Guatemala – Page 12 – immigrationcourtside.com

ROUND TABLE OF FORMER IMMIGRATION JUDGES SPEAKS OUT AGAINST EOIR’S LIMITS ON PUBLIC ACCESS TO IMMIGRATION COURTS

Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Director, Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.

VIA EMAIL AND FIRST CLASS MAIL

James McHenry, Director
Christopher Santoro, Acting Chief Immigration Judge Executive Office for Immigration Review
5107 Leesburg Pike, 18th Floor
Falls Church, VA 22041

Dear Director McHenry and Chief Immigration Judge Santoro,

Public access to the immigration courts is vital to the constitutional protections of the respond- ents who appear in court. Pursuant to 8 C.F.R. § 1003.27 the immigration courts are open to the public. Limited exceptions to public access exist under the regulations, for example, to protect witnesses or parties or the public interest (§ 1003.27(b)), in VAWA cases (§ 1003.27(c)), and when there is a protective order (§ 1003.27(d)). Asylum hearings are confidential and are not open to the public unless the asylum applicant consents (8 C.F.R. § 1208.6).

Migrant Protection Protocol “MPP” hearings are routinely conducted in violation of 8 C.F.R. § 1003.27. Observers have been denied access to remote hearing locations where respondents are appearing in “tent courts.” In addition, it was recently announced that some MPP hearings would be heard via video teleconference by immigration judges in the Fort Worth Adjudication Center. For such hearings, public access is entirely restricted, as observers are not allowed in the tent courts or the adjudication centers. As Judge Ashley Tabaddor stated in an interview with CNN, “MPP is rife with issues but by assigning the adjudication centers to the tent courts takes us to a new low where public access to the court are now eliminated.” She further stated, “[t]his is not the way we as judges or courts should function.”

We agree with Judge Tabaddor. On December 5, 2019, a member of our group of former immi- gration judges, Ilyce Shugall, was denied access to the immigration court while attempting to observe an MPP individual calendar hearing. Human Rights First requested permission for the observers to sit in Laredo with the respondents in the tent courts. The request was denied. Ac- cordingly, the observers, including Former Immigration Judge Shugall, who traveled across the country, were required to sit in San Antonio to observe respondents appearing from Laredo via

December 10, 2019

VTC. Although the individual hearing was an asylum merits hearing, the respondent consented to Former Judge Shugall observing the hearing.

Early in the hearing, Immigration Judge Cynthia Lafuente-Gaona confirmed that the respondent consented to Former Judge Shugall observing, as she was with a delegation from Human Rights First. Subsequently, Judge Lafuente-Gaona asked Former Judge Shugall to step out of the court- room because she was taking notes on her computer and looking at her cell phone. The assistant chief counsel for ICE was taking notes on his computer, but was never asked to cease his note taking. Former Judge Shugall advised she would put both her phone and computer away and take notes on a note pad. Judge Lafuente-Gaona told Former Judge Shugall she “should know better” because she was a former judge. Former Judge Shugall explained that attorneys and ob- servers used computers and phones in her courtroom when she was on the bench and had used her computer and phone in court all week, including in Judge Lafuente-Gaona’s courtroom the prior day. Former Judge Shugall remained in the courtroom and continued her note taking on a note pad. Some time later, a legal fellow from Human Rights First entered the courtroom. Judge Lafuente-Gaona again confirmed with the respondent that he consented to the additional observ- er. While doing so, she told the respondent that the observers were “writing about what he was saying,” which was entirely untrue. Judge Lafuente-Gaona then told the observers that their note taking on note pads was distracting and asked both to leave. After a break, the observers con- firmed with Judge Lafuente-Gaona that she was requiring they remain outside of the courtroom for the remainder of the hearing. She had two male guards escort the two female attorneys out of the courtroom. That same day the legal fellow from Human Rights First was prevented from ob- serving another pro se merits hearing.

Immigration judges preside over individual and master calendar hearings that are rife with dis- tractions. During master calendar hearings, people are constantly entering and leaving the court- room, taking notes, talking, and moving papers. On many dockets, children are crying, crawling on the floors, throwing toys and food, and playing with microphones. In addition, in immigra- tion courtrooms across the country, parties routinely take notes on computers and use cell phones in court. Observers taking notes during a pro se asylum hearing is not inherently distracting. That the judge became distracted because a former immigration judge and an attorney from a human rights organization made her nervous does not justify closing the courtroom.

While the above examples are specific to MPP hearings, issues related to public access to the immigration courts is not exclusively limited to MPP. For example, according to a Daily Beast article, earlier this month a reporter was forced to leave an immigration courtroom in New York.

Very few respondents subject to MPP are represented. There are significant concerns with ac- cess to counsel and due process in MPP proceedings. Allowing observers in court, pursuant to the regulations, is crucial. A judge’s failure to follow the regulations and the constitution should be of great concern to EOIR. It is certainly of paramount concern to this group of former immi- gration judges.

As former immigration judges, we understand that a judge has the right to control the conduct of those attending a hearing, but exercise of that control cannot compromise the parties’ due pro-

cess rights. We request that EOIR investigate this issue and ensure that the public has appropri- ate access to all immigration courts.

Very truly yours, /s/

The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

Steven Abrams

Terry Bain

Sarah Burr

Teofilo Chapa

Jeffrey Chase

George Chew

Matthew D’Angelo

Bruce J. Einhorn

Cecelia Espenoza

Noel Ferris

James Fujimoto

Jennie Giambastiani

John Gossart

Paul Grussendorf

Miriam Hayward

Rebecca Bowen Jamil

William Joyce

Carol King

Margaret McManus

Charles Pazar

Laura Ramirez

John Richardson

Lory Rosenberg

Susan Roy

Paul Schmidt

Ilyce Shugall

Denise Slavin

Andrea Sloan

William Van Wyke

Polly Webber

Bob Weisel

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

NOTE: A few of the above signatures were not received in time for the “hard copy” mailed to EOIR. They later were added to the publicly distributed version.

Public access is critical to Due Process and Fundamental Fairness in Immigration Court. In the Arlington Immigration Court, we were constantly “under observation” by reporters, Congressional staff, NGOs, students, Senior Executives from DOJ and DHS, Asylum Officers, OIL Attorneys, EOIR Headquarters and BIA staff, ORR staff, and other members of the public. We welcomed it. All of us viewed it as a “teaching opportunity” and a chance to demonstrate “Due Process in action” and to communicate our judicial philosophies and expertise in the law to others. It was an important “public education” opportunity.

Indeed, when I taught “Refugee Law & Policy” as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law “Court Observation” was a required assignment. The same was true of many of my teaching colleagues at the many law schools in DC and Virginia.

Far from “disruptive” or “distracting,” I found that public observation actually improved everyone’s performance, including my own. Everyone in the courtroom got into “teaching mode,” willing and eager to demonstrate the importance of their roles in the justice system. Counsel on both sides would often remain for a few minutes after the case to discuss their respective roles and how they came to choose immigration law as a career (of course, being careful not to discuss particular case facts).

Indeed, one of the most meaningful items of “feedback” I got from an observer (paraphrased) was: “I expected something much more openly adversarial and hostile. I was surprised by the degree of cooperation, mutual respect, and teamwork by everyone in the courtroom including counsel, the witnesses, the interpreter, and the judge to complete the case in the time allotted and to inform the judge’s decision. Everyone seemed to be working toward a common goal of resolution, even though they had different roles and views on the right outcome.”

Of course that was then. I’ve been told that most Immigration Courts these days are much more “openly hostile territory” particularly for respondents and their counsel. All the more reason why we need more, rather than less, in person court observation.

Many thanks to our friend and Round Table colleague Judge Ilyce Shugall for bringing this festering problem “out in the open.”

PWS

12-12-19

PROFILES IN JUDICIAL COWARDICE: AS FEDERAL COURTS FAIL, DUE PROCESS DIES, & THE REGIME SIMPLY THUMBS ITS NOSE AT THE LAW BY RETURNING ASYLUM SEEKING FAMILIES TO “DEATH ZONES!” — “Experts, advocates, the United Nations and Guatemalan officials say the country doesn’t have the capacity to handle any sizable influx, much less process potential protection claims. Guatemala’s own struggles with corruption, violence and poverty helped push more than 270,000 Guatemalans to the U.S. border in fiscal 2019.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-10/u-s-starts-pushing-asylum-seeking-families-back-to-guatemala-for-first-time

Molly O’Toole reports for the LA Times:

In a first, U.S. starts pushing Central American families seeking asylum to Guatemala

A woman leaves the market in Guatemala City with a bundle of bamboo culms. (Luis Soto / Associated Press)

By MOLLY O’TOOLE STAFF WRITER

DEC. 10, 2019 6:58 PM

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have started to send families seeking asylum to Guatemala, even if they are not from the Central American country and had sought protection in the United States, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

In July, the Trump administration announced a new rule to effectively end asylum at the southern U.S. border by requiring asylum seekers to claim protection elsewhere. Under that rule — which currently faces legal challenges — virtually any migrant who passes through another country before reaching the U.S. border and does not seek asylum there will be deemed ineligible for protection in the United States.

A few days later, the administration reached an agreement with Guatemala to take asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border who were not Guatemalan. Although Guatemala’s highest court initially said the country’s president couldn’t unilaterally enter into such an agreement, since late November, U.S. officials have forcibly returned individuals to Guatemala under the deal.

At first, U.S. officials said they would return only single adults. But starting Tuesday, they began applying the policy to non-Guatemalan parents and children, according to communications obtained by The Times and several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

One family of three from Honduras, as well as a separate Honduran parent and child, were served with notices on Tuesday that they’d soon be deported to Guatemala.

The Trump administration has reached similar agreements with Guatemala’s Northern Triangle neighbors, El Salvador and Honduras, in each case obligating those countries to take other Central Americans who reach the U.S. border. Those agreements, however, have yet to be implemented.

The administration describes the agreements as an “effort to share the distribution of hundreds of thousands of asylum claims.”

The deals — also referred to as “safe third country” agreements — “are formed between the United States and foreign countries where aliens removed to those countries would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” according to the federal notice.

Guatemala has virtually no asylum system of its own, but the Trump administration and Guatemalan government both said the returns would roll out slowly and selectively.

