Category: Matthew 25:44

REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

OUR DISTINGUISHED PANEL:

Eileen Blessinger, Blessinger Legal

Lisa Johnson-Firth, Immigrants First

Andrea Rodriguez, Rodriguez Law

FBA Austin -Central America — Intro

JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW

By

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Federal Bar Association Immigration Conference

Austin, Texas

May 17, 2019

Hi, I’m Paul Schmidt, moderator of this panel. So, I have something useful to do while my wonderful colleagues do all the “heavy lifting,” please submit all questions to me in writing. And remember, free beer for everyone at the Bullock Texas State Museum after this panel!

Welcome to the front lines of the battle for our legal system, and ultimately for the future of our constitutional republic. Because, make no mistake, once this Administration, its nativist supporters, and enablers succeed in eradicating the rights and humanity of Central American asylum seekers, all their other “enemies” — Hispanics, gays, African Americans, the poor, women, liberals, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, Democrats — will be in line for “Dred Scottification” — becoming “non-persons” under our Constitution. If you don’t know what the “Insurrection Act” is or “Operation Wetback” was, you should “tune in” to today’s edition of my blog immigrationcourtside.com and take a look into the future of America under our current leaders’ dark and disgraceful vision.

Before I introduce the “Dream Team” sitting to my right, a bit of asylum history.

In 1987, the Supreme Court established in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca that a well founded fear of persecution for asylum was to be interpreted generously in favor of asylum applicants. So generously, in fact, that someone with only a 10% chance of persecution qualifies.

Shortly thereafter, the BIA followed suit with Matter of Mogharrabi, holding that asylum should be granted even in cases where persecution was significantly less than probable. To illustrate, the BIA granted asylum to an Iranian who suffered threats at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, DC. Imagine what would happen to a similar case under today’s regime!

In the 1990s, the “Legacy INS” enacted regulations establishing that those who had suffered “past persecution” would be presumed to have a well-founded fear of future persecution, unless the Government could show materially changed circumstances or a reasonably available internal relocation alternative that would eliminate that well-founded fear. In my experience as a judge, that was a burden that the Government seldom could meet.  

But the regulations went further and said that even where the presumption of a well founded fear had been rebutted, asylum could still be granted because of “egregious past persecution” or “other serious harm.”

In 1996, the BIA decided the landmark case of Matter of Kasinga, recognizing that abuses directed at women by a male dominated society, such as “female genital mutilation’ (“FGM”), could be a basis for granting asylum based on a “particular social group.” Some of us, including my good friend and colleague Judge Lory Rosenberg, staked our careers on extending that much-need protection to women who had suffered domestic violence. Although it took an unnecessarily long time, that protection eventually was realized in the 2014 precedent Matter of A-R-C-G-, long after our “forced departure” from the BIA.

And, as might be expected, over the years the asylum grant rate in Immigration Court rose steadily, from a measly 11% in the early 1980s, when EOIR was created, to 56% in 2012, in an apparent long overdue fulfillment of the generous legal promise of Cardoza-Fonseca. Added to those receiving withholding of removal and/or relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), approximately two-thirds of asylum applicants were receiving well-deserved, often life-saving legal protection in Immigration Court.

Indeed, by that time, asylum grant rates in some of the more due-process oriented courts with asylum expertise like New York and Arlington exceeded 70%, and could have been models for the future. In other words, after a quarter of a century of struggles, the generous promise of Cardoza-Fonseca was finally on the way to being fulfilled. Similarly, the vision of the Immigration Courts as “through teamwork and innovation being the world’s best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all” was at least coming into focus, even if not a reality in some Immigration Courts that continued to treat asylum applicants with hostility.

And, that doesn’t count those offered prosecutorial discretion or “PD” by the DHS counsel. Sometimes, this was a humanitarian act to save those who were in danger if returned but didn’t squarely fit the somewhat convoluted “refugee” definition as interpreted by the BIA. Other times, it appeared to be a strategic move by DHS to head off possible precedents granting asylum in “close cases” or in “emerging circumstances.”

In 2014, there was a so-called “surge” in asylum applicants, mostly scared women, children, and families from the Northern Triangle of Central America seeking protection from worsening conditions involving gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments.There was a well-established record of femicide and other widespread and largely unmitigated gender-based violence directed against women and gays, sometimes by the Northern Triangle governments and their agents, other times by gangs and cartels operating with the knowledge and acquiescence of the governments concerned.

Also, given the breakdown of governmental authority and massive corruption, gangs and cartels assumed quasi-governmental status, controlling territories, negotiating “treaties,” exacting involuntary “taxes,” and severely punishing those who publicly opposed their political policies by refusing to join, declining to pay, or attempting to report them to authorities. Indeed, MS-13 eventually became the largest employer in El Salvador. Sometimes, whole family groups, occupational groups, or villages were targeted for their public acts of resistance.

Not surprisingly in this context, the vast majority of those who arrived during the so-called “surge” passed “credible fear” screening by the DHS and were referred to the Immigration Courts, or in the case of “unaccompanied minors,” to the Asylum Offices, to pursue their asylum claims.

The practical legal solution to this humanitarian flow was obvious — help folks find lawyers to assist in documenting and presenting their cases, screen out the non-meritorious claims and those who had prior gang or criminal associations, and grant the rest asylum. Even those not qualifying for asylum because of the arcane “nexus” requirements appeared to fit squarely within the CAT protection based on likelihood of torture with government acquiescence upon return to the Northern Triangle. Some decent BIA precedents, a robust refugee program in the Northern Triangle, along with continued efforts to improve the conditions there would have “sealed the deal.” In other words, the Obama Administration had all of the legal tools necessary to deal effectively and humanely with the misnamed “surge” as what it really was — a humanitarian situation and an opportunity for our country to show human rights leadership!

But, then things took a strange and ominous turn. After years of setting records for deportations and removals, and being disingenuously called “soft on enforcement” by the GOP, the Obama Administration began believing the GOP myths that they were wimps. They panicked! Their collective “manhood” depended on showing that they could quickly return refugees to the Northern Triangle to “deter” others from coming. Thus began the “weaponization” of our Immigration Court system that has continued unabated until today.

They began imprisoning families and children in horrible conditions and establishing so-called “courts” in those often for profit prisons in obscure locations where attorneys generally were not readily available. They absurdly claimed that everyone should be held without bond because as a group they were a “national security risk.” They argued in favor of indefinite detention without bond and making children and toddlers “represent themselves” in Immigration Court.

The Attorney General also sent strong messages to EOIR that hurrying folks through the system by “prioritizing” them, denying their claims, “stuffing” their appeals, and returning them to the Northern Triangle with a mere veneer of due process was an essential part of the Administration’s “get tough” enforcement program. EOIR was there to “send a message” to those who might be considering fleeing for their lives — don’t come, you won’t get in, no matter how strong your claim might be.

They took judges off of their established dockets and sent them to the Southern Border to expeditiously remove folks before they could get legal help. They insisted on jamming unprepared cases of recently arrived juveniles and “adults with children” in front of previously docketed cases, thereby generating total chaos and huge backlogs through what is known as “aimless docket reshuffling” (“ADR”).

Hurry up scheduling and ADR also resulted in more “in absentia” orders because of carelessly prepared and often inadequate or wrongly addressed “notices” sent out by overwhelmed DHS and EOIR court staff. Sometimes DHS could remove those with in absentia orders before they got a chance to reopen their cases. Other times, folks didn’t even realize a removal order had been entered until they were on their way back.

They empowered judges with unusually high asylum denial rates. By a ratio of nine to one they hired new judges from prosecutorial backgrounds, rather than from the large body of qualified candidates with experience in representing asylum applicants who might actually have been capable of working within the system to fairly and efficiently recognize meritorious cases, promote fair access to pro bono counsel, and insure that doubtful cases or those needing more attention did not get “lost” in the artificial backlogs being created in an absurdly mismanaged system. In other words, due process took a back seat to “expedience” and fulfilling inappropriate Administration enforcement goals.

Asylum grant rates began to drop, even as conditions on the ground for refugees worldwide continued to deteriorate. Predictably, however, detention, denial, inhumane treatment, harsh rhetoric, and unfair removals failed to stop refugees from fleeing the Northern Triangle.

But, just when many of us thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. The Trump Administration arrived on the scene. They put lifelong White Nationalist xenophobe nativists Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller in charge of eradicating the asylum process. Sessions decided that even artificially suppressed asylum grant rates weren’t providing enough deterrence; asylum seekers were still winning too many cases. So he did away with A-R-C-G- and made it harder for Immigration Judges to control their dockets.

He tried to blame asylum seekers and their largely pro bono attorneys, whom he called “dirty lawyers,” for having created a population of 11 million undocumented individuals in the U.S. He promoted bogus claims and false narratives about immigrants and crime. Perhaps most disgustingly, he was the “mastermind” behind the policy of “child separation” which inflicted lifetime damage upon the most vulnerable and has resulted in some children still not being reunited with their families.

He urged “judges” to summarily deny asylum claims of women based on domestic violence or because of fear of persecution by gangs. He blamed the judges for the backlogs he was dramatically increasing with more ADR and told them to meet new quotas for churning out final orders or be fired. He made it clear that denials of asylum, not grants, were to be the “new norm” for final orders.

His sycophantic successor, Bill Barr, an immigration hard-liner, immediately picked up the thread by eliminating bond for most individuals who had passed credible fear. Under Barr, the EOIR has boldly and publicly abandoned any semblance of due process, fairness, or unbiased decision making in favor of becoming an Administration anti-asylum propaganda factory. Just last week they put out a “bogus fact sheet” of lies about the asylum process and the dedicated lawyers trying to help asylum seekers. The gist was that the public should believe that almost all asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle are mala fide and that getting them attorneys and explaining their rights are a waste of time and money.

In the meantime, the Administration has refused to promptly process asylum applicants at ports of entry; made those who have passed credible fear “wait in Mexico” in dangerous and sometimes life-threatening conditions; unsuccessfully tried to suspend the law allowing those who enter the U.S. between ports of entry to apply for asylum; expanded the “New American Gulag” with tent cities and more inhumane prisons — dehumanizingly referred to as “beds” as if they existed without reference to those humans confined to them;  illegally reprogrammed money that could have gone for additional humanitarian assistance to a stupid and unnecessary “wall;” and threatened to “dump” asylum seekers to “punish” so-called “sanctuary cities.” Perhaps most outrageously, in violation of clear statutory mandates, they have replaced trained Asylum Officers in the “credible fear” process with totally unqualified Border Patrol Agents whose job is to make the system “adversarial” and to insure that fewer individuals pass “credible fear.”

