"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter speaks at a mental health conference in 1979 (Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
The United States is smaller today because Rosalynn Carter has been called home.
She was our American First Lady, a role she filled with grace, love and compassion. She lived a life of service and dignity. Two generations before Americans started talking about the mental health crisis, she was helping ease suffering from it.
Rosalynn Carter was married to the 39th president of the United States for 77 years. He first saw her as a newborn who had been delivered by his mother, a nurse, peering over the edge of her crib.
Theirs was a love story for the ages. They were an example for all Americans about how to cherish and honor what you love the most.
Jimmy Carter came home from Annapolis in 1945 and fell in love with Rosalynn. It is something to see them both so young at the end of World War II, with their destinies stretching out in front of them.
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President Carter entered hospice care almost _____ months ago. Many have commented about the fact that Jimmy Carter has lived longer than most imagined he would when the American people were given the news, but no one should be surprised. Would a man of such indomitable will, strength and goodness have been able to leave his wife first?
Of course, such decisions are not ours alone, but in the case of President Carter, I suspect he was uncompromising on the matter. The American people should prepare themselves now that the celebration of both of these remarkable Americans will follow each other quickly. What a lesson they have given all of us about service, love and selflessness.
What Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter did with their lives was monumental. How they lived their lives with humility, compassion, dignity, patriotism and service at the core was a great blessing to this country.
Politics is a brutal business with transcendent moments of grace. Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter provided many. They were peacemakers who served on the world stage, and then went home to where they came from, and served for another 50 years.
We tend to spend a great deal of time in America focused disproportionately on the worst and most wretched amongst us. That is a tragedy of our time. It is also a great and unnecessary punishment inflicted on our children, who are taught too often that there aren’t heroes who walk amongst us anymore. It’s not true. Rosalynn Carter was a hero, and so is her husband Jimmy.
James Earl Carter is a faithful man. Pray for him and Rosalynn today. Pray for him to ease the sadness of a man who was our president, who never broke faith with his love, his family, his oath, his duty or any of us. He is one of us like his beautiful wife Rosalynn. What makes them exceptional is that they have shown after a lifetime of love and patriotism that they have been amongst the best of us.
May God bless Rosalynn Carter and the whole Carter family.
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What true patriotism and public service looks like!
Gate at Dachau Creative Commons Trump and his White Nationalist supporters have a grim, dark vision of America’s future! Will this be the end of our democracy?
Christian nationalism is a grave threat to the United States and the American republic. There should be no ambiguity or dullness when it comes to understanding what it is — no matter how benign it may present itself. It is what lurks beyond the veneer that is terrifying. There, the evil is revealed and manifested.
The dogma is a perversion of Christ’s teachings that is antithetical to Christianity. More importantly, Christian nationalism is utterly opposed to democracy. Theocrats despise the United States. God‘s laws are beyond the reach of the American state, and Christianity is but one religion in the beautiful mosaic of American faith. It should always be noted that 600 generations of humans worshipped freely on the North American continent before the first European Christians came and killed them.
The US Constitution is the law of the land in the United States. Within it are the protections that safeguard our liberty. The freedoms of speech, dissent, conscience, worship and expression shall stand untroubled for as long as the great republic endures. We are within one calendar year of its possible end. We have arrived at a moment of grave crisis that cannot be ignored. The abyss that looked distant seven years ago is at hand.
Christian nationalism is incompatible with American democracy and pluralism. When political extremists take power in the name of God there is always death. Always.
I was pleased to participate in “American Theocracy: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” a documentary released in January 2023. Please watch this clip below. I have shared it before, but the fire keeps building.
The separation of church and state and religious freedom are profoundly important foundational achievements of the American republic. The extremists who seek power in God’s name are not benign men and women. They won’t be deterred by setbacks in Ohio and other places. They are on the march, and they are demanding power whether it is handed to them or not.
I want you to read these words from yesterday’s The New York Times that make clear Donald Trump’s plans:
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
Let’s call these giant detention and deportation camps what they are intended to be. These are concentration camps. Specifically, they are to be American concentration camps. Dachau was the Nazis’ first camp in Germany.
What will the first American camp look like? There will no doubt be a first, and it will likely be the first to house the political prisoners rounded up under Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act. He has promised to invoke it at the instant he returns to power.
Please understand this: Trump is announcing his intentions. He means it. He is surrounded by scores of “little Eichmanns” ready to help him achieve his aims. He should be taken literally and seriously at all times.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson is second in line to the presidency. He rejects the greatest American idea in history, which is the separation of church and state. The greatest American invention — the peaceful transition of power — is utterly dependent on the separation of church and state in this country.
Johnson denied the 2020 election results, lied about the election results, created the conditions for the insurrection of January 6th, voted to disenfranchise millions of Black votes after the insurrection and continues to insist Trump won the election, despite the claim being a combination of fraud, malice and weapons-grade nuttery. The hostility to democracy is deeply rooted within his religious fanaticism, which is unique amongst the various strains of fanatical faith that have always found a home in America because of our nation’s unique faith protections.
We have churches where people pick up rattlesnakes and kiss them to prove they are protected by God. Proof of sin is a bite to the face and a painful death. Bo and Peep of Heaven’s Gate convinced their followers that they were headed to the Hale-Bopp comet, and Jim Jones took his flock to doom in Guyana. There are cults and fundamentalists all over America, but there is only one strain that wants to control your life by controlling the powers of the state to administer God’s law. They are the American Taliban.
Mike Johnson has invented his own distorted version of history as if the events of the late 1780s-90s occurred 6,000 years ago.
The American Constitution is clear about the founders’ intentions and their descendants’ actions to preserve and expand those intentions. There is no room for theocracy in the American system. It was rejected at hour one. The desire to impose it on all of us by a man who believes people and dinosaurs co-existed at the beginning of time 6,000 years ago is never going to happen…or is it?
The most important thing to understand about theocrats is that they view political power as being mandated by God. In fact, many fanatics across America believe Donald Trump has been sent by him, and his opponents are demonically-inspired.
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We can’t ignore the very real threat that Trump and his GOP followers present to our democracy. Now is NOT the time for Democrats and independents to “go soft” on human rights and immigrants’ rights!
While not highlighted by Steve Schmidt (no relation) the NYT quote above, one of Trump’s initiatives will be to instruct Administration officials to violate the 14th Amendment by denying citizenship to those born in the U.S. based on their parents’ status! USG officials must take an oath to uphold the Constitution, but apparently Trump just plans to summarily fire any public servant who will not submit to his unconstitutional plan!
Those considering abandoning Biden because of his support for Israel should recognize the alternative — a rabidly anti-Muslim authoritarian bigot (who, ironically, has also been soft on those expressing anti-semitism and other purveyors of hate) who would happily try to punish them just for existing! See e.g.,https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-gaza-israel-policy-trump-contrast_n_654eb574e4b0c9f246602f16.
It’s worth remembering that one of the first actions of Hitler’s Third Reich was to strip Jews of their German citizenship, a move that the complicit German judiciary approved and enthusiastically implemented! Who would have thought that nearly 90 years later, we would have a major American political party in thrall to a self-proclaimed fascist demagogue!
“Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.
“When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don’t use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.
“It’s just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he’s the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he’s brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.”
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That about sums it up!
Or, you could just say: “A kakistocracy led by a maliciously incompetent racist moron!”
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
