"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Trump Is Sending Asylum-Seekers To Guatemala. His Administration Privately Admitted It Had No Idea What Would Happen To Them Next.
BuzzFeed News Reporter
A group of Guatemalan migrants deported from the US arrive at the Air Force base in Guatemala City on Sept. 5.
In the final days before launching a controversial plan to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala, Department of Homeland Security officials were still scrambling to figure out critical details, including how those seeking protection would obtain shelter, food, and access to orientation services, according to government briefing materials obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Despite the questions, the documents indicate that DHS planned to send 12 asylum-seekers on the first flight to Guatemala, a Central American country that has struggled with violent crime, and was tentatively scheduled to depart on Tuesday.
The materials, drawn up last week for newly appointed acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, suggest that department officials were trying to finalize key details regarding the implementation of a complicated proposal to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala as part of a deal similar to a safe third country agreement.
The plan has been highlighted by the Trump administration as a key element in its strategy to deter migration at the border and another method to restrict asylum-seekers from entering the US.
“There is uncertainty as to who will provide orientation services for migrants as well as who will provide shelter, food, transportation, and other care,” read the DHS brief, drafted for Wolf in the run-up to a meeting Friday with Guatemala’s Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart. The implementation plan spelled out that Guatemala would provide the services but recently there had been “confusion” as to whether that would happen, according to the materials.
Wolf was urged to raise the issues with Degenhart in their meeting and clarify the outstanding issues.
“The U.S. needs confirmation from the [Government of Guatemala] that they will provide shelter, transportation, and food,” the briefing materials read. “If not, the U.S. and [Government of Guatemala] need to brainstorm other avenues of assistance.”
It is unclear if the planned flight is still scheduled to take off.
Trump administration officials have said that partnering with countries in Central America ultimately benefits the US by cutting down on the number of asylum-seekers attempting to make the journey to the US. Advocates counter that such agreements place vulnerable populations in countries that lack systems for adequate asylum processing and have high murder rates and rampant crime.
Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and has the sixth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world. Nearly half of the country suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the prevalence reaching about 70% in some indigenous areas of Guatemala, according to a 2018 report from USAID.
The country has struggled with violence but has seen a drop in murders in recent years, with a homicide rate of 22.4 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the US had a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000.
A recent United Nations report also found that about 98% of crimes in Guatemala went unpunished in 2018.
The government posted regulations on Monday that clear the way for asylum officers to begin screening asylum-seekers under the plan. The interim final rule, which takes effect Tuesday, creates a process for asylum-officers to screen migrants thrust into the plan. In short, unless an asylum-seeker can prove it is “more likely than not” that they will be persecuted or tortured in Guatemala, they will be removed to the country to obtain protections there.
Administration officials have previously told congressional staffers that more than 200 individuals had applied for asylum in Guatemala, but only 18 had been processed.
While DHS officials have in the past heralded the involvement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in helping build up Guatemala’s nascent asylum system, the briefing materials suggest that those efforts have been rocky, at best.
“It is our understanding that for some time now there has been friction between the [Government of Guatemala] and UNHCR regarding UNHCR’s role in the implementation” of the plan, according to the briefs. The UN has told US government officials it would provide orientation services for asylum-seekers who have been sent back to Guatemala.
But Guatemalan officials have told the US that UNHCR would not have access to their “reception centers and asylum programs.”
On Saturday, Reuters reported that US officials said asylum-seekers forced into the plan would not be flown to remote areas of Guatemala, an option the Central American country had proposed.
“All airports are being analyzed,” Degenhart told Reuters. “There are some that’ll qualify but others that won’t.”
The agreement could be one way for the Trump administration to attempt to safeguard a potential court overturn of its policy banning asylum for those who cross through a third country.
While the Supreme Court allowed for the policy to continue while the case continues in a federal appeals court challenge, it’s unclear whether the justices or the federal appellate court will ultimately side with the Trump administration.
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So, the Supremes and the 9th Circuit are “ruminating” about these issues while folks are dying or being sent off to oblivion by an Administration notorious for its operational incompetence and its bad faith approach to immigration and asylum laws. How is that a “Safe Third Country” or a “right to apply for asylum regardless of status?” How is that performing the judicial duties for which they supposedly are being paid?
Meanwhile, corrupt immoral Administration officials are out there touting these programs as “deterrents” — not a means of fair adjudication or actual protection under our laws and international Conventions. So, why are Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices so oblivious to truth?
Hopefully, law schools are bringing up a new generation of lawyers that pay more attention to ethics, take the time to understand the human side of the law, and who will be courageous enough to stand up for individuals’ human rights against Government overreach. Obviously, too many of the preceding generations of “lawyers turned appellate judges” flunked on all counts.
Maybe a period of time representing migrants pro bono should be an absolute requirement for future Federal Judicial appointments. No matter how you look at it, we’re experiencing an institutional meltdown in the Federal Appellate Judiciary that, when combined with a lawless authoritarian Administration run wild, is endangering both our country and humanity.
U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention: U.N. study
The United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention, including more than 100,000 in immigration-related custody that violates international law, the author of a United Nations study said on Monday.
Worldwide more than 7 million people under age 18 are held in jails and police custody, including 330,000 in immigration detention centres, independent expert Manfred Nowak said.
Children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest time possible, according to the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
“The United States is one of the countries with the highest numbers – we still have more than 100,000 children in migration-related detention in the (U.S.),” Nowak told a news briefing.
“Of course separating children, as was done by the Trump administration, from their parents and even small children at the Mexican-U.S. border is absolutely prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I would call it inhuman treatment for both the parents and the children.”
There was no immediate reaction from U.S. authorities. Novak said U.S. officials had not replied to his questionnaire sent to all countries.
He said the United States had ratified major international treaties such as those guaranteeing civil and political rights and banning torture, but was the only country not to have ratified the pact on the rights of children.
“The way they were separating infants from families only in order to deter irregular migration from Central America to the United States to me constitutes inhuman treatment, and that is absolutely prohibited by the two treaties,” said Nowak, a professor of international law at the University of Vienna.
The United States detains an average of 60 out of every 100,000 children in its justice system or immigration-related custody, Nowak said, the world’s highest rate, followed by countries such as Bolivia, Botswana and Sri Lanka.
Mexico, where many Central American migrants have been turned back at the U.S. border, also has high numbers, with 18,000 children in immigration-related detention and 7,000 in prisons, he said.
The U.S. rate compared with an average of five per 100,000 in Western Europe and 14-15 in Canada, he said.
At least 29,000 children, mainly linked to Islamic State fighters, are held in northern Syria and in Iraq – with French citizens among the biggest group of foreigners, Nowak added.
Even if some of these children had been child soldiers, he said, they should be mainly treated as victims, not perpetrators, so that they could be rehabilitated and reintegrated in society.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Why is Trump not being held accountable for leading the “race to the bottom” while littering the track with illegalities and trampling on our Constitution?
This is how we will be remembered by future generations!
Contrary to the rants of dangerous subversive Billy Barr, “The Resistance” may be the only thing that can save American and our national values.
And, let’s “lose” all the GOP/Fox News BS about “reversing election results.” Not only is impeachment an authorized Constitutional process, but, in fact, removal of Trump would result in his replacement by his hand-picked GOP stalwart successor VP Mike Pence. Hardly a “reversal” of results.
As I’ve said before, in some ways Pence could be worse than Trump, because he’s much more competent and knowledgeable on how Government actually works. Where Trump often trips over his own two feet (or, perhaps, “tweet”), Pence might be able to get things done even where they aren’t in the national interest. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t stop anyone from voting to remove Trump, because it’s the right thing to do. Unlikely to happen, though, given the blind commitment of the GOP to Trumpism and its ugly messages of cruelty, intellectual dishonesty, and dehumanization.
Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.
The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”
Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)
Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.
But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.
Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)
Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.
The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.
Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.
Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives
As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.
“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.
The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”
. . . .
Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.
. . . .
“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
. . . .
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Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.
Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.
“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”
Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.
“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”
President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.
Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.
Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.
Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”
Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.
As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.
The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.
Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.
Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.
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Mary Papenfuss Contributor HuffPost
Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:
Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
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Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.
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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.
Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?
One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!
But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.
Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.
George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”
Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.
But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.
Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.