The Administration says the fact that the “credible fear” pass rate is much higher than the asylum grant rate is evidence that the system is being “gamed.” That’s nativist BS! The, reality is just the opposite: that so many of those who pass credible fear are eventually rejected by Immigration Judges shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the Immigration Court system. Under pressure to produce and with too many biased, untrained, and otherwise unqualified “judges,” many claims that should be granted are being wrongfully denied.

Today, the Immigration Courts have become an openly hostile environment for asylum seekers and their representatives. Sadly, the Article III Courts aren’t much better, having largely “swallowed the whistle” on a system that every day blatantly mocks due process, the rule of law, and fair and unbiased treatment of asylum seekers. Many Article IIIs continue to “defer” to decisions produced not by “expert tribunals,” but by a fraudulent court system that has replaced due process with expediency and enforcement.

But, all is not lost. Even in this toxic environment, there are pockets of judges at both the administrative and Article III level who still care about their oaths of office and are continuing to grant asylum to battered women and other refugees from the Northern Triangle. Indeed, I have been told that more than 60 gender-based cases from Northern Triangle countries have been  granted by Immigration Judges across the country even after Sessions’s blatant attempt to snuff out protection for battered women in Matter of A-B-. Along with dependent family members, that means hundreds of human lives of refugees saved, even in the current age.

Also significantly, by continuing to insist that asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle be treated fairly in accordance with due process and the applicable laws, we are making a record of the current legal and constitutional travesty for future generations. We are building a case for an independent Article I Immigration Court, for resisting nativist calls for further legislative restrictions on the rights of asylum seekers, and for eventually holding the modern day “Jim Crows” who have abused the rule of law and human values, at all levels of our system, accountable, before the “court of history” if nothing else!

Eventually, we will return to the evolving protection of asylum seekers in the pre-2014 era and eradicate the damage to our fundamental values and the rule of law being done by this Administration’s nativist, White Nationalist policies.That’s what the “New Due Process Army” is all about.

Here to tell you how to effectively litigate for the New Due Process Army and to save even more lives of deserving refugees from all areas of the world, particularly from the Northern Triangle, are three of the “best ever.” I know that, because each of them appeared before me during my tenure at the Arlington Immigration Court. They certainly brightened up my day whenever they appeared, and I know they will enlighten you with their legal knowledge, energy, wit, and humanity.

Andrea Rodriguez is the principal of Rodriguez Law in Arlington Virginia. Prior to opening her own practice, Andrea was the Director of Legal Services at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). She is a graduate of the City University of New York Law and George Mason University.  

Eileen Blessinger is the principal of Blessinger Legal in Falls Church, Virginia. Eileen is a graduate of the Washington College of Law at American University.  In addition to heading a multi-attorney practice firm, she is a frequent commentator on legal issues on television and in the print media.

Lisa Johnson-Firth is the principal of Immigrants First, specializing in removal defense, waivers, family-based adjustment, asylum and Convention Against Torture claims, naturalization, U and T visas, and Violence Against Women Act petitions. She holds a J.D. from Northeastern University, an LLB from the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and a B.A. degree from Allegheny College.

Andrea, starting with you, what’s the real situation in the Northern Triangle and the sordid history of the chronic failure of state protection?

PWS

05-20-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  4. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!

AS TRUMP’S POLICY OF “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” CONTINUES TO UNRAVEL, UNHINGED PREZ CONSIDERS MASSIVE VIOLATIONS OF CONSTITUTION & HUMAN RIGHTS — “OPERATION WETBACK 2019” In The Offing?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-leaves-open-possibility-of-invoking-insurrection-act-to-remove-migrants/2019/05/17/6b49c2c4-7892-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html

John Wagner reports for the Washington Post:

A White House spokesman left often the possibility Friday that President Trump would invoke an arcane law that would allow him to deploy the military to remove illegal immigrants, as Trump warned migrants on Twitter that they could be leaving the country soon.

Asked during a television appearance whether Trump is considering using the Insurrection Act, spokesman Hogan Gidley said the president is “going to do everything within his authority to protect the American people” and has “lots of tools at his disposal.”

“We haven’t used them all, and we’re looking at ways to protect the American people,” Gidley said during an appearance on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

His interview took place amid a series of tweets from Trump, including some that suggested new actions to crack down on illegal immigration.

[Trump’s plan to overhaul legal immigration draws cool reception]

“All people that are illegally coming into the United States now will be removed from our Country at a later date as we build up our removal forces and as the laws are changed,” Trump said in one tweet. “Please do not make yourselves too comfortable, you will be leaving soon!”

In another, Trump said “bad ‘hombres’” were being detained and would be “sent home.”

His tweets followed a Rose Garden speech on Thursday about a new immigration plan that opened him to criticism from conservatives for not pressing a harder line.

The new White House proposal seeks to prioritize the admission to the United States of high-skilled workers over those with family members who are U.S. citizens, but it does not change the net level of green cards allocated each year.

In a sign of sensitivity to criticisms from immigration hard-liners, The Post reported Thursday that Trump’s advisers are looking at measures behind the scenes such as the Insurrection Act, an arcane law that allows the president to employ the military to combat lawlessness or rebellion, to remove illegal immigrants.

The idea of using the law was first reported by the Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet, after Trump finished his speech Thursday afternoon.

Such a plan would involve deployment of the National Guard and cooperation of governors who might not be inclined to go along with Trump’s order.

Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey and David Nakamura contributed to this report.

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

Sounds like the “brainchild” of Stephen Miller!

Nothing brings cowardly nativists to their knees more quickly than hordes of unarmed, desperate migrants seeking to exercise their legal and human rights! The Trump Administration might be “rattling the sword” with Iran, but truth is that they are scared of their own shadows. Race-baiting and threatening the weakest, most vulnerable, and defenseless among us are about the only things they know how to do.

PWS

05-17-19

Related posts:

  1. 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!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

WELCOME TO FRANZ KAFKA’S AMERICA: Where Individuals Are Imprisoned Indefinitely In Substandard Conditions Without Trial For The “Crime” Of Asking For Protection Under Our Legal Process — The Objective: Coerce Them To Stop Asking For The Benefits Our Law Offers & Demoralize Them To The Point Where They Would Rather Be Killed Or Tortured Than To Proceed With Their Legal Cases!

https://apple.news/ADUUhY0-QSR6JBMSznV322A

Professor Stacy Burstin writes in USA Today:

I toured an immigration detention center. The prison-like atmosphere was mind-numbing.

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop — not an endless jail sentence with the goal of causing migrants to self-deport.

4:00 am EDT May. 16, 2019

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop, not a prison. But what else can one call a place with razor wire covered fences, holding cells, head counts, locked dormitories, solitary confinement, limited recreation, inadequate mental health services and no-contact visits?

While visiting the New Mexico border area as volunteers with Catholic Charities Immigration Legal Services of Southern New Mexico in March, a group of undergraduates, three law students, a campus minister and I toured the Otero County Processing Center. Management & Training Corp. (MTC) runs the facility for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service.

A smiling ICE officer greeted us at the start of our visit, explaining that ICE likes giving tours of Otero to dispel criticisms circulating about immigration detention.

Inside an immigration detention center

Our first stop was the count room dominated by a large board covered with more than 900 colored tags on hooks — mostly blue and orange — representing the detainee population and designating the level of security and privileges afforded based on jumpsuit color. “Blues” have no known criminal history and simply entered the United States without papers. “Oranges” are divided into two groups — individuals who have a history of very minor crimes such as public intoxication, and those arrested for or convicted of other nonviolent crimes. “Reds” have arrests, convictions or other history involving violent activity.

Read more commentary:

My Sharpie marker might be the only thing keeping migrant mothers and children together

An illegal immigrant killed my daughter. Trump’s right — we must complete the border wall.

Stories from the border: The women asylum seekers I met need protection, not barriers

In the intake area, we found newly arrived men lingering in a large holding cell behind a locked, metal door waiting to be processed. A security officer explained the intake procedure, but it was hard for me to focus on his words because I couldn’t take my eyes off the mountain of duffel bags and backpacks full of their belongings piled next to a shower room. I later learned that same image haunted my students.

We passed through the medical unit where individuals receive basic medical care. Those with more serious conditions, we were told, are sent outside of the facility. Our guides told us that a psychiatrist visits once a month to oversee medication, and one full-time counselor is available for the 900 or more detainees. There is a small room where detainees deemed suicidal are watched.

Our guides also brought us into one of the dorms — locked housing where 50 men sleep on thin mattresses in rows of bunk beds. I was overcome with a sense of time standing still; boredom pervaded the room. Despite MTC’s commitment to “provide an atmosphere that is comfortable, safe, and conducive to making time pass quickly for those who find themselves in our care,” individuals are limited to two hours of recreation a day.

One of the students asked whether English classes are offered. Our guide replied that they are working on it, that such programs have not been instituted because those at Otero only stay for six to eight weeks. But we met detainees who reported being there for six to eight months or more.

The blues and oranges able to secure a job in the facility (only four of the 50 men in the dorm we visited were working at the time) earn at least $1 a day, the ICE-stipulated minimum wage. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the detainees we saw raking the grounds, mopping hallways, doing laundry or preparing food allowed MTC to meet its labor needs without actually paying for them.

A glimpse through a narrow window revealed the Secured Housing Unit — the solitary confinement block — a row of small cells where individuals causing problems are sent. Men who are vulnerable to bullying or abuse (including transgender women) can also request a move here for protection, though they would have to be pretty desperate to do so.

Immigrants need asylum, not imprisonment

Facilities like Otero are not supposed to be prisons. Most ICE detainees have not been convicted of any crime. For many others, they are detained even though a U.S. court had dismissed charges, authorized release while awaiting trial, or convicted and imposed a minimal sentence already served.

None of these men belong in jail.

Yet the realization that we were in a jail only intensified at our last stop — the visiting area. We found a large glass window running the length of a long table, seats placed on either side. Detainees are kept separate from loved ones and communicate by phone.

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop for individuals seeking a determination of whether they have a legal basis for staying in the United States. Yet many at Otero are eligible to apply for asylum and other forms of humanitarian protection.

