Populism – Page 11 – immigrationcourtside.com

GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST AG MAKES VICIOUS UNFOUNDED ATTACK ON REFUGEES & THEIR ATTORNEYS THE CENTERPIECE OF HIS SPEECH TO LARGEST CLASS OF INCOMING U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES — “Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests.”

Sessions to immigration judges: Immigrants’ attorneys like ‘water seeping’ around law

By Tal Kopan, CNN

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a new group of immigration judges Monday that it is their job to “restore the rule of law” to the immigration system over the contrary efforts of the lawyers who represent immigrants.

The remarks at the training of the largest-ever class of new immigration judges implied that the judges were on the same team as the Trump administration, and that immigrants and their attorneys were trying to undermine their efforts.

“Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests,” Sessions said, adding the same happens in criminal courts. “And we understand that. Their duty, however, is not uphold the integrity of the act. That’s our duty.”

Sessions noted that “of course” the system “must always respect the rights of aliens” in the courts. But he also warned the judges of “fake claims.”

“Just as we defend immigrant legal rights, we reject unjustified and sometimes fake claims,” Sessions said. “The law is never serviced when deceit is rewarded so that the fundamental principles of the law are defeated.”

The comments came in the context of Sessions’ repeated moves to exert his unique authority over the immigration courts, a separate legal system for immigrants that is entirely run by the Justice Department.

Sessions approves every judge hired and can instruct them on how to interpret law, and thus decide cases, as well as how to manage cases. He has used that authority multiple times in the past year, including issuing a sweeping ruling that will substantially narrow the types of cases that qualify for asylum protections in the US. Those decisions overrode the evolution of years of immigration judges’ and the immigration appellate board’s decisions.

Sessions reminded the new judges of that authority and those decisions in his remarks, saying he believes they are “correct” and “prudent” interpretations of the law that “restores” them to the original intent.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/10/politics/sessions-immigration-judges/index.html

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Another totally inappropriate and unethical effort by Sessions to insure that migrants, particularly asylum seekers, receive neither fair consideration nor Due Process from U.S. Immigration Judges in connection with their, in many instances, very compelling cases for protection.

Let’s shine a little light of truth on the Sessions’s dark myth-spinning:

As recently as 2012, the majority of asylum applicants who received decisions on the merits of their claims in Immigration Court were granted protection;
Conditions in most “sending countries” — particularly those in the Northern Triangle — have gotten worse rather than better;
There is no reasonable explanation for the large drop in approvals in recent years other than bias against asylum seekers;
Even after Sessions took over, 30% of those who get merits determinations won their cases;
The success rate is higher for those released from detention and given fair access to counsel;
Most detained migrants, particularly those intentionally detained in substandard conditions in obscure locations, do not have reasonable access to counsel;
Most attorneys representing detained asylum seekers serve pro bono or for minimal compensation (particularly in relation to the amount of time and effort required to prepare and present an asylum case in detention);
Detention of asylum seekers simply to deter them from coming is illegal;
Separation of families is a deterrent is also illegal;
Neither detention nor “zero tolerance” prosecutions have been shown to have a material impact on the flow of refugees to our Southern Border;
Sessions has provided no evidence of any widespread fraud in asylum applications by refugees from the Northern Triangle;
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”), the leading interpreter of refugee and asylum protections, has consistently criticized the US’s overly restrictive approach to asylum adjudication;
Article III U.S. Courts continue to be critical of both the unlawful policies being promoted by Sessions and the fundamental errors still being made by the BIA and some Immigration Judges in analyzing asylum cases and claims under the Convention Against Torture;
According to the US Supreme Court, a chance of harm as low as 10% can satisfy the generous legal standard for asylum;
According to the UNHCR, asylum applicants should be given the “benefit of the doubt;”
Most of those who fail to get asylum, like the abused woman denied protection by Sessions in Matter of A-B-, face life threatening situations in their home countries — we have merely made a conscious choice not to offer them asylum or some alternative form of life-saving protection.

As Sessions sees that his time as Attorney General will likely come to an end before the end of this year, he is doubling down on his White Nationalist, xenophobic, racist, restrictionist, lawless agenda. He wants to inflict as much damage on migrants, refugees, women, and people of color as he can before being relegated to his former role as a rightist wing-nut. He also seeks to convince the Immigration Judges that they are not independent juridical officials but mere highly paid enforcement agents with an obligation to deport as many folks as possible in support of the President’s agenda.

I do agree with Sessions, however, that the newly-minted Immigration Judges have a tremendously difficult job. If they adopt his philosophy, they are likely to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution and laws of the US and to wrongly return individuals to death-threatening situations. On the other hand, if they carefully and fairly follow the law and give full consideration to the facts, they will be compelled to grant protection in many cases, thus potentially putting them on EOIR’s “hit list.” (Basically, new US Immigration Judges, even those with many years of civil service, can be “fired at will” by EOIR during their first two years of “probation” as judges.)

The only solution is an independent Article I Immigration Court that will guarantee that someone as totally unqualified as Sessions can never again impose his personal will and bigoted, anti-Due-Process views on what is supposed to be a fair and impartial court system.

PWS

09-10-18

GONZO’S WORLD: THIS IS WHY HE STAYS: UNDERNEATH ALL THE “TRUMP NOISE” SESSIONS IS METHODICALLY ERADICATING DUE PROCESS, PERVERTING THE LAW, & TURNING ONE OF THE LARGEST FEDERAL COURT SYSTEMS INTO A “KILLING FLOOR” TARGETING OUR MOST VULNERABLE & DESERVING REFUGEES! — “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/09/jeff-sessions-is-executing-trumps-immigration-plans-with-a-quiet-efficient-brutality/

Sophie Murguia and Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn report for Mother Jones:

Jeff Sessions Is Executing Trump’s Immigration Plans With a Quiet, Efficient Brutality

The attorney general’s systematic gutting of immigration courts is the latest example.

Sophie Murguia and Kanyakrit VongkiatkajornSep. 7, 2018 6:00 AM

Over the past few months, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has faced fierce criticism for his role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. But while the White House continues to deal with the fallout from tearing kids away from their parents at the border, Sessions has been busy orchestrating another, much quieter attack on the country’s immigration system.

Tensions have been simmering for months between the attorney general and the hundreds of judges overseeing immigration courts, but they reached a new high in July. The flashpoint was the case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum, a Guatemalan man who was scheduled to appear in a Philadelphia immigration court, but had repeatedly failed to turn up. The judge, Steven Morley, wanted to determine whether Castro-Tum had received adequate notice, and rescheduled a hearing for late July. But instead of waiting for that appointment, the Justice Department sent a new judge from Virginia to take over the case. Judge Deepali Nadkarni subsequently ordered Castro-Tum deported.

The move sparked immediate outcry: The National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing about 350 immigration judges, filed a formal grievance, and 15 retired immigration judges released a public statement condemning the action. “Such interference with judicial independence is unacceptable,” they wrote.

This was just the latest of many accusations that Sessions and his Justice Department were interfering with judicial independence in immigration courts. Since the beginning of the year, the attorney general has severely limited judges’ ability to manage their cases, increased pressure on judges to close cases quickly, and dramatically reshaped how America determines who it will shelter. While Sessions isn’t the first attorney general to exercise these powers, immigration advocates say he’s using his authority in unprecedented ways and as a result severely limiting due process rights for migrants.

Unlike most courts, immigration courts are housed within the executive branch, meaning immigration judges are actually DOJ employees. Sessions is therefore ultimately in charge of hiring judges, evaluating their performance, and even firing them. He can also refer cases to himself and overrule previous judges’ decisions, setting precedents that effectively reshape immigration law.In a little more than six months, Sessions has issued four consequential decisions on immigration cases he referred to himself, in some instances overturning decades of legal precedent. Attorneys general under the Obama administration used that power only four times over eight years.

“We’re seeing Attorney General Sessions take advantage of the structural flaws of the immigration court system,” says Laura Lynch, the senior policy counsel at AILA, which has joined the judges’ union in asking Congress to make the immigration courts independent of the Justice Department.