Silence is Not an Option: We Cannot Sign On to New Asylum Policies by Lindsay M. Harris
As I write, it is a Friday night. It’s been a busy week as an immigration lawyer. On Thursday, during a five-hour long interview at the asylum office, I received an important reminder on the price of silence. The asylum officer asked my courageous client, a torture survivor, what she would do if she returned to her home country. Her response? “I cannot stay quiet. Staying silent is like putting your signature on the things that are happening. It is like saying they are OK. For as long as there is injustice against my people, I cannot stay quiet.”
And so, I cannot stay quiet. The attack on asylum seekers continues. Data obtained by journalists last week revealed that Customs and Border Protection officers are granting as low as 10% of the credible fear interviews they conduct. Perhaps this statistic sounds high to you. Bear in mind that the credible fear interview was designed to be a threshold screening interview, a “beep test” if you will, so that any asylum seeker who could establish a significant possibility of asylum eligibility would be allowed to move forward and present her case to an immigration judge. The issue here is that CBP officers should not be conducting these interviews in the first place. Prior to June, only USCIS asylum officers, also part of the Department of Homeland Security, were allowed to conduct these highly sensitive interviews. Asylum officer grant rate of credible fear interview has in the past been as high 90%, at least back when USCIS released data on these interviews. This made a great deal of sense because those officers receive extensive and ongoing training on key topics, including the labyrinthine and ever-changing nature of asylum law, interviewing survivors of trauma and torture, sensitivity around gender-based violence, power dynamics with authority figures, etc.
But, direction from Stephen Miller in the White House, whose emails we have also been privy to this week, was to shift responsibility from USCIS asylum officer to CBP officers to conduct credible fear interviews. This massive shift in the job function of CBP officers has not been accompanied by any public information about the training they have received. Recently the American Immigration Council and others sued to obtain the training materials, if there even are any, given to CBP officers prior to taking on this new role.
It is not at all surprising that CBP officers are granting fewer credible fear interviews. Indeed, CBP is, at its core, an enforcement agency, focused on keeping immigrants out. CBP’s track record of wrongfully deporting asylum seekers, over the last 23 years, at least, speaks for itself. I have written at length about how CBP officers ignore their duties to even ask asylum seekers four very basic questions to screen whether or not they have a fear of return to their home country. From the institution of the credible fear system in 1996, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, American Immigration Council, and others, have documented CBP’s failure to ask the questions, failure to record accurate responses, and flat out ignoring expressions of fear and wrongfully deporting asylum seekers to their home countries where they face harm and possibly death.
Dilley, Texas, is home to the largest immigration detention center in the country. Up to 2400 women and their children can be held inside the center, purpose-built and opened in 2015 on a former site for oil and gas drilling. I’ve written about this place and the unforgivable waste of detaining families before. The majority of families at Dilley are asylum seekers. At this female only facility, CBP has seen fit to assign male officers to conduct credible fear interviews with the mothers. This is despite the very well-documented extremely high levels of gender-based violence and trauma survivors among this asylum-seeking population.
This is not, of course, the only attack on asylum seekers and immigrants this week. Late Friday afternoon the government quietly released new proposed regulations to increase fees throughout the agency. This includes, for the first time ever, a $50 fee for individuals to apply for asylum protection. This may not seem like very much, but asylum seekers are not permitted to even apply for a work permit until 150 days after their asylum application is received. At the same time, asylum seekers are not entitled to any federal benefits (and hardly any state benefits, except a couple of outliers, like Maine), $50 will be a barrier to some from obtaining protection. Years ago I worked for a non-profit organization where we charged a $100 fee for each client, and many of my clients struggled to pay that in $10 or $20 installments over a period of a year or more.
At the same time, the government has already released proposed regulations to remove the 30-day court mandated processing deadline for asylum seeker work permits, eliminating any processing deadline whatsoever and enabling the government to delay work authorization indefinitely with impunity. And, on Wednesday the Administration released their proposed rule to more than double the 150-day waiting period after filing an asylum application to file for a work permit to a year. This will leave asylum seekers unable to fend for themselves, vulnerable to those who would prey on individuals living at the margins of society, and unable to access healthcare, public transportation, obtain driver’s licenses, banking systems, and, of course, access to legal counsel.
I ask you to heed the powerful words of my client this week. Americans, call on Congress to act. Call your senators demand that they question Acting USCIS Director Kenneth Cuccinelli and CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan, who appeared before Congress earlier this week, on these new policies. Ask Cuccinelli about his agency’s dereliction of duty in permitting CBP officers to conduct credible fear interviews. Ask him about the fees for asylum. Ask him about unreasonably delaying work authorization. Ask Morgan about what specific training his officers have received to conduct credible fear interviews. Speak out, ask questions, and take action. We cannot continue to sign off on these practices because they fundamentally undermine the human rights of asylum seekers, and, in turn, our own humanity.
Asylum officers rebel against Trump policies they say are immoral and illegal
In collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at a much-criticized Trump administration policy to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers implementing it.
It only took Doug Stephens two days to decide: He wasn’t going to implement President Trump’s latest policy to restrict immigration, known as Remain in Mexico. The asylum officer wouldn’t interview any more asylum seekers only to send them back to danger in Mexico.
As a federal employee, refusing to implement the government policy probably meant that he’d be fired, and an end to his career as a public servant. He’d only been assigned five of the interviews so far. But it was five too many — to the trained attorney, the policy officially termed “Migrant Protection Protocols” was not only unethical, it was against the law.
When Stephens told his supervisor in San Francisco his decision, he said he was stunned.
“I told him, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not doing these interviews,’” Stephens said, speaking publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview. “I think they’re illegal. They’re definitely immoral. And I’m not doing them.’”
Stephens is believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to conduct interviews under the program, according to Michael Knowles, a spokesman for the National CIS Council, the union that represents some 13,000 asylum officers and other employees of Citizenship and Immigration Services worldwide.
But he isn’t alone. Across the country, asylum officers are calling in sick, requesting transfers, retiring earlier than planned and quitting, all to resist this and other Trump administration immigration policies that they view as illegal, according to Stephens, as well as other asylum officers and officials.
In a collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at one of the Trump administration’s most successful policies to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers forced to implement it.
The asylum officers’ primary job is to make sure that the U.S. government is not returning people to harm in their home countries, a foundational principle in both U.S. and international law. But under MPP, instead of allowing asylum seekers who come to the southern border to wait in the U.S. for their immigration hearings, U.S. officials are forcing them to wait in Mexico.
Since the Trump administration announced the policy in December, U.S. officials have pushed roughly 60,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico, to wait in areas that the U.S. State Department considers some of the most dangerous in the world.
While U.S. officials downplay the danger in Mexico, kidnappings, rape and other violence against asylum seekers under the program are widespread and well documented, according to other officials, advocates, lawyers and academic researchers.
Homeland Security officials concede that the program is designed to discourage asylum claims. The president is running for reelection on renewed promises to limit immigration. Under the policy, only 11 asylum seekers have been granted some kind of relief, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database.
The half-dozen asylum officers interviewed by The Times say that in almost every interview they’ve conducted under the policy, the asylum seeker expressed a fear of returning to Mexico — many said they’d been harmed there already. But under the new standards, the officers say they had to return them anyway.
“What’s my moral culpability in that?” said an asylum officer who’s conducted nearly 100 interviews. She requested anonymity because she feared retaliation. “My signature’s on that paperwork. And that’s something now that I live with.”
The asylum officers rebelling against Trump’s immigration policies say they run counter to the laws passed by Congress, as well as their oath to the Constitution and extensive training, which includes how to detect fraud or any potential national security concerns.
Under U.S. law, migrants have the right to request asylum. Some 80% of asylum seekers pass the first step in the lengthy process, an interview with an asylum officer that’s known as a credible-fear screening. Congress set a low standard for the officers to use at this initial stage, to minimize the risk of sending someone back to harm, or even death. But ultimately, only about 15% of applicants win asylum before an immigration judge.
Trump and his top officials use this difference between the percentage of asylum seekers who pass the first step versus the percentage who ultimately win asylum to claim that asylum itself is a “hoax” or “big fat con job.”
