, they get out… They don’t usually get asylum.”
Edgar Hernandez Gonzalez, right, his daughter Sherly and girlfriend Sofia Alvarez Favela wait to request asylum on the Santa Fe International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said he and his family were being threatened and were fleeing crime in Juarez. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last week, after 20 immigrants from Cuba, Honduras, Mexico and Russia arrived at the border bridge in El Paso, U.S. officers stationed in the middle of the bridge — the “limit line” — told them to wait. And so they did, some for days in the cold and rain. Others stayed at a nearby shelter.
“We’ll wait and see, night and day, because I don’t have anywhere to go,” said Alexander Narzilloev, 35, who was with his wife and sons, ages 3 and 6.
Narzilloev ran a construction supply business in Moscow but fled after he was extorted by local mafia and received death threats, including one from a man who called and said he knew where Narzilloev’s son attended kindergarten, he Narzilloev said.
The family had originally gone to the crossing in Calexico, Calif., where officers told them they didn’t have space. After waiting a week and spending what remained of their $8,000 savings on a hotel, Narzilloev and his family caught a bus to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in hopes of entering El Paso.
“I heard in the news Trump said close all the borders. Has it happened yet?” he said. “That’s supposed to be for illegals. We are legal.”
Last week, several House Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen requesting a briefing on why and how asylum seekers were being turned away. Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, issued a statement calling for “fair and orderly processing of asylum seekers.”
“Any attempts to deny these families and individuals their right to seek asylum are wrong,” he said.
The Trump administration has tried a variety of approaches to deter people from trying to reach the United States — most controversially a “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging every adult migrant who crosses the border illegally, separating parents from their children.
The policy resulted in 2,654 children being separated and widespread outrage before Trump canceled it in June.
The administration still wants to detain families indefinitely and has been battling immigrant advocates in hopes of overturning a federal judge’s 1997 order that requires children be held for no longer than 20 days. Federal prosecutors have also fought to narrow the definition of political asylum.
But the government has been flummoxed by what Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, calls the “asylum gap”: the inability to stop people from making false claims for asylum and living legally in the U.S. for years while their cases proceed.
Immigrant advocates say the new tactics at the border are aimed at discouraging asylum claims. The ACLU of Texas noted Tuesday that Customs and Border Protection, the largest federal law enforcement agency, with a staff and budget doubled in the last 20 years, processed 1.1 million fewer people at the southern border last year than it did in 2000.
Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.
Cuban migrant Yunier Reyes, 35, waits with other migrants from Honduras and Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In El Paso, customs officers have told immigrants to return in a few hours, or simply “later.” The San Ysidro crossing in San Diego has been using a process called “metering,” in which asylum seekers have had to make appointments through Mexican immigration officials.
In a federal class-action lawsuit filed last year that’s still pending, Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado and other advocacy groups argued on behalf of more than a dozen immigrants that the policy violates international law and the right to due process.
During a visit to San Ysidro last week, McAleenan praised metering and said it’s likely to expand to other crossings if there’s a “significant increase in arrivals” in coming weeks.
He said the process didn’t amount to turning away immigrants because “they can stay in line if they want.”
“If somebody arrives and they have a claim, we are providing access,” he said, adding that some officers have been investigated, disciplined and retrained after turning away asylum seekers.
Other allegations were unsubstantiated, he said.
Edith Tapia, a policy research analyst with the Hope Border Institute, center, talks with a Mexican couple and their children who hope to request asylum in the U.S. at the foot of an international Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Workers from the nonprofit Hope Border Institute visit El Paso bridges to document cases of asylum seekers being turned away. On Oct. 24, they found Pedro Morales, 21, and girlfriend Janet Macola, 19.
The two said they fled Cuba after authorities halted their attempt to open a beauty salon and threatened to throw Morales in jail. Now they were seeking asylum.
So was a family of four from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. They said that their area had become a ghost town, controlled by a mayor in league with organized crime, and that they were too scared to be quoted by name.
The Cuban couple and the Mexican family approached U.S. officers at the center of the bridge and were told the same thing: “It’s full right now.”