Why are U.S. taxpayers paying a private company to provide housing, food and 24/7 security for individuals, the majority of whom pose no security threat and have a right under U.S. law to seek protection?

Why are these men consigned to live in a mind-numbing, prison-like atmosphere that leads many — in Otero and similar facilities around the country — to become so desperate to get out that they abandon valid claims and self-deport?

Unfortunately, my students and I came to the troubling conclusion that this desperation is not just the inevitable result of immigration confinement, but may actually be the goal in the first place.

Stacy Brustin, professor of law, is director of the Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Clinic at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

4:00 am EDT May. 16, 2019

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

In the final “Kafkaesque” twist, perhaps Trump’s “maliciously incompetent” immigration policies will simply convince individuals needing refuge that our legal system is as worthless and dishonest as the ones they are leaving behind.

For the right price and degree of risk (and refugees are by nature risk takers) smugglers will be able to eventually get persistent individuals to the interior. There, as I have pointed out, their chances of avoiding forced removal will be much better than their odds of getting asylum in an unfairly biased, increasingly lawless system that uses illegal coercive methods and is stacked against their claims, no matter how valid or compelling.

Right now these folks are NOT a security risk, no matter what lies Trump and the restrictionists spread. A smart, humane, competent, and law-abiding Administration would simply encourage them to arrive at ports of entry, promptly screen them, apply the asylum laws in the generous way that they were intended, integrate those granted (probably the majority, under a fair, generous application of the law, in accordance with Cardoza-Fonseca) into our society, and return those who do not qualify after full due process in a humane and dignified manner.

Why would folks cross the border between ports of entry to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol if they could present themselves at a border port and be treated promptly, humanely, and fairly? That’s what would actually give us a secure border as well as many grateful, productive new residents who will help the U.S. It would also promptly separate out those who clearly can’t qualify for protection before they establish ties to the U.S.

With a smarter, common-sense approach to the Immigration Courts, universal access to counsel, and better, more professional, judges who were actually well-trained in recognizing and granting meritorious asylum cases (and not expected to function as a “Border Patrol junior auxiliary”), asylum cases could be completed in compliance with full Due Process in months, rather than years. The Border Patrol could go back to real law enforcement, which they are largely ignoring right now in a rush to do Trump’s bidding.

Instead, Trump seems determined to create a situation where many will die, smugglers will get richer, but more individuals will get to the interior where they will live, unscreened and perhaps exploited, but alive, as part of a growing “underground” or “immigration black market.” The Border Patrol won’t even be able to count them or “arrest” (arguably an inappropriate term for
“turn ins”) them as they do now to support their bogus claims of  a “law enforcement emergency.” This self-created “emergency” — actually a humanitarian tragedy —has little to do with legitimate law enforcement. How maliciously incompetent can one Administration get?

And, no, “Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall” won’t stop professional smugglers! They are already laughing at his ineptness and anxiously waiting to see how his next nativist-driven dumb policy will improve their business and fill their coffers. The dumbest smuggler is probably smarter than Trump, and much less dangerous to America.

PWS

05-17-19

 

Related posts:

  1. CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. PROFESSOR FITZ BRUNDAGE @ WASHPOST: Can We Regain Our Humanitarian Values In The Age Of Trump? — “We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.”
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

THESE ARE THE DECENT FOLKS THAT TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST NATION WANT YOU TO FEAR — “I constantly lived in fear and all I could do was pray to God to keep my kids safe. I think that that photo of me and my kids being gassed helped people see that we are humans too and we deserve to be treated with basic dignity. All of us are the same in the eyes of God.”

https://apple.news/AnODNXB12S1u3477b18BmjQ

Gina Martinez reports for Time:

She Was Tear-Gassed at the Border. But for This Migrant Mother, the Hardest Part Is the Children She Left Behind

Gina Martinez

In November 2018, the image of Maria Lidia Meza Castro desperately holding on to her twin daughters at the U.S.-Mexico border as a tear gas canister unleashed smoke behind them sparked national anger.

“Honestly, in that moment, I just thought, ‘I’m going to die with my kids right here and now,’” Castro tells TIME.

Six months later, Castro is living in a three-bedroom house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with the five children she brought with her on the 2,000-mile journey from Honduras. And as millions of Americans prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday, she says she would do it all again. But, her thoughts are constantly on the four children she left behind.

“Trust me, in Honduras you really suffer. Thank God at the very least I’m not suffering, but my kids over there are, and that’s tough,” she says.

Castro says she left Honduras in October 2018 and reached Tijuana a month later. It was there that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers fired tear gas canisters at migrants rushing toward the U.S. border. Following the incident, Castro spent weeks in Tijuana camps until she and a group of fellow migrants were escorted to the Otay Mesa port of entry with the assistance of the nonprofit group Families Belong Together and two Democratic members of Congress. They also helped her apply for asylum. After making it through the border, she and her children were detained for five days before being released to live in the Washington area, close to where Castro has family.

THE BRIEF

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Photographer Federica Valabrega first met Castro and the five children she brought with her last November in Mexicali, Mexico, as they were making their way to Tijuana, days before the photograph of her being tear-gassed made headlines.

Valabrega lost contact with Castro after she entered the U.S. When she finally tracked her down, Valabrega spent three weeks with the Castro family, living with them and documenting their daily lives as they adjust to the United States.

“Ultimately, I felt compelled to follow up with Maria because I wanted to know how she was doing and because her determination to do anything in her power to raise her children in a better place as a single mother inspired me,” Valabrega says.

Castro and five of her kids share their new home with a fellow Honduran migrant mother and her two children. For now, the future is uncertain –– Castro’s attorney says there is a huge backlog and no set court date, leaving Castro and her children in limbo.

She is forced to wear an ankle bracelet, which some asylum seekers are issued to ensure they do not flee before their court date, and is not legally allowed to work. She spends her days tending to the children she was able to bring and worrying about the ones back in Honduras.

Castro crossed the border with her 4-year-old son James, 5-year-old twin girls Cheyli and Sayra, 13-year-old daughter Jeimy and 15-year-old son Victor. But she longs to be reunited with her 20-year-old son, Jayro, who was already in the U.S. but was deported in early February; her 18-year-old twins boys, Fernando and Yoni; and her 16-year-old son Jesus, who is paraplegic and cannot walk or travel. She fears they will fall prey to the violence she fought so hard to escape.

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“It’s hard because things are looking so bad in Honduras,” she says. “Over there they are killing people, they’re forcing young men to sell drugs and commit other crimes. My son feels terrible because he’s so far from me but also because I’m not able to help him financially because I still haven’t been able to get a job.”

Castro’s inability to have a job forces her to rely on a local church for food and other essentials while she awaits a court date that is likely still months away.

“I wish I could work. I want to fight for them and support them financially, but it’s not possible yet,” she says.

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Now, as Castro and her youngest children settle into life in the United States, she says her focus is solely on obtaining asylum so she can begin working and providing for all nine of her kids.

“I’m just happy for the opportunity to be here. Now that I’m here, I at least have some hope to give my kids a good life,” she says. “I like it here because there is not as much danger; here you can be in peace. It’s just so different from life in Honduras, where you can’t even be outside after a certain time without putting your life in danger.”

She says her children are getting more accustomed to life in the Washington suburbs with each passing day. They are beginning to learn English and enjoy playing in the park.

As Castro looks back on the difficult journey from Honduras, she says she would do it all over again if it meant ending up where she is now.

“It was very much worth the suffering we had to go through to end up here,” she says. “I constantly lived in fear and all I could do was pray to God to keep my kids safe. I think that that photo of me and my kids being gassed helped people see that we are humans too and we deserve to be treated with basic dignity. All of us are the same in the eyes of God.”

She adds: “My message to mothers everywhere, especially moms who are going through what I am, is just that God gave us a chance to change our lives and with patience and hope we can fight for our families and give them a better life.”

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Go to the complete article from Time at the link for some great photography from Federica Valabrega.

Whether or not Maria Lidia Meza Castro and her family qualify to stay in the U.S., they and others like them deserve to be treated humanely, respectfully, and to have their claims fully and fairly considered. That’s not happening now, particularly at EOIR which has intentionally tried to skew the law against applicants from Central America and fails over and over to either apply the asylum law correctly or to correctly and honestly assess the conditions in the Northern Triangle. Not to mention that EOIR management has turned the Immigration Courts into an intentionally hostile environment for the mostly pro bono attorneys trying to help asylum applicants. And, Trump would like to truncate the process even further. Totally disgraceful!

Even if Castro doesn’t ultimately qualify for relief under the immigration laws, she and her family would be in danger in Honduras and could make contributions to the United States. Therefore, a smart, humane, and brave country would carefully consider granting broader protections than asylum law might allow. Instead, the Trump Administration tries to contort and limit what should be generous, life-saving relief available under our asylum laws.

PWS

05-12-19

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  2. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. GREAT KATE: Morrissey’s Moving Journalism Shows Human Side Of Why We Have Asylum Laws & How Trump Regime’s White Nationalist Abuses Are Diminishing All of Us!

COLBERT I. KING @ WASHPOST: The Ugly Endurance Of Racism In America: “I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-america-would-age-out-of-racism-what-was-i-thinking/2019/05/10/32e89c8a-7274-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html

King writes:

There was a time when I believed, almost as an article of faith, that with the passage of time, America would age out of racism. What in the world was I thinking?

But that is what I told myself in the fall of 1954 — five months after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision — when I learned that students attending then-all-white Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Technical high schools, and several white junior high schools in the District, had staged walkouts to protest the assignment of black kids to their schools. I was enrolled at then-all-black Dunbar High School at the time.

I really believed that racial integration was a step toward the goal of full equality and that, as the months wore on, those who walked out would shed their fear and anger. Instead, they and their families devoted the time remaining before the black students arrived to finding a means to flee the city.

Still I dreamed.

When, in 1956, students and adults shouted racial epithets and threw rotten eggs and rocks at a young black woman named Autherine Lucy who tried to enter the University of Alabama to obtain a degree in library science, I consoled myself with the thought that the hurlers of eggs and epithets would age out of the picture. Even when the University of Alabama expelled Lucy, under the guise of ensuring her personal safety, I thought those elders would one day be off the scene.

The same thought was in my head in the fall of 1957, when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called the National Guard to surround Central High School in Little Rock to prevent nine African American students from attending the all-white school, declaring “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter.