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, has publicly criticized the officers, saying they approve too many requests and oppose Trump’s initiatives for partisan reasons. On Wednesday, Cuccinelli was named acting deputy Homeland Security secretary.
Cuccinelli’s spokesperson stopped responding to requests for an interview. But The Times asked Cuccinelli during an October media breakfast about concerns from officers.
“So long as we’re in the position of putting in place what we believe to be legal policies that haven’t been found to be otherwise,” Cuccinelli said, “we fully expect them to implement those faithfully and sincerely and vigorously.”
Citizenship and Immigration Services also declined requests for data on staffing for the Homeland Security agency, and the asylum section specifically, to try to quantify what officers and officials called an “exodus” primarily because of the policy.
Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the ongoing litigation against the policy. The panel’s ruling on whether the policy is legal is pending.
When Stephens refused to do the interviews, his supervisors started disciplinary proceedings, issuing him formal warnings, he described at the time. He decided to quit, but not before he sent out a legal memo he’d drafted arguing why the policy violates the law, which he sent to his entire San Francisco office, supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator. He later got his own legal representation, at Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit.
He says he’s still trying to draw attention to the program, encouraging others to speak out against it.
“You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”
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So, what happened to the integrity of 9th Circuit Appellate Judges and Congress? Why are they OK with blatant violations of our laws, our Constitution, and human rights that actually kill people? You could call it “accessory to murder.”
Folks like Doug Stephens, Molly O’Toole, and many other courageous, dedicated members of the “New Due Process Army” are making a public record. While the cowardly abusers might be “getting away with murder” in “real time,” they will eventually be held accountable by history for their illegal, immoral, and unconscionable actions. And, that includes not only the “perpetrators” in the Trump Administration, but also their many disgraceful enablers in the judiciary and Congress.
Many innocent people might die or be sent to oblivion. But, their bloodstains won’t be washed away, even by time.
Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.
The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.
To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.
Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.
Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.
Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.
Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.
Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. Thiswould have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.
Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.
But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.
Take asylum law.
“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.
But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.
Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.
This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”
“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.
A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.
The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?
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Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?
It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.
Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!
Across the years of a presidential administration, the churn of politics and policy brings certain men and women to the top of U.S. politics. The past few days have demonstrated the paths to preferment and influence in the Trump years.
First is the case of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump and the administration’s unofficial liaison to the alt-right world.
Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.
All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.
Second, there is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the tireless, tendentious, often bellowing chief defender of Trump during the impeachment hearings.
Jordan is not, of course, alone in his heroic sycophancy. GOP Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.), Mark Meadows (N.C.) and others try to equal him. Together they update Alexander Pope: Fools rush in where Mick Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani fear to tread.
But Jordan has mastered the art of talking utter rubbish in tones of utter conviction. His version of the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry? Rather than committing corruption, Trump was fighting corruption. Military assistance was suspended, in Jordan’s telling, while the president was deciding whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “legit” in his determination to oppose corruption. When Trump found that Zelensky was the “real deal,” the aid was released.
This is a bold but flimsy lie, of the type Trump has made common. Why, in this scenario, would Trump try to secure specific commitments from Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and to examine Trump’s conspiracy theory about Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election? Are we supposed to believe that Trump employed these as random, theoretical examples of corruption that a worthy, crime-fighting leader would root out? And was the release of U.S. aid just two days after Congress was notified about the whistleblower report a coincidence as well?
Jordan asks us not to accept additional facts but to live in a substitute reality. Almost everyone who participated in these events — both professional staff and political appointees — has affirmed that Trump was employing leverage to secure his political objectives. It is the plain meaning of the reconstructed transcript of Trump’s call to Zelensky.
But none of this matters to Jordan or his colleagues. Consistency and coherence are beside the point. Their objective is not to convince the country; it is to maintain and motivate the base, and thus avoid Trump’s conviction in the Senate. The purpose is not to offer and answer arguments but to give partisans an alternative narrative. And the measure of Jordan’s success is not even the political health of his party (which is suffering from its association with Trump); it is the demonstrated fidelity to a single man.
The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.
Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.
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Let’s hear that again:
Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.
Yup!
This also confirms what we already knew about Miller’s “role model,” his former boss and White Nationalist nativist “mentor’ Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. He’s someone who should have been disowned by the GOP ages ago and who has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” his total unfitness too hold public office!
Meghan E. Lopez Head of Mission International Rescue Committee El Salvador
Yesterday my colleague Frank Mc Manus updated you on the escalating crisis in Yemen. Today, I wanted to share what’s happening in El Salvador — and why your help is needed now.
The threat to women and girls is real. It is frightening. And it must not go unnoticed any longer.
In the States, we often don’t hear much about El Salvador aside from it being the country of origin for many asylum seekers at the border. We don’t hear that what’s happening at the border is a symptom of the real crisis in El Salvador and other countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America.
El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent and deadly places, similar to those of active war zones. The high level of violence is largely due to organized crime and rampant gang activity — and it’s what drives people to flee for their lives. Here are some startling facts:
In 2018, one woman was murdered every 20 hours.
There were more than 9.2 homicides per day.
Approximately 10 people each day disappear.
My teams on the ground are seeing that it’s teenage girls who are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence from state, civilian and criminal entities. They are also being forced into becoming “gang girlfriends,” which is essentially sex slavery so they can protect their families.
We are helping women and girls and their families in El Salvador in many ways. We run an online platform called CuentaNos.org which has become a lifeline. It provides information for people during moments of crisis or while on the move in El Salvador, and soon in Honduras and Guatemala as well. We provide emergency cash assistance to help people find shelter and safety when they most need it and a crisis referral service to help people connect directly with the support they need, all the while working to improve those services that our partners provide.
Thank you so much for giving your attention to this often forgotten crisis.
My very best,
Meghan Lopez
Head of Mission
IRC El Salvador
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So why are we not only returning vulnerable women, children, and families to El Salvador, but, outrageously, also trying to send asylum applicants from other countries there, even though the Administration knows full well:
It isn’t “safe,” by any definition;
It’s a hellhole where gangs, narcos, and corrupt government officials aligned with them are in control of much of the country;
It doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system; and
It can’t protect and support its own population, let alone tens of thousands of refugees from other countries that the U.S. intends to “outsource” there.
These outrageous shams are some of the “proud legacy” that folks like “Big Mac With Lies” leave behind. And the new DHS honchos, Wolf and “Cooch Cooch,” have promised to be even more cruel, racist, and scofflaw.
Remember the truth and the facts the next time you hear a dishonest Trump official falsely claim that the only reason folks are fleeing for their lives is to take advantage of “loopholes” in US. law.
Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.
Emails from Miller to a former Breitbart writer, sent before and after he joined the Trump campaign, show Miller obsessively focused on injecting white nationalist-style talking points on race and crime, Confederate monuments, and Islam into the far-right website’s campaign coverage, the SPLC report says.
Miller, one of the few surviving initial appointees in the administration, has been credited with orchestrating Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies.
The SPLC story is based largely on emails provided by a former Breitbart writer, Katie McHugh. McHugh was fired by Breitbart over a series of anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced the far right, telling the SPLC that the movement is “evil”.
However, throughout 2015 and 2016, as the Trump campaign progressed and she became an increasingly influential voice at Breitbart, McHugh told the SPLC that Miller urged her in a steady drumbeat of emails and phone calls to promote arguments from sources popular with far-right and white nationalist movements.
Miller’s emails had a “strikingly narrow” focus on race and immigration, according to the SPLC report.
At various times, the SPLC reports, Miller recommendations for McHugh included the white nationalist website, VDare; Camp of the Saints, a racist novel focused on a “replacement” of European whites by mass third-world immigration; conspiracy site Infowars; and Refugee Resettlement Watch, a fringe anti-immigrant site whose tagline is “They are changing America by changing the people”.
McHugh also says that in a phone call, Miller suggested that she promote an analysis of race and crime featured on the website of a white nationalist organization, American Renaissance. The American Renaissance article he mentioned was the subject of significant interest on the far right in 2015.
In the two weeks following the murder of nine people at a church in Charleston by the white supremacist Dylann Roof as Americans demanded the removal of Confederate statues and flags, Miller encouraged McHugh to turn the narrative back on leftists and Latinos.
“Should the cross be removed from immigrant communities, in light of the history of Spanish conquest?” he asked in one email on 24 June.