The expansion of the policy to families could mean many more asylum seekers being forcibly removed to Guatemala.

Experts, advocates, the United Nations and Guatemalan officials say the country doesn’t have the capacity to handle any sizable influx, much less process potential protection claims. Guatemala’s own struggles with corruption, violence and poverty helped push more than 270,000 Guatemalans to the U.S. border in fiscal 2019.

Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

POLITICSWORLD & NATION

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Molly O’Toole is an immigration and security reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy covering the 2016 election and Trump administration, and a politics reporter at the Atlantic’s Defense One. She has covered migration and security from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf, and South Asia. She is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU, but will always be a Californian.

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To be an Article III Federal Appellate Judge or Supreme Court Justice these days seems to be little more than a license to take a “what me worry approach” to Due Process, immigration, asylum, racism, and the human tragedy unfolding around us every day. As long as it isn’t their kids and families being harassed, abused, allowed to die in prison, or unlawfully sent to potential “death camps” in some of the most dangerous regions of the world, who cares?

Abuse of others, particularly the less fortunate and most vulnerable: “Out of sight, out of mind.” As long as the paychecks keep coming and the security is good in the ivory tower, the legal gobbledygook and spineless task evasion will keep flowing until our nation finally goes out of business under Trump’s anti-Constitutional authoritarian onslaught.

Will it affect those lifetime judicial pensions? Just don’t let the screams of the abused, tortured, and dying keep you up at night judges! But do authoritarian dictatorships really need “judges,” even subservient ones?

PWS

12-11-19

EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: KID KILLERS ON THE LOOSE: “Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-is-to-blame-for-a-teen-migrants-death/2019/12/09/569ae0e8-1ac6-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html

Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.

That is the only conclusion to be drawn from a shocking report by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica about Hernandez’s death in May at a U.S. Border Patrol station in Texas. I assume the agents and health-care workers who should have given Hernandez lifesaving attention are decent human beings, not monsters. But they work within an intentionally monstrous system that assigned no value to a young Guatemalan boy’s life.

President Trump’s racist and xenophobic immigration policies are not grounds for impeachment; rather, they are an urgent reason to defeat him in the coming election. But at least six migrant children, including Hernandez, have died in federal custody on Trump’s watch. Somebody should be held accountable. Somebody should go to jail.

Hernandez died of influenza and neglect.

He had crossed the Rio Grande without documents with a group of migrants who were almost immediately apprehended by the Border Patrol. In keeping with administration policy, he was separated from his adult sister and processed at a notoriously overcrowded holding facility in McAllen, Tex., where a nurse practitioner found he had a temperature of 103. She diagnosed him with the flu and said he should be taken to a hospital if his condition worsened.

Instead, worried he might infect others at the McAllen center, officials moved him to a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco and locked him in a cell. That was on the afternoon of May 19. By the following morning, Hernandez was dead.

Border Patrol logs show that agents checked on Hernandez several times that night. But ProPublica obtained cellblock video showing that “the only way . . . officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking.”

The video “shows Carlos writhing for at least 25 minutes on the floor and a concrete bench,” ProPublica reported. “It shows him staggering to the toilet and collapsing on the floor, where he remained in the same position for the next four and a half hours.”

Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, claimed that Hernandez’s lifeless body was discovered by agents doing a morning check. But the video shows, according to ProPublica, that it was Hernandez’s cellmate who sent up the alarm.

“On the video, the cellmate can be seen waking up and groggily walking to the toilet, where Carlos was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He [the roommate] gestures for help at the cell door. Only then do agents enter the cell and discover that Carlos had died during the night.”

Let that sink in for a moment. A 16-year-old boy has obviously fallen ill and has a soaring fever. Instead of seeking medical care for him, agents of the United States government — acting in your name and mine — leave him to die on the cold concrete floor of a detention cell.

Hernandez’s death implies more than the apparent negligence of a few overworked Border Patrol agents. It indicts a whole system designed by the Trump administration to deter would-be migrants and asylum seekers by punishing those who do make the journey.

In Hernandez’s case, the fatal punishment was meted out illegally. He had been in custody for six days when he died, but the Border Patrol is only supposed to hold children for 72 hours, at most, before transferring them to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Trump administration instituted a shockingly inhumane policy of separating migrant parents from their children, who in many cases were sent hundreds of miles away. Thousands of children were warehoused in cages, like animals. Toddlers and infants were absurdly expected to represent themselves at immigration hearings whose nature they could not begin to understand.

It is true that officials have had to deal with a flood of migrants who overwhelmed border facilities and personnel. But the Trump administration responded to the surge not with compassion but with purposeful callousness. It is horrific that six migrant children are known to have died in Customs and Border Protection custody since September 2018. It is even worse when you realize there were no such deaths, not a single one, during the eight years of the Obama administration.

According to ProPublica’s report, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez was a bright and engaging boy who captained his school’s soccer team in the village of San Jose del Rodeo. The Border Patrol assigned him the alien identification number A203665141. His body was shipped home for burial.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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So why are racist White Nationalist policies that kill kids and then cover up “OK?” Why are Kelly, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” and others responsible for human rights violations running around making big bucks off their misconduct, giving speeches as if they were “normal” former senior executives, and even running for public office rather than facing charges for their misconduct? Others like Chief Toady Billy Barr and “Cooch Cooch” remain in office while spreading their authoritarian lies and attacking our democratic institutions.

And what about complicit Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices who have let Due Process, fundamental fairness, and human decency die while looking the other way?

Human rights criminals like Trump & Miller need plenty of “go along to get along” accomplices to carry out their abuse.

Thanks, Eugene, for speaking out when so many others in privileged positions of supposed responsibility have been so cowardly and complicit in the face of tyranny that intends to destroy our democracy and that has already undermined our humanity.

Where’s the outrage!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-11-19

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

Jodi Goodwin, Esquire
Immigration Attorney
Harlingen, TX

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remain-in-mexico-policy-immigrant-kids_n_5deeb143e4b00563b8560c69

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

A few times a week, attorney Jodi Goodwin walks across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to a refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, to meet with asylum-seekers. Her clients are among the more than 2,500 immigrants crammed into tents while they wait for U.S. immigration hearings ― often stuck for months in dirty and dangerous conditions.

The forced return to Mexico of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. is one of President Donald Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, yet it hasn’t received nearly the attention that his family separation and prolonged detention practices have.

Since January, under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” initiative ― also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) ― the U.S. government has sent at least 54,000 immigrants to wait for their court dates in Mexican border towns. Instead of staying with relatives in the U.S., families are sleeping in tents for up to eight months, in unprotected areas where infections spread within crowded quarters and cartel kidnappings are commonplace. Family separation ended a year ago. But Trump’s mistreatment of asylum-seekers continues in a different form.

Some parents are so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending their children across the bridge alone, since unaccompanied kids who arrive at the border cannot be turned away under MPP. Since October, at least 135 children have crossed back into the U.S. by themselves after being sent to wait in Mexico with their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Mexico, many of these migrants don’t have access to lawyers and are forced to plead their cases in makeshift tent courts set up along the U.S. border where overwhelmed judges conduct hearings via video teleconference. The courts have limited public access ― lawyers and translators say that they have been barred from attending hearings. Migrants’ advocates argue that the tent courts violate due process, and immigrant rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the use of videoconferencing.

Goodwin, who has 42 clients, said there is a serious shortage of lawyers willing to represent immigrants staying in another country where crime is rife. She spoke with HuffPost about why the Remain in Mexico policy is even more traumatic than separating thousands of families and why it hasn’t sparked public outrage.

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Jodi Goodwin (center) at the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

HuffPost: Immigrant parents forced to wait in Mexico are making the heart-wrenching choice to send their kids to the U.S. alone. What are the conditions like at the camp in Matamoros?

Jodi Goodwin: It smells like urine and feces. There’s not enough sanitation. There’s 10 port-a-potties for thousands of people. Up until recently, there was no potable water available at all. People were bathing in the Rio Grande river, getting sick and, in some cases, drowning. People were seriously dehydrated.

The camp sounds completely unfitting for any human being, let alone children.

It’s a horrific situation to put families in. It’s great to live in a tent for the weekend when you’re going to the lake. It’s not great to live in a tent for months at a time where you don’t have basic necessities.

Are kids getting sick?

The kids are sick every day. I’ve seen all kinds of respiratory illnesses and digestive illnesses. I’ve seen chronic illnesses like epilepsy. I saw a baby that appeared to have sepsis who was forced to wait on the bridge for more than three hours before being taken to a hospital.

And what about the kidnappings? Have you heard of families being taken by cartel members who then try and extort an immigrant’s U.S. relatives for money?

About half of the people I’ve spoken to in Mexico have been kidnapped. The cartel knows if they can grab an immigrant, they’re likely to be able to work out a ransom. If they don’t, then they just kill them.

Any specific examples?

I dealt with one case where a mom from El Salvador and her 4-year-old son were kidnapped within an hour of being sent back to Mexico under MPP. They were taken for eight days before her brother in the U.S. paid the kidnappers $7,000.

The lady was terrified. She was sleep-deprived, food-deprived and water-deprived. She said that the people who had kidnapped her were extremely violent and hit her kid. They were drinking alcohol and raping people at a stash house where several other people were being held.

LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS

Migrants, most of them asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico from the U.S. under the “Remain in Mexico” program, occupy a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, on Oc. 28, 2019.

The last time we spoke, you were on the frontlines of family separation, visiting detention centers where mothers were hysterically crying after being ripped apart from their children. How does the trauma of MPP compare, particularly for parents who are sending their kids across the border alone?

It’s way worse. I can’t with any confidence say that they will ever see their children again.

Why not?

I knew there were legal ways to get out of family separation. We were able to talk with our clients and didn’t have to go off to another country. And for those parents who got through their interviews or their court hearings, we were able to get them back with their kids.

With MPP, the assault is not only on human rights but also on due process within the court systems, which has completely hijacked the ability to be able to fix things. The parents can’t even get into the country to try to reunify with their kids.

Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. Do you think a similar number of families will be ripped apart because of Remain in Mexico?

