Racism – Page 150 – immigrationcourtside.com

THE GIBSON REPORT — 10-02-17

Here are this week’s “Top Headlines:”

ICE Arrests 45 New Yorkers In 4 Days As Part Of Nationwide Raid On Sanctuary Cities

Gothamist: “Of the total 498 detainees arrested nation-wide this week, 181 do not have a criminal record, according to ICE. This means roughly 36 percent of immigrants picked up in the sweep are being held for their undocumented status alone. This category of non-citizens was considered a low priority in the latter years of the Obama administration, but President Donald Trump has widened the dragnet. In addition to the New York arrests, there were 28 in Baltimore; 30 in Cook County, Illinois; 63 in Denver; 101 in Los Angeles; 107 in Philadelphia; 33 in Portland; 27 in Santa Clara County, California; 14 in Washington, D.C.; and 50 across Massachusetts.” See also: Immigrant Arrests in New Jersey Largely Include Those Without Criminal Records

Trump Sent Judges to the Border. Many Had Nothing to Do.

Politico: “Of the 101 arrests in Los Angeles, 85 of the individuals had criminal convictions—meaning 16% percent of the Angelenos arrested had no prior criminal convictions, per numbers given to LAist from an ICE spokesperson.

The sweep arrested immigrants in 10 locations across the country. Los Angeles had the second-most arrests, behind 107 arrests in Philadelphia (498 people were arrested in total). The list of locations—which also included New York, Washington D.C., and Baltimore.”

NBC: “[E]ven as the Trump administration expands its dragnet, the court is so backlogged that some hearings are being scheduled as far in the future as July 2022.”

Americans back DACA by a huge margin (POLL)

ABC/Washington Post Poll: “A vast 86 percent of Americans support a right to residency for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, with support crossing the political spectrum. Two-thirds back a deal to enact such legislation in tandem with higher funding for border control.”

Lawsuit on ICE’s Detention and Treatment of Pregnant Women

AIC, ACLU, AILA, WRC, CGRS, NWIRP, and RAICES filed a complaint with the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Inspector General, urging a thorough investigation into the steps ICE has taken to implement and oversee its policies on the detention and treatment of pregnant women.

TRLA Sues U.S. Officials for Prolonged Detention of Asylum Seekers

Chron: “The practice of detaining asylum seekers who don’t present a danger violates not only their right to due process but international and U.S. law on refugees, according to the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid suit on behalf of five detained immigrants.”

DHS Goes After Social Media

The rule, published in the Federal Register on 9/18, mentions that DHS will include “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results” as part of people’s A files. This takes effect on 10/18. This was actually initially reported by Buzzfeed.

Democrats signal willingness to make border security concessions for DACA

NYT: “Fearful of concessions to Mr. Trump that could increase immigration enforcement aimed at their families and friends, the activists are targeting Democratic congressional leaders with loud political protests.”

SCOTUS Hearings

10/2: SESSIONS V. DIMAYAwill be reargued: is “crime of violence” void for vagueness
10/3 JENNINGS V. RODRIGUEZwill be reargued: mandatory detention and bond
Five justices attend Red Mass with homily addressing immigration, religious freedom

CALLS TO ACTION

AILA: Take Action: Demand Transparency from Federal Agencies for “Extreme Vetting” Policies

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PWS

10-02-17

GONZO’S WORLD: COMING TO THE SUPREMES THIS FALL: Jeff Sessions v. United States of America! – White Nationalist AG Takes On 21st Century America In Concerted Effort To Recreate “The Bad Old Days” Of Maximo Bias & Inequality!

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/trumps-justice-department-is-taking-on-other-federal-agencies-in-court/

Pena Levy reports for Mother Jones:

“The first day of the Supreme Court’s new term on Monday will feature a rare legal showdown: The Justice Department will face off against another federal agency. It’s unusual for the Justice Department, representing the United States government, to disagree with an executive agency, much less send its top lawyer to try to defeat that agency before the Supreme Court—but it’s only the first of several such confrontations in the Trump administration.

There are currently three major cases in which the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a position in opposition to another executive agency. The nation’s top court will referee one of these disagreements on Monday, and the other two are likely to reach the Supreme Court next year. The situation is partially explained by politics: The department is opposing agencies whose missions—protecting the interests of workers and consumers—are less likely to align with the goals of a conservative administration. But it’s also a signal of how aggressive the Justice Department plans to be in pursing its conservative agenda through the courts.

“It’s highly unusual to have two lawyers, both representing the federal government, taking opposite positions in a court,” says Deepak Gupta, an appellate lawyer who has filed briefs in two of the cases opposing the Justice Department’s positions. “The fact that it’s happening in multiple instances across a broad range of issues is really remarkable and is a sign of how aggressively the Trump administration is flipping positions on a broad range of issues.”

The case going before the court on Monday concerns workers’ right to collective action. The other two will decide whether the creation of the agency in charge of protecting consumers violates the Constitution and whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees from being fired because of their sexual orientation. The Justice Department’s willingness to take on other agencies is even more notable because in two of the cases, the department’s top lawyers had to change the department’s position in order to oppose the agencies. Such changes are generally not made without serious deliberation and restraint because the department is expected to have a consistent position on legal issues.

“You would expect the justices to perhaps want to look a little bit more closely at precisely what the government’s position is,” says Jonathan Adler, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, “to make sure that any change is in fact well considered and not something that’s being done cavalierly or superficially.”

On Monday, the US solicitor general, a Republican lawyer named Noel Francisco who was confirmed by the Senate earlier this month, will argue against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which his office was representing until a few months ago. Under President Barack Obama, the solicitor general prepared to represent the NLRB, the federal agency charged with protecting workers from unfair labor practices, before the Supreme Court. But in June, the solicitor general’s office switched sides. “After the change in administration, the Office reconsidered the issue and has reached the opposite conclusion,” the office announced in a brief. The NLRB would now need to represent itself, and the solicitor general would appear in court on the other side. Labor advocates say they have to go back to the Reagan administration to find an analogous situation, in which a new administration changed its position before the Supreme Court for what appeared to be largely political reasons.

“This is not normal, even in a change of administration,” says Celine McNicholas, a labor attorney at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, and a former counsel at the NLRB. Politics always affect agencies’ agendas, she says, but for the solicitor general to change his office’s stance before the Supreme Court for what appear to be political reasons “is a significant shift.”

The stakes in the NLRB case are high. The question is whether employment contracts can prohibit employees from joining together to seek better working conditions or higher wages or to address grievances, instead forcing them into secret, individual arbitration proceedings. Since 2012, the NLRB has held that these increasingly common mandatory arbitration clauses are illegal because they violate employees’ right to join together, which is enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. The Justice Department has taken the position that in order to get a job, workers can be forced to waive any right to petition collectively in the future. If the department and the employers it is siding with prevail, such employment contracts are likely to proliferate further, giving every employer the ability to escape any chance of a class-action lawsuit or other type of collective agitation.

In March, the Justice Department filed a motion before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in which it agreed with PHH. A “removal restriction for the Director of the CFPB is an unwarranted limitation on the President’s executive power,” the department wrote in a court filing announcing its new position.The Justice Department has also switched positions in a case over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency created after the financial collapse in 2008 to protect consumers from predatory mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other financial products. The agency, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has been a target of Republicans since its inception. Now the Trump administration has seized on a chance to weaken it. The case originated when the CFBP levied a $109 million fine against PHH Corporation, a mortgage services provider that it alleged was referring customers to specific insurers in what was tantamount to a kickback scheme. PHH sued, claiming that in creating the CFPB’s leadership structure, Congress made the agency more independent from the president than is allowed under the Constitution. The agency’s director serves a five-year term and can only be fired by the president for cause.