Sessions’ changes have been “extremely demoralizing,” says Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “I’ve been in the field for 40 years, and I have never seen morale among immigration judges so low.”

Here are the biggest ways Sessions is attacking the immigration courts:

It’s now much more difficult to apply for asylum

In June, Sessions overturned a decision granting asylum to a Salvadoran woman, known in court documents as A-B-, who had escaped an abusive husband. He used the case as an opportunity to declare that migrants can’t generally be given asylum based on claims of domestic abuse or gang violence—a catastrophic blow to the tens of thousands of Central American migrants fleeing these dangers.

Sessions’ decision, though, doesn’t just affect how judges can rule. US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that helps process asylum cases, interpreted his decision to mean that survivors of domestic and gang violence usually won’t pass their initial “credible fear” interviews after they cross the border—a first step that determines whether asylum seekers are even allowed to make their case before a judge. As Mother Jones’ Noah Lanard has reported, immigration lawyers say they’ve seen “overwhelming” numbers of migrants denied at the credible fear interview stage since Sessions’ decision.

In a statement, a group of former immigration judges described this decision as “an affront to the rule of law,” pointing out that it challenges longstanding protections for survivors of gender-based violence. “Women and children will die as a result of these policies,” Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told Mother Jones when the decision was first announced.

A group of asylum seekers is now suing Sessions in federal court, arguing that this new policy violates due process rights and contradicts existing immigration law. They say that the policy’s sweeping generalizations ignore the requirement that each case be heard on its own merits.

Making matters even more complicated, in another decision earlier this year, Sessions vacated a 2014 precedent that guaranteed asylum applicants have the right to a full hearing before a judge can decide on their case. “The implications of [the new decision] are tremendous,” says Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of Law and one of the lawyers representing A-B- and the asylum seekers suing Sessions. “It’s basically saying that a judge can decide a case on the papers alone, and not allow an individual the right to present their case in front of that judge.”

Judges have less control over their case loads …

This summer wasn’t the first time Castro-Tum’s case drew national attention. Judge Morley had “administratively closed” the case back in 2016—a common step that judges have used to set aside thousands of cases, oftentimes when immigrants had no criminal background or had been in the US for many years and had family ties. Though the cases weren’t technically closed, they were put on hold and typically never re-opened, usually so judges could focus on higher-priority cases.

Earlier this year, Sessions re-opened Castro-Tum’s case by referring it to himself, and used it to severely restrict when judges could use administrative closure. That sent the case back to Morley, which is how the DOJ ended up replacing the judge and sparking widespread outrage.

The judges union has said that administrative closure is an important and necessary tool for judges to manage their caseloads, and removing it would result in an “enormous increase” in a court backlog that’s already piling up with almost 750,000 cases. Sessions’ decision also noted that cases which had previously been administratively closed, such as Castro-Tum’s, could now be re-opened, potentially adding thousands more cases to the backlog and creating further uncertainty for the defendants.

… and will have to move through them more quickly

In a somewhat related move, in April, Sessions and the Justice Department announced new performance metrics for judges. According to a DOJ memo, judges would now need to complete at least 700 cases a year, as well as close cases within a certain time period, in order to receive a satisfactory performance review. If they fail to receive satisfactory marks, judges could potentially lose their jobs or be relocated. According to the memo, judges currently complete on average 678 cases a year. The new measures will go into effect October 1.

The judges’ union, legal scholars, and other associations have strongly criticized the move, noting that case quotas would place enormous pressure on judges to quickly complete cases and affect their ability to fully hear cases—likely leading to more deportations.

“A tough asylum case takes about three to four hours to complete, but they’re pushing judges to schedule three or four cases a day, which is probably twice as many as most judges could do and do a good job on…It’s basically inviting people to cut corners,” says Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration. “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”

It’s harder for them to reschedule cases

On August 16, Sessions limited the ability for judges to issue continuances, which they did to postpone or reschedule removal cases, often when a defendant was waiting for a visa or another kind of immigration benefit and needed time to resolve their pending applications. Sessions has determined judges can now only issue continuances under a “good cause” standard, such as when an immigrant is likely to succeed in their attempt to stay in the US, either by winning an asylum hearing or receiving a visa.

Several retired immigration judges sent a letter to Sessions the next day, calling his decision on continuances a “blow to judicial independence.” They noted that some judges may receive from 10 to 15 requests for continuances a day—and would now need to spend time writing decisions on them, in addition to hearing their cases. “Immigration Judges should be treated as judges, and should be afforded the independent judgment that their position requires, including the basic power to control and prioritize their own case dockets,” the retired judges wrote. Advocates have also expressed concerns that immigrants could now be deported while waiting for another immigration benefit that would have given them legal status.

And as more judges retire, Sessions gets to staff up

Marks, of the judges union, notes there’s been a “tsunami” of retirements over the past two years. “Members of the association are telling us [that] they are leaving at the earliest possible opportunity or choosing to leave now because of the actions of the current administration,” she says. “They do not feel supported. They do not feel that they are free to make the decisions they need to make.”

Given the retirements, Sessions will have the ability to reshape the courts even further: Since January 2017, the DOJ has sworn in 82new immigration judges, and plans to hire at least 75 more this fall. Sessions has also worked to cut down the time it takes to hire judges.

What’s more, the Justice Department has faced allegations of politicized hiring. In April, House Democrats sent a letter to Sessions expressing concern that the DOJ had blocked several judges’ appointments for ideological reasons. The DOJ said in a statement to CNN that it “does not discriminate potential hires on the basis of political affiliation.”

Finally, while the DOJ has a long history of hiring judges with immigration enforcement backgrounds, the judges union has expressed concern that the DOJ may now be “over-emphasizing litigation experience” in its hiring practices, and “created even more skewed appointment practices that largely have favored individuals with law enforcement experience over individuals with more varied and diverse backgrounds.” As of last year, a little over 40 percent of immigration judges previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security.

Schmidt, the retired immigration judge, says he’s worried that even more new judges will come from prosecutorial backgrounds. “Who would really want to work for Sessions, given his record, his public statements?” he asks.

Under Sessions, he says, the immigration court “has become a deportation railway.”

Sent from my iPad

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Great article, bringing together “all of the threads” of Sessions’s White Nationalist destruction of the U.S. Immigration Courts and his vicious racially-motivated attack on refugees from the Northern Triangle, particularly abused women and children.

For many years, “Gonzo Apocalypto” was a GOP “back bencher” in the Senate. His White Nationalist, restrictionist agenda was too much even for his GOP colleagues. His views were quite properly marginalized.

Suddenly, Trump runs for President on an overtly racist, White Nationalist, xenophobic platform. That’s music to Gonzo’s ears and he becomes the earliest Senate supporter.

Wonder of wonders, Trump wins, makes Sessions clone Stephen Miller his top immigration adviser, and appoints Gonzo as AG. His eyes light up. Suddenly, he’s free to dismember the entire Immigration Court, sack it’s Due Process vision, and attack migrants and refugees of color, particularly women, children, and families in ways that are both life threatening and permanently damaging.

He also gets a chance to dismantle civil rights protections, promote homophobia, disenfranchise minority voters, favor far right Evangelical Christianity, fill up prisons with the poor, black, and Hispanic, encourage police brutality against minorities, screw criminal defendants, disregard facts, harm refugees, and, icing on the cake, protect and promote hate speech. It’s a “dream come true” for a 21st century racist demagogue.

That Trump has mindlessly attacked his most faithfully effective racist, White Nationalist Cabinet Member says more about Trump than it does Sessions. Sessions is going to continue socking it to immigrants and minorities for just as long as he can. The further back into the era of Jim Crow that he can push America, the happier he’ll be when he goes on to his next position as a legal analyst for Breitbart or Fox.

Until then, there will be much more unnecessary pain, suffering, degradation, and even death on tap for migrants and their families.

Join the New Due Process Army — stand up against Session’s White Nationalist Agenda!