But they were still around years later when, in the summer of 1964, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were in Mississippi helping to register voters. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

Through it all, I clung firmly to the belief that because those white men and women hellbent on making life miserable for people unlike themselves were getting up in age, they would soon die out and be replaced by a younger, more broad-minded, racially tolerant generation of white Americans. Unlike many of their elders, these young people would be unencumbered by ingrained racist ideas, I said to myself.

Evidence of that smacks us in the face.

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21 .

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19 .

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46 .

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo. They were driven by the same racial animus that caused students to walk out of Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Tech high schools 65 years ago.

The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, Wilton Daniel Gregory, has called racism “a grave moral disease whose recurrence, aggressiveness and persistence should frighten every one of us.”

What’s striking about today’s disease, Gregory wrote in a December 2016 article carried by the Catholic News Service, is that it “may seem to have been brought under control”; that it was on the wane.

Presciently, Gregory wrote, “We have returned to a moment in our nation’s history when racist feelings and sentiments have been condoned as acceptable to express publicly and publish openly.”

The response he called for would reflect the sentiment of my youth: to “disavow any vestige of racism and hatred of other people because of race, religion, legal status or gender.”

Eradicating and inoculating us from this disease is our hope and never-ending challenge — for each of us. For certain, hate won’t outgrow itself.

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

I have noticed before the similarity between the faces and expressions of the overwhelmingly white, mindlessly cheering crowds, behind Trump at his rallies as he rattles off his “normal litany” of lies, insults, and racist provocations and the absurd, yet ugly and dangerous, faces of white racists in the 1950’s and 1960’s South —- captured in black and white photos as they bullied and taunted African Americans at lunch counters or African American kids attempting to attend school. Really, I also wanted to believe that those days were gone, and the white folks pictured were either gone or would be embarrassed and humiliated by the cowardice, ignorance, and inhumanity of their past actions.

King is right: “hate won’t outgrow itself.” And Trump and his followers are are nurturing, growing, and harvesting that hate on a daily basis. The majority of us who don’t believe in Trump’s vile messages and unacceptable methods must take our country back before hate and bigotry consume it!

PWS

056-11-19

Related posts:

  1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  2. GEORGE PACKER @ THE ATLANTIC: With Failed Institutions & Lousy Leaders, Including a President Leading the Charge to the Bottom, America Faces An Uncertain Future — “A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.” — Joe Biden & The Dems Could Be The Last, Best Hope For American Democracy & Real Progress Toward “Equal Justice For All!”
  3. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  4. TA-NEHISI COATES IS OPTIMISTIC THAT WE’RE FINALLY AT A MOMENT OF CHANGE IN AMERICA’S APPROACH TO RACE RELATIONS — Read Ezra Klein’s Vox News Interview With Ta-Nehisi to Find Out Why!

TRUMP & HIS ENABLERS CLAIM THAT IT’S SAFE TO RETURN GUATEMALANS — THEY LIE! — The Facts “On The Ground” Tell A Far Different Story: “No wall will stop the flow of migrants. No raging about rapists or threats to separate families will stop it. No racism against brown people or fear of demographic change in 21st-century America will stop it. A broken American immigration system certainly won’t stop it. Not as long as Central Americans are desperate.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/border-immigration-crisis-guatemala.html

Roger Cohen writes in the NY Times:

VADO, N.M. — Rigoberto Pablo ran out of hope. There was no work, no decent schooling for his children. Nothing in the dried-out streams, wilting coffee plants and wafting sewage of his village in the western highlands of Guatemala gave him reason to think his family’s suffering would end. So late last year, he crossed the nearby Mexican border, U.S.A.-bound.

Three months later, in February, I met him in this small New Mexico town, a timid man with a gentle smile. Pablo, age 37, is in American limbo, like hundreds of thousands of migrants. Seated on a sofa in the home of his hosts, he reached down, turned up the hem of his pants and revealed the electronic ankle monitor that Immigration and Customs Enforcement affixed when it released him. A green light confirmed he was being tracked. “If I take it off,” he said, “they’ll come after me.”

His 14-year-old son, Alex, who crossed the border with his father on Nov. 14 and is now in seventh grade at a nearby school, gazed at the device. His dad, he said, is “not a rapist or murderer. He wants to work and I want to study.”

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Desperate people do desperate things! Duh! That’s what one of my colleagues told me my first week on the bench in Arlington. Too bad that Trump and the incompetents who work for him don’t take the time to understand the basics of human migration and conduct themselves lives like human beings and responsible public officials.

America deserves someone better than Donald Trump and his cowardly sycophantic GOP. Both Guatemala and the U.S appear to be “governed” by kakistocracies!

We diminish ourselves as a nation with each day that Trump is in office. But, that won’t stop human migration. It’s going top take folks much smarter, more humane, and more competent that Trump and his toadies to successfully address today’s immigraton issues.

PWS

05-11-19

 

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  2. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  3. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

GREAT NEWS FOR DUE PROCESS! — With A Boost From Roundtable Of Former Immigration Judges Member Judge John Gossart, CASA, & CAIR Coalition, Fairfax Co. Virginia Enacts Universal Representation!

Judge (Ret.) John F. Gossart, Jr.

Claudia Cubas, Litigation Director, CAIR Coalition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, May 10, 2019
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Diana Castaneda, dcastaneda@wearecasa.org, 240-515-5561
Fairfax County Now First Virginia Jurisdiction to Fund Legal Representation
for Immigrants in Need
Fairfax, VA – CASA and CAIR Coalition are pleased to announce that the Fairfax County Board of
Supervisors voted to fund a $200k “Universal Representation” pilot program, which will provide legal
representation to immigrants living in Fairfax County who are facing deportation proceedings and in need
of counsel—including DACA recipients and TPS holders.
“With the passage of Universal Representation, CASA and our community are proud that Fairfax County
has taken a step forward in terms of equity by ensuring that immigrants are treated with dignity by
providing legal representation. We will continue advancing immigrant rights as one community,” said
Luis Aguilar CASA Virginia Director.
“As our communities continue to weather the capricious changes in immigration law and the threat of deportation hangs over so many of our neighbors, Fairfax County has taken a simple yet effective stance: provide Fairfax families with counsel when detained and facing deportation,” said Kelly White CAIR Program Director – Detained Adult Program.
The decision of Fairfax County is invaluable for the more than 175 Fairfax families facing immigration proceedings each year.
immigrant and mixed-status families from the threat of deportation. ###

Universal Representation protects due process by allowing immigrants to access their rights under U.S.
law.
“My husband and I work full-time to be able to give our family a place to live. We have two children
with DACA. If one of us is detained by ICE I know for sure we won’t have the resources to afford a
lawyer. This program will allow us to have legal representation,” said Carmen Rios Fairfax Co. Resident.
CASA especially appreciates and recognizes Supervisors Jeff McKay and John Foust’s exceptional
leadership in helping to protect immigrant and mixed-status families.

With almost 100,000 members across the states of Maryland, Virginia, and South Central Pennsylvania, CASA is the largest member-based Latino and immigrant organization in the mid-Atlantic region. CASA organizes with and litigates on behalf of low-wage immigrants. Visit us at www.wearecasa.org and follow us on Twitter at @CASAforall

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Never has representation been more critical. With EOIR joining the Trump Administration’s all out assault on migrants and Due Process, no individual should face these biased and politicized “courts” without legal representation committed to fight for justice to the “real” courts and to expose and document the parody of justice in today’s Immigration “Courts” under the unethical political leadership of EOIR.

Many thanks to Roundtable Member Judge John Gossart for passing this along.

Join the New Due Process Army. Fight the EOIR travesty!

PWS

05-12-19

 

Related posts:

  1. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
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  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

TAL @ SF CHRON: The New American Gulag Is Overflowing With Children

Immigrant children in US custody soaring back toward record levels

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigrant-children-in-US-custody-soaring-back-13834123.php

WASHINGTON — The number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody is reaching breaking-point levels again, months after the Trump administration had reduced the total in shelters in response to anger over policies that kept children there.

The recent increase is largely due to a surge in the number of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rather than an administration policy. Overall crossings this year have skyrocketed to decade-high levels.

As of Thursday, the number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody had increased to more than 13,000, according to figures obtained by The Chronicle. The number is a near-record high, and puts the shelter network that the Department of Health and Human Services runs to keep such children in custody near maximum capacity.

Trump administration officials have asked Congress for nearly $3 billion more to increase shelter capacity. Without it, they say, Health and Human Services could run out of money for the system by June.

While the shelter network has come under increased attention in the aftermath of President Trump’s separation of families at the border last summer in order to prosecute the parents, the vast majority of children in the system come to the U.S. by themselves.

The 13,000 figure has been exceeded only once before. Last fall, the total surpassed 14,000 children in custody for the first time in history, topping out close to 15,000.

That was due mainly to an administration policy under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement rigorously screened adults who were applying to take the children out of custody. The change slowed the process and often deterred such sponsors, usually family members, from coming forward. ICE also arrested some for being undocumented immigrants.

The practice so infuriated members of Congress that in a government funding bill in February, they barred ICE from using the information it collected as part of the screenings to arrest immigrants.

The Trump administration instituted a policy in December to try to release undocumented children from its custody more quickly, rescinding its requirement to fingerprint every adult in the home where the child would be living. Only the adult sponsoring the child is fingerprinted now.

By January, that had brought the number of children in custody below 11,000, according to Health and Human Services, with thousands of beds available.

More here : https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigrant-children-in-US-custody-soaring-back-13834123.php

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

Always great to get Tal’s timely and highly readable reporting!

What’s the solution?  Well, it’s not the Trump Administration’s “preferred solution” of allowing the Border Patrol to mindlessly rocket vulnerable kids back to the Northern Triangle to be killed, tortured, exploited, abused, or forced to join gangs. It’s actually part of a worldwide trend that has seen more and more of the total refugee population comprised of children. So, this phenomenon shouldn’t have come as a surprise to a competent Administration focused on dealing with refugee situations humanely under the laws.

A rational solution would be to work closely and cooperatively with NGOs with expertise in child refugees (like, for example, Kids In Need Of Defense (“KIND”) or the Safe Passage Project), pro bono lawyers, and communities to figure out what is in the best interests of these children.