“When will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since Stalin?” he asked in another the following day.
When another mass shooting happened in Oregon in October 2015, Miller wrote that the killer, Chris Harper-Mercer “is described as ‘mixed race’ and born in England. Any chance of piecing that profile together more, or will it all be covered up?”
Miller repeatedly brings up President Calvin Coolidge, who is revered among white nationalists for signing the 1924 Immigration Act which included racial quotas for immigration.
In one email, Miller remarks on a report about the beginning of Immigrant Heritage Month by writing: “This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century.” The four decades in question is the period between the passage of the Immigration Act and the abolition of racial quotas.
Miller also hints at conspiratorial explanations for the maintenance of current immigration policies. Mainstream coverage of the 50th anniversary of the removal of racial quotas in immigration policy had lacked detail, Miller believed, because “Elites can’t allow the people to see that their condition is not the product of events beyond their control, but the product of policy they foisted onto them.”.
Miller used a US government email address during the early part of the correspondence, when he was an aide to senator Jeff Sessions, and then announced his new job on the Trump campaign, and a new email address, to recipients including McHugh.
As well as McHugh, recipients of his emails included others then at Breitbart who subsequently worked in the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon and current Trump aide, Julia Hahn.
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“The Worst Generation?”
Also, remember that Miller is an acolyte of shameless White Nationalist racist Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. The latter was last seen groveling and pleading before Donald Trump in what hopefully for America will be a vain attempt to regain his Senate seat in Alabama. The country certainly has been enriched by not having this vile purveyor of racist lies, false narratives, and gratuitous cruelty on the national scene since Trump fired him. Nevertheless, his cruelty, illegal, and immoral actions during his tenure as Attorney General continue to destroy lives and haunt our nation.
After whites fled and before the ‘creative class’ moved in, immigrants kept urban neighborhoods alive.
A.K. Sandoval-Strausz
November 8, 2019
Chicago’s South Lawndale was just like countless other neighborhoods that bottomed out during the urban crisis of the mid-20th century. Settled after the fire of 1871 and built up in the early 1900s, it had prospered as an industrial district offering steady factory work and affordable housing to immigrants from Germany, Poland and Bohemia. But by the 1960s, its white residents were leaving en masse, moving to the suburbs for newer housing and to avoid sharing the neighborhood with black families who were moving in. The writer Stuart Dybek remembered South Lawndale in those years as a place where people “walked past block-length gutted factories [and] . . . half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves.”
But some locals saw a solution to the neighborhood’s decline. Among them was Richard Dolejs, a real estate agent and community leader. Instead of moving out, he recalls, “we said: ‘Well, what about the Mexican community? We should apply to that group and try to bring ’em in.’ ” In the early ’60s, he persuaded lenders to write mortgages for the newcomers and hired Spanish-speaking staff to help them with the paperwork. This was not just altruism: Dolejs’s neighbors wanted to sell or rent their houses to somebody, and since a nearby barrio was being destroyed in the name of “urban renewal,” Hispanic Chicagoans needed somewhere new to live.
They found it.
Depopulation, job loss, fiscal distress and soaring crime in America’s cities were among the nation’s most intractable problems from the 1950s to the early 1990s. When that crisis abated, many experts credited the recovery largely to the “creative class,” urban professionals and other people with money. But it owed more to Latino immigrant families who had begun to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods decades earlier, laying essential foundations for the well-heeled to return. As Latin American migrants are today demonized and scapegoated, their indispensable role in solving one of the greatest crises of the 20th century shouldn’t be overlooked.
Like South Lawndale, many other city neighborhoods deteriorated steadily during the urban crisis. Dallas’s Oak Cliff area had thrived starting in the 1940s thanks to military spending on a nearby aircraft and missile factory. The prospect of racial integration, however, led a few whites to launch racist attacks and many more to flee to homogeneous neighborhoods in north Dallas or the suburbs. Oak Cliff’s Mexican American population grew beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Dallas officials ran new highways through another area, disrupting the city’s main barrio and displacing its residents; they were joined by Mexican immigrants beginning in the 1970s.
Latino migrants saved neighborhoods like these from the abandonment and decay that afflicted so much of urban America. While virtually every other demographic group in most cities shrunk, Latin American newcomers replenished neighborhoods. In 1960, my research in census data found that South Lawndale and Oak Cliff were each about 1 to 2 percent Hispanic; four decades later, 91 percent of South Lawndale’s 81,000 residents and 76 percent of Oak Cliff’s 116,000 denizens were Latinos. They were a community lifeline at a time when many landlords, unable to sell or rent their properties but still responsible for mortgages and taxes, hired “torches” to burn them down so they could collect insurance money. Between 1950 and 1980, the North Lawndale neighborhood lost a shocking 10,000 housing units, nearly a third of its previous total. But in adjacent South Lawndale, the number of dwellings held steady as Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants became homeowners.
This was a nationwide phenomenon. New York City lost 820,000 residents between 1950 and 1980, and it would have shrunk more if not for gains of over 1 million new Latinos after 1980. Boston lost 238,000 residents in those decades but gained 100,000 new Latinos since 1980. Cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia also depended on arriving Latinos — about 85,000 in Milwaukee and 160,000 in Philadelphia — to help stabilize their populations. The clearest example was Chicago, which shed more than 600,000 residents between 1950 and 1980. Nearly 370,000 new Hispanic residents after 1980 saved the Windy City, which is now 29 percent Latino, from losing population as quickly as urban-crisis bellwethers like Detroit and Cleveland.
Three decades of population decline in most urban areas nationwide gave way to a new era, beginning around 1980, when more than two-thirds of the 25 biggest cities gained residents. Much of this increase owed to Latinos. In most big cities, Hispanic populations expanded in the 1970s and reached peak growth rates by the 1990s; meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white populations shrank continuously, with the predominantly white “creative class” stabilizing this demographic only in the past 20 years. As a result, of those 25 biggest cities, 12 have populations that are more than one-quarter Hispanic, including eight that are more than one-third Hispanic and two, San Antonio and El Paso, that are majority Latino. By the same token, research on more than 3,000 U.S. counties and 150 big cities has demonstrated that Latinos were the largest immigrant group contributing to economic growth, as an influx of immigrants generated jobs and propelled revitalization through the housing sector.
This is not just a question of numbers. It is difficult to imagine how many neighborhoods — from the North Corona section of Queens to Detroit’s Mexicantown to Minneapolis’s Lake Street to everything west of Interstate 25 in Denver — could have sustained themselves without the arrival of 25 million new Latino urbanites over the past half-century. Equally important, however, are the ways these migrants imported everyday customs from Latin America and adapted them for their new homes.
The most significant of these habits was a preference for walking over driving. In countries such as Mexico, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, few people owned cars, especially in the rural areas from which most immigrants came. This made the newcomers the ideal inheritors of the American urban core, a landscape created before the automobile. While Anglo Americans were leaving in droves for car-dependent suburbia, Latinos repopulated neighborhoods built around pedestrians and public transportation.
This in turn revitalized the inner-city commercial landscape. Urban small businesses had been declining for decades, pressured since the mid-1950s by suburban malls and since the 1970s by predatory big-box retailers. But new Latino residents energized neighborhood commerce. They shopped locally, at stores they could walk to, where shopkeepers spoke Spanish. Businesses like these enjoyed a protected market with a growing clientele: The Kauffman Index, which measures entrepreneurial activity, showed that in almost every year from 1996 through 2018, Latinos were more likely than any other demographic group to open their own businesses.
They also brought life back to city streets. While two generations of American thinkers fretted over the loss of public life, from Richard Sennett’s “The Fall of Public Man” in 1977 to Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” in 2000, Latino neighborhoods experienced a revival of streetside socializing. Once-empty sidewalks, play areas and parks echoed with the sounds of música norteña, salsa and cumbia and the cheers of spectators at neighborhood soccer leagues — and eventually, Anglo Americans learned to shout “¡Goooooooool!” when a team scored.