Gupta, a former top official at the CFPB, sees this case as the most troubling of the three because, rather than execute the laws passed by Congress as required by the Constitution, the administration has opted to argue against an act of Congress. This is not unheard of; in 2011, the Obama administration announced that it would no longer defend a federal law that banned the recognition of same-sex marriages. But in announcing that decision, then-Attorney General Eric Holder explained that it was made in consultation with Obama and after an extensive review of the issue.

In contrast, the Trump administration’s decision to flip its position on the constitutionality of the CFPB seemed to lack serious deliberation. Three weeks before the administration announced its new position in a court filing, the department took the opposite position in a case that raised the same constitutional objection to another agency—the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—with the same leadership structure as the CFPB. In February, the department filed a brief, signed by acting assistant attorney general Chad Readler, in which it argued that the challenge to the FHFA’s structure was an “illogical thesis” and “wholly without merit.” Three weeks later, Readler made the opposite argument about the CFPB. Acknowledging the conflict, Readler advised the court retroactively in the FHFA case that the government “does not urge reliance” on the argument it had previously advocated.”

. . . .

But under Sessions, the Justice Department has decided not only to take on other executive agencies, but also to switch positions in a number of other cases, including multiple voting rights cases. How judges will react to this fickleness—particularly in the coming Supreme Court term—could affect the Trump administration’s ability to uphold its broader agenda in the courts. “Of all the offices in the federal government,” says Adler, “we tend to expect the solicitor general’s office to be the most candid about what the law requires versus what’s a policy judgment, and to really not overplay that or overstate that.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

“This is not normal.” That pretty much sums up the Trump Administration and the entire career of “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions in a nutshell! The worst thing is that U.S. taxpayers are being ripped off for clowns like Sessions and his fellow travelers who are out to trash the rights and interests of the majority of Americans and to rip apart the rule of law and decency in Government at the same time.

It’s sorta like when guerrillas support themselves by extorting their political enemies or perceived enemies (something that the BIA in its wrong-headed rush to restrict asylum protection doesn’t recognize as “persecution,” even though it’s one of the oldest and most classic forms of political persecution). Make no mistake about it, Gonzo and his team of politicos are waging “guerrilla warfare” against career lawyers and the rule of law at the U.S. Department of Justice and in the Federal Courts. And, to date, they have largely gotten away with it.

These unquestionably are “law-free” bias-driven policy decisions by Gonzo. I’ve never seen any evidence whatsoever that Sessions actually reads or has even basic knowledge of American law. It’s just not necessary for a lifelong member of “The Wrecking Crew.” What is clear, however, is that he arrived at DOJ not with legal books, but with “cue cards” prepared for him by the Heritage Foundation, restrictionist immigration groups, and his White Nationalist buddies Miller and Bannon. His memoranda and briefs are studies in disingenuous doublespeak, complete nonsense, White Nationalist myths, and an overall intellectual shallowness that almost matches that of Trump.

It also shows why nobody should take seriously Gonzo’s disingenuous babbling about the Constitution or the “Rule of Law,” both of which he mocks nearly every day he remans in the high office for which he is so spectacularly unqualified. Liz was definitely right!

The good news, if any, is that by the time this disaster is over, the Solicitor General’s Office will have lost its last shred of credibility in the Article III Federal Courts. And, perhaps it will be a good thing for American justice when the “SG” loses his or her “privileged position” and is finally viewed as just another suspect and self-interested litigant in court. And, not a very smart or very well-qualified litigant at that.

Once lost, credibility can seldom be regained. Think about that one, Noel Francisco, before you and your subordinates become complete shills for the legally and morally bankrupt positions of Gonzo and Trump.

PWS

10-02-17

BHUTANESE REFUGEES REJUVENATING AKRON, OHIO — Refugees Are People, Adjusting To A New Life, And Making America A Better Country — “We understand that it’s not just the right thing to do as human beings,” she said, “but it has amazing social and economic consequences.” — AMERICA NEEDS MORE REFUGEES, LESS TRUMP, LESS SESSIONS, LESS MILLER, LESS BANNON, LESS “AYATOLLAH ROY!”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/akron-ohio-bhutanese-refugees_us_59ca88cfe4b0cdc773353640

M.L. Schultze reports for HuffPost:

Thanks “AKRON, Ohio ― Akron owes its only population growth since the turn of the century to a kingdom on the other side of the Earth. As many as 5,000 Nepalis, who held onto their culture during centuries in Bhutan and decades in refugee camps in Nepal, have made their way here during the last decade.

They went to work in the Gojo plant, enrolled their kids in public schools and learned how to navigate roads, snow and U.S. society. But real success in resettling refugees “means moving people from surviving to thriving,” says Eileen Wilson, who runs refugee outreach for a Cleveland agency called Building Hope in the City.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR HUFFPOST
Family Groceries in Akron, Ohio.
Thriving means different things to different people. In Akron, it’s come to mean a dozen Nepalese shops and restaurants in what were once abandoned storefronts on North Hill. It means neighborhoods where long-slumping home sales are recovering. It means a cricket pitch in the park, a Nepalese bed-and-breakfast, and the migration of refugees from Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and New York ― the kinds of places Akron is used to losing people to.

It also means that a once alarmingly high suicide rate among refugees has dwindled.

Akron has declared itself a “Welcoming Community,” and Deputy Mayor Annie McFadden says the city and its newest residents are establishing a synergy.

Listen to America, a HuffPost Road Trip
HuffPost is hitting the road this fall to interview people about their hopes, dreams, fears ― and what it means to be American today.
Thirty-nine-year-old Amber Subba has lived the Akron migration story from the beginning. On his Facebook page, he introduces himself as Bhutanese-Nepali-American.

Subba and his family came to Akron in 2008. They’d spent more than 17 years in a refugee camp in Nepal. They’d been forced there when he was 11 by the Bhutanese government’s campaign for a national identity ― one that had no room for people of Nepalese descent who held onto their language and culture.

As refugee camps go, Subba says, the seven clustered in southwest Nepal weren’t bad: Refugees organized systems of commerce, education and self-governance. But more than 100,000 people were also living with annual monsoons and periodic fires, little privacy and constant uncertainty, including how much longer Nepal would let them stay.

In late 2006, President George W. Bush surprised the refugee resettlement world by announcing the U.S. would accept up to 60,000 Bhutanese refugees. Most of America barely noticed, but local, federally chartered agencies like the International Institute of Akron started to make plans.

Subba acknowledges his adopted city wasn’t exactly prepared.

Jobs were scarce. Language was the great isolator. The laws and customs were unknown.

Practically “nobody had a car,” Subba said. “Nobody had driver’s licenses and we didn’t have proper training about how to use the bus. And we didn’t know about snow and things like that.”

Still, he said, “we survived.”

In fact, Subba did quite a bit more than survive. He rose from interpreter to case manager at the institute, became a U.S. citizen and was president of the Bhutanese Community Association of Akron. He composes folk music ― love songs played on streaming radio and easily recognized in the world of the Nepalese diaspora.

His was the first marriage outside the tight circle of Akron’s Bhutanese community. His wife, Tiffany Ann Stacy, enjoys their definition of family that extends well beyond their two children.

As with most families in their culture, Subba’s parents live with them. “It’s really nice, because my kids don’t go to day care,” she said. “They spend the day in the garden digging in the dirt, growing vegetables and learning two languages.”

“The best thing is I’m never lonely,” she joked. “The worst thing is, I’m never alone.”

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Read the rest of the story at the link.

Compare the human decency and humanity described in this article with the selfishness, grotesque cowardice, prejudice, and indecency of the Trump Administration. Refugees make us better; Trump makes us worse!