Then, pursue the right options: Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (”SIJS”) for some; expedited grants of asylum through the Asylum Office under the Wilberforce Act for others; TPS for others, recognizing the reality that there is an “ongoing state of armed conflict” in the Northern Triangle; an exercise of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) for others; and humane and organized repatriation for others, where that is actually in the child’s best interests.

There are plenty of tools available under existing laws to deal with this issue. We just have an Administration that refuses to use them and prefers to create a “crisis” to justify “throwing children under the bus.” Mistreating children is cowardly and bodes ill for the future of any country that permits it to happen. What goes around comes around!

PWS

05-10-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!

TRUMP “JOKES” ABOUT SHOOTING MIGRANTS TO THE DELIGHT OF HIS SUPPORTERS!

https://apple.news/ATFIvqS4cSr6ZYm7nQkHnpg

Jack Holmes writes @ Esquire:

Donald Trump Cracked a ‘Joke’ After His Supporter Yelled About Shooting Immigrants at the Border. This Isn’t a Joke.

Not when armed militias are roaming the border and one member mused about doing the same thing. Not when the president has relentlessly dehumanized migrants and advocated for political violence from the podium.

Why are they laughing and clapping? Because they know it’s not a joke.

The President of the United States committed multiple felonies and hired a pet toad as attorney general to try to shove it under the rug. He is now asserting that Congress is not a co-equal branch of government with oversight powers as laid out in the Constitution, and so has no authority to subpoena documents or witnesses he doesn’t like. He and his apparatchiks have decided they can just flout the law-that they are above it. He has relentlessly attacked the free press as an enemy of the state, attempting to undermine any source of information independent from his government. He has called for his political opponents to be investigated and imprisoned. He has repeatedly embraced political violence from the rally podium. He has “joked” about extending his term and, Wednesday night, about serving more than the two he’s limited to by the Constitution.

Sadly, that last part wasn’t the most frightening “joke” of the evening at the Trump rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, last night.

When Trump talked about stopping asylum-seekers and other undocumented immigrants, a person in the crowd yelled, “Shoot them!” and everybody laughed and cheered and clapped. In response, the president laughed that this was all some charming regional quirk of the Florida Panhandle, where you can “get away with” this kind of joke.

Another ABC News reporter, Will Steakin, also backed this account.

This is not a joke. Over and over again, Trump has made comments his aides later dismissed as “jokes,” or gone out of his way to say he would never do something, all with the intent of putting these ideas out there. Perhaps they might take on a life of their own. He once said he “hates these people”-referring to reporters-but “would never kill them.” Why does that need to be said, unless you want to get people thinking about it? At a rally in February, a supporter worked into a frenzy physically attacked a BBC reporter while Trump spoke.

The intent last night was clear: float the idea by suggesting we could never allow border agents to use weapons against migrants, even though other countries do. And then, when a guy in the crowd jumps to the next step, let it slide into the public imagination under the guise of a “joke.” It’s a trial balloon. Will there be pushback? Where will the message land, and how?

After all, there are already people roaming the border who are musing about murdering immigrants. Various “militias” have taken it upon themselves to patrol the border as a vigilante-or paramilitary-force. As reporter Ken Klippenstein found just this week thanks to a police report obtained through FOIA, some of them are quite interested in what the president’s joking about.

They’re already “detaining” large groups of migrants at gunpoint based on no legal authority. That’s also known as “kidnapping.” (The leader of the group, United Constitutional Patriots, was arrested. Now the group want to change its name to escape accountability.) At least one member, it appears, is already musing about lining people they capture up against a wall and shooting them. Perhaps they are looking for some kind of…permission. Or signal. From someone in a position of authority. Who communicates it’s not a big deal-normal, even. We’re all laughing, after all.

Elsewhere in the speech, Trump once again echoed conspiracy theories about an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.

This is the theory that drove the Tree of Life synagogue shooter-who believed Jews were helping to organize the “invasion” of nonwhite people through The Caravan-to kill 11 Jewish worshippers. (After the shooting, Trump said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if someone was funding The Caravan when asked by a reporter, echoing anti-Semitic tropes. In response to a reporter’s further question, he even alluded to George Soros, a Jewish billionaire and frequent target for right-wing conspiracies. He also doubled down on his “invasion” language.) In reality, most people coming to the southern border are seeking asylum based on claims they are fleeing domestic or gang violence in the chaotic Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In another time, we might call them refugees. They travel in “caravans” up through Mexico because the journey is dangerous and there’s safety in numbers.

No matter: they are convenient villains in the president’s dark and venal vision of the American Experiment, where this is a country for and by white people and everybody else ought to be thankful for whatever they get. The demonization of The Other is a tale as old as America, but Donald Trump has returned the nation to dangerous places in 2019, questioning not just the Americanness, but the very humanity, of Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. He does so by attacking these groups’ violent outliers-the drug dealers and coyotes and ISIS-but these are the only examples of these groups he has ever discussed. There has never been one word about the Guatemalan mother who flees here with her child and works for decades cleaning somebody’s house. It’s only ever the murderers and rapists, and if they’re “invading” your country, any response is justified.

His followers get the message. Note that the woman in the clip above-who confirmed someone else in the crowd yelled “shoot ’em”-did not say the supporter and the president were talking about “illegal immigrants.” She said “immigrants.” Because that’s who Trump is always talking about. It’s not about the law. Donald Trump has no regard for the law. It’s about Us and Them. There is no reason to believe this will get anything other than worse while this grotesque and incurable man continues to wield more power than any other human being on Earth. He is a danger to the most marginalized in our society now, but that’s how it always begins. If he can get away with this, who will be next?

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

Read the complete article with some of the “twitter feeds embedded” at the above link.

What kind of country are we becoming?

What kind of folks cheer and encourage “jokes” about shooting the most vulnerable among us? Trump has certainly brought out all the worst in America.

There are no “jokes” in Trump’s world — he’s a sick and cruel coward without values, human empathy, or any sense of humor. As American historian Professor Heather Cox Richardson pointed out recently on Facebook “Trump has a pattern of floating ideas as ‘jokes’ to normalize them.”

At one point in our recent past, a politician who “joked” about shooting unarmed people would have been censured by both parties and forced to resign. Trump has “normalized” the vile and unspeakable and brought out the absolute worst in his supporters and the hollow toadies with whom he surrounds himself. It’s destroying America. The rest of us who still believe in humanity and the values to which our country historically has aspired, without fully achieving, need to stand up to this redux of Germany in 1939 and Birmingham in 1963.

Join the New Due Process Army. Fight to uphold our Constitution against the dangerous onslaught of Trump and his enablers!

PWS

05-10-19

 

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  2. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
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COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/sunday/anti-immigrant-hatred-1920s.html

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.

Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

Image

Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. 
Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.

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

The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.

Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.

At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.

Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?

How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

Related posts:

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  2. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  3. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS MASSIVE ASSAULT ON HUMAN RIGHTS! — Can Anyone Stop These Scofflaws!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/us-asylum-screeners-to-take-more-confrontational-approach-as-trump-aims-to-turn-more-migrants-away-at-the-border/2019/05/07/3b15e076-70de-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

The Trump administration has sent new guidelines to asylum officers directing them to take a more skeptical and confrontational approach during interviews with migrants seeking refuge in the United States. It is the latest measure aimed at tightening the nation’s legal “loopholes” Homeland Security officials blame for a spike in border crossings.

According to internal documents and staff emails obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, the asylum officers will more aggressively challenge applicants whose claims of persecution contain discrepancies, and they will need to provide detailed justifications before concluding an applicant has a well-founded fear of harm if deported to their home country.

The changes require officers to zero in on any gaps between what migrants say to U.S. border agents after they are taken into custody and testimony they provide during the interview process with a trained asylum officer.

[Court backlog of more than 850,000 cases undercuts Trump immigration agenda]

‘This is what we’re seeing every day’: Another long night on the U.S.-Mexico border

The new guidelines and directive to asylum officers are among the most significant steps the administration has taken to limit access to the country for foreigners seeking asylum, whose right to apply for humanitarian protection is protected by U.S. law and rooted in post-World War II international treaties granting refuge to those fleeing persecution. The changes appear to signal the administration wants to turn away asylum seekers earlier in the legal process, aiming to cut down on the number of applicants who enter the court system and to deter others from attempting to cross into the United States to seek asylum.

With a record number of Central American families arriving at the border and swamping U.S. courts with asylum claims, Trump has repeatedly scoffed at the protections and has told crowds that dangerous criminals are using it to game the system and stay in the United States.

“The asylum program is a scam,” Trump said last month in a speech. “Some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen, people that look like they should be fighting for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) . . . you look at this guy you say ‘Wow, that’s a tough cookie!”

Jessica Collins, a CIS spokesperson, confirmed that new guidelines — included in a lesson plan Reuters has posted online — were issued to officers, describing them as a “periodic update.”

“As part of this periodic update, we have reiterated to asylum officers long-standing policies that help determine an individual’s credibility during the credible fear interview and have ensured there are consistent processes for both positive and negative credible fear determinations,” Collins said in a written statement.

Central American asylum seekers exit the Chaparral border crossing gate after being sent back to Mexico by the U.S. in Tijuana, Mexico, in January. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

Homeland Security agencies already are struggling to comply with court orders limiting the amount of time families with children can be held in detention, and further processing delays could exacerbate dangerous overcrowding at Border Patrol stations and immigration jails. Some areas along the border have been overwhelmed, at times seeing three times as many migrants as they have beds in detention facilities, leading many to be directly released into the United States after initial questioning.

The initial screening is known as a “credible fear” assessment, and it has become a particular focus of frustration for the White House at a time when illegal border crossings have jumped to a 12-year high, exceeding 100,000 per month.

The influx has swamped U.S. agents and filled Border Patrol stations far beyond their capacity, forcing the government to frequently bypass the credible fear screening process and release tens of thousands of Central American families with little more than a notice to appear in court.

“We’ve released four times as many people as we’re able to arrest on an annual basis,” said Albence, noting that ICE makes approximately 40,000 “at large” arrests of immigration violators in the U.S. interior each year.

Statistics show most migrants who claim persecution pass the initial credible fear screening, but far fewer ultimately receive asylum from a judge. An avalanche of new applicants in recent years has contributed to a backlog of more than 860,000 cases in U.S. immigration courts, and it can take years for an asylum applicant to get a final answer in court.