In Oak Cliff, Latino immigrants helped reverse two decades of falling property values, and by the 1980s, local homes were appreciating faster than in Dallas as a whole. As the city’s share of Latinos jumped from the 1990s into the 2010s, Dallas’s crime rate began a decline that saw homicides drop by 69 percent between 1991 and 2018. Similarly, in South Lawndale, home values more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, and by 2018 the number of homicides citywide had dropped by 40 percent from its peak in 1991. Neighborhood business activity soared; soon journalists, business groups, social scientists and public officials were lauding South Lawndale — now known as Little Village — as an example of a new and revitalized Chicago. Like other barrios, it still had problems with poverty, underfunded schools and delinquent youth, but things had improved dramatically.
Leaders of cities nationwide soon recognized the positive effects of immigration. They organized to welcome newcomers, especially after the 2010 Census showed how many urban areas depended on immigrants to sustain their populations and workforces. Detroit, for example, launched a development initiative called Global Detroit, observing that “immigration has proven, by far, to be the best American strategy to combat population loss.” A few years later, Detroit’s leaders joined with municipal officials from across the industrial heartland to establish the Welcoming Economies Global Network — its motto is “Leading Rust Belt Immigrant Innovation” — with more than two dozen affiliates.
Latin American immigrants have filled essential roles in metropolitan economies, making up a large proportion of home builders, child-care workers, building maintenance staff, and restaurant cooks, servers and busboys. Sociologists and economists have shown that the urban professionals cities covet today need child care and other household help, and that they are attracted to cities by cafes, clubs and restaurants. Without the hands that have built and renovated homes, looked after children, kept office buildings running, and prepared meals, white-collar families wouldn’t live in urban America.
These urban professionals increasingly require not just Latino labor but Latino space, as they seek out neighborhoods with “character” and “authenticity.” In numerous barrios — from San Francisco’s Mission District to Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights to New York’s Washington Heights — urban professionals have paid barrios their highest compliment by gentrifying them. A few years ago, Chicago immigrant José Luis Arroyo recalled a young white man who walked up and asked to purchase his house, saying he had lived there before his family moved away. “These Americans left because they thought we were going to destroy their neighborhood,” Arroyo told researchers for the Chicago Mexican Migrant Oral History Project. “These young peoples’ parents got scared and moved away, and they took their children with them. And then these children grew up and became professionals and came to visit the barrio. And now they want to move back!”
The revitalizing influence of Latinos and other immigrants now extends far beyond cities. Many of the pathologies of the urban crisis are today afflicting rural America, where a lack of economic opportunity and a catastrophic opioid epidemic have emptied out small towns and left vast numbers of workers disabled. Once again, Latin American newcomers have led the way in addressing the rural crisis by providing much-needed labor on Pennsylvania farms, in Iowa meatpacking plants and at Wyoming nature resorts and repopulating the surrounding small towns. Of the nearly 2,300 rural counties in the United States, 94 percent saw increases in Hispanic residents between 1990 and 2000, and from 2000 to 2010, Latinos made up 58 percent of all population growth in nonmetropolitan counties.
A nation of immigrants is what we have been, and it is what we shall remain. The newest Americans trust us to be the nation we said we were for all those years: a city upon a hill, the North Star, the last best hope of Earth, Mother of Exiles. Perhaps they can help us recognize ourselves; for they are just the latest in a proud lineage of migrants seeking their promised land.
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Trump’s racist White Nationalism basically targets all who “differ” from his absurd “nativist vision” of America and his disdain for truth and values.
Tyler Anbinder Professor of History George Washington University
Professor Tyler Anbinder writes in WashPost:
November 7, 2019 at 10:03 a.m. EST
President Trump insists that he harbors no prejudice against immigrants. “I love immigrants,” he told Telemundo in June. Indeed, Trump has married two immigrants — Ivana Zelníčková (from what is now the Czech Republic) and Melanija Knavs (born in what is now Slovenia). He does occasionally say something positive about an immigrant group, such as when he wondered why the United States couldn’t get more immigrants from Norway. But for the most part, Trump portrays immigrants as a threat or a menace, and he calls the largest segment of America’s newcomers — Latinos — “animals” and invaders.
As a historian who specializes in the study of anti-immigrant sentiment, I know that Trump is not the first president to denigrate newcomers to the country. But Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.
Trump’s nativism is especially striking for its comprehensiveness. Over the centuries, nativists have leveled 10 main charges against immigrants: They bring crime; they import poverty; they spread disease; they don’t assimilate; they corrupt our politics; they steal our jobs; they cause our taxes to increase; they’re a security risk; their religion is incompatible with American values; they can never be “true Americans.”
Trump has made every one of these charges. No American president before him has publicly embraced the entire nativist worldview. A commander in chief who is also the nativist in chief has the potential to alter immigrants’ role in American society now and for generations to come.
There have, of course, been upsurges of nativism in previous eras, but presidents have rarely been the ones stoking the flames. President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things nearly tripled the time immigrants had to wait before they could become citizens and vote, but his voluminous writings contain nary a word critical of immigrants.
Millard Fillmore, president at the height of the massive influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, remained silent during his administration on the social tensions these newcomers caused. Even in 1856, when the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (popularly called the Know Nothing Party) nominated Fillmore to return to the White House, he and his surrogates eschewed attacks on immigrants and rebranded the party as a moderating force between proslavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans.
Congress has typically been the source of the greatest nativist zeal in national politics — and presidents have generally tried to tamp down that zeal. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur vetoed legislation barring the immigration of Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, though Arthur later agreed to sign a 10-year ban. In subsequent decades, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed bills making the ability to read a prerequisite for adult men to immigrate. Congress eventually overrode Wilson’s veto to enact such a law in 1917.
By the 1920s, most Americans were convinced that further limits on immigration were necessary. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in December 1923, following the political winds, and by “American,” he meant white in race, Anglo-Saxon in ethnicity and Protestant in religion. Coolidge endorsed the severe limits Congress placed on the immigration of Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews and accepted a ban on immigration from Asia and Africa, as well.
The only Americans who came even remotely close to rivaling Trump’s nativist influence were more narrowly focused than the president is. Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were widely admired anti-Semites whose views reached millions, but their animus was focused on powerful Jews at home and abroad, not Jewish immigrants in general. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had millions of loyal radio listeners in the 1930s, but he, too, was more an anti-Semite than a broad nativist. None of them commanded the devotion of nearly as large a share of the population as Trump does.
John Tanton, who died this year, was a driving force behind the modern anti-immigration movement, organizing and raising money for a variety of groups that have advocated a reduction in immigration. But those groups didn’t have influence until Trump began spreading their ideas and appointing their leaders and allies to positions in his administration.
Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts have featured several classic nativist tropes. He falsely associates immigrants with crime, as when he said during his campaign that Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In truth, immigrants commit significantly less crime than the native-born do. He scapegoats entire immigrant religious groups for the actions of one or two criminals, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after Syed Rizwan Farook (who was not even an immigrant) and his wife (who was foreign-born) killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. He perpetuates the notion that immigrants pose a public health threat, as when he wondered in 2018 why we let “all these people from shithole countries come here.” One of his objections, reportedly, was that Haitians “all have AIDS,” though the White House denies he said that. He’s making it harder for low-income immigrants to come here in ways that would almost certainly reduce immigration from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, justifying his proposal on the grounds that he needs to “protect benefits for American citizens.” And he argues that even the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants — if they are part of ethnic, religious or racial minorities — are not real Americans, as he suggested when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
What makes Trump more influential than any previous American nativist is the size of his audience and the devotion of his supporters. Trump has more than 66 million Twitter followers and a powerful echo chamber in conservative media, allowing him to instantaneously convey his ideas to a quarter of the adult population. Other presidents had passionate followers (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan come to mind), but none of them expressed much, if any, animus toward immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way many Americans view immigrants: Nearly a quarter now call immigration a “problem,” more than double the percentage who characterized it that way in 2015, and the highest share since Gallup began asking that question a quarter-century ago.
Trump has made public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations. As he lambasted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali immigrant, at a July rally in Greenville, N.C., the crowd erupted with chants of “Send her back,” echoing Trump’s notorious tweet. “There was a filter,” a Latino resident of Greenville noted after the rally, that previously prevented Americans from expressing such hatred of immigrants, but “now the filter has been broken. My Hispanic friends are afraid to go to the store. They’re afraid to do anything. It’s scary.”