PWS

09-08-18

YES, HE’S TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED FOR THE OFFICE — (THAT’S SOMETHING THAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW, EVEN BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION) — BUT HAVING A SELF-PROCLAIMED GROUP OF “GENUINE CONSERVATIVES” RUN THE COUNTRY BEHIND HIS BACK ISN’T THE ANSWER!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

By now, I assume everyone has read the explosive “Anonymous NY Times Op-Ed” (linked above) that confirmed 1) what everyone already knew about Trump’s total incompetence for office, and 2) the widely rumored but heretofore not previously confirmed existence of an organized “resistance” to Trump within his own senior staff. While many will take heart from the latter, count me out.

What a bad dream! So, now, as a result of the gutless GOP and their supporters, we have the unelected, self-proclaimed “real conservatives” unilaterally deciding which Trump programs are “worthy” — like tax breaks for the rich or eliminating environmental protections — and which are “unworthy” — like, presumably starting a gratuitous nuclear war or handing the country over to Putin.

Is this really an acceptable solution to this GOP/White Nationalist created problem?

What about taking our country back at the ballot box from the anti-American Trump base? What about “outing” these self-proclaimed “saviors” and confronting the GOP with the need to initiate some “removal proceedings” against Trump?

What these “internal resisters” really are doing is putting their own egos over the good of the country. They need to resign, tell what they know, and demand action to remove Trump immediately.

Time to vote every Republican out of office.

Yes, Trump’s removal would result in the ascension of

“Mike the Terrible” Pence to the office of President. Under normal circumstances that would be an unparalleled national disaster in its own right. But, obviously, these aren’t normal times.

Some actually are speculating that “Mikie” is the “Deep Bloat” here. Seems unlikely given his record of sycophancy; on the other hand, he’s the one guy Trump can’t fire. And, stranger things have happened — like Trump being inflicted on us in the first place.

In the meantime, join the New Due Process Army and fight Trumpist White Nationalism in all of its insidious forms.

PWS

09-05-18

TRUMP’S UGLIEST LEGACY: “MARA – Make America Racist Again”

http://flip.it/8v_SjE

Sher Watts Spooner writes at Daily Kos:

Nothing will stop him from discarding the dog whistle and grabbing a bullhorn in his racist tweets and shouts.

Whatever happens to Donald Trump, however long it takes before he’s out of office, there’s one area where it will be hard to stop the spread of his poisonous politics: his stoking of racial hatred.

Trump and Republicans keep trying to turn the murder of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts, allegedly done by an immigrant who may have been in the United States illegally, into a campaign issue, trying further to stir up anger and raise fears about immigrants among Trump’s base. But they conveniently ignore the murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson on a BART train in Oakland, California, allegedly committed by a white supremacist.

It’s not hard to figure out their reasoning: Tibbetts was white, and her accused killer is Latino. Wilson was African-American, and her accused killer is white. Crimes by “others” are by definition bad and scary, to a racist’s way of thinking. Crimes by whites must be a sign of mental illness, right?

Multiple reports and analyses show that the number of hate crimes against minorities have risen since Trump became president, and that the number started rising the day after the election in 2016. “There were more reported hate crimes on Nov. 9 than any other day in 2016, and the daily number of such incidents exceeded the level on Election Day for the next 10 days,” says a report from The Washington Post.

Even the increase in hate crime numbers is no doubt understated, because hate crimes are always underreported. But they have been rising all over the country, in cities, in small towns, and on college campuses, ever since Trump’s election. Victims encompass all minorities: African-American, Latino, Muslim, LGBT, Asian-American, and immigrants of multiple nationalities. Except, of course, for immigrants from Western European countries like Norway. Immigrants from “shithole countries” are obviously still fair game.

Over the last decade, extremists committed 387 murders in the United States, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. Of those, 71 percent were done by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists. Islamic extremists were responsible for only 26 percent.

When do hate crimes occur? There’s no shortage of bigoted remarks and bombastic insults at his campaign rallies, often rousing his supporters into shouts against whatever minority group he currently has in his cross hairs, whether that’s the media, immigrants, Muslims, or whatever his outrage du jour.

But often, says one study, hate crimes occur right after a bigoted Trump tweet.

An online paper published on the Social Science Research Network found a pattern of an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes after particularly virulent anti-Muslim tweets. From the paper’s abstract:

We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign.

A commentary on the study in Scientific American cautioned that the link between Trump tweets and anti-Muslim hate crimes is correlational and not necessarily causal. Still, the researchers “point out that their findings are consistent with the idea that Trump’s presidency has made it more socially acceptable for many people to express prejudicial or hateful views that they already possessed prior to his election.”

Making such prejudicial and hateful views “socially acceptable” is the crux of the problem. We all know that racism exists and always has existed. With Trump’s ascendancy, people with those racist views have ripped away the layer of social responsibility, giving them (in their own eyes) permission to express racism openly, with little fear of repercussion. The abundance of cell phone videos distributed on social media showing insults, harassment, arrests, attacks, and even some killings illustrates the fact that harassment toward people who are merely #LivingWhileBlack is an everyday occurrence.

A Washington Post column by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt called Trump’s willingness to play up racial fears to his base “The wound that may long outlive Donald Trump.”

Though Trump and Fox News fearmonger Tucker Carlson will always be able to find inflammatory cases of young white women killed by sinister brown men, studies overwhelmingly show that immigrants, including illegal immigrants, commit crime at far lower rates than do native-born citizens. As the percentage of foreign-born increased in the United States from 7 percent to 13 percent between 1990 and 2013, violent crime rates fell 48 percent.

Politically, though, what matters is the first statistic — the increase in foreign-born. […]

The always fraught challenge of incorporating this generation of immigrants — assimilating, learning from, being enriched by — will be that much harder and take that much longer. It will happen; most of those people are not going away, no matter how much Trump dreams of deportation, and the country’s adaptive genius will be stronger than the Trump poison.

But the poison will linger. And when history considers how the Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans acquiesced to Trump’s many depredations, it will be their failure to stand up for respect and tolerance between one human being and another that will be judged most harshly.

The Southern Poverty Law Center agrees:

Since he stepped on the political stage, Donald Trump has electrified the radical right. Through his words and actions, he continues to deliver for what he clearly sees as his core constituency. As a consequence, we’ve seen a rise in hate crimes, street violence and large public actions organized by white supremacist groups that have been further emboldened by the president’s statements about “shithole countries” and his policies targeting refugees and immigrants of color.

Nothing will stop Trump from exploiting the racial and ethnic fear and hatred he has espoused for decades and brought out into the open when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015, spouting nonsense about Mexico sending rapists and drug dealers to the U.S. Nothing will stop his base from cheering about a nonsensical wall that will never be built (and Mexico certainly will never pay for). Nothing will stop him from discarding the dog whistle and grabbing a bullhorn in his racist tweets and shouts.

Ultimately, that will be Donald Trump’s legacy: MARA—Make America Racist Again

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White Nationalist racism is at the core of the Trump/Sessions/Miller immigration agenda. I don’t see how one can push that agenda while denying its underlying ugly intent.

PWS

09-04-18

A FATHER’S PLEA: Stop Using Mollie Tibbetts’s Tragic Death To Spread A Racist Message: “Instead, let’s turn against racism in all its ugly manifestations both subtle and overt. Let’s turn toward each other with all the compassion we gave Mollie.”

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/09/01/mollie-tibbetts-father-common-decency-immigration-heartless-despicable-donald-trump-jr-column/1163131002/

From the Des Moines Register:

From Mollie Tibbetts’ father: Don’t distort her death to advance racist views

Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate

Ten days ago, we learned that Mollie would not be coming home. Shattered, my family set out to celebrate Mollie’s extraordinary life and chose to share our sorrow in private. At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.

Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., “heartless” and “despicable.”

Make no mistake, Mollie was my daughter and my best friend. At her eulogy, I said Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate. She may not be able to speak for herself, but I can and will. Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.

Throughout this ordeal I’ve asked myself, “What would Mollie do?” As I write this, I am watching Sen. John McCain lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and know that evil will succeed only if good people do nothing. Both Mollie and Senator McCain were good people. I know that both would stand up now and do something.

The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.

To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.