That lag time that has created a loophole in U.S. immigration enforcement, Homeland Security officials say, especially for applicants who arrive with children. They are typically released from custody and allowed to remain in the country while their cases are adjudicated. The process allows them to spend years living and working in the United States, regardless of whether their claims are ultimately found to be valid.

One senior DHS official said Miller and others in the administration are struggling against an asylum officer corps that doesn’t share its immigration goals and would rather refer an applicant to the courts than risk making the wrong choice in a rushed decision with life-or-death consequences.

The administration’s changes take effect immediately, and asylum officers will be trained in their application in coming weeks, according to the emails and CIS officials.

Those changes also direct the Justice Department to complete processing of asylum claims within 180 days.

Lafferty also told staff that 10 U.S. Border Patrol agents had volunteered to join a pilot program that will train them to conduct credible fear screenings. As many as 50 agents will be trained in coming months, he said.

The plan has raised concerns from immigrant advocates who say agents should not be making such consequential decisions about credibility of migrants’ deportation fears and their eligibility for humanitarian refuge.

“Credible fear interviews involve the discussion of sensitive, difficult issues,” Julie Veroff, of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, wrote Monday, calling the plan “highly concerning.”

“Federal law thus requires that credible fear interviews be conducted in a ‘nonadversarial manner,’” Veroff wrote. “Credible fear interviews have always been conducted by professionals who specialize in asylum adjudication, not immigration enforcement.”

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

Same old, same old. Seems like Trump has been down this path before with Sessions and Nielsen. It ended in a stinging rebuke from Judge Emmet Sullivan  in Grace v. Whitaker.

Why aren’t we at the point of contempt citations and disbarment actions for frivolous litigation being conducted  by the Trump Administration?

PWS

05-18-19

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

PROFESSOR FITZ BRUNDAGE @ WASHPOST: Can We Regain Our Humanitarian Values In The Age Of Trump? — “We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/03/can-united-states-retain-its-humanity-even-crisis

Brundage writes in WashPost:

By Fitz Brundage
Fitz Brundage is the William B. Umstead professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and the author of “Civilizing Torture,” which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.

May 3

Does it violate human rights to hold children in fenced enclosures in grim facilities that are bone-chillingly cold for weeks on end? Is separating children from their parents a form of cruel and unusual punishment? When does a crisis justify the kind of treatment normally seen as inhumane?

The furious debate over migrant detention along the nation’s southwest border with Mexico has put these questions front and center in American politics. But they’re not new. The treatment of people on the margins of American life — criminals, immigrants, civilians in overseas war zones — has always proven a challenge to our democratic ideals.

Yet beginning in the 1920s, activists waged a half-century-long struggle to persuade the Supreme Court to stop abusive practices by authorities. After World War II, the United States also committed itself to the promotion of international human rights. These two signal developments have been seriously eroded, first by the excesses of the war on terrorism and now by the Trump administration’s targeting of the unwelcome and powerless, whether they are undocumented immigrants in the United States or asylum seekers. We have returned to a pattern of willful ignorance, one that allows us to avoid grappling with deeply immoral policies.

Threats to our safety, perceived or real, have long justified the kind of “tougher policies” that President Trump has demanded for the southern border. He may not be well versed in history, but the president is joining a long line of elected officials who found that rights and basic norms are easily jettisoned when they collide with demands for greater security. Across our history, from the Indian wars to the war on terrorism, officials were quick to call for “tougher policies” and slow to fill in the details. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered military commanders in the Philippines to adopt “the most stern measures” to punish Filipino guerrillas; in a subsequent campaign the Marines followed orders and left a trail of devastation and death across the island of Samar. But such methods were justified as a “military necessity.”

Roosevelt rationalized the brutal treatment of alleged guerrillas by citing the need to stanch the threat to security. This kind of evasive language has repeatedly prevented us from coming to terms with acts of cruelty carried out in the name of national security. We’re seeing that pattern again.

What precisely did Trump officials mean when they announced “a tougher direction” for immigration? They certainly imply more than just the proposals for new fees and regulations reducing the numbers of asylum seekers. Are the American people ready to confront the reality of harsh security measures? Or will we retreat into euphemisms such as a “hardened” border and “zero tolerance” for migrants that covers up the reality of what is actually happening on the border?

We are deciding day by day whether to extend the basic protections of law and civilization to the people arriving on our border. For much of the nation’s history, the prohibition on cruelty and torture in American law rested on the premise that the fundamental decency of Americans, especially empathy for fellow citizens, would make such violations unthinkable.

But our capacity to empathize begins to fray at the margins, and we grow less certain about who, exactly, deserves protection. Those deemed undeserving, unwelcome or powerless — Native Americans, the enslaved, prison inmates and criminal suspects — have commonly suffered forms of violence and abuse that violated our national principles. Some people are inside the protection of the law, and some are cast out from it.

In fact, we’ve already seen this pattern. Accusations of cruelty and torture by ICE and CBP agents have been circulating for years, and they follow this well-worn pattern. Official denials are followed by investigations that almost always find limited violations by “a few bad apples,” not the kind of systemic abuse that would call our broader policies into question.

This pattern has long historical roots: When investigations of police brutality in Washington during the 1930s revealed widespread use of abusive interrogation methods, the police superintendent, whose predecessors had dismissed similar allegations for decades, only grudgingly conceded that a few officers may have gone too far in their resolve to protect the public.

Focusing on bad apples has long allowed us to excuse morally bankrupt policies. We need to realize that human rights abuses on the southern border aren’t spurred by immoral actors in ICE or CBP, but rather because of a political leadership that can’t or won’t come up with humane immigration policies.

Congress needs to do its job and exercise scrupulous oversight of Trump’s immigration policies. But the real solution to our border crisis is to demand that all elected officials, from local sheriffs to senators, responsibly address immigration and human rights. Trump declared that he wants immigration to be a key campaign issue in 2020. His opponents should accept that challenge. We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.

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

Join the New Due Process Army today and fight for human rights, the rule of law, accountability for Government scofflaws, and a return to basic human decency! Fight for a better future for ALL Americans!

PWS
05-07-19

Related posts:

  1. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  2. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/04/world/americas/honduras-gang-violence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Azam Ahmed Reports for the NY Times:

. . . .

Shootouts, armed raids and last-minute pleas to stop the bloodshed formed the central threads of their stories. MS-13 wanted the neighborhood to sell drugs. The other gangs wanted it to extort and steal. But the members of Casa Blanca had promised never to let their neighborhood fall prey to that again. And they would die for it, if they had to.

Almost no one was trying to stop the coming war — not the police, not the government, not even the young men themselves. The only person working to prevent it was a part-time pastor who had no church of his own and bounced around the neighborhood in a beat-up yellow hatchback, risking his life to calm the warring factions.

“I’m not in favor of any gang,” said the pastor, Daniel Pacheco, rushing to the Casa Blanca members after the shooting. “I’m in favor of life.”

The struggle to protect the neighborhood — roughly four blocks of single-story houses, overgrown lots and a few stores selling chips and soda — encapsulates the inescapable violence that entraps and expels millions of people across Latin America.

Since the turn of this century, more than 2.5 million people have been killed in the homicide crisis gripping Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Igarapé Institute, a research group that tracks violence worldwide.

The region accounts for just 8 percent of the global population, yet 38 percent of the world’s murders. It has 17 of the 20 deadliest nations on earth.

And in just seven Latin American countries — Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela — violence has killed more people than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen combined.

Most of the world’s most dangerous
cities are in Latin America

Latin America

Africa

U.S.

Other

SAFER CITIES

MORE DANGEROUS

Cancún,

Mexico

Kingston,

Jamaica

San Pedro Sula,

Honduras

San Salvador

London

Los Angeles

Paris

Tokyo

Istanbul

Los Cabos,

Mexico

Tijuana,

Mexico

Bogotá,

Colombia

St. Louis

Moscow

New Orleans

6.2 global avg.

0

40

60

80

100

120

Average homicide rate per 100k people

By Allison McCann

Source: Igarapé Institute and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Cities include the 50 highest homicide rates in the world and a group of prominent others for comparison, all with populations of at least 250,000. Average homicide rates are from 2016-2018 or the latest data available.

The violence is all the more striking because the civil wars and military dictatorships that once seized Latin America have almost all ended — decades ago, in many cases. Most of the region has trudged, often very successfully, along the prescribed path to democracy. Yet the killings continue at a staggering rate.

They come in many forms: state-sanctioned deaths by overzealous armed forces; the murder of women in domestic disputes, a consequence of pervasive gender inequality; the ceaseless exchange of drugs and guns with the United States.

Underpinning nearly every killing is a climate of impunity that, in some countries, leaves more than 95 percent of homicides unsolved. And the state is a guarantor of the phenomenon — governments hollowed out by corruption are either incapable or unwilling to apply the rule of law, enabling criminal networks to dictate the lives of millions.

For the masses fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, the United States is both a cause and solution — the author of countless woes and a chance to escape them.

Frustrated with the stream of migrants treading north, President Trump has vowed to cut aid to the most violent Central American nations, threatening hundreds of millions of dollars meant to address the roots of the exodus.

But the surviving members of Casa Blanca, who once numbered in the dozens, do not want to flee, like tens of thousands of their countrymen have. They say they have jobs to keep, children to feed, families, neighbors and loved ones to protect.

“There is only one way for this to end,” said Reinaldo. “Either they kill us or we kill them.”

. . . .

 

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

For the full version of Azam’s report and a much better chart graphic, go to the above link!

Trump’s complete lack of humanity, empathy, and his constant racist-inspired lies and misrepresentations about refugees and asylum seekers are truly reprehensible.

But, he and his henchmen like Stephen Miller are by no means the entire problem.

Every day in U.S. Immigration Court, DHS attorneys make demonstrably false representations minimizing the truly horrible conditions in the Northern Triangle, particularly for women. Every day, some U.S. Immigration Judges betray their oaths of office by accepting those false representations and using them, along with an unfairly skewed anti-asylum view of the law, to deny asylum cases that should be granted.