It could be more. Over 55,000 people have been sent back to Mexico. I’ve talked to so many parents who have sent their kids across. It’s a heart-wrenching decision process that they go through. How do you give up your baby?

It reminds me of Jewish parents who were captives in Nazi Germany and had to convince their kids to get on a different train or go in a different line to save their own lives.

Have you witnessed these separations firsthand?

In November I saw a little boy and his 4-year-old sister sent across the bridge with an older child, who was about 14 years old. The teenager carried the baby boy, who still had a pacifier in his mouth, and the girl was holding onto the older kid’s belt loop.

I was standing on the bridge between Matamoros and the U.S. and I turned around to look down at the bank of the Rio Grande river. Every single parent who has sent their kid to cross tells me the same thing: As soon as they say goodbye and hug their kids, they run to the bank to watch them. [Her voice breaks] I knew there was somebody probably standing on that bank hoping those kids made it across.

Do you still think about those kids?

Oh yeah. The green binky that the little baby was sucking on is knitted in my mind.

VERONICA CARDENAS / REUTERS

The Mexican National Guard patrols an encampment where asylum-seekers live as their tents are relocated from the plaza to near the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros on Dec. 7, 2019.

You’ve been working hundreds of hours a month to try and help people stranded in Matamoros. This work must take a toll on you personally.

I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me.

I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.

Family separation resulted in massive outcry from the public, which eventually pressured the government to end the zero-tolerance policy. Why is MPP not getting the same attention?

There is no public outrage because it’s not happening on our soil. It’s happening literally 10 feet from the turnstile to come to the U.S. But because it’s out of sight and out of mind, there is no outrage. What ended family separation was public outrage. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It had everything to do with shame, shame, shame.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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I’m with you, Jodi! Thanks for your dedication to justice for the most vulnerable!

What’s wrong with this scenario: life-tenured Federal Judges who won’t stand up for the rule of law, Due Process, and Equal Protection in the face of an arrogantly and overtly lawless White Nationalist Regime; DOJ and other U.S. Government lawyers who defend immoral and disingenuous positions in Federal Court, often, as in the Census Case and the DACA Case using pretextual rationales and knowingly false information; dehumanization, with overwhelming racial and religious overtones, of those who deserve our protection and rely on our sense of fairness; undercutting, mistreating and humiliating the brave lawyers like Jodi who are standing up for justice in the face of tyranny; GOP legislators who are lawyers defending Trump’s mockery of the Constitution, human decency, and the rule of law and knowingly and defiantly spreading Putin’s false narratives.

Obviously, there has been a severe failure in our legal and ethical education programs and our criteria for Federal Judicial selections, particularly at the higher levels, and particularly with respect to the critical characteristic of courage. Too many “go alongs to get alongs!” I can only hope that our republic survives long enough to reform and correct these existential defects that now threaten to bring us all down.

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Where’s our humanity?

We should also remember that many asylum seekers from Africa, who face extreme danger in Mexico, are also being targeted (“shithole countries?”) and abused as part of the Regime’s judicially-enabled, racially driven, anti-asylum, anti-rule-of-law antics at the Southern Border. https://apple.news/AyYSWSXNfSdOm63skxWaUTQ

Also, morally corrupt Trump Regime officials continued to tout “Crimes Against Humanity” as an acceptable approach to border enforcement and “reducing apprehensions!” Will machine gun turrets be next on their list? Will Article III Judges give that their “A-OK?”

We’re actually paying Article III Federal Judges who are knowingly and intentionally furthering “Crimes Against Humanity.” Totally outrageous!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-10-19

AS ARTICLE III JUDGES SHIRK DUTIES, EMBOLDENED EOIR RAMPS UP ASSEMBLY LINE JUSTICE IN TENT CITIES WHILE PLOTTING TO BAR PUBLIC FROM VIEWING THEIR LATEST ASSAULTS ON DUE PROCESS!

Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN:

More immigration judges to be assigned to cases at tent facilities

By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

Updated 7:13 AM EST, Fri December 06, 2019

(CNN)More immigration judges will begin conducting hearings over video conferencing at tent courts along the US-Mexico border, raising concerns among lawyers about transparency in the immigration process.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration erected facilities in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, to serve as makeshift courts for migrants seeking asylum in the United States who have been returned to Mexico until their court date. The judges in these cases are not at the tent facility but preside by teleconference from other immigration courts several miles away.

As of mid-September, there were 19 judges from three separate immigration courts in Texas hearing cases. But the latest expansion includes the use of immigration judges assigned to a center in Fort Worth, Texas, that is closed to the public, leaving little opportunity for people to observe hearings.

“I’m just very concerned that there will be no public access to these hearings. And hearings will be operating in secret, without any transparency and notice to the public,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

US court proceedings are generally open to the public.

Adjudication centers serve as a hub for immigration judges who beam into courtrooms remotely to hear cases. There are two — one in Fort Worth and another in Falls Church, Virginia. Neither is open to the public.

Immigration judges assigned to the Fort Worth Immigration Adjudication Center are expected to begin hearing cases of migrants who fall under the administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” program via video teleconference in January 2020, according to the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts.

“Public access to hearings is governed by regulation, and EOIR’s process and policies surrounding the openness of hearings have not changed,” said EOIR spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly.

Lynch said some attorneys representing migrants who have been waiting in Mexico for their court date began receiving notices of judges from the Fort Worth center assigned to their cases in late November. The immigration judges’ union has also taken issue with the use of the center.

“MPP is rife with issues but by assigning the adjudication centers to the tent courts takes us to a new low where public access to the court are now eliminated,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “This is not the way we as judges or courts should function.”

The process has already presented lawyers with a host of logistical challenges and some anticipate those will worsen as immigration judges assigned to adjudication centers begin hearing cases.

Currently, advocates and legal observers have been able to monitor proceedings from three immigration courts in Texas: Harlingen, San Antonio and Port Isabel.

US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to CNN that access to the Laredo and Brownsville hearing facilities, which are located on the agency’s property, “will be assessed on a case-by-case basis when operationally feasible and in accordance with procedures for access to any CBP secure facility.”

Around 60,000 migrants have been subject to the administration’s policy that requires some migrants to wait in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. Given that they’re residing in Mexico, immigration lawyers based in the US have limited access to them, particularly in dangerous regions. Only a small share of migrants in the program have secured representation, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks court data and released a report on access to attorneys this summer.

Some in the legal community argue that access to the tent facilities, not just the immigration courts where the judges are located, is important for that reason — to give lawyers the opportunity to connect with migrants who may need legal representation and explain the process. It’s equally important, lawyers argue, that people be allowed to observe the proceedings.

“Without the public being able to see what’s been going on in these hearings, the public has no assurance that people are being given proper due process and proper shot at fighting their asylum case,” said Erin Thorn Vela, a staff attorney in the racial and economic justice program at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

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Wow! Secret Courts sentencing folks to torture or death without lawyers, adequate notice, time to prepare, or any consistent application of reasonable rules. Sounds like the “Star Chamber.” Is that why we fought the American Revolution? To create our own version of the worst abuses of the Crown? Apparently.

As American justice and the rule of law go down the tubes, the Supremes and the Circuits have become “disinterested observers,” at best.

Thanks to Laura Lynch at AILA for forwarding this latest example of judicial irresponsibility.

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-06-19

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: TRUMP REGIME OFFICIALS SCHEMED TO UNCONSTITUTIONALLY SEPARATE FAMILIES WITHOUT SYSTEM TO REUNITE THEM — “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-many-immigrant-families-separated_n_5ddebbbbe4b0913e6f782022

Angelina Chapin reports in HuffPost:

Last year, the Trump administration ripped apart thousands of immigrant families despite knowing it did not have a tracking system in place that would ensure they could be reunited, according to a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

As a result, the public will likely never know how many immigrant children have been separated from their parents.

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The Trump administration was prepared to separate more than 26,000 children from their families between May and September 2018 under a zero tolerance policy for unauthorized border crossing, according to the inspector general report released on Wednesday. But in spite of the plan for mass separations ― ultimately blocked in court in June 2018 ― the government didn’t have the technology to track family separations.

The estimate that roughly 3,000 children were taken from their parents between May and June 2018 is undoubtedly lower than the true number.

The Department of Homeland Security failed to accurately record the family relationships of roughly 1,400 children over a year and a half, from October 2017 to February 2019, according to the report.

Immigration officials knew about these technical issues long before the zero tolerance policy was implemented. But they failed to fix them before taking children from their families en masse, making an already traumatic situation for parents and kids all the more chaotic.

“It just confirms that the real policy and attitude of dehumanization of this population,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

DHS and HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.

Michelle Brané, director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission

The Trump administration has admitted that it didn’t have a proper system to track separated families across both DHS and HHS. HHS is responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children, including those taken from their families at the border.

In April, after an internal watchdog report revealed the Trump administration had likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously known, HHS officials said it could take up to two years to identify them because of the disorganized data. In a court filing, a deputy director at HHS called the process of tracking down these children a “burden” and said the department didn’t have enough staff to take on the project.

During family separation, DHS’s IT system did not have the ability to properly label separated family members or track them after they were split up, according to the inspector general report. As a result, employees came up with various ad hoc methods of tracking families. But they were not standardized across the department and caused widespread confusion once the data reached ICE officers.

Agents were also not properly trained on how to use the existing technology, and mistakes were rampant. Shortly after the zero tolerance policy was implemented, eight children were separately entered into the system despite being from the same family, according to the report. There was also no plan to reunify families post-separation, despite the fact that parents were being deported without their children.

While the stated goal of the zero tolerance policy was to prevent immigrants from being apprehended and released into the U.S. while they awaited legal proceedings ― a process derisively known as “catch-and-release” ― the result was that children were traumatized and detained for record amounts of time.

Brané said the government has still failed to take accountability for its faulty tracking system and the lifelong trauma it has caused these families.

“There was an affirmative decision not to record,” she said. “They continue to drag their feet and act defensive as though this was some sort of natural disaster that happened to them that they didn’t respond to in the best way.”

Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? Here’s how.

