UNHOLY BEDFELLOWS: Trump’s Cruelty Combines With 9th Cir.’s Complicity To Abuse & Kill U.S. Asylum Seekers In Mexico

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-refugee-camp-rio-grande-migrants-border-20190708-htmlstory.html

Molly O’Toole & Carolyn Cole Report for the LA Times:

A group of roughly 100 Haitians, Africans and South Americans cross the Rio Grande, just shallow enough for adults to wade despite an overnight storm.

As they wait on the muddy bank near Del Rio, Texas, to surrender themselves to the Border Patrol, the voices of children in the group carry across the river to the Mexican side.

There, in the city of Ciudad Acuña, hundreds of migrants have formed an impromptu refugee camp in an ecological park bound on one side by the river. Just outside the park, the official port of entry to the United States sits at the end of a short bridge.

They’ve crossed thousands of miles by foot, boat and bus to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find themselves stalled in a purgatory of soggy tents and overflowing bathrooms. Now, they face an uncertain wait prolonged by Trump administration policy.

The temptation to make the risky and illegal river crossing mounts daily.

“If you see people jumping over the river, it is because they are tired of staying here,” said one resident of the camp, Luis, who declined to give his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back home.

Home for him would be the West African nation of Cameroon, where Luis was vice principal of a school until he fled last fall. He escaped a widening conflict between the country’s English-speaking minority and its Francophone-majority government, which receives security assistance from the U.S.

He was jailed and tortured before escaping to neighboring Nigeria, Luis said. After a trek across three continents, he landed here, where he has waited for six weeks to present himself to U.S. officials at the Del Rio port of entry.

He hopes to join a sister in Ohio.

“At times, it is really disheartening,” he said, “so it is difficult to wait.”

. . . .

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Read the complete article along with Carolyn’s wonderful photography at the link.

Cruel, “designed to fail” policies and complicit judges who fail to protect the statutory, constitutional, and human rights of others are unlikely to stop the flow of forced migrants in the long run. They will, however, succeed in killing some, torturing others, ruining many lives, and causing permanent damage to large numbers of their fellow human beings, particularly children.

NBC/Reuters just reported on continuing concerns, confusion, and accusations regarding treatment of migrants in Mexico by the National Guard. https://apple.news/APdRhfQFnTneror8AprpRZQ I’m willing to bet that this is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Eventually, the true “body count” and extent of the human rights violations chargeable to Trump, the 9th Circuit, and the Mexican Government will surface. It will be unbelievably ugly.

Future generations will also find it difficult to understand and explain our national complicity, since the facts about the abuses the Trump Administration is heaping on humanity in our name are out in the open for life-tenured judges to ignore at the peril of their lasting reputations. And, too many of them are doing just that.

PWS

07-10-19

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the complete article at the above link.

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

PWS

07-08-19

HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE SLAMS BIA, BARR FOR INSTITUTIONALIZING SLOPPY WORK — BIA “Has Certainly Not Earned The Deference”

Jul 5 EOIR’s Troubling New Regulations

On July 2, the Department of Justice published final regulations impacting how decisions of immigration judges will be reviewed, both on appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals and by certification to the Attorney General. I plan to cover the topic in depth in a later article, but I wanted to post my quick take on the fact that the new rule encourages the BIA to decide cases using two sentences of boilerplate language (plus a citation) that provides no insight into its determination process. However, the regs imbue such decisions with a presumption that the Board “properly and thoroughly considered all issues, arguments, and claims raised or presented by the parties on appeal or in a motion that were deemed appropriate to the disposition of the appeal or motion, whether or not specifically mentioned in the decision.”

Just to be clear, the boilerplate denials look like this (in their entirety):

“ORDER: The Board affirms, without opinion, the result of the decision below. The decision below is, therefore, the final agency determination. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(e)(4).”

The above decision is referred to as an “affirmance without opinion,” or “AWO” for short. In its commentary accompanying the publication of the final rule, the Department of Justice addressed a commenter’s concern that the BIA may use such AWOs to quickly deny cases even if a favorable disposition is warranted where “the Board member reviewing the case simply lacked the time or inclination to spend his or her resources writing a reasoned, public opinion for that particular case.’’ The Department responded by summarizing the BIA’s process of having staff attorneys first review the record of proceedings before making a recommendation to the Board member. The Department offered such process as proof that “the use of an AWO does not reflect an abbreviated review of a case, but rather reflects the use of an abbreviated order to describe that review…”

Several facts are at odds with this claim. There is an excellent corps of staff attorneys at the BIA, but over the past few years, those staff attorneys have been pushed to decide more cases in less time or risk discipline or termination. Staff attorneys are encouraged to produce 40 decisions per month that are actually signed by Board Members, but are being assigned increasingly difficult cases to decide. One staff attorney reported needing 18 hours to complete one decision on a very unique legal issue, but was still expected to meet the overall quota. Such extreme pressure would make it tempting if not necessary for attorneys to resort to AWOs simply to keep their jobs. Furthermore, as the present EOIR Director has downgraded the staff attorney positions to entry level with no upward progression, and as the agency is strapped for funds, the Board is extremely short of such attorneys at present, further increasing the pressure on those remaining to decide more cases more quickly.

As for review by the Board Members themselves, there were always those who were known to sign anything handed to them. In a 2007 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, former Judge Richard Posner noted that one Board Member, Ed Grant, “was discovered to have decided more than 50 immigration cases in one day, requiring a decision ‘nearly every 10 minutes if he worked a nine-hour day without a break,’” or 7 minutes per case if he worked an 8 hour day and took lunch. See Kadia v. Gonzales, 501 F.3d 817, 820 (7th Cir. 2007). I hope we can all agree that reviewing a complete record of an immigration court hearing, plus the decision drafted for such case, in seven minutes does in fact reflect an abbreviated review of the case.

In its comments to the new regs, the Department further defended its presumption argument by citing the language from a Ninth Circuit decision, Angov v. Lynch, 788 F.3d 893, 905 (9th Cir. 2015), relating to the reliability of a State Department consular investigation which undermined some of the factual claims of an asylum claim. In that case, the court (in a 2-1 decision) upheld the IJ’s reliance on the report (in spite of its author’s unavailability to testify), stating that such reports “aren’t just a collection of statements by disconnected individuals. Rather, they are the unified work product of a U.S. government agency carrying out governmental responsibilities. As such, the report itself, and the acts of the various individuals who helped prepare it, are clothed with a presumption of regularity.”

However, the situation in Angov was not analogous to a BIA decision. In carrying out an investigation to confirm or disprove factual aspects of the asylum claim, the issue of reliability in Angov related to the likelihood of government misconduct: i.e., whether the investigator lied, and in fact had not taken the investigatory steps claimed in the report. The presumption cited by the court was that the State Department officials did their job “fairly, conscientiously, and thoroughly,” that none had a personal stake in the outcome, and that “no one lied or fabricated evidence.” It should also be noted that the Court found that, because the petitioner had not formally entered the U.S., he had no constitutional due process rights, and thus could not challenge the admission of the report on such grounds. And the court conceded that the outcome would have been different had the claim arisen in the Second Circuit, whose case law favored the petitioner’s argument.

However, in the context of the BIA’s review on appeal, the question isn’t whether the single Board member fabricated facts or had a personal stake in the claim. The question is whether the Board Member got it right – i.e. whether he or she properly interpreted the law, and applied that law correctly to the proper facts. History has demonstrated that they often do not, nor would they be expected to when signing a decision every seven minutes.