PWS

10-02-17

THE GRIFTERS: Yes, It’s Satisfying To See A True Scumbag Like Price “Outed!” But, Before You Get Too Excited, Remember That His Replacement “will serve at the altar of Trump, after all. The only requirement? Destroy what you can. Let everyone else suffer.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/30/tom-price-resignation-victory?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ross Barkin writes in the Guardian:

“The sad truth is that Trump will probably replace him with a health and human services secretary who is just as bad at the job
For the Trump skeptics, the full-blown resisters, and everyone who prefers to see government remotely good, the downfall of Tom Price was a moment of true catharsis.

Donald Trump’s loathsome health and human services secretary was driven from office on Friday after a series of stunning Politico reports detailed how he racked up at least $400,000 in travel bills for charter flights. The extravagance was too much even for Trump, who in his past life as a failed developer wasted plenty of taxpayer money, and Price was told he had to go.

Before sobering reality sets in – nothing has really changed about Trumplandia – let’s remember all the ways Price represented the worst of the worst about Trump’s storming of Washington.

Tom Price resigns as health secretary over private flights and Trump criticism
A former rightwing congressman from Georgia and an orthopedic surgeon, Price spent most of his House tenure trying to destroy Obamacare and replace it with something far more draconian.
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As health and human services secretary, his dream fully realized, Price set about trying to undermine American healthcare as much as humanly possible without achieving a repeal of Obamacare. Price stopped trying to encourage people to sign up for insurance, ensuring costs would rise for everyone else. He obliterated Obamacare’s advertising budget.

Price backed a Trump budget that slashes funding for health and human services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His vision of healthcare was rather simple: get any trace of the government out of there, any protections that might be offered for the poorest and sickest. Let the free market take care of the rest.

Now Trump will cast about for a worthy successor. Price, a multimillionaire, will feel shame for a few days and then go back to cashing out in the private sector, maybe as a healthcare lobbyist trying to wrangle goodies from his old colleagues. The waterline of the swamp will rise.

Health secretary Tom Price apologizes for taking private flights for work
The real question, once the celebration dies down from liberals and various journalists heartened by the power of the press to get their scalp, is how anything will change in Trump’s Washington.

Will a new HHS secretary bring some common sense to the role and realize stabilizing the healthcare markets is their chief job? Will he or she attempt to be anything resembling an administrator? Probably not.

Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump is a gun-slinging independent beholden to no party, he is fully indoctrinated in far-right, slash-and-burn thinking. He is a president for nihilist billionaires and Milton Friedman apostles. He will lurch to the left, but his grounding will stay true. We know that from his tax plan, which promises to give relief to the rich and no one else.

In another time now lost to history, both parties paid allegiance to the idea of governing. Democrats, in the post Franklin D Roosevelt-era, were the party of large, activist government, but Republicans understood that dismantling what they inherited made no sense.

Richard Nixon preserved the gains of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society legislation. Medicare and Medicaid remained.
Under a moderate Republican president – almost no moderates actually ran for president in 2016, and it’s increasingly unclear such a creature even exists – Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act would be understood for what it is: not socialism, but a mixture of government intervention and market-driven policies dreamed up by the rightwing Heritage Foundation and later pioneered by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

It is nothing approximating single-payer healthcare. It’s a start – but it’s also plenty flawed.

Many marketplaces are succeeding, but others are failing, in part because the Trump White House is encouraging their failure. The next best thing to repealing Obamacare, for the Republican party, is to let it rot without serious reform.

Federal subsidies must be increased and a public option should be introduced to compete with private insurers. The long-term goal, championed by Bernie Sanders, should be Medicare-for-all, universal healthcare, though we’re not there yet.
Price’s successor probably won’t think about any of these things. He or she will serve at the altar of the Trump, after all. The only requirement? Destroy what you can. Let everyone else suffer.”

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Why wouldn’t Price, who ripped off taxpayers to the tune of approximately $1 million, face some consequences beyond being permitted to resign?

Also, Donald Trump is not “destroying the soul of the GOP” (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one). The modern GOP stands for the same corrupt agenda as Trump. That’s why they never really stand up to him. And, Tom Price, a Swamp Creature if there ever was one, was a perfect representative of everything that is wrong with today’s GOP.

And with a truly miserable specimen of a human being like “Ayatollah Roy” and a slate of Bannon-inspired scummy White Nationalist candidates in the wings, the GOP has by no means “bottomed out.” The worst is yet to come.

PWS

10-01-17

MAKING AMERICA GREAT: MEET THE FACE OF REAL AMERICAN SOCIAL JUSTICE AND PROGRESS — Madison Cap Times Profiles Justice Castañeda, Executive Director Of Madison’s Common Wealth

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/q-a-justice-casta-eda-brings-a-unique-life-story/article_c4be73c7-2b00-5afb-9655-fc30cb096a44.html

Jason Joyce reports for The Cap Times:

“As the executive director of Madison’s Common Wealth, Justice Castañeda, 37, oversees an organization that is involved in affordable housing development and management, youth and adult job training, business incubation and community engagement.

It’s a unique operation and Castañeda brings to the job a unique life story and approach to his work. In a discussion with the Cap Times, Castañeda discussed his background, the organization’s efforts in the Meadowood Neighborhood, where it will soon open a second office, and how the city can better support its community development organizations.

Were you born in Madison?

I was born at 23 N. Ingersoll St., at home.

And you grew up in Madison? Went to Madison schools?

I went to a lot of them. I moved a lot, like 19 times before I was 18 years old.

My academic career started at Red Caboose daycare center, graduated fifth grade at Mendota Elementary, graduated eighth grade from O’Keeffe Middle School and by the grace of God I graduated from East High School. As an educator, I realize I was probably somebody’s project. A teacher got together with a guidance counselor and said look, here’s this guy. Let’s try to figure out a way to get him across the stage.

It turns out Madison is a really hard place to grow up as a person of color, boy of color in particular, but my father had a very strong network of people who wrapped their wings around me. As much as I had to deal with, I had this very strong orbit.

And after high school, you went into the military?

I worked construction for a couple years. I was charged with a felony because when I was 18, I got into a fight at East High School and because two of the kids were 17, I was charged with physical abuse to a minor. It got dismissed. I think about it every day. If kids get into fights should they get felony charges? By the skin of my teeth I beat that charge, but I think about how my life would have been dramatically different with a felony because I wouldn’t have been able to get into the Marine Corps.

What did you get out of your service?

In the Marine Corps, all those basic needs are taken care of and you have time to reflect. I thought a lot about Madison and why I was so angry. It gave me space to approach education from a healthy space where I wasn’t worrying about things. I was able to take random classes. I had a lot of things to learn. I started liking school.

A couple lessons learned: Don’t go back to Madison. That’s 101. I still think that, for folks of color, if you can get out of here, stay out. Especially if you’re educated. You don’t realize it until you leave, but in Southern California where everyone looks like me, it was critical. So I stayed in San Diego. I started at UC-San Diego when I was still in the military. Going back to school when you’re 25, education like youth is wasted on the young. It’s a whole different experience. I got straight As, I got my degree and started working as a teacher’s apprentice in San Diego. I was teaching kids who reject the hypocrisy of mainstream educational processes and institutions. Call them what you will.

They told me you should think about grad school. I ended up going to Stanford for policy organization and leadership studies in the school of education. When I finished that Master’s degree, I didn’t feel like I was done. I then went on to MIT, on the GI Bill, and did another Master’s in city planning, looking at housing, community and economic development.

And you got pulled back to Madison.

I was looking for a case study and I just happened to know about Madison and how there’s been an inordinate amount of money put into things and, from every indicator, it’s only gotten worse, particularly for people of color here. How is that possible? I wrote a proposal to the mayor to come here and study this and I would do some work for him, but I was funded through MIT. This was 2012.