It’s all a ridiculous political stunt that Secretary Mattis has shamefully gone along with. Talk about someone forgetting his oath — allowing the US Military to be used as a “political prop” for “White Nationalist Nation.” Presumably historians and biographers will remember “Mad Dog’s” dereliction of duty at a critical point in our country’s existence.
The real point is that for much less money than Trump is wasting on his “military stunt” he could place enough USCIS Asylum Officers at or near ports of entry on the Mexican border to promptly, professionally, and humanely process applicants in accordance with our laws. That would also encourage and reward individuals for appearing for orderly processing and security screening at the proper places, rather than entering the country surreptitiously. It would also reduce the strain on the Border Patrol by reducing incentives for illegal crossings of asylum seekers between ports of entry.
But, this isn’t about sensible or lawful border and asylum policy. It’s about a White Nationalist demagogue putting on a “show” for his “base.”
Lost in last month’s heroic drama rescuing the Thai youth soccer team is that three of the boys and their coach are stateless individuals; that is, they have no citizenship papers from any country. While they were trapped in the cave, it was the least of their problems. As their lives begin to return to a new normal, the obstacles of their statelessness are compounding their challenges.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a stateless child is born every 10 minutes somewhere in the world. UNHCR estimates that at least 10 million people in the world are stateless and subject to severe consequences. Stateless people typically are denied the protections of the laws of the nation, limited in their access to labor markets, and restricted from the social safety net. Jacqueline Bhabha, professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, concludes that being stateless as a child can stunt opportunity, erode ambition and destroy the sense of self-worth.
In this context of an emerging crisis of stateless children, why would anyone propose legal and policy changes that would exacerbate statelessness?Those who argue that the United States should end birthright citizenship are doing just that. Recently, Michael Anton, who had been a national security adviser to President Trump, published an editorial arguing against birthright citizenship. Grounded in the Constitution, birthright citizenship is automatically granted to any individual born within and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. As a candidate, Donald Trump suggested ending birthright citizenship, labeling it the “biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” An excellent series of editorials debating the matter has ensued, largely centered on legal issues.
Beyond the legal debate lies the policy crisis that would unfold if the United States abandoned birthright citizenship: Ending birthright citizenship would place an undue burden on U.S. citizens as they scramble to obtain appropriate government documents to establish that they are U.S. citizens. Children of citizens as well as children of foreign nationals would run the risk of becoming stateless.
As respected immigration attorney Margaret Stock has noted, most U.S. citizens rely on the birthright citizenship rule to establish their citizenship. A birth certificate from a jurisdiction in the United States is all one needs currently. Each U.S. state has its own unique registry of births, and most vital statistic records are kept at the county level. These local birth registries do not verify the citizenship of the child’s parents.
Equally critical, a birth certificate is the linchpin of all other state and federal government identity documents. It is required for state-issued driver’s licenses and state ID cards, as well as federally-issued Social Security cards and passports. If a birth certificate issued by a local jurisdiction in the United States no longer establishes that the person is a U.S. citizen, what would be the qualifying document?
At this time, a passport is the only document the U.S. government issues that confirms both the individual’s identity and citizenship. Fewer than half (46 percent) of U.S. citizens have passports. A 2006 surveysponsored by the Brennan Center at New York University estimated that more than 13 million U.S. adults lacked readily available documentation of citizenship, and a birth certificate was one of the documents included as proof.
Imagine the steps new parents would have to go through to establish their child’s citizenship if birthright citizenship were abandoned. Expectant mothers would need to pack their passport or a bundle of identification documents in the overnight bag readied for the baby’s delivery.
These bureaucratic hurdles would be particularly onerous for low-income citizens or citizens living in rural or geographically underserved areas. The Brennan Center survey also found that citizens earning less than $25,000 per year are more than twice as likely to lack ready documentation of their citizenship as those earning more than $25,000. If a birth certificate no longer would be proof of citizenship, this disparity would rise substantially. Such citizens might find themselves stateless because they would not be able to acquire the documents needed to establish U.S. citizenship.