Yet through the new regulations, the Department of Justice is essentially saying that, due to the crushing case load, just trust that it is doing everything correctly, and defer to its two-sentence boilerplate decisions without requiring further explanation of its reasoning. The retort to this may be found a little later in Judge Posner’s decision in Kadia: “Deference is earned; it is not a birthright. Repeated egregious failures of the Immigration Court and the Board to exercise care commensurate with the stakes in an asylum case can be understood, but not excused, as consequences of a crushing workload that the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have refused to alleviate.” Kadia, supra at 821 (emphasis added). I am not aware of any other court that would expect Circuit Court judges to grant them carte blanche to simply affix rubber-stamp denials on appeals, particularly those involving life-or-death determinations arising in the asylum context. Furthermore, regular readers of my blog or that of my friend Paul Schmidt will know that the BIA errs not infrequently in its interpretation of fact and law. And for the record, the caseload has become far more crushing in the 12 years since Judge Posner penned those words in Kadia.

Take for example a recent decision of the Fourth Circuit. In Orellana v. Barr, No. 18-1513 (4th Cir. May 23, 2019), the court found that the BIA had distorted the evidence of record in order to conclude that the government had been willing and able to control the non-government persecutor by ignoring the many credible instances in which the police did not respond to the petitioner’s call for help, and instead focusing on the few isolated incidents in which they did respond. So had the BIA chosen to decide the case with a two-sentence AWO, should the same circuit court have credited the Board with properly considering and weighing all of the police’s responses and non-responses, without such distortion, because government employees are presumed to properly carry out their duties? The Third Circuit reversed the BIA for its troubling, erroneous overreach in Alimbaev v. Att’y Gen. of U.S., 872 F.3d 188 (3d Cir. 2017), finding the Board to have violated its proper standard of review, and then wrongly reversed based on false insinuation and nitpicking. Had the BIA relied on a two-sentence AWO in that case, should the circuit court have just assumed that none of those errors had occurred, and that the BIA had instead reached the correct conclusion for the right reasons?

The BIA has certainly not earned the deference the Department of Justice believes it deserves based on the regulatory presumption. Hopefully, the circuit courts will waste no time in pointing this out in future appeals of the AWOs we can expect to see frequently from the BIA.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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Like Jeffrey, I’ve been saying for some time now that under the control of Attorneys General who are neither experts in immigration and refugee law nor qualified quasi judicial adjudicators, the Federal Courts should stupor giving “Chevron deference” to BIA decisions.

PWS

07-07-19

THE DOWNSIDE OF KAKISTOCRACY: Trump Has Neither The Interest Nor Talent To Successfully Address The Problem Of Forced Migration From The Northern Triangle!

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-theres-a-migrant-crisis-at-the-us-border-and-theres-only-one-way/

From The Globe & Mail:

EDITORIALS

There’s a migrant crisis at the U.S. border. And there’s only one way to end it

The image of a father and his two-year-old daughter, their corpses face down in the mud on the banks of the Rio Grande, illustrates one part of the crisis on the southern border of the United States. The nightmarish conditions for migrants, with many held in severely overcrowded U.S. detention facilities, are another chapter. And then there’s how the U.S. Congress, paralyzed by distrust between Democrats and Republicans, waited until last week to vote additional funding aimed at improving life in those holding pens.

But the most revealing thing about the migration issue, and its solution, are the words of Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador.

On Monday, the same day funerals were held for Oscar Alberto Ramirez and his daughter Valeria, Salvadorans who drowned while trying to ford the river that marks the border into the promised land, Mr. Bukele was asked about the reason for the tragedy.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to,” he said in English. “People flee their homes because they feel they have to. Why? Because they don’t have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don’t have basic things like water, education, health.

“We can spit blame to any other country but what about our blame? I mean, what country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador. They fled our country. It is our fault.”

And also: “If people have an opportunity of a decent job, a decent education, a decent health-care system and security, I know forced migration will be reduced to zero.”

That’s the issue, in a nutshell. Problem and solution.

If President Donald Trump was serious about fixing the crisis on his country’s southern border, instead of playing it for political advantage, he’d be listening to Mr. Bukele.

The people of El Salvador are hardly to blame for what has happened to their homeland. The Central American country and neighbouring Honduras and Guatemala are corrupt, economically depressed and violent. In 2016, El Salvador had the world’s highest murder rate. Honduras was second. It’s why so many feel they have no choice but to leave.

In May, U.S. authorities took more than 144,000 migrants into custody at the southern border. That means more people crossed from Mexico to the United States in one month than have crossed into Canada at the Roxham Road unofficial crossing point in three years. The vast majority crossing the U.S.-Mexico border did so between official posts, as Mr. Ramirez and his daughter attempted to do. Most came to make a refugee claim.

The flow of migrants entering the United States in May was roughly three times as high as it was during the Obama administration. The surge is driven by people from the so-called Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. As Mr. Bukele correctly described it, misery spurs migration.

But El Salvador is not doomed to forever be a land of misery. Consider that nearby Costa Rica has long been peaceful, democratic and relatively prosperous. And Panama, a dictatorship just a generation ago, has made big strides and is now level with Costa Rica. The United Nations Human Development Index ranks both countries ahead of Brazil, Mexico, China and nearly all of Latin America and the Caribbean. El Salvador is far behind. But change is always possible.

In 2018, Mr. Trump famously said he wanted fewer immigrants from “shithole countries.” To put it in words Mr. Trump can understand, the way to stop people from fleeing crappy countries is to make them less, you know, crappy.

Mr. Bukele, the son of Palestinian immigrants, has a dream of turning El Salvador into a place that draws investment and people, rather than chasing them away. It’s part of the reason why he said what he said about his country’s responsibility for migration. He wants and needs Washington’s help.

If the United States were serious about stemming the flow of migrants, it would be crafting a Marshall Plan for Central America. It would be helping the Northern Triangle achieve better government and more development and investment.

Instead, Mr. Trump earlier this year announced that, as punishment for sending so many migrants, he would cut aid to the Northern Triangle. His administration quietly backed away from the pledge, but the message has been sent. Enlightened self-interest is not on this President’s menu.

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

The real problem here is that solutions to forced migration issues:

Take time;
Require knowledge and intellectual sophistication;
Require international cooperation; and
Aren’t in the White Nationalist “playbook” from which Trump gets all of his failed ideas on migration.

PWS

07-05-19

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENTS DENY MIGRANTS INTERPRETERS IN KANGAROO COURTS WHILE LYING ABOUT RATIONALE — Money For Tanks & Golf, None For Due Process? — Why Are The Article III Courts Complicit By Not Blowing Whistle On “Courts” That Don’t Come Close To Providing Due Process?

Tal Kopan
Washington Reporter, SF Chronicle

Link might help for sharing…

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Trump-administration-ending-in-person-14070403.php

Trump administration ending in-person interpreters at immigrants’ first hearings

Tal Kopan, San Francisco Chronicle

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to replace in-court interpreters at initial immigration court hearings with videos informing asylum seekers and other immigrants facing deportation of their rights, The Chronicle has learned.

The administration portrays the change as a cost-saving measure for an immigration court system bogged down under a growing backlog. But advocates for immigrants are concerned the new procedure could jeopardize their due-process rights, add confusion and potentially make the system less efficient by causing more of them to go underground or appeal cases.

The Justice Department informed the nation’s immigration judges of the change last month at a training session, multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Chronicle.

At issue are “master calendar” hearings where immigration judges meet with undocumented immigrants, usually dozens of them, in rapid succession to schedule their cases and to inform them of their rights. The quick sessions are intended mainly to be sure the immigrants understand what is happening and know when their next hearing will be and what steps they need to take in the interim.

Under the new plan, which the Justice Department told judges could be rolled out by mid-July, a video recorded in multiple languages would play informing immigrants of their rights and the course of the proceedings. But after that, if immigrants have questions, want to say something to the judge or if the judge wants to confirm they understand, no interpreter would be provided.