My stepdaughter, whom Mollie loved so dearly, is Latina. Her sons — Mollie’s cherished nephews and my grandchildren — are Latino. That means I am Hispanic. I am African. I am Asian. I am European. My blood runs from every corner of the Earth because I am American. As an American, I have one tenet: to respect every citizen of the world and actively engage in the ongoing pursuit to form a more perfect union.

Given that, to knowingly foment discord among races is a disgrace to our flag. It incites fear in innocent communities and lends legitimacy to the darkest, most hate-filled corners of the American soul. It is the opposite of leadership. It is the opposite of humanity. It is heartless. It is despicable. It is shameful.

We have the opportunity now to take heed of the lessons that Mollie, John McCain and Aretha Franklin taught — humanity, fairness and courage. For most of the summer, the search for Mollie brought this nation together like no other pursuit. There was a common national will that did transcend opinion, race, gender and geography. Let’s not lose sight of that miracle. Let’s not lose sight of Mollie.

Instead, let’s turn against racism in all its ugly manifestations both subtle and overt. Let’s turn toward each other with all the compassion we gave Mollie. Let’s listen, not shout. Let’s build bridges, not walls. Let’s celebrate our diversity rather than argue over our differences. I can tell you, when you’ve lost your best friend, differences are petty and meaningless.

My family remains eternally grateful to all those who adopted Mollie so completely and showered us with so much care, compassion and generosity. Please accept our desire to remain private as we share our loss. We love Mollie with all our hearts and miss her terribly. We need time.

Rob Tibbetts is the father of Mollie Tibbetts.

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R.I.P. Mollie.

Thanks for speaking up, Rob.

PWS

09-03-18

Sent from my iPad

EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: ADMINISTRATION MOUNTS ATTACK ON HISPANIC CITIZENS: “This vile, unadulterated racism”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-doesnt-see-latinos-as-americans/2018/08/30/0ab8b7de-ac83-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html?utm_term=.67faf4e3a5bd

Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:

President Trump’s bigoted hatred of Latino immigrants has been clear from the beginning. Now his administration is aggressively persecuting Latino citizens as well.

It is hard to be shocked anymore, given the daily outrages committed by Trump and his minions, but a report Thursday by The Post was jaw-dropping: In the borderlands of southern Texas, the State Department is denying passports to hundreds and perhaps thousands of men and women who have official birth certificates demonstrating they were born in the United States.

In some cases, valid passports have been confiscated and revoked, their holders stranded in Mexico, unable to come home. In other cases, people have been arrested, sent to detention centers and slated for deportation. Imagine how they and their American families must feel — and how their distress must make Trump and his fellow xenophobes feel warm inside.

Denial of passports effectively renders the victims stateless — meaning they cannot travel outside the country, because they would not be readmitted — and potentially vulnerable to being deported. Again, these are people who have government-issued birth certificates, long accepted as gold-standard proof of citizenship. The Trump administration simply doesn’t see Latinos as full-fledged Americans.

The Post quoted a 40-year-old man named Juan — he didn’t want his last name used for fear of being targeted — who has a birth certificate stating he was born in the Texas border city of Brownsville. He served his country for three years in the U.S. Army, then was a cadet in the Border Patrol, and now works as a Texas state prison guard. But when he applied to renew his passport this year, the State Department responded with a letter saying it didn’t believe he was a citizen.

It is important to understand that for Americans who live along the border, a passport is a necessity. People flow back and forth across the Rio Grande all the time to work, make business deals, see family or perhaps just try out a trendy new restaurant. The border is not like the Berlin Wall, though evidently Trump would like it to be.

There is a backstory: In the 1990s, some Texas midwives admitted accepting bribes to falsely claim that some Mexican infants were born in the United States. These same midwives, however, also delivered many more Latino babies, at least thousands, who were legitimately born in the United States. From official records, it is impossible to tell the difference.

The Trump administration appears to be denying passports simply because the applicant is Latino, was born in southern Texas and was delivered by a midwife — something the federal government explicitly promised not to do in a 2009 court settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The administration claims there has been no change in policy. But The Post quoted immigration lawyers who say there has been a dramatic surge in passport denials.

In Juan’s case, the State Department demanded he produce documents including proof of his mother’s prenatal care in the United States, his baptismal certificate and rental agreements from when he was an infant. He managed to find some of this obscure material — and yet his passport application was denied a second time.

A military veteran who served his country was told that it isn’t his country after all.

Think how you would feel if this nightmare were happening to you. Like everyone else, you have no memory of the details of your birth. You know only what your parents have told you and what the official records say, all of which is almost surely true. Suddenly, because of your Latino heritage, your core identity is challenged and your right to live in the United States is threatened.

If the government had specific evidence that an individual’s birth certificate was falsified, then we could have a debate about the right thing to do. But this administration is assuming that a person of a certain ethnicity, recorded as being born in a certain part of the country and meeting other unspecified criteria, is de facto not a citizen — and has the burden of proving otherwise.

At this point, the Trump administration has the burden of proving this is anything other than vile, unadulterated racism.

Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers. His administration cruelly separated nearly 3,000 migrant children from their families and seeks to make their parents ineligible for asylum. His clear message to would-be Latino immigrants is: No admission.

And now, an equally blunt message for lifelong Latino citizens: Go away.

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We have a racist, White Nationalist regime. What does that say about those who continue to support its toxic policies and the Liar-in-Chief?

GET OUT THE VOTE IN NOVEMBER! TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK FROM THE WHITE NATIONALISTS AND THEIR ENABLERS! START HOLDING TRUMP, SESSIONS, AND THE OTHER REGIME AUTOCRATS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR UNLAWFUL, IMMORAL, AND DIVISIVE POLICIES!

PWS

08-31-18

GRIFTER-IN-CHIEF STICKS IT TO FEDERAL WORKERS! – “Today’s announcement has nothing to do with making government more cost-efficient — it’s just the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on federal employees.”

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/30/opinions/donald-trump-is-shafting-federal-workers-begala/index.html

Paul Begala writes @ CNN:

Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House. He was a consultant to Priorities USA Action, which was a pro-Obama super PAC before it was a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)President Donald Trump ran for office as a populist. He swore to fight for the “forgotten men and women,” a phrase he stole from FDR. But under his presidency, the middle class remains forgotten — hammered is more like it.

President Trump’s announcement that he wants to cancel the 2.1% pay raise for federal workersis just the latest assault on the middle class.

He sent a statement to Congress on Thursday saying we can’t afford to give our people a measly 2.1% bump because — are you ready for this? — “We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.”

Donald Trump is now worried about the debt. Are you kidding me? That’s like John Dillinger worrying about gun violence. Like Kim Kardashian worrying about being overexposed. Like Donald Trump worrying about spray-tanning and pathological lying.

President Trump championed a tax cut that spends $1.5 trillion on the forgotten corporate class. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, when the GOP tax bill is fully implemented, an astonishing 83% of its benefit will flow to the top 1%.

The President’s answer to the fiscal meltdown he is causing is not to ask those who’ve gotten the most to pay a little more. It’s to hurt the folks who are already serving us.

Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, home to numerous federal workers, both in the D.C. area and the Norfolk naval region, called BS on Trump’s newfound fiscal prudence.

“Let’s be clear,” Warner wrote in a statement, “the President’s decision to cancel any pay increase for federal employees is not motivated by a sudden onset of fiscal responsibility. Today’s announcement has nothing to do with making government more cost-efficient — it’s just the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on federal employees.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents 700,000 of the 2 million federal workers, is vowing to fight. “Federal employees have had their pay and benefits cut by over $200 billion since 2011, and they are earning nearly 5% less today than they did at the start of the decade,” said AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. in a press release. He plans to push Congress to go over President Trump’s head and mandate the pay hike.

I hope they win. After all, you get what you pay for. Do you want your overworked air traffic controller to be missing meals and feeling faint? Do you want your Social Security check being handled by someone who’s holding three jobs? How about bridge inspectors and meat inspectors and the folks who fight forest fires? Or the scientists and doctors who are working around the clock to find cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer and HIV/AIDS?

Should they get a pay cut? Do you want the men and women who take on the drug cartels to be worried about making their rent payment? Really?