UNHCR cites three major causes of statelessness: discrimination, gaps in nationality laws, and lack of birth registrations. Would the political leaders who oppose birthright citizenship support the establishment and funding of a federal system of birth registration that provided citizenship documents to all U.S. citizen children?
Opponents of birthright citizenship may have their eyes set on the children of unauthorized migrants, but the impact would be equally acute on the children of U.S. citizens who do not have the wherewithal to maneuver the bureaucracy to acquire citizenship documents.
Ruth Ellen Wasem is a clinical professor of policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. For more than 25 years, she was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration. She is writing a book about the legislative drive to end race- and nationality-based immigration.
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Although this article originally was published in The Hill in July 2018, Ruth recently reminded me of its continuing relevance and timeliness.
The beauty of the 14th Amendment is that although Congress has been dilatory in resolving the status of millions of undocumented Americans who are significant contributors to our society and economy, because of the 14th Amendment, the issue is slowly but surely “self-resolving.”
As the “older generation” of undocumented Americans passes on, the overwhelming number of their offspring are full US citizens and are able to fully integrate into our society and have the advantages of belonging and full political rights that were denied to their parents. Rather than building generations of disenfranchised, underutilized, and likely disgruntled residents in our midst, the American citizenry automatically renews itself.
And, I’m sure that this new generation of Americans will give some careful thought to the hateful, wrong, and outright racist rhetoric being promoted by Trump, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other GOP White Nationalists. That’s why real national leadership would be wise to unite, rather than divide America and to promote a humane and inclusive solution to the issue of undocumented immigration.
The totally bogus and disingenuous argument being pushed by Trump and the racist right is that children of undocumented individuals aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US. That is of course, total BS — doesn’t even pass the “straight face” test!”If it were true, no undocumented individual could be removed from the US because they would not be “subject to the jurisdiction” of our courts and legal system. Nor could they be punished for crimes or required to comply with our traffic laws, etc., because they would not be “subject to our jurisdiction.” What would happen to Ol’ Gonzo’s “zero tolerance” policy then. Indeed, our whole system for regulating, admitting, excluding, and removing foreign nationals is based on the reality that regardless of their status, they are subject to our laws and legal system.
In other words, we have “jurisdiction” over them, unlike foreign diplomats and heads of state who, to a large extent, are “diplomatically immune” from many of our laws and regulations. That’s actually the very limited category to whom Congress intended the term “subject to the jurisdiction” to apply.
The role of President Donald Trump’s ominous warnings about the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday highlights the destructive consequences of Fox News’ grip on the president.
While Robert D. Bowers, the man accused of carrying out the mass shooting, had criticized Trump for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, critics pointed out that president had “stoked the fears of the Bowerses among us,” deploying incendiary and false rhetoric about the migrant caravan in hopes of bolstering the Republican Party’s standing. “The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day,” Adam Serwer wrote for The Atlantic. “But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.”
Trump, in turn, came into contact with that fiction via Fox’s fearmongering. The president’s first public statements about the caravan came in response to a segment he watched on the Fox News morning show ”Fox & Friends,” and in the weeks that followed, his rhetoric and that of the conservative network escalated at pace.
For more than a year, I’ve been studying the Trump-Fox feedback loop, my term for the way Fox News at times is able to set the national media agenda because the president watches the network’s programming, tweets about it in real time and adopts its particular fixations. As the rest of the press scrambles to cover Trump’s comments, Fox’s right-wing obsessions consume the news cycle, whether or not they were originally newsworthy. In this case, Fox News urged him to whip his followers into a frenzy over the caravan, and he did it. There’s no indication that either Fox News or Donald Trump will cut off this campaign of fear.
The caravan formed in Honduras on Friday, Oct. 12. By Oct. 15, it was already receiving substantial coverage on Fox News. The next morning, in response to a report on ”Fox & Friends,” Trump issued his first public statement on the migrants, warning the Honduran government that he would cut its aid if the caravan was not stopped. Trump’s comment generated more coverage both on Fox News and at other media outlets. On Wednesday night, Oct. 17, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and urged Republicans to make the caravan a key voting issue, claiming that “the left is eager” for the caravan to enter the United States.