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So, the victims of these human rights violations continue to suffer while the regime’s “perps” go free and even brag about their White Nationalist racist dehumanization actions. Some are still in Government positions, others are giving speeches, and the evil mastermind of “zero tolerance” Jeff Sessions is running for office. Incredibly, Sessions was actually in charge of insuring that our Government complied with the law and respected individual rights. Instead, he carried out a Jim Crow racist program of human rights abuses, demeaning the Department of Justice and the rule of law in the process. How does this make sense?

This happens when regime flunkies believe that they will never be held accountable for their actions and abuses. Obviously, that’s a view that starts with their Supreme Leader and his party of enabling sycophants.

PWS

11-30-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” UPDATE: SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION JUDGES STAND UP AGAINST TRUMP REGIME’S LAWLESS BEHAVIOR — Elsewhere Along The Border, Most Judges Appear To “Go Along To Get Along” With White Nationalist Agenda!

https://apple.news/A8ArjPBJHQmSHq_XVgoRjKw

Alicia A. Caldwell reports for the WSJ:

U.S.

Judges Quietly Disrupt Trump Immigration Policy in San Diego

Immigration court terminates more than a third of ‘Remain in Mexico’ cases

SAN DIEGO—Immigration judges in this city are presenting a challenge to the Trump administration’s policy of sending asylum-seeking migrants back to Mexico, terminating such cases at a significantly higher rate than in any other court, according to federal data.

Between January and the end of September, immigration judges in San Diego terminated 33% of more than 12,600 Migrant Protection Protocols cases, also known as Remain in Mexico, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Judges in El Paso, Texas, the busiest court hearing MPP cases, terminated fewer than 1% of their more than 14,000 cases.

The nine San Diego judges have repeatedly ruled that asylum seekers waiting in Mexico weren’t properly notified of their court dates or that other due process rights were violated.

The high rate of dismissals is undermining the Trump administration’s goal of quickly ordering the deportation of more illegal border crossers who request asylum, including those who don’t show up from Mexico for their court hearings.

The effect is more symbolic than practical. Such a decision doesn’t mean a migrant is allowed to stay in the U.S., even if they show up for their court hearing. Instead, it saves them from being banned from coming to the country for 10 years and makes it tougher for the government to charge them with a felony if they cross the border illegally in the future. Those whose case is dismissed when they aren’t in court might not even know about the decision unless they call a government hotline.

Spokespeople for Customs and Border Protection, which carries out MPP at the border, and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.

However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose lawyers represent the government in immigration Court, have filed an appeal with a Justice Department panel. The appeal questions whether judges who terminate cases for migrants who don’t show up in court made a mistake.

A spokeswoman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the immigration court’s parent agency, said immigration judges don’t comment on their rulings.

Denise Gilman, an immigration lawyer and director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, said the high number of dismissals in San Diego sends a message that judges there believe many government’s cases don’t meet minimum legal standards.

That stands in contrast to immigration judges elsewhere, experts and advocates said.

“Everywhere but in San Diego, [judges] are going with the flow,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer and policy analyst with the American Immigration Council, which opposes the Trump administration’s border policies.

Immigration judges are unlike most other judges in that they are civil servants, neither appointed nor elected. In civil courts, some jurisdictions are known as more plaintiff- or defendant-friendly. Some federal appeals courts skew left or right, but most don’t rule so frequently on a single policy as immigration judges on MPP.

The Trump administration has sent more than 55,000 asylum-seeking migrants to Mexico to await court hearings under MPP. Migrants were first turned back in January, and through the end of September, just over 5,000 have been ordered deported. Eleven were granted some sort of relief, including asylum, according to TRAC.

Over two recent days in San Diego, multiple judges made clear that they had concerns about Remain in Mexico program as they dismissed cases.

Judge Scott Simpson terminated cases for a family of three from Honduras after ruling that the government violated their due process rights by not properly filling out their notice to appear. As a result, he said, the migrants didn’t know the grounds on which they could fight their case.

“I found that the charging document was defective on a technicality,” Judge Simpson explained to Belma Marible Coto Ceballos and her two children. “It just means that your court case is over.”

MORE ON IMMIGRATION

• Bipartisan House Deal Opens Path to Citizenship for Illegal Immigrant Farmworkers

• Immigrant-Visa Applicants Required to Show They Can Afford Health Care

• U.S. Immigration Courts’ Backlog Exceeds One Million Cases

• New Trump Administration Rule Will Look at Immigrants’ Credit Histories

Ms. Coto quietly nodded as she listened to an interpreter before her attorney, Carlos Martinez, objected to the government’s plan to send the family back to Mexico while it appeals the termination. She and her children are afraid to return, Mr. Martinez explained, after Ms. Coto was assaulted in Tijuana.

Judge Simpson said he didn’t have the authority to keep the family in the U.S., but sought assurances that authorities would interview Ms. Coto about her fears of being sent back to Mexico.

During a separate hearing that same day, 10 MPP cases were closed by Judge Christine A. Bither, who also raised questions about the migrants’ addresses listed on government documents. She denied a government request to issue deportation orders in their absence.

Judge Simpson, meanwhile, repeatedly questioned how the government would update migrants in Mexico about their cases. Migrants routinely move between shelters or cities and don’t have a fixed address where they can receive mail.

He noted that migrants’ addresses are routinely listed on government documents as “domicilio conocido,” or general delivery in Spanish. In one case, he noted that “domicilio conocido” was misspelled for a migrant family that arrived late to the port of entry and missed the bus to immigration court. The government agreed to dismiss that case.

Write to Alicia A. Caldwell at Alicia.Caldwell@wsj.com

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As noted in the article, the issues raised by the San Diego rulings are now before the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”). Even if the BIA Appellate Immigration Judges “do the right thing” and reject the DHS appeal, I’m relatively sure that Billy Barr will change the result so that the DHS “wins” (and justice “loses”) no matter what the law says.

Larger question: a system where the biased prosecutor gets to hire and supervise the “judges” and then change the result if the individual nevertheless wins is obviously unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment. So whatever happened to the Article III Courts whose job it is to uphold the Constitution and enforce the Bill of Rights against Executive overreach (which is exactly why the Bill of Rights was included in our Constitution)? Why are those gifted with life-tenure so feckless in the face of clear Executive tyranny?

Some Immigration Judges who lack life tenure and the other protections given to Article III judges are willing to stand up; those who are empowered so they can stand up instead stand by and watch injustice unfold every day in this fundamentally unfair system that is an insult to Constitutional Due Process, a mockery of justice, and a disgrace to their oaths of office!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

PWS

THANKSGIVING WISH: JUSTICE FOR THOSE HELD IN TRUMP’S DEADLY “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — DHS KID KILLERS: CDC TELLS CBP TO VACCINATE DETAINED MIGRANTS: CBP Chooses To Kill Kids & Spread Disease!

https://apple.news/Ag7KzWmcGSWqY5RAzCSzygg

Robert Moore reports in the WashPost:

CDC recommended that migrants receive flu vaccine, but CBP rejected the idea

EL PASO — As influenza spread through migrant detention facilities last winter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that U.S. Customs and Border Protection vaccinate detained migrants against the virus, a push that CBP rejected, according to a newly released letter to Congress.

The CDC recommendation was revealed in a letter from the agency to Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC. The agency’s director, Robert Redfield, issued the letter Nov. 7 in response to questions DeLauro posed last month after the flu had taken a toll on migrants in U.S. custody during the past year.

An 8-year-old Guatemalan boy died of the flu while being detained near El Paso in December, a month before the CDC’s vaccination recommendation. In the months after CBP rejected the recommendation, at least two children — one in El Paso and one in Weslaco, Tex. — died after being diagnosed with the flu in Border Patrol custody, autopsy reports showed. Influenza outbreaks in Border Patrol detention facilities continued through May, sickening hundreds of people, including agents and detainees.

DeLauro said CBP’s continuing refusal to provide flu vaccines to detained migrants is “unconscionable,” especially given Trump administration policies and migrant influxes that at times have caused U.S. facilities to be significantly overcrowded.

“CDC’s recommendations are clear: flu vaccines should be administered to people as soon as possible to prevent the spread of this deadly disease,” she said. “Worse still, administration policies that kept families locked in cages for extended periods of time greatly increased their risk of illness.”

Officials with CBP have never provided immunizations for detained migrants and does not plan to do so now, according to Kelly Cahalan, an agency spokeswoman.

“CBP has significantly expanded medical support efforts, and now has more than 250 medical personnel engaged along the Southwest border. To try and layer a comprehensive vaccinations system on to that would be logistically very challenging for a number of reasons,” she said. “The system and process for implementing vaccines — for supply chains, for quality control, for documentation, for informed consent, for adverse reactions — is complex, and those programs are already in place at other steps in the immigration process as appropriate.”

The two agencies that hold migrants for extended periods, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, provide flu vaccines. Adults and families who cross the U.S. border increasingly are being sent back to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols program before they are turned over to ICE and thus do not get vaccinated. Unaccompanied children generally go to ORR shelters.

A Trump administration strategy led to the child migrant backup crisis at the border

The CDC recommends that most people in the United States age 6 months and older receive a flu vaccination, as it is the primary preventive measure against what can be a potentially severe illness. In the 2018-2019 flu season, nearly 63 percent of children under the age of 18 received the flu vaccine and just more than 45 percent of adults received the vaccine.

CDC officials visited Border Patrol detention facilities in El Paso and Yuma, Ariz., in December and January, at CBP’s request. The CDC’s January report warned that because of inadequate medical infrastructure in the facilities, “illness in the Border Patrol facilities stresses both the Border Patrol staff and community medical infrastructure.”

The report made nine recommendations for minimizing the spread of the flu, and CBP adopted many of them, including expanding medical staff at detention facilities and increasing flu surveillance.

But CBP did not implement a recommendation for an aggressive vaccination program that would prioritize children and pregnant women.

Brazilian families spent weeks in tent-like border facility, far longer than typical

In his Nov. 7 letter to DeLauro, Redfield reiterated the vaccination recommendation: “CDC recommends that priority should be given to the screening and isolation of ill migrants, early antiviral treatment, and flu vaccinations for all staff. CDC further recommends influenza vaccination at the earliest feasible point of entry for all persons at least six months of age, which is in concurrence with our general influenza vaccine recommendations.”

Other health experts also have recommended vaccines for migrants detained by CBP, especially children. A group of physicians that reviewed autopsy reports of children who died in CBP custody made that recommendation in an August letter to DeLauro and others in Congress.