Worse still, President Trump wants to end what’s known as the “locality pay increase” — an annual adjustment to assist federal workers in parts of the country where the cost of living is high — like, say, the neighborhood Trump Tower is in. So TSA agents at LaGuardia Airport in New York, medical researchers in Atlanta, Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Los Angeles, homeland security professionals in D.C. — all will suffer.

Of course, while federal workers struggle, President Trump has made a fortune from government assistance. One analysis by The New York Times estimates Trump received $885 million in tax breaks from New York alone. And that doesn’t count the millions he’ll get from the tax cut he signed.

You might even say they’ve been forgotten.

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A deficit exploding $1.5 trillion for tax cuts for the upper 1% who don’t need them! But, in the middle of a booming economy, our Government can’t afford any money for its hard-working employees who are keeping the country running despite Trump’s “Clown Kakistocracy!” Come on man! It’s all a part of Trump’s war on the United States and his scheme to destroy our Government. Sadly, it’s consistent with various proposals from the “Bakuninist Wing” of the GOP over the years.

The solution for those who want our republic to continue: get out to the vote and throw the grifters and their fellow travelers out of office, starting this November!

PWS

08-31-18

JASON DZUBOW @ THE ASYLUMIST: IMMIGRATION PROVOCATEUR STEPHEN MILLER ISN’T A HYPOCRITE – HE’S EXACTLY WHAT HE CLAIMS TO BE: A Xenophobic Bigot!

http://www.asylumist.com/2018/08/20/stephen-miller-is-not-a-hypocrite/

Stephen Miller Is Not a Hypocrite

by Jason DzubowAugust 20, 2018

If you follow the news about immigration, you probably know Stephen Miller. He’s a Senior Policy Advisor to President Trump, and he’s supposedly the nefarious driving force behind many of the Administration’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies.

Last week, Dr. David S. Glosser–Mr. Miller’s uncle and a retired neuropsychologist who volunteers with refugees–penned a powerful article refuting his nephew’s raison d’etre: Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. The article discusses the immigration history of Mr. Miller’s family, and points out that the policies espoused by Mr. Miller would have prevented his own ancestors from escaping persecution in Europe. Here’s Dr. Glosser’s money shot:

Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.

Can you guess which one is Stephen Miller?

It’s a powerful piece, in part because of Dr. Glosser’s relationship to Stephen Miller, and in part due to the juxtaposition of these two men. Dr. Glosser speaks from his personal experience dealing with refugees. He sees the story of his parents and grandparents in the stories of modern-day refugees. He has absorbed the lessons of the past, particular with regard to ethnic and religious demonization. Mr. Miller, on the other hand, seems inured to the suffering of his fellow humans and immune to the lessons of history. I have never heard him articulate a fact-based justification for his cruel policies. But he persists in advocating for those policies nevertheless. Mr. Miller’s background and how it influences (or fails to influence) his thinking are important questions, as is the “grim historical irony” of his views.

Here, however, I want to discuss a different question: Is it accurate to call Mr. Miller and the President hypocrites because their policies would have blocked their own ancestors from immigrating to the United States? A second, perhaps more important question, is this: Why does the first question matter?

A hypocrite is a person who pretends to be something that he is not. It’s an epithet often used for politicians who claim to be virtuous and honest, but who, in reality, are the opposite. The word derives from the Greek “hypokrites,” which means “actor,” and there’s a long and rich history of contempt for hypocritical politicians (Dante, for example, relegates the hypocrites to the eight circle of hell, which is pretty close to the bottom).

I don’t think that Mr. Miller or Mr. Trump are hypocrites simply because their immigration policies would have blocked their own ancestors from coming to the U.S. They may be bigots and bullies, whose policies are based more on falsehood than fact, but that is not hypocrisy. Indeed, Mr. Trump has repeatedly articulated his disdain for Muslims, Mexicans, people from “shit-hole countries,” etc., and so the fact that he enacts policies to exclude such people seems perfectly consistent with his world view. He and Mr. Miller may hold ignorant and racist views, but that does not make them hypocrites.

Why does any of this matter?

Aside from the fact that words should be used properly (or as Inigo Montoya might say, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”), it seems wrong to try to limit what people can do by shaming them as hypocrites based on their ancestry. Is the decedent of slave owners a hypocrite if she supports Affirmative Action? Would a Native American be a hypocrite if he became an immigration lawyer? Is the daughter of a candy store owner acting hypocritically if she becomes a dietician? You get my point. We are who we are because of, and in spite of, our progenitors. But I don’t think we should be condemned for the choices we make that are not consistent with the choices they made.

Further, with regards to a complex topic like immigration policy, labels such as “hypocrite” seem inapplicable and designed to shut down–rather than encourage–discussion. Even a person who personally benefited from U.S. refugee policy, for example, has a right to oppose the admission of additional refugees. Economic and political circumstances change, as does the population of refugees seeking admission to our country. Maybe you support admitting some types of refugees (those like you) and oppose admitting others. Such a position is likely based on ignorance of “the other,” but I don’t think it is necessarily hypocritical.

So condemn Mr. Miller for his bigotry and his lies. Call out the irony of his policies, which would have blocked his own ancestors from finding refuge in our country. But don’t call Stephen Miller a hypocrite. Sadly, he is exactly what he purports to be.

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I personally think that racist, White Nationalist, and White Supremacist, as well as disingenuous are the best terms to describe Miller. And, it’s no coincidence that he once worked for Jeff Sessions.

PWS 08-23-18

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO KILL 1,400 AMERICANS! — Is Anyone Paying Attention?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/trump-coal-plan-will-kill-1400-americans-a-year

Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:

Last week, we learned that Donald Trump’scoal-loving administration was set to release a proposal that would allow coal-burning plants to flood the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, raising a giant middle finger to the killjoy tree-huggers who insist on protecting the environment and human health through silly little things like government regulations. Whereas Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan would have caused a shift toward less-dirty energy sources like wind, natural gas, and solar, the White House’s plan would prop up coal plants by giving states free rein to come up with their own rules, or letting them petition to opt out of regulations altogether. On Tuesday, the administration officially unveiled the proposal, and as it turns out, it’s not as bad as everyone feared—it’s much, much worse, if one considers the deaths of 1,400 Americans and the hastened demise of the planet to be “worse.”

The New York Times [reports] that, buried within 289 pages of technical analysis, the Environmental Protection Agency casually notes that under the scenario individual states are most likely to follow in order to comply with Trump’s hilariously titled “Affordable Clean Energy rule,” between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths will occur each year by 2030 due to “increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates known as PM 2.5.” On the flip side, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was expected to prevent between 1,500 and 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030, but that guy’s a law-flouting Commie, so screw him. In addition, the Trump administration’s own analysis concludes that its plan would cause 48,000 new cases of “exacerbated asthma” and a minimum of 21,000 missed school days a year by 2030 due to ozone-related illnesses. By contrast, the plan it is replacing would have resulted in a significant drop in new instances of asthma and 180,000 fewer missed school days annually.

But breathing, going to school, and a normal life-expectancy are obviously for losers, which is presumably why William Wehrum, the acting administrator of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, simply referred to the plan’s downsides as “collateral effects” in a comment to the Times; he also said that the administration has “aggressive programs in place that directly target emissions of those pollutants.” (Incidentally, Wehrum spent much of the past 10 years working to destroy air-pollution rules as a lawyer representing—wait for it—coal-burning power plants, chemical manufacturers, oil drillers, and refineries. He was able to so seamlessly transition to weakening air-pollutant rules from within the E.P.A. thanks to “a quirk in federal ethics rules [that] limit the activities of officials who join the government from industry [but are] less restrictive for lawyers than for officials who had worked as registered lobbyists.”)

Speaking of premature deaths, Trump is apparently super concerned about them—not when they happen to humans, of course, but to birds, whose early demise he vastly overestimated last night in a characteristically crazy, off-the-rails speech decrying wind turbines and other forms of energy that both cost and pollute less than coal. Quoth the man who is somehow the president of the United States:

You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the wind wheels [mimics windmill noise, mimes shooting gun], “Bing!” That’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But uh, you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about wind, when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” Well, then we have a problem. O.K. good. They were putting him in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subsidary [sic]—you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great.

