DON KERWIN @ CMS: REFUGEES HELPED MAKE AMERICA GREAT — NOW UNPATRIOTIC TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO COMPLETELY ABANDON WORLD’S REFUGEES AT THEIR TIME OF GREATEST NEED — Richest, Most Diverse, Most Resettlement-Able Country In The World Intends To Shirk Humanitarian Duties — Undoubtedly Some Will Die & Many Will Be Traumatized By This Cowardly Attack On On International Obligations To World’S Most Vulnerable!

https://cmsny.org/whats-less-patriotic-than-abandonment-of-the-us-refugee-protection-program/

Donald M. Kerwin
Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Don writes:

What’s less patriotic than abandonment of the US refugee protection program?

Donald Kerwin

Director

Center for Migration Studies

(Raúl Nájera/Unsplash)

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This week, the Trump administration has descended to a new level of contempt for the US refugee protection system. From its very first days in office when it evoked specious national security concerns to suspend the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days and indefinitely bar the admission of Syrian refugees, the administration has sought to discredit and diminish the US refugee resettlement, asylum, temporary protection, and other humanitarian programs.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump regularly decried the ways in which President Barack Obama exercised Executive authority, including by offering status, work authorization and protection from deportation to undocumented residents brought to the United States as children. As president, however, he has far exceeded Obama in unilaterally exercising his immigration authorities, albeit in favor of indiscriminate enforcement and evisceration of humanitarian programs. Many of these measures – although often justified on rule of law grounds – have not survived legal challenge.

To provide just a sampling of the Trump administration’s misguided policies, it has cut refugee admissions to historically low levels at a time of unprecedented need; has sought to rescind Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 95 percent of the program’s beneficiaries; ended the Central American Minors (CAM) program which allowed El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran children to undergo refugee screening in their own countries and join their legally present parents in the United States; cut aid to the Northern Triangle states, which have produced in recent years the lion’s share of migrants and asylum-seekers to the United States, and; denied access to the US asylum system through interception, border enforcement, and cruel deterrence strategies, such as separating children from parents and forcing asylum seekers to wait for months in dangerous Mexican border cities while their US claims are pending.

The president habitually impugns the patriotism of his critics, but has systematically attempted to dismantle quintessentially American programs, which have long reflected and projected US values. Some of the most shameful episodes in the US history – as when it turned away the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany on the S.S. St. Louis – involve the United States’ failure to protect refugees. By contrast, its leadership in responding to the refugees generated by World War II, the Vietnam conflict, the Cuban revolution, and the Balkans war in the former Yugoslavia – earned it the respect, gratitude and good will of many states and countless persons.  They made it a beacon of freedom.

How do these programs serve US interests? They save lives (a core value). They promote regional and global stability. They reduce irregular migration. They promote US foreign policy goals. They encourage developing nations to continue to offer haven and integration opportunities to the bulk of the world’s refugees. They promote cooperation with US diplomatic, military and counterterror strategies. They link communities, including diverse faith communities, that work together to welcome and resettle refugees. As President Ronald Reagan put it in 1981, they continue “America’s tradition as a land that welcomes peoples from other countries” and shares the “responsibility of welcoming and resettling those who flee oppression.”

On July 18, Politico reported that the administration has been trying to make the case for admitting no refugees in FY 2020 – not those already approved for admission, not the family members of refugees in the United States, not those who assisted the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not survivors of religious persecution, although the administration regularly touts its commitment to religious liberty. It has reportedly been weighing a farcical rationale for this extraordinary step; that is, the United States cannot both process asylum claims and resettle refugees, although it has been doing both for decades.

On July 15, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOD) issued final interim regulations – which became effective the following day – that seek to deny access to the US asylum system to virtually every asylum-seeker at the southern border. With narrow exceptions, the rule would bar asylum claims by those “who did not apply for protection from persecution or torture where it was available in at least one third country” outside his or her “country of citizenship, nationality, or last lawful habitual residence through which he or she transited en route to the United States.”

Yet the Immigration and Nationality Act allows any non-citizen physically present in the United States to apply for asylum.  Removal is permitted only “pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement” to a third country where “the alien’s life or freedom would not be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and where the alien is eligible to receive asylum or equivalent temporary protection.” In short, this exception applies to “safe third country” agreements with other nations.  The United States has only one such agreement – with Canada – which does not apply to asylum-seekers with family members in the other country, as the DHS and DOD regulation would.  The pre-conditions for such an agreement are that an agreement actually exists,  the state parties to the agreement are “safe,” and they have “full and fair” asylum policies and procedures. The DHS/DOJ rule flouts all of these statutory requirements.