A new report from the Brookings Institution warns that risk factors such as lackluster sanitation, overcrowding and poor nutrition are creating a “perfect storm” of conditions in CBP detention facilities that could lead to severe outbreaks of the flu and other communicable diseases. The report recommends vaccinating detained migrants as a way of limiting outbreaks.

Robert Moore is a freelance journalist based in El Paso.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

© 1996-2019 The Washington Post\

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Trump’s White Nationalist “DUD” (“Detain Until Dead”) policy in action! Might also include in your Thanksgiving thoughts those abused under Trump’s “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” program as well as those who will soon be “orbited” to potential harm or death under bogus “Dangerous Third Country Agreements.”

Will Markie “Fund My TGIF” Morgan and his fellow killers, child abusers, and human rights abusers at DHS ever be held accountable for their arrogant misdeeds in Trump’s service? Don’t count on it. But, removing this truly cruel, immoral, and otherwise horrible group of “kakistocrats” and their Supreme Leader in 2020 is both possible and necessary for the continued existence of our country and would be a service to the future of the human race.

Doesn’t mean it will happen; but, our nation might not survive if it doesn’t.

Give thanks for the New Due Process Army!

Due Process Forever; New American Gulag Never!

Happy Thanksgiving,

PWS

11-28-19

IT’S NEVER BEEN ABOUT “LEGAL V. ILLEGAL,” “BORDER SECURITY,” “JOBS,” OR “GETTING IN (NON-EXISTENT) LINES” — The Trump Regime Has Always Been About A White Nationalist Immigration Agenda Of Hate!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-no-other-way-to-explain-trumps-immigration-policy-its-just-bigotry/2019/11/25/348b38f4-0fcc-11ea-9cd7-a1becbc82f5e_story.html

Catherine Rampell in the WashPost:

November 25, 2019 at 7:58 p.m. EST

It was never about protecting the border, rule of law or the U.S. economy. And it was never about “illegal” immigration, for that matter.

Trump’s anti-immigrant bigotry was always just anti-immigrant bigotry.

There’s no other way to explain the Trump administration’s latest onslaught against foreigners of all kinds, regardless of their potential economic contributions, our own international commitments or any given immigrant’s propensity to follow the law. Trump’s rhetoric may focus on “illegals,” but recent data releases suggest this administration has been blocking off every available avenue for legal immigration, too.

Last month, the number of refugees admitted to the United States hit zero. That’s the first month on record this has ever happened, according to data going back nearly three decades from both the State Department and World Relief, a faith-based resettlement organization.

So what happened?

The problem wasn’t that the 26-million-strong global refugee population lacked a single person who met America’s strict screening requirements. No, our admissions flatlined because Trump announced and then delayed signing a new refugee ceiling for the 2020 fiscal year. This delay led to a complete moratorium on admissions.

Hundreds of flights were canceled for approved refugees who had waited years or decades to come — once again, legally — to our shining city on a hill. As the moratorium dragged on, some refugees’ eligibility expired. At least four were minors who have now turned 18. This means they’ve aged out of the resettlement program they were accepted under and now must get back in line, perhaps indefinitely, to reapply under a different system as adults.

By the way, when Trump finally did sign off on that new fiscal 2020 refugee ceiling, it was for a mere 18,000 admissions. That too is an all-time low. The Trump administration has also thrown up other roadblocks for refugees, such as allowing states and localities to veto any resettlements within their borders. (This policy is being challenged in court.)

Trump supporters might argue that, whatever our moral obligations to the world’s destitute and desperate, the president is merely keeping immigrants out to protect our economy.

They are wrong.

The Trump administration’s own research — which it attempted to suppress — found that refugees are a net positive for the U.S. economy and government budgets. That is, over the course of a decade, refugees pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.

The Trump administration is also turning away categories of legal would-be immigrants who are historically admitted because they are economically valuable.

Last week, for instance, we learned that enrollment of new international students has fallen more than 10 percent over the past three years, according to the Institute of International Education.

This is a shame. Higher education has been one of our most successful industries, adding $45 billion to the U.S. economy last year alone. International students spend money in the local economies where they study — on lodging, food, books, entertainment. They are also more likely to pay full freight in tuition. This means they cross-subsidize American students, especially in states where public education funding has fallen.

International students are also more likely to major in high-demand STEM fields, providing U.S. employers with a pipeline of talent that supports the jobs of native-born Americans.

New international student enrollment is declining for a number of reasons, including high tuition and fear of campus gun violence. But the barrier most frequently cited by universities lately is problems with the visa-application process. Meanwhile, other developed countries, such as Canada and Australia, are poaching students who might otherwise have contributed their talents here.

These are hardly the only signs we’re discouraging or denying legions of desirable and legal would-be immigrants.

Denial rates for H-1B visas — awarded to high-skilled workers — have more than doubled since Trump took office, according to tabulations from National Foundation for American Policy. Processing delays for citizenship applications have doubled. Naturalization and visa fees have skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, when families apply for their legal right to asylum at the border, we tell them to await processing in Mexico, in a region so dangerous that Americans are instructed not to visit. (“Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common,” the State Department website advises.)

There, asylum seekers live outdoors, in filthy, flooded, freezing tents. Agonized parents send sick and frostbitten toddlers to cross into the U.S. alone, because they fear they’ll die waiting in Mexico.

And if these desperate families don’t like living in squalor, we tell them they should just return home, get in line and apply through another legal route into the United States. Perhaps as refugees, students or workers.

As though there were still such routes to be found.

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

It’s institutionalized hate, racism, sexism, lawlessness, and cruelty.

One of the worst things is that’s it’s basically enabled by Federal Appellate Courts who see the same problems as many U.S. District Judge do, but “go along to get along” by “normalizing” Trump’s disgraceful racist behavior and “deferring” to pretextual Executive actions that are merely facades for a dishonest, illegal, and unconstitutional White Nationalist agenda. Sort of reminds me of the bogus “separate but equal” doctrine of judicial cowardice.

Apparently, too many life-tenured Article IIIs in the ivory tower think that they and their privileged circles will escape the gratuitous harm being inflicted on our nation and on vulnerable individuals by a scofflaw executive. Certainly, not unlike the enabling white male judges and Supreme Court Justices who “looked the other way” and thereby enabled Jim Crow regimes to corruptly use our legal system to disenfranchise, murder, oppress, and otherwise abuse African American citizens.

Where has judicial courage among the higher levels of our Federal Judiciary gone?

PWS

11-26-19

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: HOW TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME SEIZED CONTROL OF THE IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY & IS USING IT TO RE-CREATE 1924 & PROMOTE ITS AGENDA OF RACIST HATE — Who Needs Legislation When You Have GOP Obstructionists In Congress & Feckless Federal Courts?

https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/invisible-wall/

Rachel Morris writes in Highline:

IN THE TWO YEARS AND 308 DAYS THAT DONALD Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from Texas to California, there is no blockade of unscalable steel slats in heat-retaining matte black, no electrified spikes, no moat and no crocodiles. The animating force of Trump’s entire presidency—the idea that radiated a warning of dangerous bigotry to his opponents and a promise of unapologetic nativism to his supporters—will never be built in the way he imagined.

And it doesn’t matter. In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall.

In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.

Before Trump was elected, there was virtually no support within either party for policies that make it harder for foreigners to come here legally. For decades, the Republican consensus has favored tough border security along with high levels of legal immigration. The party’s small restrictionist wing protested from the margins, but it was no match for a pro-immigration coalition encompassing business interests, unions and minority groups. In 2013, then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment that would have lowered the number of people who qualified for green cards and work visas. It got a single vote in committee—his own. As a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security observed, “If you told me these guys would be able to change the way the U.S. does immigration in two years, I would have laughed.”

. . . .

In November, Cuccinelli was promoted to DHS deputy acting secretary. Kathy Nuebel Kovarik became acting deputy at USCIS and Robert Law, the former FAIR lobbyist, ascended to the head of the policy office. The agency has promised a new flurry of major policy changes before the end of the year. And in what is perhaps the purest expression of the administration’s intentions so far, it started sending Central American asylum seekers to Guatemala with no access to an attorney, no review by an immigration court, far away from the border infrastructure of activists and reporters and lawyers or any form of help at all.

IT’S EASY ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE NONE of the Trump administration’s reforms are entrenched in law, they can be overturned as quickly as they were introduced. And yet even though, in theory, the policy memos can all be withdrawn, the “sheer number of both significant and less significant changes is overwhelming,” said Jaddou, the former USCIS chief counsel. “It will take an ambitious plan over a series of years to undo it all.” Formal regulations, like the third-country asylum rule and public charge rule, if it succeeds, will be especially hard to unravel.

The institutional implications run deeper. The backlog of delayed cases will likely take several years to get under control. The administration has promoted six judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates to the Justice Department’s immigration appeals court, including one who threatened to set a dog on a 2-year-old child for failing to be quiet in his courtroom. Those appointments are permanent.

The refugee program, too, will take years to rebuild. The plunge in admissions caused a plunge in funding to the nine resettlement agencies, which have closed more than 100 offices around the country since 2016. That’s a third of their capacity, according to a report by Refugees Council USA. “The whole infrastructure is deteriorating,” said Rodriguez, the former USCIS director. Because the application process is so lengthy, even if a new administration raises refugee admissions on day one, it would take as long as five years before increased numbers of people actually make it to the United States. Consider that in January 2017, the State Department briefly paused in-bound flights for refugees who had finally made it through the gauntlet of health, security and other checks. As of this summer, some of those refugees were still waiting to leave. While the flights were grounded, they missed the two-month window during which all of their documents were current. When one document expires, it can take months to replace, causing others to expire and trapping the refugee in what the report called “a domino effect of expiring validity periods.”

Even harder to repair is the culture shift within USCIS. New visa adjudicators will remain in their jobs long after the political appointees have gone—kings and queens of their own offices. Employees who were promoted for their skeptical inclinations will stay in those positions, setting priorities for subordinates. The multitude of changes at USCIS are the product of an administration that regards immigration as its political lifeblood. There’s no guarantee—or indication—that any of the potential Democratic nominees would apply the same obsessive zeal to overturning them.