We looked at land use, including economic development, and family and children’s health. It was three years we worked on this. We came here, we stayed here, we rode the buses. I had a group and it was helpful they were not from Madison. I think there’s a lot that we take for gospel where someone from the outside would say, explain that to me. Explain why you think the center of the city is a place that’s not accessible to the majority. What’s the history of that? Who was able to own land there? How did they get access to it? We looked at not just organizations, but their boards. You find that it’s a very small group of people who have been making decisions for a long time.

People say Madison is 77 square miles surrounded by reality, but it’s really 77 square miles that epitomize reality. I was able to take this Madison work and put together a huge framework for community and economic development. I started doing consulting for foundations and think tanks around these national community development initiatives. Ninety percent of what I used came out of Madison.

And when did you start at Common Wealth?

It will be eight months on Oct. 1.

Common Wealth has purchased and rehabbed housing in the Meadowood neighborhood. What are your goals there?

I was working for the city when they started doing job training out there. They ended up buying buildings around Meadowood Park. Organizationally, people weren’t sure we should be working out there. The neighborhoods aren’t well designed out there. The low-income housing was not designed aesthetically for human beings.

What do you mean by that?

Human beings respond to light. They are not well lit. And the air doesn’t move. People always want to know how you get kids to stop hanging out at the gas station and I say put benches in so they’re not standing in the thoroughfare. People disagree with that, so I say get some of your friends and on a 90-degree day, go spend a weekend in low-income housing. There’s no protective, defensible spaces like porches. Places for people to practice the art of parenthood.

Yahara View Apartments (Common Wealth’s building on East Main Street) is the only low-income housing project on the isthmus and nobody even knows it exists. Why is it different? It was made for human beings. The porches on the Meadowood buildings aren’t porches. They’re jump-off egress points that are for the fire code. That’s almost insulting.

What you’re looking at with housing rehab is, does the building have integrity to begin with? Are you creating housing for humans? Imagine what it’s like for people to fall in love there. To thrive there. Is that the housing we’re building? Build housing as if human beings matter, for children to grow up and fall in love.

And are you increasing the housing stock? We have a housing shortage, so if you’re doing all this rehab, why not build more housing? And is this being supported by comprehensive community development efforts? I compare housing to the wheels on a car. The engine is the most complex part of the car, but without wheels you’re not going nowhere.

So Common Wealth has housing, we do business incubation, we do adult and youth workforce development, we have a comprehensive violence prevention effort. We have a huge investment on the east side, so our staff has grown from the east side. Now we have this component of 39 units on the west side. It can’t be housing alone. We have to bring everyone.

We made a lot of promises to people when we bought buildings on the west side. But we’re going to leverage everything Common Wealth does to support that work. And by the way, we’re going to get an office out there. I have old ties to Allied Drive, old family and friends. A lot of the people I grew up with on the east side can’t live on the east side anymore, so they live out there. So we’re going to be good neighborhood partners. Common Wealth opened in ‘79 and it’s taken 38 years to help stabilize Willy Street. This takes a long time.

I see Common Wealth as a Madison asset. It’s an idea. It was a bunch of rogueish, badass hippies who saw a problem and said we’re going to fix it and it’s going to be weird, but we’re going to do it and try these things out. It’s a Madison thing. Going around the country, I’m really interested in youth development and education and then I’m also into housing, land use and land trusts. And also I think we need to talk about economic development and industrial relations and people look at me like, “Yo, you’re crazy. There’s no such place.” And I’m like, you don’t know from whence I came.

In Madison, a common concern is you’ve got all of these groups doing good work, operating in silos and they are too busy to talk to each other. People on the east side don’t talk to people on the west side. Is there a solution for that?

One of the advantages of growing up all over this town is I know people all over town. With this problem, you’ve got the four Cs: Competition in that I’m competing against you to get something. Then cooperation, we can sit at the same table. Coordination: I’m going to use the sink right now, and when I’m done you can use it. Collaboration: You’re going to make the pie crust, I’m going to pick the cherries, someone else is going to make the filling and we’re going to eat the pie together. It’s really important we understand the iterations there. Generally, people want to go from competition to collaboration. But there are steps in there.

A lot of that is driven through funding cycles. Are the funding cycles at the various organizations like Evjue (the charitable arm of the Cap Times) and the Madison Community Foundation and United Way aligned? Because we’re always asking organizations that don’t have any money, run by folks who are just passionate, who don’t have formal education. We want them to do advanced coordination and collaboration. Is that being asked of the funding entities? The city, county, state, university? And the private sector? Are we asking those areas to align? How about someone design a structure to look at all these things collectively.”

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It’s fantastic that Justice was willing to return to Madison and help make things better for everyone, notwithstanding his reservations about the community from his youth. Some people are part of the problem; others, like Justice, are part of the solution.

Speaking of “the problem,” clueless, racist, old White guys like Sessions, Trump, and their GOP cronies are never going to improve conditions in minority communities, nor are they going to solve crime, gang, and drug problems with their wasteful and counterproductive “gonzo enforcement” that has proved spectacularly unsuccessful and counterproductive time after time. The only things they are doing is wasting money, making problems worse, driving ethnic communities into isolation, and throwing some expensive and socially damaging “red meat” to the racist White Nationalist “base.”

As I’ve pointed out before, making life better for all Americans, promoting social justice, increasing trust, and achieving community cooperation in law enforcement are painstakingly slow processes that take some real thought and reflection and an honest understanding of how America treats many in the minority community. There are no “silver bullets.” As I’ve said before, MS-13 started in the US and was exported by Reagan-era politicos who did not care about understanding either the causes of gangs or the effects of deporting gang members to a civil war torn El Salvador without a plan for helping to deal with what would happen on the “receiving” end. “Out of sight, out of mind” — but, not really. “What goes around comes around.”

PWS

10-01-17

TIRED OF READING ABOUT THE ANTICS OF BOZOS 🤡 IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION? —Here’s The Story Of Cristian Minor, A “Good Guy” Making America Great!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/casa-san-jose-lawyer-undocumented-immigrants_us_596fc5dfe4b0110cb3cb6e94

Sarah Ruiz-Grossman reports for HuffPost:

“With immigrants living in a climate of fear under President Donald Trump, lawyers like Cristian Minor are stepping up to help undocumented I families.
Minor volunteers at a Pittsburgh legal clinic run by local nonprofit Casa San Jose, where he provides free counsel to Latino immigrants. One of the most difficult matters he deals with is helping parents designate a guardian to care for their U.S.-born children in case the parents are detained or deported.
“The fears of the community are that at any moment ― when they go to work ― they could be detained by ICE,” Minor said, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “Can you imagine that you live every day of your life and you don’t know if you’re going to come back and see your kids? I became a father recently ― and I cannot imagine my life being away from my child.”
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies ― including cracking down on undocumented immigrants and rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program ― have generated great worry in immigrant communities. He has repeatedly referred to undocumented immigrants as criminals, while ICE is making headlines with its blunt enforcement efforts. In early February in Austin, Texas, ICE stopped undocumented immigrants in traffic, attempted to arrest them in their homes and patrolled around a grocery store. Later that month, school kids in the area told HuffPost that their parents were afraid to go food shopping or drop them off at school.
Casa San Jose started the legal clinic in November after Trump’s election.
Minor is an immigrant himself. Arriving in the U.S. from Mexico eight years ago, he considers himself “lucky” to have come here “with documents.” He initially attended law school in Mexico, ultimately earned his law degree in the U.S. and today is a lawyer focused on oil and gas consulting, immigration and family law. He’s now a U.S. citizen and is married to a woman from Pennsylvania.
Minor told HuffPost he wants to “destroy the image of the immigrant” as a criminal. Research has shown that immigrants — both documented and undocumented — are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.
“I can attest to the good faith of the immigrants who come here,” he said. “They don’t come to steal jobs. They just come for a better life.”