Ironically, the Trump administration claims that it needs to take this step based on the numbers of people seeking protection from countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Yet great demand and need argue for a robust, well-resourced asylum system, not the shell of a program.

Some percentage of asylum-seekers from these countries will ultimately be found to be ineligible for asylum, although a very high percentage have been forced to leave their violence-torn homelands and will at least present credible claims. For its part, the Trump administration has not effectively addressed the causes driving the flight of these migrants, has not offered legal migration opportunities to those in great need, and has failed to take any of steps necessary to address a human crisis of this magnitude. These steps would certainly reduce irregular migration and the high numbers of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.  Instead, it has resorted to deterrence, interception and border enforcement policies – a recipe for failure on humanitarian, legal, and enforcement grounds, and a boon only to human smuggling networks and for-profit prisons.

The administration is dismantling the US refugee resettlement program and the asylum system – at immense human cost, to the nation’s detriment, and with disastrous consequences for the international system of refugee protection which it once led.  This isn’t patriotism.  It’s an act of sabotage of a defining set of American value and a once proud program.  One day – perhaps soon – it will be looked upon as a shameful episode in US history.

July 19, 2019

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Wow! Just when you might have thought Trump couldn’t be any more cowardly or unpatriotic, he sinks us even lower!

Trump’s claims that the U.S. is “full” or that we don’t have room for more refugees is pure racist restrictionist BS! According to Amnesty International, one-third of the world’s refugees, 6.7 million people, are hosted by the world’s poorest countries. https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/refugees-asylum-seekers-and-migrants/global-refugee-crisis-statistics-and-facts/

Under Trump, the U.S. has become a leading shirker of refugee resettlement responsibilities, encouraging other prosperous Western Nations to follow our cowardly and selfish example.

Lebanon (GNP approx. $52 billion) hosted 1.4 million refugees, or 156 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants; Jordan (GNP approx. $41 billion) hosted 2.5 million refugees, or 72 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, the U.S., GNP approx. $20 trillion+, has reduced its refugee resettlement commitment to less than 30,000 and now outrageously proposes to “zero it out.” 

Cowardly, inhumane, irresponsible, selfish, racist leaders reflect on all of us, not just on the disturbing lack of values of the minority of Americans who installed them in office and keep them propped up.

The U.S. is now officially leading the “race to the bottom.” Will those of us who believe in a confident, generous, courageous, patriotic America, reestablishing ourselves as a human rights leader be able to get it together to “right the ship” in 2020. Or, will the Ship of State continue to sink with Trump and his unpatriotic White Nationalist racists at the helm?

PWS

SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-in-an-age-of-impunity-it-will-have-consequences-for-us-all/2019/07/07/8ff2d894-9f2b-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html

E.J. Dionne, Jr
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Opinion Writer
Washington Post
David Miliband
David Miliband
Chief Executive
International Rescue Committee

E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes in the Washington Post commenting on a recent speech by David Miliband, Chief Executive of the International Rescue Committee:

. . . .

“A new and chilling normal is coming into view,” Miliband concluded. “Civilians seen as fair game for armed combatants, humanitarians seen as an impediment to military tactics and therefore unfortunate but expendable collateral, and investigations of and accountability for war crimes an optional extra for state as well as nonstate actors.”

But these evils cannot be isolated from the larger political corrosion in the rest of the world — and this includes the long-standing democracies themselves. “The checks and balances that protect the lives of the most vulnerable people abroad,” he said, “will only be sustained if we renew the checks and balances that sustain liberty at home.”

This isn’t simply about aligning principle and practice. More fundamentally, when governments abandon a commitment to accountability domestically, they no longer feel any obligation to insist upon it internationally. It’s no accident, as Miliband noted, that under President Trump, the United States “has dropped the promotion of human rights around the world from its policy priorities.”

He pulled no punches: “The new order is epitomized in the photo of Russian President [Vladimir] Putin and Saudi Crown Prince [Mohammed bin] Salman high-fiving each other at the G-20 meeting in Argentina in November last year. With Syria in ruins, Yemen in crisis, and political opponents like Boris Nemtsov and Jamal Khashoggi dead, theirs was the embrace of two leaders unencumbered by national institutions or by the fear of international law.”