Many of the immigrants come from Central America, but collectively they speak a diverse range of indigenous languages and sometimes don’t know Spanish. Immigrants from all over the world also come before the court system, which is run by the Justice Department.

The shift would especially affect immigrants who do not have attorneys to explain proceedings. Many immigrants lack representation at the initial hearing, and legal services around the country say they are being stretched thin. The government does not provide attorneys.

Instead of turning to an in-court interpreter, judges would have to rely on any who happen to be in the building for other purposes, or call a telephone service for on-demand translation that judges say can be woefully inadequate or substantially delayed.

“It’s a disaster in the making,” one judge said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person did not have Justice Department approval to talk publicly. “What if you have an individual that speaks an indigenous language and has no education and is completely illiterate? You think showing them a video is going to completely inform them of their rights? How are they supposed to ask questions of the judge?”

The Justice Department billed the move as a cost-saving measure. Sources familiar with the interpreter situation say there have been ongoing issues with the budget and the contract with the primary interpreter provider, leading the administration to encourage more use of the telephone service and look for other ways to keep costs down.

A Justice Department who was not authorized to speak on the record said the shift away from in-person interpretation was “part of an effort to be good stewards of (the department’s) limited resources.” The official said the direction to judges was not a policy change, but declined to elaborate.

The immigration judges union, the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the change was another in a line of steps the administration has taken to force judges to do more with fewer resources at the risk of fairness.

Asked to comment, union President Ashley Tabaddor, a judge in Los Angeles, said the Justice Department had not given enough notice for the union to raise objections or provide input on the change.

She dismissed budget concerns as a justification.

“Interpreter cost is not a surprise cost — it’s an integral part of every case,” Tabaddor said. “If they actually look at the courts as a real court, they would never be dismissive of the role of an interpreter. But the fact that we are here and have these budget shortfalls means they have prioritized the budget in a way that is dismissive of the integral role of the interpreters, and reflects the flaw of having the courts run by a law enforcement agency.”

The immigration courts have been overwhelmed for years with a burgeoning load that is now approaching 1 million cases. The judges association has advocated for the courts to be removed from the Justice Department and made an independent system.

The Trump administration has made a series of efforts it says are intended to speed up the process and avoid having hundreds of thousands of immigrants build lives in the U.S. while waiting to learn if they will be deported. Critics, including immigration lawyers and advocates and some judges, say many of the changes have actually undermined the system, confusing immigrants and creating grounds for lengthy appeals.

Some judges said it’s common at master calendar hearings for immigrants to misunderstand the advice to find a lawyer. Some conclude that means they should not return for their next hearing if they don’t have a lawyer. Failing to appear is grounds for a deportation order.

The system is “not an assembly line,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and former senior legal adviser to the immigration appeals court who now volunteers for organizations that provide legal assistance to immigrants. He said the master calendar is most immigrants’ first impression ever of a court system, and that a lack of interpreters and interaction with a judge could foster a sense of distrust.

“You’re dealing with people’s lives,” Chase said. “All kinds of crazy issues arise. Sometimes there’s a health issue, and you need to be able to communicate to find this stuff out.

“And also, people come in so afraid,” Chase said. “If they’re able to talk with the judge and realize, ‘This person is a human being and they’re able to work with me’ — being played a tape reinforces this feeling that, ‘I’m dealing with this deportation machine.’ ”

Chase said concerns about the cost and length of the process are legitimate, but he questioned the administration’s way of addressing them.

“You always hear the word ‘efficiency’ from this administration now, and it’s very infrequent that you hear ‘due process’ or ‘justice,’ ” Chase said. “There’s no longer concern about the balance. It’s totally efficiency-heavy these days, and I think it’s being decided by people who haven’t been in the court much and don’t understand the consequences.”

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan

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My suggestion: In the future, any legal claims involving Members of Congress or Article III Judges and any members of their immediate families should be tried only in U.S. Immigration Court. The opposing party should be given the ability to:

Select the judge;
Write or rewrite the rules governing the litigation;
Change any result with which they might disagree; and perhaps most important
The proceedings shall be conducted in a language that only the opposing party and the “judge” understand.

That way, these folks would be receiving the same type of “justice” under the Constitution that they are happy to inflict on individuals in today’s Immigration Courts. Seems fair to me.

PWS

07-03-19

CONSTITUTIONAL SCOFFLAW BARR “OUTED” AGAIN: U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman (WD WA) Rips AG’s Unconstitutional Denial Of Bonds To Asylum Seekers – Finds Matter of M-S- Unlawful!

https://apple.news/AVi9zCrsgS2y4pg6ZqHWJ6A

Vanessa Romo reports for NPR:

A Seattle federal judge ruled Tuesday that asylum-seeking migrants detained for being in the U.S. illegally have the right to a bond hearing in immigration court rather than being held until their cases are complete.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said it is unconstitutional to indefinitely detain migrants who fled to the U.S. seeking asylum protections.

The decision reverses an April directivefrom Attorney General William Barr ordering immigration judges not to release migrants on bail after an applicant successfully establishes “a credible fear of persecution or torture” in the home country — a policy that has been in place since 2005.

“The court finds that plaintiffs have established a constitutionally-protected interest in their liberty, a right to due process, which includes a hearing before a neutral decision maker to assess the necessity of their detention and a likelihood of success on the merits of that issue,” Pechman wrote.

In her ruling, Pechman also took issue with an aspect of Barr’s policy that left open the possibility that migrants, still awaiting a hearing, could be re-detained by ICE after being released on bond.

“The Government’s unwillingness to unconditionally assert that Plaintiffs will not be re-detained means that the specter of re-detention looms and these Plaintiffs and many members of their class face the real and imminent threat of bondless and indefinite detention …,” she said.

The ruling comes amid a widespread shortage of immigration judges that has caused massive delays in processing hearings. The most recent dataavailable from The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows a total of 424 judges nationwide face a backlog of 892,517 cases on the courts’ active dockets as of the end of April.

“The three largest immigration courts were so under-resourced that hearing dates were being scheduled as far out as August 2023 in New York City, October 2022 in Los Angeles, and April 2022 in San Francisco,” TRAC reports

Pechman also modified a preliminary injunction issued earlier this year. The new injunction requires the government to ensure bond hearings are held within seven days after they are requested by eligible asylum-seekers. If the government exceeds that limit, the undocumented immigrant must be released.

Immigrant rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, sued to block the policy, which was set to take effect this month.

In a statement, Matt Adams, legal director of Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said: “The court reaffirmed what has been settled for decades: that asylum seekers who enter this country have a right to be free from arbitrary detention.”

Michael Tan, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, added: “Try as it may, the administration cannot circumvent the Constitution in its effort to deter and punish asylum-seekers applying for protection.”

The Department of Justice is expected to appeal the ruling quickly.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

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Go to the NPR website for a full copy of Judge Pechman’s decision in Padilla v. ICE.

So, while the 9^thCircuit is bopping along violating human rights by enabling Trump’s absurdly illegal “Kill ‘Em in Mexico Program,” as a result of a three-judge panel who tanked on their oaths of office, Judge Pechman and some others at the “retail level” of the Federal Judiciary are still on the job and upholding our Constitution against the all-out assault led by Barr on behalf of Trump.

It’s also worth remembering that the U.S. Attorney General is supposed to uphold the Constitution and protect individual rights, rather than serving as tool of racist White Nationalist extremism as Sessions and Barr have done. Already in shambles and a disgraceful ethical morass, there won’t be anything left of the “Justice” Department by the time Barr’s toxic tenure ends.

Bill Barr is a national disgrace and an affront to American justice. But, hey, it’s the Trump Adminisration, so what else is new?