Really, what else is there to add?

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Read the rest of the Levin Report at the link.

I suppose with a President who favors KGB vet Putin over our intelligence officers, is dodging criminal charges for payoffs to an adult entertainment star and a Playboy model, and surrounds himself with family members, criminals, grifters, and wingnut ideologues, deciding to sacrifice 1,400 Americans to promote a dying industry that damages the health and welfare of its employees is sort of “below the radar screen.”

But, it’s on the screen over here at “courtside.”

PWS

08-23-18

NYT EDITORIAL: “DON’S CONS” — TRUMP TAKES CORRUPTION TO A NEW LEVEL!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/manafort-cohen-guilty.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ty_20180822&nl=opinion-today&nlid=79213886edit_ty_20180822&ref=headline&te=1

All the President’s Crooks

One of them, Mr. Trump’s own lawyer, has now implicated him in a crime.

By The Editorial Board

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

Aug. 21, 2018

Image
Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.CreditLeft, Jeenah Moon for The New York Times; right, Zach Gibson/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.

On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.

Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”

Related in Opinion

Opinion | Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke and Norman L. Eisen

What the Manafort Verdict Means

Aug. 21, 2018

Opinion | Ken White

Can Michael Cohen Bring Down Trump?

Aug. 22, 2018

The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.

A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.

Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.

But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.

As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.

He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.

Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.

What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.

RELATED

More on Mr. Cohen and Mr. Manafort

Trump Praises Manafort for Refusing to ‘Break,’ Unlike Cohen, His Former Fixer

Aug. 22, 2018

Cohen and Manafort Are in Deeper Legal Trouble. Mueller Could Benefit.

Aug. 22, 2018

Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction

Aug. 21, 2018

Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts

Aug. 21, 2018

A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels

Aug. 21, 2018

While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:

In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.

Others have pleaded guilty to identity fraud and making false statements. Mr. Manafort’s longtime associate Rick Gates also pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.

Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.

And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.

As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).

For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2018, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Unfortunately, the Trump Circus is just picking up steam. We’re sure to be subjected to a “carpet bombing” of lies, tweets, insults, and threats as the Emperor’s clothes come off piece by piece while the emasculated GOP Congress merely sits and watches. And, of course, there will be the “normal” Trump strategy of attempting to shift blame to the victims and away from himself and the other corrupt individuals associated with him. Seems Trumpie owes Stormy (and Melania) an apology

PWS

08-22-18

WASHPOST: RACISTS FIND HOME IN TODAY’S GOP —From Dissing Mexican Americans, To Barring Muslims, Abandoning Refugees, Restricting Legal Immigration, Slamming Families, & Encouraging Voter Suppression, GOP Appears To Be “All In” On “Built To Fail” Strategy Of Making America White Again: “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/im-not-going-there-as-trump-hurls-racial-invective-most-republicans-stay-silent/2018/08/18/aab7fd8a-a189-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html

By Ashley Parker

, Reporter

Seung Min Kim

, Reporter

Robert Costa

, Reporter

August 18 at 6:14 PM

The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog” — but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) had no interest in talking about it.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind, so I really don’t have a comment on that,” said the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, chuckling at the question.

Has President Trump ever said anything on race that made Cornyn uncomfortable? “I think the most important thing is to pay attention to what the president does, which I think has been good for the country,” the senator demurred.

What about his constituents back home — are they concerned? “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that,” Cornyn said, politely ending the brief interview in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. “I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.”

And so it went last week among Republicans: As Trump immersed the nation in a new wave of fraught battles over race, most GOP lawmakers tried to ignore the topic altogether. The studied avoidance is a reflection of the enduring reluctance of Republicans to confront Trump’s often divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, in part because the president remains deeply popular within a party dominated by older white voters.

The Washington Post reached out to all 51 Republican senators and six House Republican leaders asking them to participate in a brief interview about Trump and race. Only three senators agreed to participate: Jeff Flake of Arizona, David Perdue of Georgia and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate.

Trump has a history of mocking his black critics’ intelligence

President Trump insulted NBA player LeBron James’s intelligence in a tweet Aug. 3. It’s not the first time Trump has taken this approach. (Elyse Samuels /The Washington Post)

Flake, a frequent Trump critic who is retiring, rattled off examples when asked if there were times he felt Trump had been racially insensitive.

“It started long before his campaign, the whole Barack Obama, the birtherism . . . that was abhorrent, I thought,” Flake said in a phone interview. “And then you know, the Mexican rapists . . . on his first official day as a campaign. And then you know, Judge Curiel, the statement that he couldn’t judge because of his heritage. Failure to, you know, condemn in Charlottesville. Just the willingness to go there, all the time. Muslim ban. This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. It’s just — it’s been one thing after another.”

Six other lawmakers granted impromptu interviews when approached in the Capitol, although most declined to be specific about whether they were uncomfortable with any of Trump’s statements on race. One exception was Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, another Trump critic who is leaving Congress in January.

“It’s a formula that I think they think works for them, as it relates to winning,” Corker said, referring to the use of divisive racial issues by Trump and his advisers. “I think that’s their kind of governing. I think that’s how they think they stay in power, is to divide.”

Several other lawmakers said they did not like some of Trump’s language, especially on race, but did not consider Trump to be racist.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Trump’s description of former black adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog” was “not appropriate, ever.” But he stopped short of pointing to a time when he felt the president had crossed a racial boundary.

“I just think that’s the way he reacts and the way he interacts with people who attack him,” Thune said. “I don’t condone it. But I think it’s probably part built into his — it’s just going to be in his DNA.”

The month of August — which included the first anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville — has seen Trump unleash a steady tide of racially charged invective, including questioning the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James, attacking Chinese college students and reviving his attacks on anthem protests by black NFL players. At one point last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she could not guarantee that no audio recording exists of Trump using the n-word, as Manigault Newman alleges in her book.

Republicans have struggled over issues of race since the Civil Rights era, with periodic efforts to appeal to blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Trump’s critics within the party fear that, in an increasingly diverse nation, the president is reopening wounds many Republicans had sought to heal.

Trump and his allies frequently counter by offering economic data that they say is favorable to minorities, seeking to separate Trump’s harsh rhetoric from his policy agenda.

But some longtime party stalwarts worry about the long-term consequences of the party’s near-silence on race.

Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant and vocal Trump critic, bemoaned “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”

“Trump’s shtick is that he’s the grievance candidate,” Murphy said. “He’s focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter. . . . He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That’s Trump’s DNA.”

. . . .

Perdue said in an interview that he believes Trump is results-focused and “trying to be all-inclusive,” and that Democrats are the ones using race as a political issue.

“Well, I hope they will,” Perdue said. “I have many friends in the African American community and they’re tired of being treated as pawns.”

But Republicans who believe that Trump has galloped past norms of civil society on race and other issues worry about the costs the party may ultimately pay, both politically and morally.

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Not surprising to see modern-day Jim Crows like Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) out there carrying water for the Trump/Sessions brand of 21st Century racism. After all, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that America needs more legal immigration and that family-based immigration is good for America, Perdue is one of the chief sponsors of the CIS-inspired bogus merit-based immigration bill that actually reduces legal immigration in a losing attempt to bar immigrants of color and “Keep America White As Long As Possible.” Donald Trump trying to be “all-inclusive?” How’s that David, by dissing African-Americans, calling them “dogs,” dehumanizing immigrants, slurring Hispanics, taking protections away from transgender kids, taking away security clearances of critics, attacking the free press, attacking the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community, promoting a false narrative about voter fraud, or telling thousands of lies since assuming office? Which one of these is “all inclusive?” The only “inclusive” thing about Donald Trump is that the majority of Americans who aren’t in his overwhelmingly White Guy “core.” are all included in his insults, lies, and disrespect!