Miliband acknowledged the mistakes of an earlier era (including the Iraq War) but argued that “accountability, not impunity” was on the rise in the 1990s, when there was “an unusual consensus across the left-right divide” about “the need for global rules.” We have said goodbye to all that.

In 2002, Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, published “ ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” a book that stirred consciences about the world’s obligations to helpless people unprotected — and often targeted — by sovereign governments.

Nearly two decades on, we are numb, distracted and inward-looking.

Miliband understands that democratic citizens, grappling with their own discontents, will be inclined to look away from the travails of others “until there is a new economic and social bargain that delivers fair shares at home.”

But an Age of Impunity not only poses immediate dangers to millions confronting violence far away. It also corrodes the sense of obligation of the privileged in wealthy nations toward those left behind. When anything goes, no one is safe.

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Read the complete article at the above link.

The key point here for Americans who have been “tone deaf” to Trump’s (and his toadies at DHS, DOJ, DOS, and elsewhere) gross abuses of the rule of law, human rights, and human dignity is the following: “When anything goes, no one is safe.”

PWS

07-08-19

INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE: YOU DON’T NEED A LAW DEGREE TO KNOW THIS SIMPLE TRUTH: Seeking Asylum In The U.S. Is Legal; Turning Away Asylum Seekers Is Not!

https://www.rescue.org/article/fact-check-what-national-emergency-do-we-need-wall

Behind the headlines

Fact check: What is the national emergency? Do we need a wall?

At the same time vulnerable families are reportedly being returned across the border to wait for their asylum claims to be processed, under a new administration policy called “Remain in Mexico.” Rather than make America safer, these policies will expose Central American children and families who have fled persecution, torture and violence to even more danger and uncertainty. Here’s what you need to know:

There is no national emergency at the border.

The number of irregular border crossings is actually at historic lows, according to Customs and Border Patrol figures. “This is clearly a manufactured ‘emergency,’” says Jennifer Sime, senior vice president, U.S. Programs for the International Rescue Committee.

The crisis is elsewhere.

The real crisis is the instability in Central America, which is forcing people to flee for their lives. People living in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are enduring some of the worst violence outside an active war zone. Many of those fleeing to the U.S. border have traveled together in caravans for safety.

A Central American girl holds a book as others traveling in a caravan climb the Mexico-U.S. border fence in an attempt to cross to San Diego County.

Every nation has the right to control its border. Both U.S. and international law also provide for the safe and legal movement of vulnerable people and the right to seek asylum.

Photo: ​​GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images

But rather than offering safe haven, the U.S. administration continues to block people from claiming asylum, separate families as part of its ‘zero tolerance’ effort, and forcibly return asylum seekers to Mexico as part of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy.

Seeking asylum is legal. Turning away asylum seekers is not.

Every nation has the right to control its border. Both U.S. and international law also provide for the safe and legal movement of vulnerable people—including Central American refugees and asylum seekers—and the right to seek asylum.

The administration’s policies violate these laws, and rob asylum seekers of their due process rights, including access to legal counsel. They will also expose thousands of families and children to unsafe conditions.

IRC staff who have been in Tijuana say people awaiting asylum claims, and those helping them, are fearful as they face a credible risk of being targeted by violence. “They have called the idea of sending people back appalling, and sending children in particular, unthinkable,” says Jennifer Sime.

The emergency declaration harms America

The emergency declaration and systematic attacks on asylum seekers by the U.S. administration place some of the most vulnerable people on earth in harm’s way. Alongside reports of forcibly returned children, they fatally undermine the United States’ strategic leadership and moral clarity on humanitarian issues.

Read our full statement:  IRC responds to U.S. Emergency Declaration, reports of forcible return of children to Mexico (Feb. 15, 2019)

How the IRC helps

The International Rescue Committee is calling on the U.S. administrationto rescind this cruel and irresponsible policy, follow domestic and international law, and uphold America’s humanitarian commitments.

In addition to speaking out, the IRC provides emergency assistance to help those in El Salvador who are most at risk to find shelter and safety, as well as cash assistance to help people rebuild their lives.

In the U.S., the IRC will continue to help meet asylum seekers’ basic needs, facilitate family reunifications, connect people to critical legal services and help them access psychosocial support.

Stand with asylum seekers

Instead of receiving the welcome and protection they need, families fleeing violence have had the door slammed in their faces when they reach the U.S.

 

Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight to uphold our laws and Constitution against a scofflaw and dishonest Administration.
PWS
02-24-19