PWS

07-03-19

TRUMP’S DHS STOOGES LIED! — Gov’s Own Photos & Reports Show Filthy, Disgusting, Inhumane Detention Conditions — Lawyers, Reporters, Dems Vindicated — DHS Officials Who Denied Mistreatment Lied — Why Haven’t They Been Fired?

https://apple.news/A72_kcc-XTqCtxbEfuTrUzQ

Julia Ainsley — Julia Edwards Ainsley
Investigative Reporter, NBC News

AnnieRose Ramos — Annie Rose Ramos
Producer, NBC News

WASHINGTON — Government investigators have identified poor conditions in another sector of the southern border, publishing graphic photos showing extreme overcrowding in Rio Grande Valley migrant facilities and finding that children there did not have access to showers and had to sleep on concrete floors.

Investigators for the Department of Homeland Security who visited border stations in the El Paso, Texas, sector in May found similar conditions: Migrants being held in temporary facilities for weeks rather than days, single adults living in standing room-only cells with no space to lie down, and concerns about serious health risks.

The investigators for the DHS Office of the Inspector General toured five Border Patrol facilities and two ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley sector during the week of June 10 and published their report as a “management alert” to the department on Tuesday.

Read the full report here.

The Rio Grande valley of Texas has the highest volume of immigrants along the United States-Mexico border. At the time of the visits by investigators, Border Patrol was holding 8,000 detainees in custody, with 3,400 being held longer than the 72-hour limit.

One senior manager at a facility called the situation a “ticking time bomb,” according to the report. When immigrants detained in the facilities saw investigators walking through, they banged on the cell windows and pressed notes against the plexiglass to show the length of time they had spent in custody. One said “Help 40 Day Here.”

On Monday, NBC News published findings by the inspector general that detailed poor conditions for migrants in border stations in El Paso as far back as May 7. Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said at a press conference Friday that reports of poor conditions for children in border stations were “unsubstantiated.” McAleenan said children were given showers as soon as they could be made available.

“Most single adults had not had a shower in CBP custody despite several being held for as long as a month,” according to the latest report on conditions in the Rio Grande Valley.

The report also detailed what it called “security incidents” in which immigrants have tried to escape and once refused to return to their cells after being removed during maintenance. To address the problem, Border Patrol called in its special operations force to “demonstrate it was prepared to use force if necessary,” the report said.

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Go to the link to see the DHS IG’s own photos documenting the abusive conditions and to get a link to the redacted report showing how McAleenan, Provost, Trump and others are coving up an intentionally created human rights disaster inflicted upon the most vulnerable.

We’re beyond “malicious incompetence” and basically into covering up possible criminal misconduct. Why haven’t McAleenan, Provost, and the other human rights abusers been fired? I guess it’s because this is the Trump Administration where neither the law nor morality matter!

And, this doesn’t even factor in the racism, misogyny, cruelty, and and white supremacy infecting the Border Patrol as exposed in a recent report by Pro Publica https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes

To state the obvious, if Pro Publica can find this “hidden in plain sight” trash, it’s been right there under the noses of McAleenan, Provost, Morgan, and other DHS malicious incompetents all along. They just chose to look the other way.

PWS

07-02-19

COURTSIDE HAS BEEN SAYING IT FOR YEARS; THE NY TIMES FINALLY PICKS UP: Trump & Co’s White Nationalist Racist Immigration Policies Are Corrupting America!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/border-immigration.html

The NY Times Editorial Board writes:

Last year, as part of an effort to carry out President Trump’s promise of “extreme vetting” of visitors to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security began collecting social media account information from millions of people seeking to cross the border.

After all, a radical online could be a radical offline.

That’s why the stream of posts ricocheting around a 9,500-member Facebook group, comprising current and former Border Patrol agents as well as some people with no apparent connection to the Border Patrol, is so troubling. Members of the group, as documented by ProPublica this week, “joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.”

Of a 16-year-old migrant from Guatemala who died while in Border Patrol custody in May, a member of the group wrote, “If he dies, he dies.”

Customs and Border Protection said on Monday that it had informed the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general about the posts and had started its own investigation. The National Border Patrol union decried the posts as “inappropriate and unprofessional.”

A reckoning from their superiors is due for any border agents who dishonored their uniform by spreading vileness on social media. In June, when the Plain View Project, a nonprofit research effort, released documentation on dozens of police officers from eight departments across the country posting racist, misogynist and Islamophobic material, 72 police officers in Philadelphia were pulled off the streets and the top prosecutor in St. Louis said she would no longer accept cases from 22 officers.

In a larger sense, the Border Patrol Facebook posts reveal a worrying mind-set among some of those charged with administering the harshest crackdown on migrants and asylum-seekers in decades. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers,” Representative Joaquin Castro, who heads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told ProPublica.

The realities of that crackdown have created conditions that Americans would condemn if they were in another country.

While lawmakers refuse to compromise on emergency aid for the humanitarian needs at the border, “children are held for weeks in deplorable conditions, without access to soap, clean water, showers, clean clothing, toilets, toothbrushes, adequate nutrition or adequate sleep,” groups supporting the children wrote in a recent court filing. A judge on Friday ordered Customs and Border Protection to allow health workers into facilities where children are being held to ensure that conditions are “safe and sanitary.”

On Monday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez toured facilities where migrants and asylum-seekers are being held. “Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets,” she tweeted.

As the congressional delegation arrived at one detention facility, they were heckled and cursed at by demonstrators, including one man wearing a Make America Great Again hat. (Another heckler hurled ethnic slurs at Representative Rashida Tlaib.)

Only a callous person could find mirth in the misery at the border. And only a desensitized nation could continue to permit the separation of children from their parents — and detaining all of them in atrocious conditions — as a morally acceptable form of deterrence.

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The constant lies, false narratives, intentional inhumanity, and “deterrence only” of Trump’s self-created “border crisis” are merely the latest example of how White Nationalism demeans our nation. This Administration has all of the legal tools necessary to process arriving asylum seekers in a fair, timely, and orderly manner. They just refuse to use them as they were intended to solve, rather than intentionally create and aggravate, migration problems.

Contrary to Trump/GOP false narratives, that includes the present ability to establish a legitimate refugee application program in or near the Northern Triangle and to use it as an incentive for refugees to apply outside the United States rather than coming to the border to apply for asylum. However, to work as an incentive, rather than a failed deterrent, the refugee program must be administered in a fair and generous manner that would allow those who have legitimate fears of persecution on the basis of gender, actual or political opposition to gangs, ethnicity, or religious activities to be properly classified as refugees and resettled here or in some other truly safe location as determined in conjunction with the UNHCR and signatory countries outside the Northern Triangle who can actually provide at least a reasonable chance of safety.

That likely means a goal of admitting at least 50,000 to 100,000 refugees to the U.S. from Central America over the next year. That, along with robust aid to address the problems creating the refugee flow would be the legal and effective approach to the forced migration issue.

Additionally, the Administration has the ability to reauthorize and extend “Temporary Protected Status” (“TPS”) to qualified individuals from the Northern Triangle already present in the U.S. until such time as the conditions in their home countries can be stabilized. This would also have the advantage of tracking the presence of such individuals in the United States while reducing the pressure on the already backlogged U.S. Immigration Court system.

Of course, the Administration has no intention of using any of these tools to solve the problem. That would be inconsistent with their racist, restrictionist, White Nationalist agenda aimed primarily at keeping non-white individuals out of the United States and reducing the rights and political power of those who are already citizens. The purpose of refugee protection laws is actually to protect refugees, not, as this Administration posits, to kill as many of them as possible outside the U.S. or at our border to “deter” other refugees from coming.

Indeed, the Administration’s absurdly inhuman and unlawful proposal to keep refugees from leaving the very countries where they are being persecuted, without addressing the conditions there, is basically that having them die, be tortured, or abused there is just fine with us. Whether folks like to face it or not, that is indeed a neo-Nazi philosophy. And, every day that Trump remains in the office for which he is so supremely unqualified further corrupts our nation.