Trump’s spread of nativism has led to an upsurge in animosity directed at immigrants. Those who read or hear the president’s nativist views are more likely to write offensive things on social media about the groups he targets, one political science study found. One study using data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League found that counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, primarily assaults or acts of vandalism, compared to counties that didn’t host rallies. ABC News identified at least 29 cases in which violence or threats of violence were carried out, and the perpetrators targeted immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants more than any other group.
The president’s rhetoric inspires not merely petty violence but occasionally full-fledged acts of terrorism as well. Throughout the fall of 2018, Trump relentlessly sowed fears that an “invasion” of Central American refugees was imminent via an immigrant “caravan” heading through Mexico toward the United States. Before a gunman killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, he apparently justified his actions on the grounds that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which these days assists refugees from all over the world, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”
Five months later, the man accused of killing more than 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand hailed Trump as a symbol “of renewed white identity” in an online manifesto. In August, a man traveled to El Paso with the goal of killing as many Latinos as possible, authorities said, slaying 22 people at a Walmart. A manifesto linked to him echoed many of the president’s favorite talking points: It condemned “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” charged that immigrants are taking jobs from natives and lauded Republicans for reducing “mass immigration and citizenship.” These accused shooters all seemingly found Trump’s nativist rhetoric inspirational.
While this upsurge in nativist violence is terrifying, history suggests that, over the long term, those who embrace immigrants will win out over those who fear them. The percentage of Americans who want to cut immigration has risen since Trump took office, but that figure is still down by almost half since the mid-1990s. Ironically, Trump’s nativist pronouncements and actions may have galvanized Americans who oppose him to look even more favorably at immigrants than they did before. Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that immigration is good for the country — an all-time high in Gallup’s poll — while the percentage who call it harmful, 19 percent, is at an all-time low.
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Twitter: @TylerAnbinder
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Beyond the vileness and lies of Trump’s White Nationalist, racist, xenophobia, Professor Anbinder’s article ends on an upbeat note:
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Unfortunately, the “upward arc of history” will be too late to save the many individual lives and futures daily destroyed by Trump’s White Nationalist hate campaign.
That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is fighting to save lives and protect the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of everyone.
Gustavo Solis reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:
By Gustavo Solis
Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.
Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to accept only migrants with future court dates scheduled.
Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.
However, records obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.
Those documents, unofficially known as tear sheets, are given to every migrant in the Migrant Protection Protocols program who is sent back to Mexico. The document tells the migrants where and when to appear at the border so that they can be transported to immigration court. What is different about the tear sheets that migrants with closed cases receive is that the future court date is not legitimate, according to multiple immigration lawyers whose clients have received these documents.
This has happened both to migrants who have been granted asylum and those who had their cases terminated — meaning a judge closed the case without making a formal decision, usually on procedural grounds. Additionally, at least one migrant was physically assaulted after being sent back to Mexico this way, according to her lawyer.
Bashir Ghazialam, a San Diego immigration lawyer who represents six people who received these fake future court dates, said he was shocked by the developments.
“This is fraud,” he said. “I don’t call everything fraud. This is the first time I’ve used the words, ‘U.S. government’ and ‘fraud’ in the same sentence. No one should be OK with this.”
The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests to comment about why they had engaged in the practice.
Ghazialam first noticed this in September, when three of his clients were sent back to Mexico after their cases were terminated on Sept. 17. After the judge made his decision, the family spent 10 days in Customs and Border Protection custody.
On Sept. 27, the family was given a document that read, in part, “At your last court appearance, an immigration judge ordered you to return to court for another hearing.” That piece of paper told them to return to court on Nov. 28.
However, the immigration judge ordered no further hearing. Ghazialam’s clients do not have a hearing scheduled on that or any other day.
To confirm Ghazialam’s claims, a reporter called a Department of Justice hotline that people with immigration court cases use to check their status and dates of future hearings. That hotline confirmed that the family’s case had been terminated on Sept. 17 and that “the system does not contain any information regarding a future hearing date on your case.”
“That date is completely made up and the Mexican authorities are not trained enough to know this is a fake court date,” Ghazialam said.
After being returned to Mexico, the mother was stabbed in the forearm while protecting her children from an attempted kidnapping. She still has stitches from the wound, Ghazialam said.
The mother presented herself at the border shortly after the stabbing. She told Customs and Border Protection agents that she was afraid to stay in Mexico. The agents gave her a fear of return interview and tried to send her back to Mexico.
But this time, Mexican immigration officials refused to let her and her children back into Mexico because they did not have a court date, Ghazialam said. She is currently with relatives in New York, waiting to figure out the future of her legal status in the United States while wearing an ankle monitor.
In most of these cases, immigration attorneys aren’t aware that their clients were sent back to Mexico until it’s too late.
In one case, a Cuban asylum seeker was returned to Mexico after an immigration judge in Brownsville, Texas, granted her asylum.
The woman’s lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, remembers hugging her client after the decision and arranging a place to meet after authorities released her later that day following processing.
Goodwin expected the process to take 45 minutes, so she went to a nearby Whataburger and ordered a chocolate milkshake. About 40 minutes later, she got a phone call from her client.
“She was hysterical and crying,” Goodwin said. “I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and she says, ‘I’m in Mexico.’ ”
Goodwin called U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities to try to find out what happened. She spent five hours at the border until 9 p.m. and then went home to draft a lawsuit. It wasn’t until she threatened to sue CBP that her client was paroled into the United States.
“It was total chaos for 24 hours to try to figure it out,” Goodwin said. “It shouldn’t be like that, especially when CBP is blatantly lying. They are creating documents that have false information.”
The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said it was worried about the practice.
“The idea that even though these vulnerable individuals are able to obtain an asylum grant from an immigration judge and CBP is sending them back to harm’s way in Mexico is really disturbing, especially under the guise that there’s a future hearing date,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the organization.
Mexico’s National Institute of Migration did not immediately respond to questions about this practice.
Although Ghazialam and Goodwin were able to eventually get their clients back into the United States, some people are still in Mexico.
That’s what happened to a Guatemalan woman and her two children after a judge terminated their case on Oct. 18. The same day the judge closed their case, a U.S. immigration official gave her a piece of paper with the false hearing date of Jan. 16.
“But this appointment does not exist,” said the woman’s New York City attorney, Rebecca Press. “If you check with the immigration court system, there is no January hearing date and the case has already been terminated.”
It’s unclear how widespread this practice is. Lawyers in San Diego; Laredo, Texas; and Brownsville confirmed they have seen it firsthand.
However, only about 1% of asylum seekers in the Migrant Protection Protocols program have lawyers. Therefore it’s difficult to track what happens to the overwhelming majority of the people in the program.
Lawyers said asylum seekers without legal representation who have been sent back in this manner probably have no way of advocating for themselves. It took Goodwin hours of calls to high-level officials in both U.S. and Mexican immigration agencies plus the threat of a lawsuit to get her client back into the United States.
“If you don’t have someone who’s willing to sit around and spend five hours on the phone and stay up all night drafting litigation to force their hand, you’re going to be stuck,” she said.
As news of these false hearing dates spread among the immigration attorney community, some lawyers are taking proactive steps to protect their clients from being returned to Mexico after their court cases are closed.
Siobhan Waldron, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote a letter to Mexican immigration officials explaining that her client had no future hearing date and outlined a step-by-step process Mexican officials could take to verify that her client’s case had been closed by using the Department of Justice hotline.
The letter worked at first.
When CBP officers tried to return Waldron’s client to Mexico on Nov. 1 with a false January hearing date, her client showed the note to Mexican officials, who refused to take her in. However, the next day, CBP officers sent Waldron’s client back to Mexico with another false court date and this time did not allow her to show Mexican officials her lawyer’s letter that she kept in a special folder, Waldron said.
“They didn’t let her take it out,” Waldron said. “They said, ‘You can’t present anything from that folder.’ ”
The lawyer plans to file “any complaint you can imagine” to CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and other regulatory agencies because “these agents need to be held accountable.”
Her client is still in Mexico, too afraid to walk outside because she has already been kidnapped and assaulted, Waldron said.
As my friend Laura Lynch points out, the individuals affected by this judicially-enabled outrage are not just “asylum applicants” – they include those who have been GRANTED ASYLUM as well as those whose removal proceedings were terminated because a U.S. Immigration Judge found that DHS ILLEGALLY SUBJECTED THEM to the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program.”