Back in 1924, Johnson-Reed’s supporters never anticipated the Holocaust, and yet they expanded its horrors. We don’t know where our own future is headed, but we live in a time of metastasizing instability. Last year, the United Nations’ official tally of refugees passed 70 million, the highest since World War II. Mass migrations, whether because of violence or inequality or environmental calamity or some murky blend of factors that don’t conveniently fit existing laws, are the reality and challenge of our era. There aren’t any easy solutions. But already, what started as a series of small, obscure administrative changes is resulting in unthinkable cruelty. If left to continue, it will, in every sense, redefine what it means to be American.

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

Read Rachel’s entire, much longer, article at the link.

Building Due Process and fundamental fairness is a painstaking incremental process that takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve. Destroying it can happen basically overnight.

This should never have happened if the Supremes had stood up to the Administration’s unconstitutional, factually bogus, racist, religiously targeted “Travel Ban” instead of green-lighting the return of “Jim Crow 2” under a clearly pretextual and fabricated “national security” facade. Judicial complicity and task avoidance enables cruelty and the destruction of democratic institutions (including, ultimately, the independent judiciary). That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is in it for the long run!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever. White Nationalism Never! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

11-26-19

PROFESSOR KAREN MUSALO @ LA TIMES: We Can Restore Legality & Humanity To U.S. Asylum Law — That’s Why The Refugee Protection Act Deserves Everyone’s Support — “The bill lays out a plan to allow women and girls fleeing gender-based violence the opportunity to obtain asylum, and bring our country back in line with its humanitarian commitments. It’s a vision that all members of Congress should be able to get behind, even at a time of bitter partisanship.”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=55eeae6e-b617-4ffd-b041-a54c15a3ada7&v=sdk

Professor Musalo writes in the LA Times:

Every day, courageous women and girls arrive at our southern border seeking refuge from unimaginable violence. Under our laws, they have the right to apply for asylum and have their cases heard. But rather than offering protection, the Trump administration is determined to send them back to the countries they have fought so hard to escape.

On Thursday, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) introduced the Refugee Protection Act. The bill lays out a plan to allow women and girls fleeing gender-based violence the opportunity to obtain asylum, and bring our country back in line with its humanitarian commitments. It’s a vision that all members of Congress should be able to get behind, even at a time of bitter partisanship.

It’s no secret that this administration is systematically dismantling our asylum law. Women and children have borne the brunt of the suffering — from the egregious policies of family separation and “Remain in Mexico,” to the quiet publication of decisions by the attorney general that have closed door after door to those seeking safety.

The Refugee Protection Act would rectify many of these inhumane actions, and includes language to reverse recent decisions that have made it nearly impossible for women fleeing domestic violence or gang brutality to qualify as refugees.

One of those decisions — known as Matter of A-B- — was handed down by then-Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in 2018. That decision has been used to limit the legal definition of “refugee” in an attempt to eliminate the possibility of asylum in the U.S. for victims of domestic violence, sex trafficking and other gender-based human rights violations. Since then, we have seen asylum approval rates plummet for women, children and families arriving at our southern border.

The Matter of A-B- case involves a domestic violence survivor from El Salvador who fears she will be killed if she is sent back to her country. My organization, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, has represented A.B. in her asylum case for nearly two years.

In El Salvador, A.B., a courageous and resilient woman, endured over 15 years of beatings, rapes, death threats and psychological abuse at the hands of her husband. She secured a divorce and even moved to another part of El Salvador, desperate to escape her abuser. But no matter where she went, he tracked her down. When she requested a restraining order, the police provided her one — and told her to hand-deliver it to him. Fearing that he would make good on his threat to kill her, she fled to the United States.

In 2016, A.B. was granted asylum by the highest administrative tribunal in the immigration system, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals. But in a highly unusual procedural move, Sessions seized upon A.B.’s case, overturned the grant of asylum, and used it to declare that the United States should no longer extend protection to domestic violence survivors.

A.B. has appealed Sessions’ action, but until a final decision is reached, she remains terrified that she will be deported. Countless other women who have made the arduous journey to the United States also face a hostile immigration system and, post-Matter of A-B-, an even harder legal battle.

Congress has an opportunity to correct this. The new bill would clarify legal requirements for asylum and provide clear guidance for cases involving gender-based violence. It would ensure that asylum seekers like A.B. get a fair opportunity to argue her claim before a judge.

The United States has a long history of giving refuge to people who’ve come to our shores. This measure would be a step toward restoring that tradition.

Karen Musalo is a law professor and the founding director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law. She is also lead coauthor of “Refugee Law and Policy: An International and Comparative Approach (5th edition).”

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Here’s a link to an ImmigrationProf Blog summary and the text of the Refugee Protection Act, a recently introduced bill:

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/11/karen-musalo-restore-asylum-for-women-fleeing-abuse-and-death-.html

PWS

11-24-19

WHITE NATIONALIST ADMINISTRATION, CORRUPT BUREAUCRATS, FECKLESS FEDERAL JUDGES COMBINE TO COMMIT “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” AGAINST LEGAL ASYLUM APPLICANTS UNDER “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” PROGRAM — “[R]eturning home would be suicide.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-squalid-mexico-tent-city-asylum-seekers-are-growing-so-desperate-theyre-sending-their-children-over-the-border-alone/2019/11/22/9e5044ec-0c92-11ea-8054-289aef6e38a3_story.html

Kevin. Sieff reports for the WashPost:

November 22, 2019 at 3:43 p.m. EST

MATAMOROS, Mexico — In the middle of the largest refugee camp on the U.S. border — close enough to Texas that migrants can see an American flag hovering across the Rio Grande — Marili’s children had fallen ill.

Josue was 5. Madeline was 3. The small family was huddled together in a nylon camping tent with two blankets last week when the temperature sank to 37 degrees. The children started coughing, Marili said. Then their fingers and toes turned bright red. The camp’s doctor had begun to see cases of frostbite.

Like most of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers at the informal camp, Marili and her children had crossed the border into the United States this summer only to be sent back to Mexico to await their asylum cases — part of a year-old U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols.

In recent weeks, dozens of parents have watched as their children, sleeping outside in the cold, have become sick or despondent. Many decided to get them help the only way they knew how — sending them across the border alone. As Josue and Madeline grew sicker, it was Marili’s turn to make a decision.

USAID helped set up microfinance in Guatemala. Now it’s funding illegal migration.

These cases illustrate the human toll of the Trump administration’s policy and suggest the United States, Mexico and the United Nations were unprepared to handle many of the unforeseen consequences.

Marili, fleeing gang violence in Honduras, knew that unaccompanied children were admitted into the United States without enduring the MPP bureaucracy and the months-long wait. The 29-year-old mother — who, like others here, asked not to be identified by her last name, for fear it could affect her asylum case — believed that returning home would be suicide. So she bundled up her children in all of their donated winter clothes and scrawled a letter to U.S. immigration officials on a torn piece of paper.

“My children are very sick and exposed to many risks in Mexico,” she wrote. “I don’t have any other way to get them to safety.”

She pressed the letter into Josue’s hand, she said, and pointed the children to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the middle of the Gateway International Bridge, the span across the Rio Grande that connects Matamoros to Brownsville, Tex.

“Josue told me, ‘Please don’t send us,’ ” Marili said, crying at the memory. “But as a mother, I knew it was the best decision for them.”

Then she sprinted to the bottom of the bridge and watched through the fence as her children turned themselves in, weeping and wondering when she would see them again, hoping they would find their way to her husband. He had entered the United States and applied for asylum before MPP was implemented. He was allowed to stay.

When they filed their asylum claim, they were told to wait in Mexico. There, they say, they were kidnapped.

In the past three weeks, migrants and aid workers say, at least 50 children have made the same crossing. The Washington Post interviewed the parents of 20 of them. On Tuesday morning, three more children were sent over. On Wednesday, another three. From tent to tent, families now talk openly about whether and when they will send their children.

More than 47,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico since MPP started in January. Through September, 9,974 cases had been completed; only 11 migrants, or 0.1 percent, had received asylum, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University.

“It’s becoming clear to us that this whole thing is a lie,” said Reyna, 38, who sent her 15-year-old daughter, Yoisie, across the border last week. “They tell us to wait and wait and wait, but no one here gets asylum.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not return calls seeking comment.

Asylum seekers began sleeping out in the wooded field here at the base of the international bridge in August. They receive no assistance from the United States or the United Nations. They rely instead on tents, clothing and food donated by a group of American retirees and medical attention from a nonprofit group whose one doctor sits under a blue tarp.

U.N. officials say they were told months ago that the migrants would be moved by the Mexican government to better conditions. It hasn’t happened.

“We started hearing about the situation, but we just didn’t have enough capacity to help,” said Dora Giusti, the head of child protection at UNICEF in Mexico. “And the Mexican government kept saying [the migrants] would be moved out of the state, so we were waiting to see if we could respond there.”

The U.N. refugee agency says border cities in Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, “are among the most insecure and dangerous in the country, which has limited our actions on the ground.”

A 19-year-old Salvadoran woman wanted to reunite with her father in California. She was shot dead in Mexico.

The municipal government opened a shelter at an indoor basketball court last month. With a capacity of 300, it’s already full. It’s also miles from the bridge, making it more difficult for migrants to reach the border for their court dates, or to meet with pro-bono lawyers. Every day, the U.S. government sends dozens of migrants to Matamoros under MPP. They are taken directly to the encampment and often sleep outside until they find a tent.

The camp consists of hundreds of tents clustered together on a spit of sidewalk and a stretch of scrubland along the Rio Grande. There are only a few showers, so many people bathe and wash their clothes in the river. Once a dead cow floated by and became lodged next to the camp. Another time, the headless corpse of a man washed ashore.

A cold front settled here for three days last week. Immediately, children started getting sick.

Gabrielle, 15 — from San Pedro Sula, Honduras — started coughing. Sarai, 12 — also from Honduras, from Santa Rosa de Copan — was vomiting. Valeria, 5 — from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa — developed a fever and became despondent.