And, perhaps worst of all, every day some life-tenured Article III Circuit Judges turn a blind eye to the legal travesty and due process disaster taking place throughout our corrupted Immigration Courts by rubber stamping results that would be totally unacceptable in any other type of litigation and which don’t even pass the “straight face test.” I guess “out of sight is out of mind,” and the wrongfully deported are “out of sight” (or maybe dead, in hiding, or duressed into joining or cooperating with gangs after the U.S. failed to protect them)

But, there are folks our there resisting this malfeasance and dereliction of duty. Among other things, they are memorializing what is happening and making a record of where the “modern day Jim Crows” and their enablers stand and what they have done to their fellow human beings in the name of “expedience” and an “Alfred E. Neuman (“What Me Worry”)” view of the law and our legal system.

Donald Trump is horrible. But, his racism and infliction of lasting damage on our country and on humanity depend on too many judges and other supposedly responsible public officials supporting, acquiescing, enabling, or minimizing his inhumane, dishonest, counterproductive, and often illegal actions.

An appropriate response by an honest, competent Administration with integrity would be:

  • Establish legal precedents recognizing those fleeing politicized gang violence, domestic violence, and violence directed at famnilies as refugees;
  • Establish precedents incorporating the Article III decisions emphasizing the concept of “mixed motive” in determining “nexus” under asylum and withholding of removal laws;
  • Establish precedents granting temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) to those who face torture at the hands of the gangs or Northern Triangle governments (or both), but who can’t establish the convoluted “nexus” for asylum, with a rebuttable presumption that the countries of the Northern Triangle will “acquiesce” in the torture;
  • Liberally use Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for nationals from Northern Triangle countries which perhaps would make large-scale asylum adjudication less of a priority and allow most cases to be dealt with in due course through the Asylum Offices rather than clogging Immigration Court dockets;
  • Work to insure that applicants for protection have assistance of counsel in developing and presenting their claims (which would also dramatically increase fairness and efficiency).

PWS

05-05-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”

WASHPOST: PROFESSOR LINDSAY MUIR HARRIS OF UDC LAW & JOAN HODGES WU OF THE ASYLUM SEEKERS ASSISTANCE PROJECT (“ASAP”) SPEAK OUT AGAINST TRUMP’S LATEST CRUEL & COUNTERPRODUCTIVE ATTACK ON VULNERABLE ASYLUM SEEKERS!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/01/asylum-seekers-leave-everything-behind-theres-no-way-they-can-pay-trumps-fee/?utm_term=.f48b5ca8c238

Lindsay & Joan write:

On Monday evening, President Trump issued a memointended to make life more difficult for those seeking asylum in the United States. The memo calls for regulations that, among other things, require asylum seekers to pay a fee to apply for asylum and their first work permit, and denies work permits to immigrants who entered the United States without inspection, or “illegally.”

Since the creation of our asylum system, after the United States signed the Protocol to the Refugee Convention in 1968 and enacted its own Refugee Act in 1980, there has never been a fee to apply for asylum. Filing for asylum is free for a reason under U.S. law and in the vast majority of other countries: Seeking asylum is a human right.

There are already plenty of obstacles and limits to that right in our existing immigration system. For instance, asylum seekers have to wait to receive permission to legally work in the United States. Congress codified a waiting period for work permits for asylum seekers in 1996. Asylum seekers can apply for a work permit 150 days after they have submitted an application for asylum. The work permit is issued sometime after 180 days.

Introducing a fee to apply for asylum and to apply for the first work permit not only is cruel but also goes against common sense and U.S. economic interests. Asylum seekers typically cannot afford to pay even a nominal fee. Trump’s memo does not specify the fee amount, only that it would “cover the cost of adjudication.” But even the rumored $50 fee would be too high for any of our clients. All individuals present in the United States have a legal right to apply for asylum, and that legal right should not depend on ability to pay. Many asylum seekers flee their countries with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the cash in their pockets. Other asylum seekers come with their life savings, which are often quickly depleted as they pay for living expenses awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims.

Years ago, one of us worked with one client who was homeless and lived in her car while she waited for her day in court. One of our current clients lives in a public storage locker because he cannot afford to pay rent. We have asylum-seeking clients who go hungry so that their children can eat, or who drink water to “feel full.” Other clients go without medication to treat chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure because they lack health insurance and money to pay out of pocket for their medications. Asylum seekers are not a population with an ability to pay extraneous fees.

This new fee would also put asylum seekers further at risk of being exploited, or even physically harmed, abused or trafficked within the United States. Asylum seekers are already vulnerable to such predatory behavior. For example, years ago, one of us worked with a young woman from Niger who fled a forced marriage and female genital mutilation. As an asylum seeker in the United States, she had no way to provide for herself and found herself passed from one abusive situation to another. By the time she filed her asylum application, she had been repeatedly raped, held captive and forced to work in various homes. She was providing free child-care in exchange for lodging but forbidden from leaving the house.

And contrary to some misconceptions among the public (and the Trump administration), asylum seekers are generally ineligible for any form of federal or state aid. Indeed, even after they are granted asylum, they do not receive significant support from the government. Between paying for rent, food and other living expenses, and not being able to work for a significant period of time, how will asylum seekers pay the fee?

[Trump isn’t trying to solve border problems. He’s trying to make them look worse.]

Asylum seekers, who have lost everything and been forced to leave their countries and start over in ours, have a tremendous amount to give to our communities if given the chance. Take Constance, for example, one of our West African clients. In 2015, while she was seeking asylum, she commuted two hours by bus each way to a factory to cut fruit during a 12-hour overnight shift. She now works as a French language newscaster for a major news and radio outlet. Another client is a microbiologist who worked waiting tables until he found a job directing a lab at a hospital. As one of our clients said: “I know I’ve lost my country, but I haven’t lost my skills. I can still contribute.” Requiring these individuals to remain idle while jobs go unfilled and immigration court and asylum office backlogs persist could mean years in limbo and is a waste of talent, expertise and the hard work asylum seekers contribute.

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My good friends Lindsay and Joan are certainly two of the “good guys” — true role models for the “New Due Process Army.”
They have devoted their professional lives to making America a fairer and better place and helping the most vulnerable among us to have a fair shot at asylum and to contribute their full talents to our society. A terrific “win-win” for us and for asylum seekers. And they both work on “shoestring budgets” — giving much and asking little — just like the refugees they are helping!
What if we had a Government that recognized, honored, and worked with such talented folks to solve problems? Imagine what we could achieve with cooperation and positive efforts, involving real expertise from those who actually know and work with asylum seekers, and who therefore recognize asylum seekers as fellow human beings and great potential assets to our country?
PWS
05-03-19

Related posts:

  1. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  2. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity

BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity

There have been many articles pointing out that Bill Barr unethically has acted as Trump’s defense counsel rather than fulfilled his oath to uphold the Constitution and be the Attorney General of all of the American people. There have also been some absurdist “apologias” for Barr some written by once-respected lawyers who should know better, and others written by the normal Trump hacks.

Here are my choices for four of the best articles explaining why Barr should not be the Attorney General. It goes without saying that he shouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be running the Immigration Court system. His intervention into individual cases in a quasi-judicial capacity is a clear violation of judicial ethics requiring avoidance of even the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. There is no “appearance” here. Barr has a clear conflict in any matter dealing with immigration.

 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/impeach-attorney-general-william-barr.html

Congress Should Impeach William Barr

By @jonathanchait
Attorney General William Barr. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

House Democrats are going to face a difficult decision about launching an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Balanced against the president’s impressive array of misconduct is the fact that several more criminal investigations that may add to the indictment are already underway, and that impeaching the president might jeopardize the reelection of red-state Democratic members. But in the meantime, Attorney General William Barr presents them with a much easier decision. Barr has so thoroughly betrayed the values of his office that voting to impeach and remove him is almost obvious.

On March 24, Barr released a short letter summarizing the main findings of the Mueller investigation, as he saw them. News accounts treated Barr’s interpretation as definitive, and the media — even outlets that had spent two years uncovering a wide swath of suspicious and compromising links between the Trump campaign and Russia — dutifully engaged in self-flagellation for having had the temerity to raise questions about the whole affair.

Barr had done very little to that point to earn such a broad benefit of the doubt. In the same role in 1992, he had supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra scandal. Less famously, in 1989 he issued a redacted version of a highly controversial administration legal opinion that, as Ryan Goodman explained, “omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion” for “no justifiable reason.”

And while many members of the old Republican political Establishment had recoiled against Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Barr has shown no signs of having joined them. He met with Trump to discuss serving as his defense lawyer, publicly attacked the Mueller investigation (which risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president”), called for more investigations of Hillary Clinton, and circulated a lengthy memo strongly defending Trump against obstruction charges.

The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility. The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability; Barr gave congressional testimony hyping up Trump’s charges of “spying,” even prejudging the outcome of an investigation (“I think there was a failure among a group of leaders [at the FBI] at the upper echelon”); evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Then he broke precedent by scheduling a press conference to spin the report in advance of its redacted publication.

It is not much of a mystery to determine which officials have offered their full loyalty to the president. Trump has reportedly “praised Barr privately for his handling of the report and compared him favorably to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions” —whose sole offense in Trump’s eyes was following Department of Justice ethical protocol. Trump urged his Twitter followers to tune in to Barr’s conference, promotional treatment he normally reserves for his Fox News sycophants.

The press conference was the final disqualifying performance. Barr acted like Trump’s defense lawyer, the job he had initially sought, rather than as an attorney general. His aggressive spin seemed designed to work in the maximal number of repetitions of the “no collusion” mantra, in accordance with his boss’s talking points, at the expense of any faithful transmission of the special counsel’s report.

Barr’s letter had made it sound as though Trump’s campaign spurned Russia’s offers of help: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote. In fact, Mueller’s report concluded, “In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer,” but that the cooperation fell short of criminal conduct.

Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstructive conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment. Barr offered this incredible statement for why Trump’s behavior was excusable: “[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said. “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” and credited him further with taking “no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.”

Sincere? How can Barr use that word to describe the mentality of a man whose own staffers routinely describe him in the media as a pathological liar? Trump repeatedly lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign, and his own dealings with Russia. And he also, contra Barr, repeatedly denied the special counsel access to witnesses by dangling pardons to persuade them to withhold cooperation.

It is true that many of Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice failed. As Mueller wrote, the president’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

This is a rather different gloss on the facts than the happy story Barr offered the press. What’s more, it is a pressing argument for Barr’s own removal. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.

There is no other department in government in which mere norms, not laws, are all that stand between democracy as we know it and a banana republic. Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task. Nearly two more years of this Trumpian henchman wielding power over federal law enforcement is more weight than the rickety Constitution can bear.