I also thought that the final comment about the late George Wallace was telling. Yup, Wallace accomplished some things in Alabama including getting more textbooks. (Remember that Adolf Hitler built great Autobahns too!) But, the screaming crowds of White Folks who supported Wallace on the national stage weren’t excited about textbooks or better roads — they loved the message of racism and White Supremacy. And, that’s exactly how history will remember Wallace and his supporters — not for the textbooks, but for the public defense and advocacy of racism (just like Hitler isn’t remembered for his Autobahns). Which is how Trump, his “base,” and his many enablers (whether enthusiastic, merely willing, or downright cowardly) will also be remembered!

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

Still doubt the racism of Trump and his agenda. check out this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic entitled “The First White President:” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

Trump’s political career began in advocacy of birtherism. But long before that, he had made his worldview clear.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

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

I encourage you to read Coates’s entire totally cogent expose of the Supreme ugliness of Trump, his “team,” and his core supporters. No, you can’t really separate Donald Trump’s policies from his racism.

That’s why America needs regime change at the ballot box. NOW!

PWS

08-18-18

GONZO’S WORLD: SPLC RESPONDS TO GONZO’S SLIME ATTACK!

We’re being attacked by Attorney General Jeff Sessions for standing up to anti-LGBT hate.

It’s an attack not just on us but on you and everyone else who believes in equality.

Yesterday, Sessions spoke to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group that vilifies the LGBT community and promotes discrimination against it in the name of religion.

Because of its bigotry, we’ve named the ADF a hate group.

It’s a label that’s richly deserved.

The ADF has promoted the myth that there’s a link between homosexuality and pedophilia – even though the weight of scientific authority has debunked the claim. Linking the two is not an expression of religious belief. It is simply a dangerous and ugly falsehood.

The group also supports the criminalization of sexual relations between consenting adults abroad … opposes anti-bullying policies that provide protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity … and is working to strip LGBT protections from U.S. law.

In his speech, Sessions attacked us for calling the ADF what it is – a hate group that would like to push the LGBT community into the closet if not into jail.

It’s ironic – and utterly hypocritical – for the attorney general to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.

After he made similar comments last week, we explained in a letter to the attorney general that we identify hate groups in a manner analogous to how the Justice Department defines hate crimes.

Just as religious beliefs would not be a defense to a hate crime prosecution, vilifying others in the name of religion should not immunize a group like the ADF from being designated as a hate group.

Sessions’ boss, President Trump, promised during his campaign to be a “real friend” to the LGBT community. Yet, Sessions has taken multiple actions to roll back protections for the LGBT community, as have Trump and other administration officials.

The nation’s top law enforcement officer should not be lending the prestige of his office to a group that wants to enshrine its bigotry into law.

But based on everything we’ve seen from this administration, it’s not surprising. It’s obvious that this administration is no “friend” to the LGBT community.

We don’t relish being attacked by the attorney general of the United States, but we’re not going to be intimidated by him.

With supporters like you behind us, you can rest assured that we’re not going to stop calling out hate when we see it. In the Trump era, it may be our most important job.

Thank you for standing with us.

Sincerely yours,

Richard Cohen
President, Southern Poverty Law Center

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

How upside down perverted has America become in the Age of Trump & the White Nationalists? Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is charged with standing up for the rights of all Americans, instead stands up for a hate group, lies, tramples the First Amendment separation of church and state, and slimes a courageous and highly respected civil rights group that has been fighting such hate and discrimination for many years. Incredibly, Sessions fans the flames of intolerance and hate while White Supremacist hate groups are preparing for another assault on the good people of Washington and Charlottesville!

This is just the latest in Gonzo’s perverted, White Nationalist, anti-American agenda. That such a misguided and prejudiced individual is actually the holder of high public office, which he regularly misuses to deliver messages of hate, intolerance, and ignorance of the law, is beyond appalling.

PWS

08-11-18

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: HOW THE TRUMP/SESSIONS WHITE NATIONALIST CABAL PLANS MORE CHILD ABUSE – THIS TIME U.S. CITIZENS – WHILE FURTHER DIMINISHING US AS A NATION – All In The Name Of Xenophobic Racism!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/three-reasons-trumps-new-immigration-rule-should-make-your-blood-boil/2018/08/09/1f59a7fe-9b4c-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html?utm_term=.01d421f3f621

Catherine Rampell reports for the Washington Post:

Once again, the Trump administration is looking to punish immigrants. And once again, innocent children are getting hurt in the process.

This time, however, many of those innocent children are likely to be U.S. citizens.

On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the Trump administration is readying a new rule that should make your blood boil. The initiative, in the works for more than a year, would make it harder for legal immigrants to receive either green cards or citizenship if they — or anyone in their households — has ever benefited from a long list of safety-net programs. These include the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), food stamps or even health insurance purchased on the Obamacare exchanges.

Three points are worth emphasizing here.

First is that, again, this policy would apply to immigrants who are in the country legally . It’s not about punishing people for “sneaking across the border,” that apparently unforgivable transgression that Trump officials have previously used to justify state-sanctioned child abuse. And, in any case, undocumented immigrants are already excluded from nearly all federal anti-poverty programs.

As such, the proposal fits into President Trump’s agenda to dramatically cut levels of legal immigration, despite his rhetorical focus on the undocumented.

Second, this rule is ostensibly about making sure immigrants are self-sufficient and not a drain on public coffers. But NBC reports that the rule could disqualify immigrants making as much as 250 percent of the poverty level.

Moreover, an immigrant’s past use of benefits does not necessarily mean he or she will need them forever. Even the immigrant populations that you might expect to have the most trouble achieving economic self-sufficiency have proved to be a good long-term investment for the nation’s fiscal health.

For instance, refugees initially cost the government money; they need a lot of help, after all, given that they often arrive penniless and without proficient English-language skills. But over time, their work and wage prospects improve and, by their fifth year here, they pay more in taxes than they received in benefits on average, according to a government report commissioned and subsequently suppressed by the Trump administration last year. (The report eventually leaked to the New York Times.)

Third, and most important, is that under the proposal, it’s not only immigrants who must forgo safety-net benefits if they don’t wish to be penalized by the immigration system. It is everyonein a given immigrant’s household.

That includes — based on an earlier leaked draft of the proposal published by The Post — an immigrant’s own children, even if those children are U.S. citizens who independently qualify for safety-net benefits.

That’s right. Legal-immigrant moms and dads may soon face a choice between (A) guaranteeing their U.S.-born children medical care, preschool classes and infant formula today, or (B) not threatening their own ability to qualify for green cards or citizenship tomorrow.

The universe of U.S.-citizen children who could be affected is large. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that, in Medicaid and CHIP enrollment alone in 2016, about 5.8 million citizen children had a noncitizen parent.

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The rule has not yet been issued. But various versions of it have leaked over the past year and a half. These have received coverage in foreign-language media, and fears about changes to immigration policy already appear to be discouraging participation in services meant to help low-income American children.

Including, perhaps most distressingly, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), a critical lifeline that provides access to food, prenatal care, breast pumps and other services for low-income mothers and children. WIC was listed in the draft rule published by The Post, and it’s not clear whether it remains in the latest version; but, either way, some immigrant parents and parents-to-be are already unenrolling, just in case.

“I had one family come and tell me, ‘Please remove us from WIC program, all services, medical, dental, everything,’ ” says Aliya S. Haq, the nutrition services supervisor at International Community Health Services in Seattle. The family had a child less than a year old who needed medical attention, but Haq could not convince them the benefits outweighed the risks of staying in the program.

Another patient, who is pregnant, asked to stop receiving prenatal assistance because she’s applying for citizenship.

Haq said the clinic’s WIC enrollment has fallen by about 10 percent over the past year; she worries daily about whether infant and maternal mortality rates will worsen, and whether there will be a negative effect on the brain development and long-term health of newborns.

Any policy that discourages, even a little bit, poor families’ use of such services is not just heartless. From an economic perspective, it is foolish. We need healthy, well-nourished, well-educated children to become healthy, well-nourished, productive workers.

But once again, children and the economic future they represent are the casualties of Trump’s casual cruelty.

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

Catherine is being too kind to the Trumpsters. So, I’ll lay it on the line for you. This isn’t just “casual cruelty.” It’s intentional racist, xenophobic cruelty of the kind that Trump, Sessions, and Miller have promoted throughout their sordid careers.