PWS

07-02-19

COURTSIDE EXCLUSIVE — INSIDE EOIR — “TRASHED IN TRANSLATION: EOIR’S Latest Attack On Due Process In Immigration Courts Shocks Professional Interpreters, Outrages Judges!”

EYORE — “Eyore”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

TRASHED IN TRANSLATION: EOIR’S Latest Attack On Due Process In Immigration Courts Shocks Professional Interpreters, Outrages Judges!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt for Immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandria, VA, July 1, 2019. No, it isn’t as dramatic as pictures of drowned families and caged toddlers. But, the effects of the latest move by those running our U.S. Immigration Courts and their political handlers could turn out to be just as deadly. Judges and interpreters were shocked by EOIR’s recently announced truncation of the right to receive effective live interpretations during master calendars as well as more management-ordered “aimless docket shuffling” which both denies due process and artificially “jacks up” already overwhelming backlogs.

How important is master calendar? It’s where individuals make their initial appearance in court and are advised about their right to a lawyer, procedures for obtaining pro bono counsel, given warnings, plead to charges of removability, seek bond if detained, have possible relief from removability explained, file applications for relief like asylum, have hearing dates and filing deadlines set, learn the DHS position on applications, have current address confirmed, receive DHS fillings, make and receive rulings on preliminary motions, and receive warnings as to the dire consequences of failure to appear and meet filing deadlines, to name just some things that go on. In other words, “important stuff.”

What happens when non-judicial politicos interfere with judges’ individual case scheduling and docketing by setting artificial limits on when and how they use interpreters? Cases that have been rescheduled numerous times over the years get “moved to the back of the bus” once again.

Individuals and their lawyers faithfully show up for their long-awaited individual “merits” hearings, sometimes after having traveled hundreds of miles, witnesses and families in tow, only to be informed by a clerk that their cases have been taken off the docket without notice for the “convenience of the agency” and will be rescheduled for some unspecified later date. Evidence goes stale, memories fade, witnesses become unavailable, lawyers move on to other jobs, and country conditions change as these cases drag on literally forever because of political meddling and management incompetence. Perhaps worst of all, these same politicos and bureaucrats engineering the delays and backlogs attempt to shift blame to the victims and judges by limiting legitimate continuances, “expediting” cases that aren’t ready to be heard, and dishonestly calling for totally unneeded restrictive changes in the law.

Ostensibly, the truncation of interpretation resulted from mismanagement on the part of these same politicos and bureaucrats who hired additional judges in a hurry without planning for those judges’ support needs, including in person interpreters. And, take it from me as someone who spent thirteen years on the immigration bench and heard thousands of cases, “telephonic interpretation” is not by any means the equivalent of “in person” interpretation Indeed, at some point, I found the process for telephonic interpretation so time wasting and inadequate, that I just stopped using it. But, that was way back when individual judges had at least a little control over what happened on their dockets and what was necessary to achieve due process in an individual case.

More likely, this move is just another step the intentional “dumbing down” of the immigration court process and the systematic dismantling of what little remains of constitutional due process for those pleading for their lives in a system doing its best to “tune them out.” It will result in more illegal removal orders.

However, these will be hard for appellate courts to detect upon review, because they might not be readily apparent from the English language version of the transcripts. Besides, some Article III courts have also abandoned their duties to the Constitution in a mad rush to “rubber stamp” as many defective removal orders as possible to “clear” their own overcrowded dockets at the expense of integrity, fundamental fairness, and quite frankly, innocent lives.

So shocking has become this “under the radar” further de-professionalization of what disingenuously holds itself out to be a ”court” that readers have been sending me anonymous comments from some distraught individual professional court interpreters. Here’s what one such concerned interpreter had to say (edited to preserve confidentiality);

“Bottomline, no more in-person interpretation for master calendars. In addition, in-person interpreters will be assigned in three-hour blocks only. Judges will no longer be allowed to have two languages in one hearing. I think this means no more relay interpretation between indigenous languages and Spanish. I’m concerned about language access being curtailed.”

These further disgraceful developments, showing a complete disregard for legal norms and individual fairness, should be carefully documented in congressional oversight hearings with an eye toward a future independent Article I immigration court. In the meantime, the Article III courts could and should put a stop to this travesty and force the system to meet at least minimal standards of professionalism and due process pending needed legislative reforms.

No American citizen would want to trust him or herself to this parody of a court system. Yet, due process under our Constitution applies equally to “all persons,” not just citizens, and the stakes in these cases often are life or death. If we refuse to defend the rights of the least among us, who will stand for our rights when the forces of oppression shift their ugly gaze? Even exaulted, yet too often complicit, life-tenured Article III judges should be asking themselves that question.

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

PWS

07-01-19

AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!

Professor Kate Cronin-Furman writes in the NY Times:

The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.

At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Tex., in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children. As a human rights lawyer and then as a political scientist, I have spoken to the victims of some of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, in places ranging from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sri Lanka. What’s happening at the border doesn’t match the scale of these horrors, but if, as appears to be the case, these harsh conditions have been intentionally inflicted on children as part a broader plan to deter others from migrating, then it meets the definition of a mass atrocity: a deliberate, systematic attack on civilians. And like past atrocities, it is being committed by a complex organizational structure made up of people at all different levels of involvement.

Thinking of what’s happening in this way gives us a repertoire of tools with which to fight the abuses, beyond the usual exhortations to call our representatives and donate to border charities.

Those of us who want to stop what’s happening need to think about all the different individuals playing a role in the systematic mistreatment of migrant children and how we can get them to stop participating. We should focus most on those who have less of a personal commitment to the abusive policies that are being carried out.

Testimony from trials and truth commissions has revealed that many atrocity perpetrators think of what they’re doing as they would think of any other day job. While the leaders who order atrocities may be acting out of strongly held ideological beliefs or political survival concerns, the so-called “foot soldiers” and the middle men and women are often just there for the paycheck.

This lack of personal investment means that these participants in atrocities can be much more susceptible to pressure than national leaders. Specifically, they are sensitive to social pressure, which has been shown to have played a huge role in atrocity commission and desistance in the Holocaust, Rwanda and elsewhere. The campaign to stop the abuses at the border should exploit this sensitivity and put social pressure on those involved in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Here is what that might look like:

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos. These agents’ actions should be publicized, particularly in their home communities.

This is not an argument for doxxing — it’s about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about. The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements. For those who won’t (or can’t) quit, it may induce them to treat the vulnerable individuals under their control more humanely. In Denmark during World War II, for instance, strong social pressure, including from the churches, contributed to the refusal of the country to comply with Nazi orders to deport its Jewish citizens.

The midlevel functionaries who make the system run are not as visibly involved in the “dirty work,” but there are still clear potential reputational consequences that could change their incentives. The lawyer who stood up in court to try to parse the meaning of “safe and sanitary” conditions — suggesting that this requirement might not include toothbrushes and soap for the children in border patrol custody if they were there for a “shorter term” stay — passed an ethics exam to be admitted to the bar. Similar to the way the American Medical Association has made it clear that its members must not participate in torture, the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession. This will deter the participation of some, if only out of concern over their future career prospects.

The individuals running detention centers are arguably directly responsible for torture, which could trigger a number of consequences at the international level. Activists should partner with human rights organizations to bring these abuses before international bodies like the United Nations Human Rights Council. They should lobby for human rights investigations, for other governments to deny entry visas to those involved in the abuses, or even for the initiation of torture prosecutions in foreign courts. For someone who is “just following orders,” the prospect of being internationally shamed as a rights abuser and being unable to travel freely may be significant enough to persuade them to stop participating.