Navigating the complexities of the U.S. immigration system can be a challenge, particularly if English is not your first language. Attorneys and law students from the University of Pittsburgh’s Immigration Law Clinic participate in Casa San Jose’s near-monthly event, helping usually more than a dozen people, the nonprofit’s executive director Julian Asenjo told HuffPost. The four-hour sessions are generally booked solid, he said.
With undocumented parents, Minor raises this question: If they are deported and choose not to take their U.S.-born children back to their home country ― which the children may never have visited and whose language they may not speak ― who will take care of the kids? He helps the parents to prepare a document that names their choice for their kids’ guardian.
But the documents are no guarantee. In Pennsylvania, Minor said, any final decision on guardianship is up to a judge, who must consider the best interest of the child. Even if the mother wants her sister to take care of her kid, for example, the judge could decide that the child is better off in foster care.
Minor’s clients are not alone: While custody rules vary by state, undocumented parents across the country have been developing plans for guardianship since Trump became president. Minor doesn’t know of any instance yet in which a parent getting deported had to leave kids behind without another parent or legal guardian. But he and others are seeking to avoid that worst-case scenario.
“The system of immigration is destroying these families,” Minor said. “They are people who came to this country fleeing situations of poverty, violence in their home countries.”
Although President Barack Obama carried out a record number of deportations and was even dubbed the “deporter-in-chief,” Trump’s policies have generated more fear because of their sweeping nature, Minor said.
Under Obama, there were clear priorities: People with criminal records or gang affiliation were at higher risk for deportation, while those with no criminal records or with U.S.-born children were lower on the list. Under Trump, however, most undocumented immigrants are at risk.
“They come here, they work really hard to provide for their family, they pay taxes, they do everything right, they have not committed crimes,” Minor said. “Suddenly you have the risk that the father can be deported, or the mother, and the kids are probably going to end up in the foster care system. It’s a very difficult thing.”
A video of a 13-year-old girl crying over her father, who was detained as he was driving her to school, garnered widespread attention earlier this year.

Besides guardianship, Minor has counseled undocumented individuals on a range of issues, from a domestic worker who was being abused by her employers to a woman whose partner was beating her. In both cases, the victim was afraid to turn to authorities for fear of being deported.
In an April survey, immigration attorneys and advocates reported that immigrants are increasingly reluctant to complain to authorities about domestic violence and sexual assault.
“This is what’s happening right now, what the Trump administration’s rhetoric is creating: marginalization of immigrants, specifically Latinos, driving people underground for fear of deportation,” Minor said. “These policies create fear and empower individuals who use this rhetoric to oppress the immigrant populations here.”
For people who want to support undocumented families, Minor suggests donating to or volunteering at a community center, like Casa San Jose. If you have language or legal skills, one of these groups might welcome your time.”

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Sarah’s article does a great job of illustrating the bogus narrative, wanton cruelty, and just plain “dumb” gonzo enforcement being promoted by Trump, Sessions, Miller and the White Nationalists, and being mindlessly carried out by DHS/ICE.

One of the worst aspects is that rather than making America safer, “gonzo enforcement,” empowers gangs, drug traffickers, domestic abusers, extorters, rapists, and sex abusers who have been essentially “turned loose” on ethnic communities by the Trump Administration with little chance being apprehended by law enforcement. That’s exactly what so-called sanctuary cities are organizing to resist.

Since DHS is prone to go for “low hanging fruit,” collaterals, minor criminals, and immigration violators, to build up bogus stats, that in turn justify their existence, the chances of the real ”bad guys” being taken off the streets by these tactics are likely reduced.

In the meantime, thank goodness for the real “good guys” like Cristian Minor who are working hard to limit and wherever possible repair the human, economic, social, and moral carnage being inflicted on America by the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-30-17

“Warren Buffett on Immigration Reform: Buffett feels that immigrants (including undocumented ones) have been and continue to be a key part of our prosperity — not a part of the problem.“

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/09/29/warren-buffett-on-immigration-reform.aspx

Matthew Frankel reports for The Motley Fool:

“Immigration reform has been a hot-button issue long before President Trump pledged to build a wall along our border. And while there’s certainly an argument to be made that we need to do a better job of controlling illegal immigration, there’s also a strong case to be made that immigrants are a big driving force behind America’s growth — past, present, and future.

Warren Buffett has been very outspoken in recent years about America and its amazing economic story. Not only does Buffett feel that immigrants have led us to where we are today, but he also thinks that immigrants are an essential component of our country’s future success.

Here’s what Warren Buffett thinks of immigrants
In a nutshell, Buffett feels that immigrants (including undocumented ones) have been and continue to be a key part of our prosperity — not a part of the problem. “This country has been blessed by immigrants,” Buffett said in February at Columbia University. “You can take them from any country you want, and they’ve come here and they found something that unleashed the potential that the place that they left did not, and we’re the product of it.”

Referring to Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, both of whom were immigrants themselves, Buffett said, “If it hadn’t been for those two immigrants, who knows whether we’d be sitting in this room.”

In his most recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE:BRK-A) (NYSE:BRK-B) shareholders, Buffett specifically mentioned immigrants as one of the major components of America’s success story. “From a standing start 240 years ago — a span of time less than triple my days on earth — Americans have combined human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers.”

On a pathway to citizenship
Buffett is an outspoken Democrat who actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race. So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Buffett doesn’t want to deport millions of illegal immigrants who are currently in the United States.

In a 2015 interview with Fox Business, Buffett said

People should be able to earn citizenship who are here. You know, I do not think we should deport millions of people. So, I think we should have a real path to citizenship.

Buffett was then asked specifically about the DREAM Act and its 800,000 minors who are in the country illegally and now face an uncertain future after the end of DACA, from the perspective of a successful American businessman. Buffett replied:

It is a question of being a human being not really a businessman. Immigrants came, our forefathers came as immigrants, they got here anyway they could. And who knows what I would have done if I were in some terrible situation in a country and wanted to come here…a great percentage of them are good citizens. I would have a path to citizenship for them, I would not send them back.

On immigration policy and reform
As we all know, the immigration debate has been going on for a long time. And Buffett’s stance hasn’t changed much over the past several years. In a 2013 interview with ABC’s This Week, Buffett said:

I think we should have a more logical immigration policy. It would mean we would attract a lot of people, but we would attract the people we want to attract in particular — in terms of education, tens or hundreds of thousands of people. We enhance their talents and have them stick around here.

Buffett went on to say that any reform package should “certainly offer [undocumented immigrants] the chance to become citizens,” and one main reason for doing so would be to deepen the talent pool of the labor force.

Buffett’s stance on immigration in a nutshell
Warren Buffett believes that allowing immigrants who are already in the country to stay and pursue citizenship is not only the right thing to do, but is essential to America’s continued economic prosperity. Buffett certainly sees the need for immigration reform, as most Americans of all political affiliations do, but wants to encourage and simplify the legal pathways to immigration.”

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Buffet speaks simple truth: Immigrants, both documented and undocumented are not threats, but rather are a necessary ingredient for America’s greatness. We need to bring law-abiding undocumented individuals into our society in some type of legal, work authorized status. We also need substantial across the board increases in legal immigration, so that in the future the immigrants we need can come through the legal system (or wait in a realistic line) rather than coming through an underground system and working and living in the shadows.

The lies, misrepresentations, and false narratives being peddled by Trump, Sessions, Bannon, Miller, Kobach, Cotton, Perdue, King, Goodlatte, Labrador, the so called “Freedom” Caucus, and the rest of their White Nationalist restrictionist cronies are a path to national disaster. Removing existing non-criminal migrants who happen to be working here in undocumented status is a colossal waste of limited Government resources that actually hurts our country in numerous ways.