The 9th Circuit’s horrible and incompetent handling of Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan will live in infamy as a monumental judicial abdication of duty that has actually harmed or killed innocent asylum seekers while inspiring DHS to new heights of illegal behavior and contempt for our entire legal system.
Why have a “Judicial Branch” that won’t stand up for individual legal rights in the face of Executive tyranny, overreach, and downright fraud? What are these robed folks doing to earn their lifetime paychecks? And, given the quality and philosophy of many of Trump”s judicial appointments, rammed through a corrupt GOP Senate by “Moscow Mitch,” these are questions the majority of Americans might be asking for decades to come!
One of the regular themes of the Trump administration is the idea that there’s no way it will be able to continue outdoing itself when it comes to wildly evil policies. And yet, on a near-daily basis, it rises to the occasion! While its evilness does not discriminate—women, Democrats, the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims, pro athletes, the poor, and the media all get a taste—very often it relates to immigrants, with Team Trump finding new and inventive ways to demonize them and make their lives miserable. Recently that‘s involved deporting kids with cancer, and now it extends to refusing to allow asylum-seekers who work when they come to the U.S.
NBC News reports that the administration is working on a proposal to prevent asylum-seekers from applying for work permits for at least a year after they enter the country. Yes, the same administration under which visa denials for poor Mexicans have “skyrocketed”, and which announced in August that new factors that will count against green card applicants will include not having the money to cover “any reasonably foreseeable medical costs” related to a medical condition, having been approved to receive a public benefit, “financial liabilities,” and a low credit score, among other things. Obviously not being allowed to work for at least a year will no doubt contribute to the likelihood that people will be forced to turn to welfare, or force them to work in the shadow economy. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense for an administration that clearly prefers upwardly mobile immigrants, unless, of course, the point of the policy was to put such individuals between a rock and a group of assholes, and simply discourage them from coming to the country altogether.
The policy is expected to be discussed at a meeting Monday afternoon between Kevin McAleenan, the outgoing acting Homeland Security secretary, and heads of agencies for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to two of the officials. And it is meant to target Mexican families seeking asylum, a demographic that has recently risen while the number of Central Americans has decreased since May.
One of the DHS officials said proponents of the policy believe prolonging the period when Mexicans are not allowed to work while they wait for their claim will deter them from coming to the U.S. in the first place…DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Of course, the intent here is to discourage individuals from making the asylum applications that U.S. law entitles them to, but that Trump, with help from complicit courts, has all but extinguished without any legislative changes from Congress.
So, first the Trump Administration artificially and intentionally inflates the Immigration Court backlog through “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” so that applications take much longer than they should in a fair and professionally administered system. Then they penalize the victims.
Meanwhile, the Article III Courts, who should have put an end to this unconstitutional nonsense long before now, continue to compound the problem by allowing a biased, xenophobic Administration to run a major court system as a branch of DHS enforcement.
Also, it’s important to remember that these outrages are happening on the watch of “Big Mac With Lies.” Those who care about honest public service and American justice should make a point not to allow “Big Mac” to “reinvent” himself to profit from his wrongdoing and the pain and suffering he has unnecessarily inflicted on asylum seekers and others entitled to justice in America but finding none during “Big Mac’s” tenure as “Trump’s Acting Toady.”
Of course, things are going to continue to get worse for humanity when Trump’s new “Acting Toady of Homeland Security,” Chad Wolf takes over.
Not a single refugee was resettled in the US last month
The nosedive is the result of a State Department freeze on admissions, according to a World Relief press release, resulting in hundreds of canceled flights and yet more uncertainty for the thousands of refugees hoping to resettle in the US. The department has issued an admissions ceiling of 18,000 for the financial year 2020—the lowest in almost 30 years, and well below the number of displaced people already in the pipeline to be resettled in the US. (Ceilings for 2018 and 2019 were 45,000 and 30,000, respectively.)
There couldn’t be a worse time for it. The UN estimates there are around 26 million refugees worldwide, many of whom are victims of torture or women and girls fleeing persecution or violence. Others may be victims of the war in Syria, where the withdrawal of US troops has generated chaos and further devastation. Barely half a percent of the 26 million will be resettled at all, and even then only after a process of intensive screening from admitting states, noted Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement released yesterday. “At a time of record forced displacement in the world, lower admissions constrain UNHCR’s ability to deliver on its refugee protection mandate and diminish our humanitarian negotiating power at the global level,” he added.
While states are barred from expelling asylum seekers or returning them “to any country in which they would face persecution,” they are under no legal obligation to accept any number of refugees. In the mid-1960s, the early years of modern refugee programs, according to the Center for Migration Studies, the US representative to the UN described the proper, legal treatment of refugees and asylum seekers as a “credit” to the US, rather than “a burden.” In recent years, however, the US government has come to see these obligations as a humanitarian headache—one that places an undue toll on US taxpayers.
In 1980, when records began, the US admitted more than 200,000 refugees to a country of around 270 million people. Nearly 30 years on, the US population has risen more than 40%, while the number of refugees resettled is down by more than 80%.
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There is simply no end to the Trump Administration’s sleazy, selfish, cowardly, cruelty. Under Trump, the U.S. has gone from a humanitarian beacon to the leader of the “race to the bottom.”
James McHenry, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, testifies before a Senate panel in 2018. Memos from McHenry detail changes in hiring practices for six restrictive judges placed permanently on the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Department of Justice has quietly changed hiring procedures to permanently place immigration judges repeatedly accused of bias to a powerful appellate board, adding to growing worries about the politicization of the immigration court system.
Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests describe how an already opaque hiring procedure was tweaked for the six newest hires to the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals. All six board members, added in August, were immigration judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates. Some also had the highest number of decisions in 2017 that the same appellate body sent back to them for reconsideration. All six members were immediately appointed to the board without a yearslong probationary period.
“They’re high-level deniers who’ve done some pretty outrageous things [in the courtroom] that would make you believe they’re anti-immigrant,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and past senior legal adviser at the board. “It’s a terrifying prospect … They have power over thousands of lives.”
Among the hiring documents are four recommendation memos to the Attorney General’s office from James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system.
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The memos, dated July 18, recommend immigration judges William A. Cassidy, V. Stuart Couch, Earle B. Wilson, and Keith E. Hunsucker to positions on the appellate board. McHenry’s memos note new hiring procedures had been established on March 8, to vet “multiple candidates” expressing interest in the open board positions.
A footnote in the memos states that applicants who are immigration judges would be hired through a special procedure: Instead of going through the typical two-year probationary period, they would be appointed to the board on a permanent basis, immediately. This was because a position on the appellate board “requires the same or similar skills” as that of an immigration judge, according to the memo.
Appellate board members, traditionally hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, are tasked with reviewing judicial decisions appealed by the government or plaintiff. Their decisions, made as part of a three-member panel, can set binding precedents that adjudicators and immigration judges rely on for future cases related to asylum, stays of deportation, protections for unaccompanied minors and other areas.
McHenry, appointed in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concludes his recommendation memos by noting that the judge’s “current federal service was vetted and no negative information that would preclude his appointment” was reported. He does not mention any past or pending grievances, although public complaints have been filed against at least three of the judges.
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These documents, obtained through FOIA via Muckrock, a nonprofit, collaborative that pushes for government transparency, and shared with CQ Roll Call, reflect “the secrecy with which these rules are changing,” said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. “It’s very hard to remove or discipline a judge that’s permanent than when it’s probationary, so this has long term implications.”
‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have left’: Migrant laments ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy
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The Department of Justice declined to answer a series of questions asked by CQ Roll Call regarding the new hiring practices, why exemptions were made in the case of these immigration judges and whether complaints against any of the judges were considered.
“Board members, like immigration judges, are selected through an open, competitive, and merit-based process involving an initial review by the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent, multiple levels of review by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ official wrote via email. “This process includes review by several career officials. The elevation of trial judges to appellate bodies is common in almost every judicial system, and EOIR is no different.”
Homestead: On the front lines of the migrant children debate
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Opaque hiring process
When the department posted the six board vacancies in March, the openings reflected the first time that board members would be allowed to serve from immigration courts throughout the country. Previously, the entire appellate board worked out of its suburban Virginia headquarters.