When those directly involved in atrocities can’t be swayed, their enablers are often more responsive. For-profit companies are supplying food and other material goods to the detention centers. Boycotts against them and their parent entities may persuade them to stop doing so. Employees of these companies can follow the example of Wayfair workers, who organized a walkout on Wednesday in protest of their company’s sale of furniture to the contractor outfitting the detention centers. Finally, anyone can support existing divestment campaigns to pressure financial institutions to end their support of immigration abuses.

Many Americans have been asking each other “But what can we DO?” The answer is that we call these abuses mass atrocities and use the tool kit this label offers us to fight them. So far, mobilization against what’s happening on the border has mostly followed standard political activism scripts: raising public awareness, organizing protests, phoning our congressional representatives. These efforts are critical, but they aren’t enough. Children are suffering and dying. The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.

Dr. Cronin-Furman is an assistant professor of human rights.

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

“The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.”

That includes attorneys who defend indefensible policies in Federal Court as well as Federal Judges all the way up to the Supremes who fail to stand up for Due Process for individuals, and who insist on treating Trump’s overt attacks on our Constitution, democracy, and human dignity as within the scope of “normal” Executive actions rather than intentional and dishonest abuses requiring censure and strong, courageous, unconditional disapproval.

PWS

06-30-19

INSIDE THE KAKISTOCRACY: “Cooch Cooch” Takes Commanding Lead In Race To The Bottom – Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) Nails Him Cold!

Rep. Don Beyer

@RepDonBeyer

Ken Cuccinelli immediately stands out in an Administration that values cruelty. What a despicable and heartless thing to say.

Quote Tweet

The Washington Post

@washingtonpost

Jun 28

Ken Cuccinelli, head of citizenship service, blames migrant father for drowning deaths captured in photo (link: https://wapo.st/2NlcWTb) wapo.st/2NlcWTb

8:19 AM · Jun 28, 2019· Twitter for iPhone

590

Retweets

1.6K

Likes

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Thanks, Don, and well said! I’m proud to have you for our Representative here in Alexandria. You have been a constant voice of decency, common sense, and opposition to the “malicious incompetence” of the Trump Kakistocracy. And those of us in Virginia who survived the “Modern Day Jim Crow Era” of “Cooch Cooch” as Virginia Attorney General know just what a nasty, vile, unqualified, racist hack he has always been and always will be. Heck, even Mitch McConnell can’t stand him, and that says something!

“Cooch Cooch’s” latest despicable act of note comes along with provoking an immediate rebellion among Asylum Officers. As I predicted, “Cooch Cooch” has already distinguished himself as a “lowlife among bottom dwellers.”

PWS

06-29-19

AMEN: A PRAYER IN THE TIME OF KAKISTOCRACY!

Judge (Ret.) Jeffrey S. Chase writes:

Hi all: I volunteer on Tuesday nights at a free immigration law clinic run by the New Sanctuary Coalition, based in Judson Church In Greenwich Village, NYC. As you can imagine, fear has been running high since the announcement of multi-city raids. Micah Bucey, a minister at Judson, composed the following non-denominational centering prayer that is now recited before each clinic. I share with you for inspiration:

Spirit of Resistance,

You who are beyond the capacity of any border or name,

You who stretch beyond the indignity of any cage

You who envelop us in the power to persist, to protest, and to rehumanize, //

As we bring our passion and our pain to this place,

We offer gratitude for small gatherings that do monumental things,

We offer gratitude for a fierce community that unbuilds walls

And we offer gratitude for dreams of the world we are creating. //

We ask that you

Refresh us with new breath and energy for the long haul,

Guide us through fear, frustration, and panic,

Expand our hearts to envelop all those who pass through this room tonight and all those who have yet to make it to this room,

Ignite the fire of our faith in the truth that love knows no borders. //

Help us to never forget

That ICE is meant to melt,

That you cannot deport a movement,

And that the moral arc of the universe only bends toward justice if we keep bending it together. //

Amen

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

PWS

06-29-19

PROFILE IN COURAGE: DHS ASYLUM OFFICERS ASK COURT TO HALT TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALIST, SCOFFLAW, HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES — As Civil Servants Speak Out Against Anti-American Administration, Why Are Some Life Tenured Article III Judges & Immigration Judges Failing In Their Constitutional Duties & As Human Beings?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/u-s-asylum-officers-say-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-is-threatening-migrants-lives-ask-federal-court-to-end-it/2019/06/26/863e9e9e-9852-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html

Maria Sacchetti reports for WashPost:

U.S. asylum officers slammed President Trump’s policy of forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while they await immigration hearings in the United States, urging a federal appeals court Wednesday to block the administration from continuing the program. The officers, who are directed to implement the policy, said it is threatening migrants’ lives and is “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation.”

The labor union representing asylum officers filed a friend-of-the-court brief that sided with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups challenging Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has sent 12,000 asylum-seeking migrants to Mexico since January. The policy aims to deter migrants from coming to the United States and to keep them out of the country while courts weigh their claims.

[Read the U.S. asylum officers’ federal court filing]

The union argued that the policy goes against the nation’s long-standing view that asylum seekers and refugees should have a way to escape persecution in their homelands, with the United States embracing its status as a safe haven since even before it was founded — with the arrival of the Pilgrims in the 17th century. The union said in court papers that the policy is compelling sworn officers to participate in the “widespread violation” of international and federal law — “something that they did not sign up to do when they decided to become asylum and refugee officers for the United States government.”

“Asylum officers are duty bound to protect vulnerable asylum seekers from persecution,” the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1924, which represents 2,500 federal workers, including asylum officers, said in a 37-page court filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California. “They should not be forced to honor departmental directives that are fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”

The legal filing is an unusual public rebuke of a sitting president by his own employees, and it plunges a highly trained officer corps that typically operates under secrecy into a public legal battle over one of Trump’s most prized immigration policies.

Under Trump, the asylum division has become a target of internal ire, often assailed for approving most initial asylum screenings and sending migrants to immigration court for a full hearing. Trump administration officials say most cases are denied. Last week, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, outraged some asylum officers by sending the staff an email they thought criticized them for approving so many initial screenings.

Trump placed Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Virginia attorney general, in the position ostensibly as part of his move to get tough on immigration policy, and the union’s legal filing appears to be directly at odds with that approach.

The policy has been challenged in federal court, with a lower-court judge temporarily halting MPP in April, saying it probably violates federal law. A three-judge appellate panel allowed the program to resume in May while the court considers the policy.

Justice Department lawyers have said in court filings that migrants are filing thousands of sham claims because they virtually guarantee their release into the United States pending a hearing in the backlogged immigration courts. The U.S. government cannot process the migrants’ cases quickly or detain children for long periods, which means some migrants can stay in the country for months or years while waiting for their cases to play out.

[In test of a deterrent, Juarez scrambles before U.S. dumps thousands of migrants]

Three migrants wait near the border shortly after being returned to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on June 13. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Ending the program, the government lawyers have said, “would impose immediate, substantial harm on the government’s ability to manage the crisis on our southern border.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on the filing Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program, did not respond to a request for comment.

The influx of Central American migrants at the southern border has overwhelmed the U.S. immigration system. It also has led to a political fight between congressional Democrats and the White House regarding crowded and unsanitary conditions in border holding facilities amid Trump’s push for heightened enforcement. More than 144,000 migrants were taken into custody in May after crossing the southern border, the largest monthly total in more than a decade, and asylum filings have soared.

Trump administration officials this week have been pleading with Congress to approve emergency funding for the humanitarian crisis at the border. The Senate on Wednesday responded, passing a $4.6 billion emergency spending measure amid debates about treatment of migrants and the risks they face as they try to enter the United States, with a graphic photo of a migrant and his young daughter having drowned in the Rio Grande as the backdrop.