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Dvid Leonhardt of the NY Times writes:

In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.

“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”

Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”

Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidenial campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”

Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.

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

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/william-barr-misled-public-mueller-report_n_5cb8b2b0e4b032e7ceb60d05

The Ways William Barr Misled The Public About The Mueller Report

Instead of just releasing the special counsel’s findings, the U.S. attorney general spun the report to the benefit of President Trump.

 

President Donald Trump has long wished for an attorney general who would act as his own private lawyer, protecting him from any potential legal damage. He finally found his man in William Barr.

Barr could have released special counsel Robert Mueller’s report from the beginning. Instead, the attorney general chose to twice present his own interpretation of the special counsel’s findings on foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election ― before allowing members of the public to see the report and decide for themselves whether Trump and his associates did anything improper.

The report, which finally came out on Thursday, paints a much more complicated picture of whether Trump obstructed justice than Barr let on.

The first time the public received a glimpse of what was in the Mueller report was on March 24, when Barr sent a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing his conclusions from the report the special counsel team had submitted to Barr two days earlier.

The second time the public heard about the report’s content was in a Thursday morning press conference when Barr went out of his way to echo Trump talking points, attacking the media and the president’s “political opponents.”

To the Justice Department’s credit, the redactions in the Mueller report were relatively light ― allowing the public to see a substantial amount of the content.

But still, in his public comments, Barr made sure to paint as positive a picture of Trump before the report became widely available.

Here’s how the attorney general misled the public:

He left out the Trump campaign’s expectation of benefiting from hacked material.

In his letter to Congress on March 24, Barr wrote:

The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: ”[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election inference activities.”

While it’s true that the Mueller report did reach that conclusion, that quote is incomplete. Barr left out the first part, which was less complimentary to the Trump campaign.

Below is the full quote from the Mueller report, with the part Barr omitted in bold:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

He said it was up to him to make a decision on obstruction of justice.

Attorney General William Barr went to bat for Trump in a Thursday morning press conference.

Attorney General William Barr went to bat for Trump in a Thursday morning press conference.

In his March 24 letter, Barr said Mueller’s team did not come to a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice in the course of the investigation. Therefore, Barr claimed, it was now up to him to make that determination.

“The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” he wrote.

Barr said he concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

But Barr never had to make that legal conclusion, as Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, pointed out. And Mueller never asked Barr to so.

Indeed, the report said the special counsel’s team couldn’t come to such a conclusion:

[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.

The report also said that ultimately, the obstruction call wasn’t for Mueller to make. The special counsel decided not to make a decision on whether to prosecute Trump because the Justice Department’s position, according to an Office of Legal Counsel memo, is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

“Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations … this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction,” the report states.

Furthermore, it seems clear that Mueller and his team expected that ultimately, Congress would make the decision on obstruction of justice.

NBC News reported earlier that some in Mueller’s office had said “their intent was to leave the legal question open for Congress and the public to examine the evidence.”

“[W]e concluded that Congress can validly regulate the President’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice,” the report says.

In other words, Congress can impeach the president if it wants to do so.

He gave an incomplete picture of Trump’s actions that could be construed as obstruction of justice.

“In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct,” Barr wrote in his March 24 letter.

The report doesn’t let Trump off the hook quite so easily. It says Trump tried to obstruct justice ― but he didn’t succeed because his staff refused to follow his orders.

“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report reads.

The report detailed 10 acts by Trump that could amount to obstruction of justice.

He said Mueller found “no collusion.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been called to testify before Congress about his report.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been called to testify before Congress about his report.

One of Trump’s favorite phrases is that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 elections. He has tweeted it 84 times.

Barr used the phrase four times in his 18-minute remarks in Thursday’s press conference:

  • “Put another way, the special counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.”
  • “But again, the special counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking.”
  • “After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation.”
  • “At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion.”

But the Mueller report never actually said the investigation found no collusion. In fact, the report explains specifically why it doesn’t use the term “collusion.” The word only appears in the report as part of this explanation or in quoting someone else.

The Mueller report avoided using the term "collusion," and explains why here.

The Mueller report avoided using the term “collusion,” and explains why here.

Therefore, Barr repeatedly saying Mueller found “no collusion” was simply the attorney general adopting a Trump talking point.

He said Trump fully cooperated with the investigation.

Barr was extremely sympathetic to Trump in Thursday’s press conference. He tried to paint a picture of a president under extreme ― and unfair ― pressure, telling reporters, “As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.”

He said Trump was “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” so it’s not surprising if he may have lashed out a bit. And, he added, Trump deserved credit for “fully cooperat[ing]” with the special counsel at all:

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.

Trump, however, didn’t fully cooperate. He refused repeated requests to give an interview to Mueller and his team. The report said the special counsel’s team considered issuing a subpoena for Trump to testify but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it:

The Mueller report says Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and his team.

The Mueller report says Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and his team.
Finally, this editorial form the SF Chronicle really “hammers home” Barr’s patent unfitness to continue serving.
Opinion

Editorial: Attorney General Barr’s misplaced loyalties

Chronicle Editorial Board

Updated

  • Attorney General William Barr has been acting as if he is Presisdent Trump’s personal attorney. Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times

 

Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times

Attorney General William Barr has been acting as if he is Presisdent Trump’s personal attorney.

President Trump has never made any secret of his desire to have an attorney general whose first loyalty was to him. Regrettably for the nation and the honest administration of justice, Trump unquestionably now has one in William Barr.

The attorney general has lost all credibility with his disgraceful handling of the rollout of the Mueller report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. Barr left the American people for more than a month with a seriously skewed characterization of the “principal conclusions” from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from the two-year investigation.

His four-page summary of those conclusions amounted to “nothing much to see here, folks.” While he was correct that the Mueller team could not make a case that anyone in Trump’s campaign broke the law by conspiring with Russians, the Barr summary was downright deceptive in its portrayal of the special counsel’s findings on possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Barr’s summary suggested that “difficult questions of law and fact” left it difficult for Mueller to determine whether Trump had obstructed the probe. Barr and his deputy took it upon themselves to conclude that “the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient” to establish obstruction.

Americans who have now read the Mueller’s team’s own words in the 448-page report discovered that Barr’s account was highly misleading. In fact, Mueller’s hesitation was not based on an inability to decide; it was guided in part by a Department of Justice policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. Given that, Mueller suggested it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime when the president could not have a chance to defend himself in a “speedy and public trial” with the constitutional protections.

Barr also suggested that Trump could not have obstructed justice into an investigation of a crime he did not commit.

Mueller’s report clearly stated otherwise.

“The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong,” it stated. Mueller’s investigation detailed “multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”

Rather than punting the obstruction decision to Barr, Mueller very clearly noted that a decision on what to do with the substantial evidence of wrongdoing he collected should be made by Congress, which has the power of impeachment.

Barr never bothered to correct Trump’s exhortation of “complete and total exoneration.” Barr might as well have been on a Trump spokesman, rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, at a bizarre Thursday news conference (before the report’s release) in which he offered a sympathetic explanation for Trump’s repeated efforts to stymie the investigation. Barr chalked it up to Trump’s anger and frustration.

Justice has been frustrated. Americans are justifiably angry. Barr has proved himself unfit for the high office he holds.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Undoubtedly, Trump is unfit for office as many of us have been saying for some time now. The Mueller report confirmed what most thinking people already knew: the guy is dishonest, immoral, pathological, and a not very bright “con man.” (He’s also a racist and a White Nationalist would be authoritarian, although those admittedly were not points of emphasis in the Mueller report which focused on other aspects of his totally disgraceful conduct.)
But, I’ll concede that Trump’s removal is unlikely to happen except at the ballot box. Even that is uncertain with about 40% of American voters apparently wedded to a “beggar thy neighbor, who cares about the majority, country be damned” worldview. Trump is already focused on a “race-baiting” strategy of leveraging the most problematic aspects of our electoral college system while treating the interests of majority of Americans with mockery and disdain.
It remains to be seen whether any Democratic candidate can unite the diverse majority of Americans for at least long enough to save our country by removing Trump and, hopefully, his GOP enablers along with him. It also remains to be seen whether any country where 40% of the voters are so out of touch with reality and the common interests of the rest of us can actually be governed, once majority rule is restored.
But, Barr is a different matter. He’s not elected, he’s not President, and we don’t have to enable his continued unethical misuse of authority at the DOJ, at least not in the the all important area of the U.S. Immigraton Court.
If Congress won’t do the job by creating an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court, it’s time for the Article III courts to invalidate precedents produced by Barr’s and Sessions’s unethical participation in individual quasi-judicial decision-making and to start invalidating removal orders entered by “courts” controlled by political enforcement officials, in clear contradiction to the Due Process requirement that individuals facing the life or death authority of the Federal Government are entitled to have fair and impartial decision makers and reasoned decisions. That can’t happen in a system controlled and directed by biased political “enforcement only” officials like Barr (and Sessions before him). Barr has made it crystal clear that he always will put the selfish interests of Trump above truthfulness, the law, due process, fundamental fairness, and the common good.
Letting this farce of a “judicial system” continue unfairly endangering individual lives and deferring to officials who are neither subject matter experts nor fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision makers is unconstitutional. By letting it continue, life-tenured Federal Judges both tarnish their reputations and fail to fulfill their oaths of office.
As a young attorney in the Department of Justice during the Watergate Era, I, along with many others, were indelibly impressed and inspired when then Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s illegal order to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor (a/k/a/ “The Saturday Night Massacre”). Obviously, Barr has dragged the Department and its reputation down to new depths — back to the days of Nixon and disgraced (and convicted) Attorney General “John the Con” Mitchell, who actually planned criminal conspiracies in his fifth floor office at the DOJ.
Obviously, there are systemic problems that have allowed unqualified individuals like Barr and Sessions to serve in and co-opt the system of justice, and denigrate the Department of Justice. (I spoke to some recently retired DOJ officials who characterized the morale among career professionals at the DOJ as “below the floor”). Some of those can be traced to the lack of backbone and integrity in the “Trump GOP” which controls the Senate and refuses to enforce even minimal standards of professionalism, meaningful oversight, and independent decision making in Trump appointees. That’s what a “kakistocracy” is. It’s up to the rest of us to do what is necessary under the law to replace the kakistocracy with a functioning democracy.
PWS
04-20-19

Related posts:

  1. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!