Time to stand up against the restrictionist, White Nationalist, xenophobic, anti-American blather. Demand that your Congressional representatives back sane, humane immigration reform that takes care of those already here and recognizes their great contributions while appropriately and significantly expanding future legal immigration opportunities so that we don’t keep repreating our mistakes over and over.

Let’s be honest about it. If the time, money, and resources that the U.S. Government is currently spending on the counterproductive aspects of immigration enforcement and inhumane immigration detention were shifted into constructive areas, there would be no “disaster relief crisis” in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands right now, and we’d have more money to spend on heath care, job training and retraining, infrastructure, addressing the opioid crisis, and many more legitimate national priorities!

PWS

09-30-17

CHARLATAN-IN-CHIEF: Trump Tweets As Puerto Rico Suffers!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/30/trump-doesnt-get-it-on-puerto-rico-he-just-proved-it-by-lashing-out-at-san-juans-mayor/

Aaron Blake reports for the Washington Post:

“President Trump is facing growing — but still measured — criticism of the federal response to the devastation in Puerto Rico. So what does he do? Lash out at the mayor of a hurricane-ravaged city, naturally.

Trump responded Saturday morning to harsh critiques from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz by targeting her personally. The president accused the mayor of playing politics and succumbing to pressure from fellow Democrats to attack his administration. He also, remarkably, directly attacked her and other Puerto Rican officials’ leadership.

Anybody who is surprised at this from a president who attacked a former prisoner of war for being a prisoner war, criticized a Gold Star family and made fun of a reporter’s physical disability has a short memory. This is who Trump is. He doesn’t accept criticism and move on; he brings a bazooka to a knife fight — even when those wielding the knife are trying to save lives.

But it’s also hugely counterproductive. In three tweets, Trump has moved a simmering, somewhat-negative story for his administration to the front burner. He decided to attack a sympathetic character and turn this into a partisan political debate. Cruz is pleading for help by saying, “We are dying.” Trump essentially told her to stop complaining. He’s also arguing that somebody who is in charge of saving lives is somehow more interested in politics. That’s a stunning charge.

And it all shows just how much Trump still doesn’t quite grasp what a crisis Puerto Rico is — both for its people and for him.

There has been anecdotal evidence that Trump doesn’t quite get it. He has repeatedly misstated the size of the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico. He has repeatedly talked about what a tough state the island was in to begin with — as if to shift blame. He has talked repeatedly about how Puerto Rico is an island “in the middle of the ocean” — as if to temper expectations. He has even talked about how Puerto Rico might be made to repay the cost of its recovery. And he’s decided to take a weekend at his golf club in New Jersey right now, even as the scope of the problems in Puerto Rico is growing.”

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Today, Trump’s cowardly incompetence is threatening the lives of Americans in Puerto Rico. Tomorrow, it could be YOU! The next day it could be the entire WORLD!

PWS

09-30-17

ACLU WILL CHALLENGE TRAVEL BAN 3.0 IN MD FEDERAL COURT!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aclu-travel-ban_us_59ceab03e4b06791bb10933f

Mollie Reilly reports for HuffPost:

“The American Civil Liberties Union announced Friday it is suing President Donald Trump’s administration over its new travel ban.
The group is bringing its challenge in the U.S. District Court in Maryland. Multiple organizations, including the National Immigration Law Center, are joining the complaint.
“President Trump’s newest travel ban is still a Muslim ban at its core, and it certainly engages in discrimination based on national origin, which is unlawful,” ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. “Adding a few North Koreans and a tiny group of Venezuelan officials doesn’t paper over the original sin of the Muslim ban. We’ll see President Trump in court — again.”
The latest iteration of the ban, announced earlier this week, is set to place new restrictions on travel to the U.S. from eight countries starting on Oct. 18. The updated ban removed earlier restrictions on Sudan, while adding North Korea, Venezuela and Chad to the list. Restrictions remain in place for Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.
It’s Trump’s third attempt to restrict travel from a small group of countries.
The ACLU and other groups have decried the new version of the ban as just as xenophobic as its earlier versions, which faced legal challenges as to whether the policies unconstitutionally discriminated against Muslims.
“This is still a Muslim ban ― they simply added three additional countries,” said Becca Heller of the International Refugee Assistance Project earlier this week. “Of those countries, Chad is majority Muslim, travel from North Korea is already basically frozen and the restrictions on Venezuela only affect government officials on certain visas. You can’t get any more transparent than that.”

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Although the Trumpsters have shored up Travel Ban 3.0 with some specifics, it’s still stupid and unnecessary. Whether that makes it illegal, however, is a more difficult question.

PWS

09-29-17

GONZO’S WORLD: “Eggshell” Attorney General Is A Parody Of The First Amendment!

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/09/jeff_sessions_wants_a_first_amendment_that_celebrates_robust_criticism_of.html

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate:

“Having seen the Sessions DOJ prosecute someone for laughing at Jeff Sessions, it’s hardly surprising that he wants a First Amendment that celebrates the robust criticism of everyone but himself. Watching Sessions’ DOJ going after private Facebook information for anti-Trump activists, it’s hardly surprising that these much-vaunted free speech protections flow in the direction of Trump officials and away from Trump dissenters. It is, nevertheless, somewhat more surprising to see that the burgeoning theory that conservatives deserve free speech protections, and liberals deserve none, is becoming yet another normalized part of this abnormal administration. After all, if you cannot even see anyone from the opposing side, you certainly have no reason to hear their voices. And what was most striking about Sessions’ rousing performance at Georgetown is that he didn’t seem to even notice or concede that an opposing side exists. This has very real practical effects for his DOJ and for our rule of law.

Read, for example, the work of my friend Garrett Epps on the stunning DOJ brief filed in the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission “religious baker” case to be heard at the Supreme Court this fall. The Justice Department evinces no solicitude at all for the injuries of anyone but the Christian baker at issue, the one who seeks not to be compelled to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Sessions’ Department of Justice, for instance, argues that Colorado hadn’t yet acknowledged the rights of marriage equality at the time of the cake incident, so the fact that such equality is now a constitutional right should not even be considered. It’s a hard case, as Epps notes. But it’s vastly easier if you simply pretend away the interests of the other side. For this DOJ, there is nobody else on the radar. Nobody else exists.

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When talking about the First Amendment and the brutal and challenging clash of diverse opinions, a big part of that is the obligation to listen to ideas that might be uncomfortable or even painful to hear. But that relationship presupposes that we can see or acknowledge that there are speakers on the other side. More and more, it feels as though the Trump administration’s aperture has narrowed to the point where someone can espouse First Amendment values while viewing genuine opponents as wholly other, foreign, and not even worth giving the chance to respond. This is the framing for the NFL protests (Trump has free speech rights, the players do not) and the framing for Sessions’ speech about student speech.

There’s little doubt that Jeff Sessions meant it when he importuned the students before him to stand up for free speech and to spend their law school careers refining their own views in opposition to conflicting ideas. But it’s far from clear that he realized how absurd it was to say those things at an event that excluded faculty and students with different viewpoints. Admonishing law students to spend their time testing their pre-existing views against alternate ideas while engaging in almost daily acts of punishing and suppressing speech and expression of alternate ideas is insane. I’m not sure that the sparking, hotly contested debates between people who hate marriage equality and the people who really, really hate marriage equality is the sort of dispute Justices Jackson and Brandeis were thinking about.

And what is terrifying is the possibility that Sessions truly believes that people with different viewpoints don’t even exist anymore in any tangible application. These dissenters are all just enemies of the state. They are no more real to him than ghosts. More and more, Sessions is constructing a Justice Department in which the other side is just noise to him, not speech. And if you cannot even see protesters and political dissidents, it’s hardly a surprise that you cannot hear them either.”