In the federal court filing, the asylum officers say they are enforcing the laws as Congress intended, based on approaches and international treaties shaped after World War II and atrocities connected with the Holocaust. Federal laws hinge on the principle of “non-refoulement” — which means people should not be sent back to countries where they could be harmed or killed. To qualify for asylum, migrants must show that they face harm based on their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

The asylum officers say Mexico is too dangerous for Central American asylum seekers, particularly women, people who are gay, lesbian or transgender, and indigenous minority groups. They cited State Department reports showing that gang violence and activity is widespread and that crimes are rarely solved.

“Mexico is simply not safe for Central American asylum seekers,” the filing said, noting that gangs that terrorized migrants in their home countries might easily follow them into Mexico. “And despite professing a commitment to protecting the rights of people seeking asylum, the Mexican government has proven unable to provide this protection.”

Asylum officers say the U.S. asylum system is “not, as the Administration has claimed, fundamentally broken,” and that they could handle more cases quickly without sending people back to Mexico.

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MPP is “entirely unnecessary, as our immigration system has the foundation and agility necessary to deal with the flow of migrants through our Southern Border,” the officers wrote.

The officers said they fear that MPP is sending asylum seekers back to a country where they are in danger, a violation of federal and international law. The said immigration agents do not ask migrants if they fear persecution or torture in Mexico, and that they only send migrants to asylum officers for screenings if the migrants independently express fear of return.

[Why migrant families are seeking asylum at the border in record numbers]

The latter are granted an initial asylum screening, often by phone or video. But they must prove that they are “more likely than not” going to face persecution in Mexico, a higher bar than in the immigration courts, where migrants are offered safeguards such as access to lawyers, a reading of their rights, and the right to appeal.

“The MPP, however, provides none of these safeguards,” the officers said.

Officials are attempting to extend the program along the nearly 2,000-mile border and are giving Mexico time to expand its shelter capacity, a top official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said.

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So why do Asylum Officers have the courage and integrity to stand up to what is essentially fraud, abuse, and murder of asylum seekers by the Trump Administration when Article III Judges won’t? U.S. Immigration Judges have so spoken out against
Administration abuses through the National Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”), although a minority of Immigration Judges have contributed to the problem by engaging in unlawful and unconstitutional bias against asylum seekers.

Obviously, we have the wrong type of individuals holding judicial positions in the U.S., something that the next competent and honest Administration should consider before appointing more complicit “go alongs to get alongs” to any type of bench.

It started with the Supreme’s atrocious and cowardly cop out on the Travel Ban case and has continued. Courage and the willingness to stand up against Government abuses are the primary qualifications for judges.

Other than some U.S. District Court Judges, too few Article IIIs have measured up to the task, and innocent people are being harmed, abused, and killed by Trump and his enablers as a result. The Courts of Appeals who have ignored the glaring Constitutional defects and clearly substandard justice in the Immigration Court system for more than a decade are particularly complicit in this unfolding disaster.

Moreover, as I have pointed out before, the lack of understanding of asylum law and unwillingness to stand up for the legal rights of asylum seekers among some Immigration Judges and too many Article III Judges is simply appalling!

To date, the performance of the Article III Judges on the 9th Circuit on the “Remain in Mexico”/“Die in Mexico” atrocity has been so disastrously deficient and incompetent as to make the wheels come off of the entire Government. This is a “rebellion” that should never have been necessary had the irresponsible, incoherent, and clueless three-“judge” panel that let “Die in Mexico” proceed done their jobs.

Hurrah for the Asylum Corps! Boo to the cowardly and unqualified judges who continue to enable Trump’s destruction of America and of human rights! And “double boo” to the career lawyers at the DOJ defending the Administration’s dishonest and illegal policies with lies and false narratives! Whatever happened to ethical standards for Federal Employees? Why do they apply to Asylum Officers, but not to DOJ “judges” and attorneys?

PWS

06-27-19

[BUREAU] ‘CRATS CONTINUE TO FLEE SINKING DHS SHIP AS ABUSES, LIES, COVER-UPS MOUNT — John Sanders Latest To Exit — Trump Taps Mark Morgan, Eager Architect Of Administration’s Temporarily Aborted “Community Reign of Terror” (A/K/A/ “Operation Wetback ‘19”) Program As Next Acting CBP Chief — Expect More Mindless Cruelty, Lies, False Narratives, White Nationalist Racism, Violations Of Law & Human Rights!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/25/politics/customs-and-border-protection-john-sanders/index.html

Priscilla Alvarez and Geneva Sands report for CNN:

Washington (CNN)Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders is resigning, he said in a message sent to agency employees Tuesday, amid the dramatic increase in the number of undocumented migrants crossing the border, a fight over how to address it and controversy over how children are being treated.

“Although I will leave it to you to determine whether I was successful, I can unequivocally say that helping support the amazing men and women of CBP has been the most fulfilling and satisfying opportunity of my career,” Sanders writes. His resignation is effective July 5.

Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Mark Morgan is expected to take over as Customs and Border Protection in an acting capacity, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. Sanders’s resignation as acting head of CBP comes amid a crush of migrants at the border that has overwhelmed facilities. Earlier Tuesday, CBP held a call with reporters on squalid conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas.

Officials conceded that children should not be held in CBP custody, noting that the agency’s facilities were designed decades ago to largely accommodate single adults for a short period of time.

The Washington Post first reported Morgan’s move.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump called off planned raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying deportations would proceed unless Congress finds a solution on the US-Mexico border within two weeks. Before it was postponed, Mark Morgan had publicly confirmed an operation targeting migrant families and others with court-ordered removals was in the works.

Morgan, a vocal proponent of the President’s efforts, was another of Trump’s picks to lead ICE after abruptly pulling the nomination of Ron Vitiello.

Morgan briefly served as Border Patrol chief during the Obama administration before leaving the post in January 2017. He previously spent two decades at the FBI. He is expected to return to Customs and Border Protection, which encompasses Border Patrol.

Sanders assumed the post after Kevin McAleenan, the former commissioner, moved up to fill the role of acting homeland security secretary in the wake of Kirstjen Nielsen’s ouster this spring. In his role, Sanders has overseen the agency responsible for policing the US borders and facilitating legal trade and travel. It is also the frontline agency dealing with the surge of migrants at the southern border.

Robert Perez, the highest-ranking career official, is the current deputy commissioner. It is unclear if he will step into the acting commissioner position.

<img alt=”100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180706121423-02-immigration-facility-0628-large-169.jpg”>

100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility

Before becoming acting commissioner, Sanders, served as the Chief Operating Officer at CBP, where he worked with McAleenan to address the operational needs of the agency and work on strategic direction.

As of June 1 this fiscal year, Border Patrol has arrested more than 377,000 family units, over 60,000 unaccompanied children, and over 226,000 single adults.

Sanders did not provide a reason for his departure.

Read Sanders’s letter here:

As some of you are aware, yesterday I offered my resignation to Secretary McAleenan, effective Friday, July 5. In that letter, I quoted a wise man who said to me, “each man will judge their success by their own metrics.” Although I will leave it to you to determine whether I was successful, I can unequivocally say that helping support the amazing men and women of CBP has been the most fulfilling and satisfying opportunity of my career.

<img alt=”100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180706121423-02-immigration-facility-0628-large-169.jpg”>

100 children moved back to controversial Clint, Texas, border facility

I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the last several days reflecting on my time at CBP. When I began this journey, Commissioner McAleenan charged me with aligning the mission support organizations and accelerating his priorities. Easy enough, I thought. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how the journey would transform me professionally and personally. This transformation was due in large part to the fact that people embraced and welcomed me in a way that was new to me — in a way that was truly special. To this day, I get choked up when speaking about it and I can’t adequately express my thanks. As a result, let me simply say I will never stop defending the people and the mission for which 427 people gave their lives in the line of duty in defending. Hold your heads high with the honor and distinction that you so richly deserve.