Global Response Management, the Florida-based nonprofit that runs the small medical clinic under the blue tarp, saw a surge in patients, most of them children. The most common cases were respiratory illnesses, said Megan Algeo, the doctor on call at the time. In one case, Algeo said, she persuaded U.S. immigration agents to admit a child for emergency care.

Elderly Mexicans are visiting their undocumented children in Mexico — with the help of the State Department

Parents in different parts of the camp decided it wasn’t fair to keep their children here. Some joined a Facebook group called Mothers in Search of Asylum to discuss their options and what would happen if their children crossed the border alone.

“I kept thinking, my daughter is going to die here,” said Blanca, Valeria’s mother.

They all had relatives in the United States. Their idea was to send their children to live with spouses, siblings, cousins while they waited in Matamoros to complete the asylum process. They worried about another cold front, or another flood (there was one in September), or cartel-sponsored kidnappings.

Gabrielle walked across the bridge alone, carrying a plastic bag with her asylum papers. Sarai went with a friend. Valeria and her sister, Anahi, 7, crossed together, holding hands.

All are now in shelters in different parts of the United States. Under U.S. policy, children who enter the country unaccompanied are taken into government custody until authorities can connect them with relatives to whom they can be released.

Glady Cañas, who runs Helping Them Triumph, one of the few humanitarian organizations at the camp, tries to persuade parents not to send their children alone.

“Why did you send your child?” she demanded of Israel, Gabrielle’s father.

Israel, 40, stared at the ground. They were standing in front of his blue tent.

“She was sick,” he said. “We were desperate. A child can’t wait here for a year like this.”

Cañas hugged him.

“I personally don’t agree with what they are doing,” she said later. “A child needs their parents. But when you look around here, you understand the desperation.”

Falling coffee prices drive Guatemalan migration to the United States

For many families here, the children — and the threats against them — were the reason they fled their countries in the first place.

Victor, 28, left El Salvador with his daughter, Arleth, now 10, after she was sexually assaulted by a man affiliated with a local gang. Victor pressed charges. He carries court documents and hospital records that substantiate the case in alarming detail. The man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “sexual aggression of a minor,” one court transcript says.

As soon as he was sentenced, Victor said, gang members came after the family. In August, they fled.

Victor and Arleth were sent back to Matamoros on Aug. 28, before tents were available. They spent 15 days sleeping outside. Eventually, he found a job in a Chinese restaurant earning $7 per day. He saved up and bought a camping tent.

But after two months, Arleth was sick, vomiting all the time. Their tent had flooded twice in the rain. After her assault, she struggled to remain calm in large groups of people, and she hated walking across the camp to use one of the portable toilets.

Victor took her several times to the Doctors Without Borders nurse who came to the camp twice a week. But she never improved.

Their ancestors fled U.S. slavery for Mexico. Now they’re looking north again.

In late September, on Arleth’s 10th birthday, Victor bought her a cake and five candles. He asked someone in a neighboring tent to take a picture of them smiling.

When her health did not improve, Victor asked her what she thought of crossing alone.

“She told me: ‘Dad, I just want to be out of this place. I want to be in the United States,’ ” he said.

Lawyers working in the camp have recently become aware of the many parents choosing to send their children alone.

“These parents have been forced to consider an unthinkable choice — to save their children by sending them into the U.S. alone or to keep them in northern Mexico, where they will be exposed to severe illness, kidnapping, torture and rape,” said Rochelle Garza of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

During the last week of October, Victor walked Arleth to the edge of the international bridge and watched her shuffle toward U.S. immigration agents.

“We had never been apart,” he said later, crying. “Her entire life, we had always been together. . . .

“People might hear what I did and think I’m a bad parent. But it’s the opposite. I did this for my daughter because we had no other choice to save her.”

For a week he didn’t hear from her. Then she called his mother back in El Salvador. She was at a government shelter somewhere in Texas. The details were hazy.

His mother recorded a message from daughter to father.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’m okay,” she said. “I hope that soon you’ll be with me.”

He played the message over and over and cried.

“The truth is I don’t have much confidence that my case is going to work out,” he said. “I’m fighting it for her. But I don’t know.”

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

The Trump Administration response: Expand the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” to additional locations near Tucson, Arizona.

It’s a national disgrace unfolding before our eyes, getting worse every day!

PWS

11-23-19

TRUMP REGIME ORDERS OFFICERS TO IGNORE EVIDENCE, VIOLATE HUMAN RIGHTS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS — “‘We are being asked to violate human rights,’” the asylum officer told BuzzFeed News.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/asylum-officers-guatemala-deport-central-guidance

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

US immigration officers implementing a Trump administration plan to deport asylum-seekers from Central America to Guatemala were provided materials this week detailing the dangers faced by those in the country, including gangs, violence, and killings with “high levels of impunity.”

The “resource guide” on Guatemala was given to asylum officers as part of materials to implement a controversial policy to deport adult asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala. The guide, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, relies primarily on public sources: academic publications, research from Human Rights Watch and other organizations, and news reports.

A Human Rights Watch report from 2018 that was included in the guide for asylum officers, said “Violence and extortion by powerful criminal organizations remain serious problems in Guatemala. Gang-related violence is an important factor prompting people, including unaccompanied youth, to leave the country.”

The research provided to the officers confirmed some of their worst fears about sending people to the country.

“Being told to send asylum-seekers to Guatemala without even a screening on their claim while also being given research explaining, in detail, the incredible danger that exists throughout the country is extensively frustrating,” said one asylum officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “This agreement feels like a pretext to get rid of as many asylum claims as possible.”

Emilio Espejel / AP

Central American migrants wait at the El Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico.

The Trump administration began this week carrying out its controversial new policy of deporting to Guatemala adults from El Salvador and Honduras who have sought asylum at the southern US border. DHS officials confirmed an initial flight to Guatemala in a Thursday press briefing.

The Trump administration says the plan is a key element in its strategy to deter migration at the border and another method to restrict asylum-seekers from entering the US. Advocates and asylum officers previously told BuzzFeed News that the unprecedented plan lacks legality and organization, and will lead immigrants to be placed in dangerous circumstances.

“Data from Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office shows that nearly 8,400 extortion complaints were filed in 2017, but less than 700 convictions made,” reads one research paper linked in the guide to asylum officers on extortion issues in the country. “Amid such high levels of impunity, fear of reprisals for not paying extortion demands is a huge concern among victims.” A link to a Guardian article titled “Guatemala in grip of ‘mafia coalition,’ says UN body in scathing corruption report,” is also included, among other stories detailing major safety issues in the country.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials included the guidance in an email to asylum officers across the country Wednesday morning in a notice that implementation of the policy would begin, according to a copy of the email provided to BuzzFeed News.

Under the policy, border officials in the El Paso, Texas, area will refer a small number of adult asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras who have recently arrived at the border to asylum officers for interviews, according to two sources with knowledge of the process.

BuzzFeed News recently revealed that, up until late last week, Department of Homeland Security officials were still scrambling to resolve critical details about the Guatemala plan. “There is uncertainty as to who will provide orientation services for migrants as well as who will provide shelter, food, transportation, and other care,” read a DHS brief drafted for Acting Secretary Chad Wolf in the run-up to a meeting Friday with Guatemala Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart.

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and has the sixth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world. Nearly half of the country suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the prevalence reaching about 70% in some indigenous areas, according to a 2018 report from USAID.

The country has struggled with violence but has seen a drop in murders in recent years, with a homicide rate of 22.4 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the US had a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000.

“We are being asked to violate human rights,” the asylum officer told BuzzFeed News.

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

Summary: Government officials routinely and openly violate human rights of asylum seekers and other migrants with impunity.

Sounds like something out of the Country Reports for some of the repressive states that I used to deal with in deciding asylum cases as an Immigration Judge.

Now, it describes the United States.

Even before Trump, the U.S. had a rather poor record of holding human rights violators accountable. The folks who mapped out the clearly illegal “torture program” during the Bush II Administration were never held accountable. Indeed, several of them were actually rewarded despite their involvement in immoral and illegal actions.

PWS

11-22-19

AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL “COURT” SYSTEM WHERE POLITICOS & PROSECUTORS DETERMINE JURISDICTION CONTINUES TO DISPENSE INJUSTICE IN LIFE OR DEATH MATTERS AS FECKLESS ARTICLE III COURTS TANK & AN EMBOLDENED ADMINISTRATION COMMITS OVERT HUMAN RIGHTS, STATUTORY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS BY RETURNING ASYLUM APPLICANTS TO UNSAFE COUNTRIES WITHOUT FUNCTIONING ASYLUM SYSTEMS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandra, VA. Nov. 21, 2019. It’s one of the most elementary principles in law: a court has jurisdiction to determine its own jurisdiction. But, in the so-called U.S. Immigration Courts, where individuals are often essentially on trial for their lives, sometimes without the benefit of legal counsel or time to prepare, Department of Justice politicos and DHS prosecutors tell the Immigration Judges what jurisdiction, if any, they possess.

Thus, in a memorandum issued on November 19, 2019, the Director of EOIR, a non-judicial “mouthpiece” for DOJ politicos that run these unconstitutional administrative “courts,” instructed Immigration Judges on the requirements of clearly fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreements” put in place by the Administration to deter, punish, and in some cases likely kill asylum applicants in dangerous, non-statutorily-qualifying countries, without credible asylum systems. He told them how and when they could exercise jurisdiction over certain cases and when they only had jurisdiction if DHS prosecutors determined in their sole discretion that it was “in the public interest.”

Remarkably, in the face of a statute that clearly gives individuals a right to apply for asylum in the U.S. “regardless of status,” the DHS now will determine whether in the exercise of their prosecutorial discretion an individual will actually be allowed to apply for asylum before an Immigration Judge. And, that clearly won’t happen often, if at all.

Otherwise, under blatantly fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements, newly arriving asylum seekers will be “orbited” to three of the most dangerous countries in the world — Guatemala, Honduras, & El Salvador — that don’t even have functioning asylum systems. Indeed, these failed states, overrun by gangs and cartels, are among the world’s most notorious “sending counties” for asylum seekers! How would countries that can’t even provide minimal protection for their own citizens and without functional asylum systems possibly provide a safe opportunity for individuals to apply for asylum? Clearly, they won’t.