We need regime change. In the meantime, here’s hoping that the New Due Process Army will keep these outrageous, racist, irrational, and unneeded regulations changes tied up in litigation until the White Nationalist regime can be thrown out of office.

PWS

08-09-18

WASHPOST: UNABATED CHILD ABUSE IN SESSIONS’S “KIDDIE GULAG!” – “[C]hildren as young as 14 stripped naked, shackled, strapped to chairs, their heads encased in bags, left for days or longer in solitary confinement, and in some cases beaten and bruised — it sounded like a scene from the Soviet gulag.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/migrant-kids-were-stripped-drugged-locked-away-so-much-for-compassion/2018/08/05/84a779d0-95b4-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?utm_term=.d6d444c5d042

By Editorial BoardAugust 5 at 6:27 PM

WHEN ACCOUNTS of abuse emerged in June from a detention center for migrant minors in Virginia — children as young as 14 stripped naked, shackled, strapped to chairs, their heads encased in bags, left for days or longer in solitary confinement, and in some cases beaten and bruised — it sounded like a scene from the Soviet gulag. This institution, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, near Staunton, couldn’t possibly be in America. And if it was, it had to be an extreme outlier — a place that, while overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, simply could not typify the federal government’s handling of children, undocumented or not, who make their way into this country.

But abuses alleged at that jail in Virginia turn out to be no worse than those inflicted, on even younger children, at another facility under ORR’s purview in Texas. Last Monday, a federal judge, incensed that underage migrants at the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center, south of Houston, had been routinely administered psychotropic drugs without parental consent, denied water as a means of punishment and forbidden from making private phone calls, ordered undocumented minors there transferred elsewhere.

Not the Soviet gulag. These things are taking place in America.

Not just coincidentally, it is President Trump’s America. True, documented abuses at both facilities pre-date Mr. Trump’s administration; at Shiloh, in particular, there have been harrowing reports of mistreatment for years. Yet the president, who has referred to illegal immigrants as “animals” and “rapists” who “infest” the United States, is a serial, casual dehumanizer of immigrants, particularly Hispanic ones. The signals he sends, amplified by Twitter, are heard everywhere. If unauthorized immigrants are vermin, as the president implies, then it’s legitimate to treat them as such — to tie them up, lock them away solo, dehydrate and drug them.

The most recent findings, concerning Shiloh, run by a private contractor and overseen by ORR, are shocking. Staff members there admitted they had administered psychotropic medication to children without bothering to seek consent from parents, relatives or guardians. Officials said “extreme psychiatric symptoms” justified medicating the children on an emergency basis — a fine explanation, except that the drugs were administered routinely in the morning and at night. (And sometimes the children were told the drugs were “vitamins.”) The children’s testimony led U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee to reject the government’s arguments, wondering how “emergencies” could occur with such clocklike precision.

Some of the minors confined at Shiloh, which houses 44 children, three-quarters of them immigrants, described abjectly cruel treatment, prompting the judge to order officials at the facility to provide water as needed to those confined there and permit them private phone calls. That a necessity so basic as the provision of water is the subject of a judicial order is a measure of the official depravity that has gripped Shiloh.

2:58

Opinion | Trump’s anti-immigrant tactics are eerily familiar to some Japanese Americans

The tools that normalized Japanese American imprisonment during World War II are being deployed against asylum-seeking immigrants today.(Kate Woodsome, Gillian Brockell, Konrad Aderer/The Washington Post)

HHS officials make a point of sounding compassionate when they describe their concern for the thousands of migrant children under their supervision. Those fine words are belied by actual conditions in real-world facilities for which the department is responsible.

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

There are plenty of villains here. But the primary culprits are Sessions, Trump, and Miller who have continued to push a racially motivated program of dehumanization of Hispanic migrants, and illegal, immoral, and damaging detention of children and families in the face of clear evidence of its impropriety and its ineffectiveness as a deterrent.

I’m not saying that other DHS and ORR officials don’t belong in jail. Obviously, the evil clown who went before Congress and compared “Kiddie Gulags” to summer camps belongs behind bars. Trump might well be unreachable except for impeachment. But, Sessions, Nielsen, Lloyd and others responsible for these grotesque abuses enjoy no such protections.

Yes, this is ORR. But the Department of Justice is responsible for taking affirmative action to end these abuses by the Government. Instead, Sessions has been second only to Trump in promoting racism, false narratives, child abuse, xenophobia, and disregard of the legal rights and human rights of migrants, particularly the most vulnerable — children, women, LGBTQ, the mentally ill, etc. In the case before Judge Gee, he unethically ordered his DOJ lawyers to “defend the indefensible.”

What kind of nation refuses to hold blatant, unrepentant, public child abusers accountable for their crimes?

PWS

08-06-18

RACISM TRUMPS IDEOLOGY — AS PERSECUTION AND TORTURE BY NICARAGUA’S LEFTIST GOVERNMENT RAMPS UP, ICE WORKS WITH NICARAGUA TO INSURE RETURN OF REFUGEES TO PERIL! — “Tiny coffins: how Nicaragua’s spiraling violence ravaged a family. In one incident, a family of six was burned alive after allegedly refusing to let pro-government paramiliaries use their home as a sniper’s perch. Neighbours told the Guardian that police officers shot at anyone who attempted to help the family.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/us-nicaragua-partner-violence-ice-deportations?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Charles Davis reports for The Guardian:

The Trump administration is quietly partnering with a government it publicly accuses of killing its own people, in an effort to speed up the deportation of Nicaraguan citizens, the Guardian can reveal.

The partnership between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the government of Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, began a week before mass protests erupted in the Central American country, and it continues despite a war of words between Washington and Managua.

Nicaragua: what’s driving the uprising and what comes next?

This week, the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, declared the Ortega government responsible for “indiscriminate violence” that has left scores dead and thousands injured since protests began three months ago. “The United States stands with the people of Nicaragua,” she said.

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Ortega, meanwhile, has described the protesters as coup-plotters and terroristsinvolved in a US-backed conspiracy.

But when it comes to deporting Nicaraguans who live in the United States, the two governments are still working hand in hand.

Ice officials signed a memorandum of understanding with Managua in April to expedite the deportation of Nicaraguan citizens – shortly after Donald Trump revoked temporary protective status (TPS) for around 2,500 Nicaraguan immigrants.

“Enhancing cooperation with our foreign partners to streamline and improve the removal process is a key part of enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our homeland,” Ice’s assistant director Marlen Piñeiro said in a press releaseannouncing the deal.

Under the agreement, Ice provides training for “authorized foreign partners” on how to access the US’s electronic travel document system, a database of foreign nationals that includes biographic and biometric information that its partners can use to identify their citizens.

The system allows the Nicaraguan government to upload travel documents that Ice agents can then print out “at detention facilities or field offices”.

. . . .

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Ever wonder why the “Abolish ICE” movement is going more “mainstream” and picking up steam? ICE does perform valuable law enforcement functions. That’s exactly why a dissident group of ICE Agents engaged in real law enforcement are seeking a split.

However, too much of what ICE does today on the so-called “civil side” is anywhere from “misguided and wasteful” to “counterproductive and damaging to our country.”

Yes, somebody does need to perform ICE’s functions. But no, they don’t have to be performed the way ICE is performing them now.

Interestingly, under Trump we now support leftist governments in persecution just as long as the victims are Hispanic (or I assume Muslim, African, or any non-white or non-Christian population) and they get killed before they can get to the US to claim asylum. Or, they get killed after we deny them protection and return them to danger.

Either way, folks should take a close look of what America has come to represent under Trump, Sessions, and the White Nationalists.

History and our grandchildren will ultimately hold us accountable for Trump’s destruction of America and disrespect for human rights, even if it is improperly being “normalized” in today’s topsy turvy world.

PWS

08-04-17

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Sophie Murguia and Kanyakrit VongkiatkajornSep. 7, 2018 6:00 AM

It’s now much more difficult to apply for asylum

Judges have less control over their case loads …

… and will have to move through them more quickly

It’s harder for them to reschedule cases

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