Throughout our journey together, your determination and can-do attitude made the real difference. It allowed CBP to accomplish what others thought wasn’t possible…what others weren’t able to do. And even though there is uncertainty during change, there is also opportunity. I therefore encourage everyone to reflect on all that you have accomplished as a team. My hope is you build upon your accomplishments and embrace new opportunities, remain flexible, and continue to make CBP extraordinary. This is your organization…own it! Don’t underestimate the power of momentum as you continue to tackle some of this country’s most difficult challenges.

I will forever be honored to have served beside you. As a citizen of this great country, I thank you for your public service.

Take care of each other,

John

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

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the latest TRAC Report confirms that under Trump, the DHS, particularly ICE, has been ignoring real enforcement priorities to concentrate on often counterproductive, yet cruel, wasteful, and polarizing, improperly politicized enforcement aimed at non-criminals and those contributing to our country. In other words, terrorizing primarily Hispanic communities just because they can. And these racist attacks appeal to Trump’s base. Just part of the “ICE Fraud” that Morgan undoubtedly intends to bring over to CBP. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/564/.

Not surprisingly, some dedicated and professional ICE Agents are tiring of Trump and his sycophants’ “malicious incompetence” that is demoralizing the agency and (as I had predicted long ago) turning it into probably the most hated, least trusted, least useful, and least effective law enforcement organization in America. Michelle Mark at Business Insider covers the “bad things that happen” when you have a “no values” White Nationalist President and exceptionally poor leaders like Tom Homan and Mark Morgan who lacked both the will and the backbone to stand up to Trump’s White Nationalist nonsense. https://apple.news/AxFctS7mET3qBX419lPootw

It’s an out of control agency badly in need of professional leadership, practical priorities, and some restraint and professional discipline in both rhetoric and actions. In other words, it needs a real law enforcement mission with honest, unbiased, professional leadership. Not going to happen under Trump!

So, the next competent President will have her or his work cut out to reform and reorganize ICE into an agency that serves the national interests of the majority of Americans. Whether that can be done in ICE’s current configuration, given its overtly racist overtones and widespread lack of community trust under Trump, remains to be seen. It could be beyond repair.

PWS

06-26-19

INSIDE TRUMP’S DEADLY KIDDIE GULAG: He’s Superseded Sessions As America’s Most Notorious Child Abuser!

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/inside-a-texas-building-where-the-government-is-holding-immigrant-children

Isaac Chotiner reports for the New Yorker:

Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children

By Isaac Chotiner

June 22, 2019

Some of the lawyers interviewing immigrant children held in Border Patrol detention facilities were so disturbed by what they saw that they have decided to talk to the media.

Photograph by Cedar Attanasio / AP

Hundreds of immigrant children who have been separated from their parents or family members are being held in dirty, neglectful, and dangerous conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas. This week, a team of lawyers interviewed more than fifty children at one of those facilities, in Clint, Texas, in order to monitor government compliance with the Flores settlement, which mandates that children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions and moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays. The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.

To discuss what the attorneys saw and heard, I spoke by phone with one of them, Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University and the director of its clinical-law program. She told me that, although Flores is an active court case, some of the lawyers were so disturbed by what they saw that they decided to talk to the media. We discussed the daily lives of the children in custody, the role that the guards are playing at the facility, and what should be done to unite many of these kids with their parents. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How many lawyers were in your party? And can you describe what happened when you arrived?

We had approximately ten lawyers, doctors, and interpreters in El Paso this past week. We did not plan to go to the Clint Facility, because it’s not a facility that historically receives children. It wasn’t even on our radar. It was at a facility that historically only had a maximum occupancy of a hundred and four, and it was an adult facility. So we were not expecting to go there, and then we saw the report, last week, that it appeared that children were being sent to Clint, so we decided to put four teams over there. The teams are one to two attorneys, or an attorney and an interpreter. The idea is that we would be interviewing one child at a time or one sibling group at a time.

How many interviews do you do in a day?

We do a screening interview first to see if the child’s most basic needs are being met. Is it warm enough? Do they have a place to sleep? How long have they been there? Are they being fed? And if it sounds like the basic needs are being met, then we don’t need to interview them longer. If, when we start to interview the child, they start to tell us things like they’re sleeping on the floor, they’re sick, nobody’s taking care of them, they’re hungry, then we do a more in-depth interview. And those interviews can take two hours or even longer. So it depends on what the children tell us. So I’d say, with a team of four attorneys, if you’re interviewing several groups, which we sometimes try to do, or if you interview older children who are trying to take care of younger children, then you are interviewing, let’s say, anywhere from ten to twenty children per day.

How many kids are at the facility right now, and do you have some sense of a breakdown of where they’re from?

When we arrived, on Monday, there were approximately three hundred and fifty children there. They were constantly receiving children, and they’re constantly picking up children and transferring them over to an O.R.R. [Office of Refugee Resettlement] site. So the number is fluid. We were so shocked by the number of children who were there, because it’s a facility that only has capacity for a hundred and four. And we were told that they had recently expanded the facility, but they did not give us a tour of it, and we legally don’t have the right to tour the facility.

We drove around afterward, and we discovered that there was a giant warehouse that they had put on the site. And it appears that that one warehouse has allegedly increased their capacity by an additional five hundred kids. When we talked to Border Patrol agents later that week, they confirmed that is the alleged expansion, and when we talked to children, one of the children described as many as three hundred children being in that room, in that warehouse, basically, at one point when he first arrived. There were no windows.

Get the best of The New Yorker every day, in your in-box.

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

As Trump launches his latest “human hostages for outrageous ransom” scheme, it’s important for Democrats to hang tough against any reduction in rights for asylum seekers. The whole “loopholes” bogus claim is just another piece of this toxic White Nationalist racist narrative.

The only “change” needed would be to require the Trump Administration to comply with its domestic, international, and Constitutional duties to administer asylum laws fairly and generously for the protection of asylum seekers. An end of child abuse should be a prerequisite for any discussions.

The reality to keep in mind is that while ICE’s ability to inflict pain and suffering on ethnic communities as part of the racially-motivated “New Operation Wetback” is real, their capacity to actually remove undocumented residents is quite limited.

Contrary to the bogus narrative, several million of the 10 million so-called undocumented residents are actually here with permission and are therefore not currently subject to removal. Those include individuals with DACA, TPS, PD, Deferred Action, and in the EOIR Court System, or whose cases are pending in the Courts of Appeals.

Additionally, many, perhaps the majority, of those with so-called final “in absentia” orders of removal never received proper legal notice of their hearings and will be entitled to file a “motion to reopen” with an automatic stay while those motions are pending. Those who are not yet in the EOIR system will go to the end of a backlog that stretches out for many years.

Given their notoriously poor record keeping, it’s likely that many of ICE’s “last known addresses” are no good. Plus, the resistance that ICE’s racist fear-mongering tactics have engendered in many communities will hamper operations.

Additionally, ICE keeps claiming that is detention capacity is already “saturated.” Thus, most of those picked up, who will not be “immediately removable,” will have to be released.

In short, while we can expect some human tragedies and human rights abuses, the result of the Trump/DHS/ICE “saber rattling” will likely be another resounding operational failure that fuels the “Abolish ICE Movement” while energizing the vote to remove Trump and his GOP White Nationalist Cabal from office in 2020. Kind of an “everyone loses” outcome – but, despite all of his lies, boasting, and shamelessly false self-promotion, that’s all Trump has ever been about.

PWS

06-23-19

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