The next morning, “Fox & Friends” repeatedly aired Gingrich’s comments and suggested that Republicans should take his advice. In response, Trump issued a series of tweets using the caravan’s advance to attack Democrats, saying they had “led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws)” an “assault on our country.”
The network and its most powerful viewer spent the next week raising the temperature, stoking fears about whether the migrants were criminals or terrorists, calling the caravan an “invasion” and describing its approach as a national emergency. Escalation bred response bred further escalation, with no sign of a line beyond which the president and his propagandists wouldn’t go.
Trump’s Fox-fueled commentary turned the caravan story into a major national news story as reporters sought to explain and contextualize what he was talking about. But the situation does not, on its face, justify the coverage the caravan has received. The migrants are currently in southern Mexico, their numbers are dwindling and, depending on whichroute the caravan chooses, they face a journey of 1,000 to 2,000 miles to the U.S. border that will take weeks or months. Those who make it to the border have the right to seek asylum, and those whose claims are rejected will be turned away. That’s what happened when a similar caravan ― which also drew vitriol from Fox News and then from Trump ― reached the U.S. border in May. The caravans have been going on for roughly a decade without issue. There is no crisis except for the one that Fox News and Trump have sought to create in order to get GOP voters to the polls.
I’ve written before of the perils of having a president who relies on conservative cable news hosts to help him understand current events. When federal policy and personnelshifts can be driven by a Fox-inspired presidential whim, the network’s influence is staggering. The greatest risk is that Trump could use his unilateral control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to a Fox segment; Trump was reportedly unnerved by b-roll the network aired in March 2017 of a North Korean missile launch, convinced that it was happening live. But on a day-to-day basis, the major concern is that the president is a demagogue who constantly lashes out at his perceived enemies in order to secure his base’s support, and Fox News’ programming is providing him with targets for his ire, whether that’s protesting NFL players or recalcitrant Justice Department officials. That pattern has played out again and again since Trump ascended to the presidency.
“Ordinarily,” Serwer wrote, “a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower.” So, too, it usually doesn’t make sense to attribute a president’s actions to a news network. But Trump is suggestible, he watches Fox News constantly, and the network’s commentators are aware of that. In lighter moments, the “Fox & Friends” hosts joke about the president’s tendency to watch the programs. In heavier ones, the program’s commentators openly offer him advice, telling him not to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller or pull troops out of Syria.
But on the Monday after the synagogue murders, nothing had changed. The migrants were again drawing coverage on “Fox & Friends” (“Border Battle Rages as Caravan Heads to U.S.,” read one chyron). And hours later, Trump tweeted that the migrants were conducting “an invasion of our Country.”
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Thanks to Trump, the GOP, and their myriad of lies, distortions, false narratives, and hate rhetoric, our democracy is on the ropes. If we don’t start voting these misguided folks out of office, on all levels, we wont have any country left.
President Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children of noncitizens born on U.S. soil, he said in a television interview taped on Monday.
The move, which many legal experts say runs afoul of the Constitution, would be the boldest yet by a president elected to office pledging to take a hard line on immigration, an issue he has revived in advance of next week’s midterm elections.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump said during an interview with Axios scheduled to air as part of a new HBO series starting this weekend. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
Trump, who has long decried “anchor babies,” said he has discussed the move with his legal counsel and believes it can be accomplished with executive action, a view at odds with the opinions of many legal scholars.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump told Axios.
When told that view is disputed, Trump asserted: “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”
“It’s in the process. It’ll happen . . . with an executive order,” he said, without offering a time frame.
The move would be certain to spark a constitutional debate about the meaning of the 14th Amendment. It reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
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Constitution? What Constitution? Perhaps an “Executive Order” restoring slavery will be next!
The helpless “Caravan” members aren’t a threat to our national security. But, Trump and those who support his lawless and divisive antics are a “clear and present danger.”