In addition, the job posts suggested that new hires would be acting in a dual capacity: They may be asked to adjudicate cases at the trial court level and then also review the court decisions appealed to the board. Previously, board members stuck to reviewing appeals cases, a process that could take more than a year.
Ultimately, all six hires were immigration judges, although past board candidates have come from government service, private sector, academia and nonprofits.
“This was stunning,” MaryBeth Keller, chief immigration judge until she stepped down this summer, said in a recent interview with The Asylumist, a blog about asylum issues. “I can’t imagine that the pool of applicants was such that only [immigration judges] would be hired, including two from the same city.”
Keller said immigration judges are “generally eminently qualified to be board members, but to bring in all six from the immigration court? I’d like to think that the pool of applicants was more diverse than that.”
Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who headed the board under President Bill Clinton, said the panel always had arbitrary hiring procedures that changed with each administration and suffered from “quality control” issues. But the Trump administration has “pushed the envelope the furthest,” he said.
“This administration has weaponized the process,” he told CQ Roll Call. “They have taken a system that has some notable weaknesses in it and exploited those weaknesses for their own ends.”
The reputation and track record of the newest immigration judges has also raised eyebrows.
According to an analysis of EOIR data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, each of these newest six judges had an asylum denial rate over 80 percent, with Couch, Cassidy, and Wilson at 92, 96, and 98 percent, respectively. Nationally, the denial rate for asylum cases is around 57 percent. Previous to their work as immigration judges, all six had worked on behalf of government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the military.
“It mirrors a lot of the concerns at the trial level,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). She said several new hires at the trial level have been Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys.
“Every day across the country, people’s lives hang in the balance waiting for immigration judges to decide their fate,” she said. “Asylum grant rates for immigration court cases vary widely depending on the judge, suggesting that outcomes may turn on which judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”
Immigration experts note that denial rates depend on a variety of factors, including the number and types of cases that appear on a judge’s docket. Perhaps a better measure of an immigration judge’s decision-making may be the rate that rulings get returned by the appeals board.
For 2017, the last full year for which data is available, Couch and Wilson had the third and fourth highest number of board-remanded cases — at 50 and 47 respectively, according to federal documents obtained by Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer. The total number of cases on their dockets that year were 176 and 416, respectively.
Some of the behavior by the newer judges also have earned them a reputation. In 2018, AILA obtained 11 complaints against Cassidy that alleged prejudice against immigrant respondents. In a public letter the Southern Poverty Law Center sent last year to McHenry, the group complained that Cassidy bullied migrants in his court. He also asked questions that “exceeded his judicial authority,” Center lawyers wrote.
Another letter, sent in 2017 by SPLC lawyers and an Emory University law professor whose students observed Cassidy’s court proceedings, noted the judge “analogized an immigrant to ‘a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood’ and asked the attorney if he would let that person in.”
SPLC also has documented issues with Wilson, noting how he “routinely leaned back in his chair, placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes” during one hearing. “He held this position for more than 20 minutes as a woman seeking asylum described the murders of her parents and siblings.”
Couch’s behavior and his cases have made news. According to Mother Jones, he once lost his temper with a 2-year-old Guatemalan child, threatening to unleash a dog on the boy if he didn’t stop making noise. But he is perhaps better known as the judge who denied asylum to “Ms. A.B.,” a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor, even after the appellate board asked him to reconsider. Sessions, the attorney general at the time, ultimately intervened and made the final precedent-setting ruling in the case.
Couch has a pattern of denying asylum to women who have fled domestic violence, “despite clear instructions to the contrary” from the appellate board, according to Johnson, the immigration lawyer who said Couch “has been prejudging all claims that have a history of domestic violence, and quite literally copying and pasting language he used to deny other domestic violence victims asylum.”
Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte-based immigration lawyer and second vice president at AILA, went to law school with Couch and called him “complex.” While he was reluctant to characterize the judge as “anti-immigrant,” he acknowledged “concerning” stories about the Couch’s court demeanor.
“In our conversations, he’s held the view that asylum is not the right vehicle for some individuals to immigrate to the U.S. — it’s one I disagree with,” McKinney said. “But I feel quite certain that that’s exactly why he was hired.”
Politicizing court system
Increasingly, political appointees are “micromanaging” the dockets of immigration judges, said Ashley Tabaddor, head of the union National Association of Immigration Judges. Appointees also are making moves that jeopardize their judicial independence, she said. Among them: requiring judges to meet a quota of 700 completed cases per year; referring cases even if they are still in the midst of adjudication to political leadership, including the Attorney General, for the final decision; and seeking to decertify the immigration judges’ union.
These are “symptoms of a bigger problem,” said Tabaddor. “If you have a court that’s situated in the law enforcement agency … that is the fundamental flaw that needs to be corrected.”
In March, the American Bar Association echoed calls by congressional Democrats to investigate DOJ hiring practices in a report that warned the department’s “current approach will elevate speed over substance, exacerbate the lack of diversity on the bench, and eliminate safeguards that could lead to a resurgence of politicized hiring.”
“Moreover, until the allegations of politically motivated hiring can be resolved, doubt will remain about the perceived and perhaps actual fairness of immigration proceedings,” the organization wrote. “The most direct route to resolving these reasonable and important concerns would be for DOJ to publicize its hiring criteria, and for the inspector general to conduct an investigation into recent hiring practices.”
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One of the most disgusting developments, that the media sometimes misses, is that having skewed and biased the system specifically against Central American asylum seekers, particularly women and children, the Administration uses their “cooked” and “bogus” statistics to make a totally disingenuous case that the high denial rates show the system is being abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers. That, along with the “fiction of the asylum no show” been one of “Big Mac’s” most egregious and oft repeated lies! There certainly is systemic abuse taking place here — but it is by the Trump Administration, not asylum seekers and their courageous lawyers.
This system is a national disgrace operating under the auspices of a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts whose life-tenured judges are failing in their collective duty to put an end to this blatantly unconstitutional system: one that also violates statutory provisions intended to give migrants access to counsel, an opportunity to fully present and document their cases to an unbiased decision maker, and a fair opportunity to seek asylum regardless of status or manner of entry. Basically, judges at all levels who are complicit in this mockery of justice are “robed killers.”
Just a few years ago, asylum seekers were winning the majority of individual rulings on asylum in Immigration Court. Others were getting lesser forms of protection, so that more than 60 percent of asylum applicants who got final decisions in Immigration Court were receiving much-needed, life-saving protection. That’s exactly what one would expect given the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in 1987 about the generous standards applicable to asylum seekers in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca.
Today, conditions have not improved materially in most “refugee sending countries.” Indeed, this Administration’s bogus designation of the Northern Triangle “failed states” as “Safe Third Countries” is absurd and shows their outright contempt for the system and their steadfast belief that the Federal Judiciary will “tank” on their responsibility to hold this Executive accountable.
As a result of this reprehensible conduct, the favorable trend in asylum adjudication has been sharply reversed. Now, approximately two-thirds of asylum cases are being denied, many based on specious “adverse credibility” findings, illegal “nexus” findings that intentionally violate the doctrine of “mixed motives”enshrined in the statute, absurdly unethical and illegal rewriting of asylum precedents by Sessions and Barr, intentional denial of the statutory right to counsel, and overt coercion through misuse of DHS detention authority to improperly “punish” and “deter” legal asylum seekers.
Right under the noses of complicit Article III Judges and Congress, the Trump Administration has “weaponized” the Immigration “Courts” and made them an intentionally hostile environment for asylum seekers and their, often pro bono or low bono, lawyers. How is this acceptable in 21st Century America?
That’s why it’s important for members of the “New Due Process Army” to remember my “5 Cs Formula” – Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make these folks with “no skin the game” feel the pain and be morally accountable for those human lives they are destroying by inaction in the face of Executive illegality and tyranny from their “ivory tower perches.”
We’re in a war for the survival of our democracy and the future of humanity. There is only one “right side” in this battle. History will remember who stood tall and who went small when individual rights, particularly the rights to Due Process and fair treatment for the most vulnerable among us, were under attack by the lawless forces of White Nationalism and their enablers!