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Read Lithwick’s complete article at the link.

I have to admit that it’s great to be retired, outside the repressively paranoid atmosphere of the DOJ (and that was before the reign of Gonzo began), and able to exercise my right to free speech again.

Sessions is enthusiastic about defending the right to promote hate speech, religious zealotry, and homophobia, all things in which he and his alt-right cronies fervently believe. But, when it comes to defending the rights of Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, and the rest of us to protest, or in the case of Blacks and Hispanics to even exercise their voting rights, not so much.

Gonzo’s career has been built on disingenuously promoting bias, racial inequality, xenophobia, homophobia, intolerance, and white privilege in the name of a Constitution that it’s hard to believe he’s ever read much less understands or follows. Other than Trump, Bannon, or Miller, I can’t imagine anyone less qualified than Gonzo to pontificate about the First Amendment, or indeed any portion of the U.S. Constitution other than, perhaps, the Second Amendment which apparently is the only part of the Constitution they have ever heard about down in Ol’ Bammy.

PWS

09-29-17

AMERICANS ARE DYING IN PUERTO RICO: That’s “Good News” In The Trump Administration! — They Tried To Do It By Stripping Vulnerable Americans Of Health Care — But, This Is Easier — Just Do Nothing!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/29/san-juan-mayor-slams-trump-administration-comments-on-puerto-rico-hurricane-response/

Samantha Schmidt and Mark Berman report for the Washington Post:

“Dammit, this is not a good-news story,” [San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín] Cruz said. “This is a people-are-dying story. This is a life-or-death story. … When you have people out there dying, literally scraping for food, where is the good news?”

Residents of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that is home to more than 3 million American citizens, have struggled without electricity, drinking water, food and medical supplies since Hurricane Maria tore across the island on Sept. 20. Many hospitals remain without power, and fears are mounting about the spread of infection and disease the longer people lack electricity and clean water.

[U.S. responded to Haiti quake more forcefully than to Puerto Rico disaster]

As the dire situation has worsened, the federal government’s initial response has drawn increasing scrutiny.

Critics of the administration have compared it to the government’s poor reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or unfavorably contrasted it with the efforts shown after other disasters, including the recent hurricanes that battered Texas and Florida. The retired three-star general who commanded the massive U.S. military response to the Haitian earthquake of 2010 told The Post that it is fair to “ask why we’re not seeing a similar command and response” in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration has bristled at the criticism, with multiple officials defending their response and the president complaining on Twitter about the media coverage. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has praised the federal government’s efforts and said the president has called him multiple times.

Trump has also been criticized for his comments about Puerto Rico, including repeatedly invoking the country’s debt issues, which stand in sharp contrast to the way he spoke about Texas and Florida after storms hit those states.”

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Read the rest of the story at the link.

The Trump Administration’s toxic combination of evil, corruption, dishonesty, and incompetence is a clear and present danger to the health, welfare, and safety of every American!

Why was the response to Haiti better? That’s a “no-brainer!” Back then we had a REAL President rather than the current Charlatan-in-Chief!

PWS

09-29-17

INSIDE THE AMERICAN GULAG: New Suit Alleges Abuse Of Pregnant Detainees BY DHS!

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pregnant-women-ice-20170928-story.html

Melissa Etehad reports for the LA Times:

“When Jennye Pagoada Lopez arrived at the U.S. border post of San Ysidro in July seeking political asylum, she showed agents ultrasound images of her pregnancy and told them she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention.

But instead of taking her to the hospital, they detained her for more than a day before transferring her to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.

It took two days to get a medical exam. Four days after that, she was informed that she had a miscarriage.

That was the account she gave in a sworn declaration to her lawyers.

“I was neglected, subjected to abusive conditions and denied medical treatment when requested,” she testified.

Pagoada is among ten women whose testimony was included in a complaint filed this week against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by seven rights groups accusing immigration officials of improperly detaining pregnant women and failing to provide them with adequate medical care.

The complaint — made to the department’s inspector general and civil rights officer — alleges that the women suffered physical and psychological harm and asks the department to investigate the cases and report on what steps immigration authorities will take to enforce its policies on the detention and treatment of pregnant women.

“We are gravely concerned with the agency’s failure to abide by its own policy against detaining pregnant women, the detention conditions that have been reported by pregnant women in various detention facilities across the country, and the lack of quality medical care provided to women who are pregnant or have suffered miscarriages while in custody,” the complaint said.”

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Read the rest of Melissa’s report at the link.

The American Gulag intends to demean, dehumanize, demoralize, and discourage migrants like Jenny Pagoda Lopez.

But, the reality is that Lopez and others like her come out as human, brave, and courageous.

The truth is that all Americans are demeaned and dehumanized by unnecessary immigraton detention. It is a stain on our humanity, our professed values, and our national conscience that will not easily be washed away.

“JUST SAY NO” to politicos who support, actively or passively, this un-American regime!

PWS

09-29-17

“AYATOLLAH ROY” Preaches A Gospel Of Hate & Bigotry That Jesus Would Never Regognize

Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post:

“The strongest objection to Moore’s hardness and harshness is theological. On the consistent evidence of Jesus’ ministry, what public attitude did he condemn the most? He stood against people who talked constantly of the law, who thought they were especially virtuous, who enjoyed scolding people, who judged others without tenderness and understanding. He was at constant war with the self-righteous and took the side of the social outcasts they condemned.

Now we see the return of the Pharisee.”

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Read the rest of Gerson’s “spot on” op ed at the link.

Jeff Sessions are you listening?

PWS

09-29-17

TRUMP’S COWARDLY DECISION TO CUT REFUGEE ADMISSIONS DURING REFUGEE CRISIS DEMEANS AMERICA AND DAMAGES OUR FUTURE — Refugees Contribute More To American Success Than Trump and His Grifter Colleagues Ever Will!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/refugee-resettlement-trump.html

Admiral Michael G. Mullen writes in the NYT:

“Amid the world’s worst migrant crisis on record, the Trump administration is cutting back on refugee resettlement. As part of his travel ban, President Trump capped the number of refugees to be admitted in 2017 at 50,000, the lowest number in decades. Now the administration has proposed lowering the goal even further, to 45,000, next year.
Over the years, the United States has lived up to its ideals and brought millions of refugees to safety and freedom. It didn’t become a resettlement leader out of pure altruism. By welcoming refugees, the United States revitalizes its democracy and its economy, helps preserve or restore stability in volatile regions of the world, and builds respect.
In slashing resettlement, the president is taking a recklessly narrow view of how best to put America first. Shutting out refugees would not only increase human suffering; it would also weaken the country and undermine its foreign policy.
There are more than 22 million refugees in the world, the highest number since World War II. Even before the Trump presidency, the United States response to this crisis was relatively modest. In fiscal year 2016, the United States resettled about 84,000 refugees, the most of any year under President Barack Obama. For comparison’s sake, the country took in roughly 200,000 refugees a year in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.
Nonetheless, the resettlement effort under President Obama served American interests. For one thing, it helped the states that host the vast majority of Syrian refugees: Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. (In fiscal year 2016, 12,500 of the refugees resettled by the United States came from Jordan, a key American ally in a strategically crucial region.) The huge influx of refugees into these nations has strained their resources and infrastructure, becoming a potential source of instability and even conflict. By resettling refugees, the United States helps preserve stability and sends a message of support to countries whose cooperation it needs on a range of issues.
The Trump administration’s cuts to resettlement send the exact opposite message. It is a message heard across the region, by enemies as well as friends of the United States. Restricting resettlement, especially in the context of the travel ban, appears to validate the propaganda of the Islamic State and other extremist groups, which claims that the United States is hostile to Muslims. The battle against violent extremism must be fought with guns, but also with ideas. Slamming the door on refugees is a significant strategic blunder.
Opponents of refugee resettlement would have you believe that the country’s enemies are exploiting the program. There is no factual basis for this claim. In fact, of all the people who enter the United States, refugees are the most thoroughly vetted. The screening process is exhaustive and lengthy, and involves numerous agencies. Our intelligence and national security professionals can both vet refugees and protect Americans. Indeed, they’ve done just that for years.
Refugees are victims of extremist groups and brutal governments. They become patriotic, hard-working Americans. Refugees are us. They are teachers, police officers, doctors, factory workers and soldiers. There are thousands of former refugees and children of refugees in the United States military. I served alongside many who were eager and proud to give back to the country that helped them in their time of need.
It’s no wonder that numerous studies have found that refugees are a net benefit to the American economy. The administration’s own study — which the president solicited from the Department of Health and Human Resources — concluded that refugees added $63 billion to the economy between 2005 and 2014.
Support for refugees creates another form of currency for the United States. Call it respect or admiration or credibility, this currency accrues when the United States leads by example and champions human rights on the world stage. It’s an invaluable and fungible resource, amassed over many decades. It enables the United States to forge ties with democratic movements. It also helps Washington persuade allies to do difficult things and pressure foes to stop their bad behavior. It is crucial to forging trade pacts, military coalitions and peace deals.
More than any other resource — including military and economic might — this accounts for American greatness. We sacrifice it at our peril.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Michael G. Mullen, a retired United States Navy admiral, was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011 and serves on the board of Human Rights First.”

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The greatest threat to America’s national security is Donald Trump and his enablers. And, it doesn’t take any type of “extreme vetting” to figure this out. Just common sense and human decency. Thanks, Admiral Mullen for “telling it like it is,” and continuing to support real American values and national interests in this time of darkness brought upon us by the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-26

INSTEAD OF DOUBLING DOWN ON FAILED POLICIES, SESSIONS SHOULD TRY ANTI-GANG STRATEGIES THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/sunday/trump-gangs-soccer-education.html

Lauren Markham writes in the NY Times:

“SundayReview | OPINION

The Wrong Way to Fight Gangs
By LAUREN MARKHAMSEPT. 28, 2017

Lester, who is among the recent Central American students at Oakland International High School who crossed into the US, during soccer practice for the Soccer Without Borders program. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Oakland, Calif. — Young migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador come to this country fleeing violence and lives that are often dictated by savage gangs. It’s expensive to get here. They often arrive with thousands of dollars of high-interest debt and little or no English skills. And they face an administration that insists that they are gangsters bringing bloodshed and gang warfare to American cities.

In fact, these young people are often fleeing gangs. And the challenges they face in the United States make them particularly vulnerable for recruitment into the same violent gangs they left home to escape.

“They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields,” President Trump said of the members of MS-13, a transnational gang composed largely of Central American youth; its activity has been growing in recent years, both in the United States and in Central America. A few weeks ago, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told law enforcement officers that these young, undocumented immigrants were “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

I work at Oakland International High School in Oakland, Calif. It is a public school with a population made up entirely of recently arrived immigrant students. Today, over 25 percent are unaccompanied minors — young people who crossed into the United States without papers or parents — who have been released from immigration custody and placed in deportation proceedings to await their day in court. Since we opened 10 years ago, our students’ gang involvement has markedly decreased. This is because we have gotten better at what we were meant to do, namely: provide programs that teach skills, offer support services that reduce barriers to coming to school, and foster a sense of community.

We offer what the gangs offer, but better.

I had one student who came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor from Honduras. His mother left him when he was little, and he never knew his father. He lived with his grandmother until she died. He was just 13. For two years he lived alone in her house, selling water bottles on the street on behalf of a neighboring family. Sometimes they invited him over for dinner; other times they didn’t.

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He told me that he saw this life in Honduras as a dead end. He crossed into Guatemala, rode on top of trains through Mexico, hiding what little money he had pressed against the inside of his cheek, and swam across the Rio Grande. He was apprehended at the border, placed into a youth detention center, and sent to live with his aunt in Oakland, pending his deportation hearing. He enrolled at Oakland International but, after a couple of weeks, his attendance waned. Soon he stopped coming altogether.

“I didn’t know anything,” he told me. Being in school felt impossible to him because he felt unable to succeed at it. He had an upcoming court case and no lawyer; that, he knew, would cost money he didn’t have.

One Saturday, I took the train into San Francisco to meet a friend. As I waited at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station outside the Civic Center, I watched as, in broad daylight, Latino teenagers sold drugs to the area’s vagrants. I knew this drug ring was connected to MS-13. There, on the other side of the plaza, was my student.

“These are animals,” President Trump said of MS-13 members. Most often, rather, they are like my student: young people, not unlike child soldiers, who enter a violent life by either force or force of circumstance. They do not come to the United States to participate in gang life; it winds up as the only option.

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Our school kept trying with this particular student. We conducted home visits in East Oakland, where he lived with his aunt, found him a therapist he could see at school, and encouraged him to join our school soccer team. He got a free lawyer. He quit selling at the Civic Center. He came back to school.

Newly arrived immigrants are a fast-growing demographic in American schools, and they will continue to be, regardless of the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Yet the Trump administration is pushing for cuts that will affect their ability to succeed in school, or even attend school at all.

The proposed 2018 education budget includes approximately $9 billion in cuts — 13.5 percent of the total. The cuts include an evisceration of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a $1 billion earmark which provides funding for enrichment opportunities for students in high-poverty schools.

Nearly all of the support our school was able to offer my student, and so many like him, was a result of 21st Century funding. It pays for Soccer Without Borders, which serves more than half of our student population, and for an organization called Refugee Transitions, which offers tutoring and homework help. It pays for mental health interns to provide therapy to youth in six languages.

Quality public education is a fundamental, if aspirational, American value. But altruism aside, investing in newcomer education makes practical sense. It costs far more to lock someone up for a year than it does to educate him.

“We’re going to destroy the vile, criminal cartel MS-13,” President Trump announced to a group of law enforcement officers on Long Island, N.Y., in July. To focus on police intervention rather than education isn’t only shortsighted, it’s also been proven not to work. All we have to do is look at El Salvador, where a series of failed iron fist campaigns that combined police crackdowns with a lack of social alternatives served to increase violence.

We could also look at history. MS- 13 was born in the United States among disenfranchised, traumatized immigrant youth in the 1980s and, through deportation, was exported to El Salvador (then spread to Honduras and Guatemala) — where it now relies on vulnerable young recruits, teenage and even younger, to grow its ranks.

Central America’s endemic violence is not going away anytime soon, so, like it or not, these young people will keep coming, regardless of the walls we build or the immigration policies we enact. Excluded and disenfranchised young people seek inclusion elsewhere: on the margins, in the shadows, in society’s dark underbelly. Gangs provide that sense of belonging, along with a feeling of success and upward mobility, for those who are not offered the same in mainstream society.

Last Tuesday afternoon, on a warm fall day in Oakland, more than 60 young men from more than a dozen countries played soccer together out on our misshapen soccer pitch. An additional 50 or so students sat in the cafeteria, working with teachers and volunteers to practice their English and finish their homework. A group of parents met in a classroom to help plan the year’s activities. It was just a typical day at the school — a day full of activities that depend on money that could disappear. If 21st Century funds go away, these programs vanish. Which means the students will find somewhere else to take them in.

MS-13, as it happens, welcomes young people with open arms.”

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Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. There ways of getting the job done. We really need to use them!

PWS

09-28-17

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