If we don’t start the process to remove Trump and his GOP from office at all levels next week, it might be too late for out for our country!
“The government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” he wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Though that assurance has been tested, the United States has endured as a safe haven for Jews.
Now President Trump has violated Washington’s compact. He has given sanction to bigotry and assistance to persecution. After the shooting in Pittsburgh, which the Anti-Defamation League believes is the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, there is no longer safety under the vine and fig tree.
I had been dreading and expecting this day, and more like it, for two years. This was more than predictable; it was predicted.
After Trump’s presidential campaign began with genteel anti-Semitism, progressed to dog whistles and ended with a full-throated targeting of Jewish “globalists,” I wrote on Election Day that the results would be coming in on the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous night of Nazi violence and vandalism against German Jews: “I pray that on this solemn anniversary, Americans tell Donald Trump and the world that we are never going back there.”
People arrive for a vigil at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Sunday. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
After Charlottesville, when Trump said there “were very fine people” marching among the neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” I wroteabout my daughter’s fear of returning to Hebrew school because of violence; armed white supremacists had chanted “Sieg Heil” and forced worshipers to flee a Charlottesville synagogue.
Consider some of the many times Trump gave sanction to bigotry before 11 worshipers were shot dead at the Tree of Life:
Tweeting an image from an anti-Semitic message board with a Star of David atop a pile of cash.
Saying “I don’t have a message” for supporters who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.
After the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, many politicians condemned the violence and blamed divisive political rhetoric around the country.(Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)
Branding his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war movement.
Alleging that “blood suckers” and “a global power structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against ordinary Americans.
And, when urged by the Anti-Defamation League to stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeating the tropes in an ad with images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.
Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of Charlottesville, Trump stocked his administration with Stephen K. Bannon and other figures of the nationalist “alt-right;” hesitated to condemn the rise of anti-Semitic threats and vandalism; issued a Holocaust remembrance statement without mention of Jews; lamented the attempts to silence Alex Jones, who peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and, declaring himself a “nationalist,” increased verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly Soros.
Supposedly, American Jews are protected by Trump’s daughter Ivanka marrying into the faith, or by Trump’s fondness for Israel’s nationalist policies.
But it doesn’t work that way. The ADL reports a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017. Other groups Trump targets — African Americans, Latinos, Muslims — have long experienced this and worse; a man in Kentucky last week allegedly tried to enter a black church before killing two black people at a supermarket. It is the new normal, though, for Jewish journalists and public figures to endure routine threats, for unabashed anti-Semitism to flourish in social media — and now for Jews to fear for their safety in quiet places like Pittsburgh, where I lived and worshiped for three years.
Whatever Trump’s motives, his words and deeds inspire the hateful and the violent. The man accused of sending pipe bombs to a dozen favorite Trump targets (including Soros) eschewed politics, his family’s lawyer says, until he “found a father in Trump.” The accused Pittsburgh gunman, though apparently rejecting Trump for being insufficiently nationalist, embraced on social media the themes Trump has popularized: the “globalist” danger, immigrant “invaders that kill our people” and an “infestation” of undesirables.
After the shooting, Trump read from the teleprompter the proper denunciation of anti-Semitism. But proceeding with a rally mere hours after the massacre, he galvanized the crowd with the same complaint the alleged Pittsburgh killer cited in social media before the carnage: the migrant caravan. Trump told the crowd, “No caravans, right? We don’t want caravans. We’re not having caravans.”
“Build the wall!” the crowd chanted.
Trump closed with his usual vow to fight “others” who are trying to “destroy our proud American heritage.” White supremacists get the message.
On Shabbat, Jewish custom says, God gives each of us a “neshamah yeteirah,” an extra soul for rejuvenation on the day of rest. But this Shabbat, we lost 11 souls. And our Jewish and American souls will continue to be so drained — unless our president changes his ways, or we change our president.
George Washington had his own set of problems when it came to race and slavery. But, any way you look at it we’ve fallen a long way to get to Donald Trump and his supporters and their vile message of intolerance and White Nationalism in the 21st Century.