Of course, the Administration has put out a litany of outrageous lies in support of its fraud. One of the most patently absurd claims is that this illegal scheme will offer asylum applicants “protection in the area” without making the “dangerous journey.”

But, there is no chance that some of the most corrupt and inept governments in the world, unable to protect their own citizens, would be able to offer reasonable protection to asylum seekers from third countries. Some of the victims of the Trump Administration’s racist malfeasance probably won’t survive long enough to even make their claims. And, there isn’t any credible process for them to apply anyway. It took the U.S. decades to develop the asylum system that Trump has now dismantled. The idea that poor countries with no expertise and resources to devote to the process will be able to adjudicate asylum claims under a comparable “fair” system doesn’t pass the “straight face test.”

Beyond that 1) the hapless individuals being returned (with no access to counsel) have already made the “dangerous journey;” and 2) the gangs and cartels operate with government acquiescence, cooperation, and/or impunity throughout the small area of the Northern Triangle. Therefore, individuals are likely to be in danger and targeted for harm, kidnapping, extortion, or all three, the minute they set foot in any of these failed states.

That’s certainly been the experience of those returned to Mexico under the dishonestly named “Migrant Protection Protocols,” more accurately known as the “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico Program.” So outrageously unlawful has this program been that some Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges have resisted or actually quit over being required to engage in illegal acts and human rights violations.

Yet, a complicit Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed these deadly attacks on our system of justice and human dignity to continue. Perhaps the “lowlight” of that court’s judicial malfeasance has been the well documented cases of DHS officials issuing fake hearing notices to their victims. Just imagine if those abuses happened to the spouse, son, or daughter of one of the these feckless judges! Judges who place themselves above justice to the humanity they serve are a systemic problem.

There’s also the matter of no transparent procedures being in place to determine what will happen to these individuals and where they will be where housed once “orbited.” Finally, even if against the odds someone actually got asylum in a Northern Triangle country, they clearly would not be “protected” by countries incapable of offering protection to most of their citizens.

By comparison, the one pre-existing “Safe Third Country” agreement with Canada, a country that actually appears to qualify under the statute, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the broadly worded fraudulent agreements with the Northern Triangle countries. The Canadian agreement is carefully circumscribed with many protections and qualifications and applies to only a small number of individuals annually.

By contrast, the fraudulent agreements with the Northern Triangle potentially apply broadly to individuals from countries like Cuba and Haiti who have never passed through the Northern Triangle and have no connection whatsoever with those countries. That’s because Canada is a real country that negotiated at arm’s length with the U.S. By contrast, the failed states of the Northern Triangle had these bogus agreements shoved down their throats with threats to cut off aid and assistance by corrupt officials like “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan acting on Trump’s and Miller’s instructions.

But, complying with statutory requirements and protecting asylum seekers under the law never has been an objective of the Trump Administration. Killing and mistreating asylum seekers as a “deterrent” and then feeding the results to a White Nationalist base as “success” is the sole objective of these corrupt programs.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, who understands and cares about honest implementation of U.S. refugee and asylum law could have contemplated in their worst nightmares that we would be discussing the Northern Triangle countries as “Safe Third Countries.” Yet, here we are.

But, perhaps the most amazing and discouraging fact is that in the face of such blatant public fraud and illegal behavior, over and over in disregarding asylum laws and Constitutional requirements, the Article III Federal Appellate Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, have failed to consistently stand up to the dishonest thugs in the Trump Administration who are running roughshod over our asylum laws and our Constitution. They daily ignore the clear unconstitutionality of an Immigration “Court” system that denies individuals the “fair and impartial” adjudicators to which the are entitled under the Fifth Amendment. In the process they are dehumanizing all of us.

The statute purports to bar judicial review of individual claims denied under the “Safe Third Country” exception. But, surely some smart member of the New Due Process Army can come up with a theory to challenge the Constitutionality of such blatantly dishonest and overtly fraudulent agreements that subvert the statute and clearly deny Due Process to individuals within the jurisdiction of the U.S.

And, let’s not forget the Congress where all constructive immigration reforms are blocked by a GOP Senate. In a rational world, Congress would have acted by veto-proof margins to withdraw the Executive’s authority to enter into “Safe Third Country Agreements” in light of the Administration’s well-publicized plans to clearly ignore and abuse the Congressionally-mandated standards. They also would have created independent Article I Immigration Courts outside of the Executive Branch. But, that would be a Congress other than one beholden to today’s GOP and their slavish devotion to Trumpism.

Those involved in negotiating, implementing, enabling, and defending these fraudulent agreements are committing major human rights violations. While there might currently be no ways of holding them legally and personally accountable, the the truth eventually will come out. History will be their judge. And, when all the ugliness, dishonesty, racism, cowardice, and dereliction of legal duties are finally exposed, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes or the shoes of their descendants who will have to live with the eternal shame of those who abuse and deny the humanity and legal rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Due Process Forever!

Here’s the EOIR’s bogus “Guidance” for those who have the stomach to wade through it:

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1218516/download

WHILE LIFE-TENURED FEDERAL JUDGES CHICKEN OUT, FORMER ASYLUM OFFICER DOUG STEPHENS SPEAKS OUT IN NYT VIDEO EDITORIAL AGAINST JUDICIALLY-ENABLED NATIONAL DISGRACE OF “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — “A former asylum officer says ‘remain in Mexico’ and other policies undermining asylum aren’t just racist, they’re illegal.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/trump-asylum-remain-mexico-policy.html

By Doug Stephens

Mr. Stephens is a lawyer.

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

In the Video Op-Ed above, a former asylum officer reveals why he resigned: to protest President Trump’s policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.

Doug Stephens had been an asylum officer for two years. But two days and five interviews that resulted in sending asylum seekers back to danger shook him. He drafted a memo detailing his legal objections to the policy, and circulated it to 80 of his colleagues, his supervisors and a member of Congress. And then he quit.

Mr. Stephens is not the only asylum officer who has grappled with following orders. In interviews with a half-dozen current and former asylum officers across the country, The Times learned of individuals leaving their posts, requesting job transfers and falling into deep depression.

The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

To date, Mr. Trump’s remain in Mexico policy, officially known as one of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has left nearly 58,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.

Doug Stephens, a lawyer, resigned his post as a Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officer in San Francisco in August.

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

See the video at the above link.

Doug “gets it,” and it didn’t take him long. My Georgetown Law students “got it.” They kept asking me how this could be happening when it seemed to be clearly illegal and a violation of the Fifth Amendment as well as international treaties.

But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority of the Supremes don’t get it? A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit didn’t get it? The Ninth Circuit ruminates for months on a question that a District Judge already answered in short order and that most first year law students could figure out in a few minutes. Circuit Courts keep signing off on removal orders produced by a clearly unconstitutional “kangaroo court” system where applicants are denied a fair and impartial decision-maker and the Chief Prosecutor can and does reach in and change results favorable to the applicant that he doesn’t like?

Something is wrong with this picture. And, it starts with intellectual corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our Federal Judiciary.

Trump has never made any secret that he hates refugees and migrants for unconstitutional racial, ethnic, and political reasons, that he intends to keep them out, and that he really doesn’t care about the Constitution, due process (except for himself), the Refugee Act, or international norms. He has utter contempt for Federal Judges and for Congress.

He tried, with spectacular lack of success, to get Congress to change the immigration and refugee laws by holding “Dreamers” hostage. Failing, he just went ahead and plowed through the Refugee Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the UN Convention, harming and killing folks in his wake. Just like he illegally reprogrammed money to build an unneeded, yet politically significant, “wall” that Congress had pointedly refused to fund. Never let the law, the national interest, or democratic institutions get in the way of the Trump White Nationalist political agenda.

The Court’s response: Let’s look the other way, like we did in the “Travel Ban Case.” We’re sort of offended by your unpresidential conduct, but, hey, as long as it doesn’t affect us and our families we’ll just hope you’ll tone it down because we really don’t want to confront you. But, if you “double down” instead, we’ll pretend like it’s never happened. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we can help you heap further abuse on your “Dreamer hostages.” What’s a little more pain and suffering on kids that we can cover up with legal gobbledygook.

One of Trump’s biggest “dissings” of the Supremes: His Administration’s total disregard and effective overruling of the Supreme’s landmark INS v. Cardoza -Fonseca case requiring the Government to implement a generous interpretation of the “refugee” definition for asylum to conform to the plain language of the statute as well as the Congressional intent behind the Refugee Act. Donald Trump and his immigraton thugs don’t even recognize what “generosity” is, and he has basically wiped out the Refugee Act and its asylum provisions without any changes in the law. How’s that for contempt of Court!

Roberts can blabber his head off about whether there are “Obama Judges” or “Trump Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words; until he and his fellow GOP appointees on the Court actually stand up to Trump’s abuses of the law, his babbling will be drowned out by Trump’s tweets.

Trump’s not right about much. But, maybe he has a point in his contemptuously arrogant attitude that the Supremes and most Circuits won’t dare require him to follow the laws or operate within the Constitution, particularly as his continues to “pack” the Federal Courts with his guaranteed judicial toadies.

That’s going to be the legacy of the “Roberts Court” if our Chiefie doesn’t wake up some morning with a new backbone and start joining his liberal colleagues in putting some breaks on Trump’s outrageous scofflaw conduct in the immigration and asylum area and saving some innocent lives in the process.

And the process should start with emphatically rejecting the Solicitor General’s unethical and often factually inaccurate and legally defective attempts to invoke the Supremes’ aid in short-circuiting the system any time the Big Baby Boss is upset with lower courts properly reigning in his illegal actions and making him follow the rules like everyone else.

Trump’s “malicious incompetence” often doesn’t accomplish much. He’s a divider, not a uniter. He’s only President of his base. The majority of the Americans can just “go pound sand” as far as he’s concerned.

But one thing he might eventually unite Americans on, for differing reasons, is contempt for spineless Federal Courts who won’t stand up to tyranny. And, that won’t be good for the future of our Constituitional Republic.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” could be the last, best hope for American’s survival. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! The “blood of the innocents” will be upon their spiffy robes if the “privileged life-tenured ones” don’t get out of their “ivory tower hazes” and have the guts to do their jobs!

PWS

11-20-19

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PWS

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Happy Thanksgiving,

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