LINDA GREENHOUSE @ NYT: SUPREMELY COMPLICIT: Meanness Has Become A Means To The End Of Our Republic For J.R. & His GOP Judicial Activists On The Supremes! — What If They Had To Walk In The Shoes Of Those Whose Legal Rights & Humanity They Demean By Unleashing Trump’s Illegal & Immoral Cruelty On Migrants?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/supreme-court-immigration-trump.html

The Freudian concept of psychological projection refers to the behavior of people who, unable to acknowledge their own weaknesses, ascribe those same failings to others. President Trump provides a striking example in his multiple post-impeachment rants calling those who sought his removal “vicious” and “mean.” His choice of the word “mean” caught my attention, because I’ve been thinking for some time now that the United States has become a mean country.

There has been meanness, and worse, in the world, of course, long before there was a President Trump. But it doesn’t require suffering from the agitation of Trump derangement syndrome to observe that something toxic has been let loose during these past three years.

Much of it has to do with immigration: the separation of families at the border and the effort to terminate DACA, the program that protects from deportation undocumented young people brought to the United States as children. Removing this protection for hundreds of thousands of productive “Dreamers,” now pursuing higher education or holding jobs (or both), is an obvious lose-lose proposition for the country. It is also simply mean.

And the meanness radiates out from Washington. The mayor of Springfield, Mass., one of the biggest cities in one of the bluest states, has taken the president up on his offer to let local officials veto the resettlement of refugees in their communities. Tennessee enacted a law to cut off state money to cities that declare themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration enforcement. (At the same time more than a dozen counties in Tennessee have endorsed a growing “Second Amendment sanctuary” movement for gun rights.)

The meanness spreads to the lowest ranks of the country’s judiciary. USA Today reported two weeks ago that a common pleas judge in Hamilton County, Ohio, has adopted the practice of summoning ICE whenever he has a “hunch” that the defendant standing before him is an undocumented immigrant. “I’m batting a thousand. I haven’t got one wrong yet,” Judge Robert Ruehlman boasted.

In the Arizona desert, where thousands of border-crossing migrants have died from exposure and dehydration in the past decade, Border Patrol agents have been filmed kicking over and emptying bottles of water left for the migrants by volunteers. (This practice evidently preceded the Trump administration; the Border Patrol, in its union’s first-ever presidential endorsement, endorsed Mr. Trump’s candidacy in 2016, deeming him “the only candidate who actually threatens the established powers that have betrayed our country.” )

The United States attorney’s office in Tucson has been prosecuting people who enter the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge without a permit to leave lifesaving bottles of water and cans of food along common migratory routes. In 2018, a federal magistrate judge, in a nonjury trial, convicted four people for illegal entry and abandoning property in the desert wilderness. The four are volunteers for No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.

In their appeal before a federal district judge, Rosemary Márquez, the four invoked the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing that their actions were driven by their faith and their belief in the “sanctity of human life.” The government responded that the four had simply “recited” religious beliefs “for the purpose of draping religious garb over their political activity.” (I’m not holding my breath for the Trump administration to similarly ridicule the religious claims of employers who say they can’t possibly include the birth-control coverage in their employee health plans, as the Affordable Care Act requires, lest they become complicit in the sin of contraception.)

The administration met its match in Judge Márquez. On Jan. 31, finding that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act barred the prosecution, she overturned the convictions. Her 21-page opinion noted that human remains were regularly found in the area, and she had this to say about that fact:

“The government seems to rely on a deterrence theory, reasoning that preventing clean water and food from being placed on the refuge would increase the risk of death or extreme illness for those seeking to cross unlawfully, which in turn would discourage or deter people from attempting to enter without authorization. In other words, the government claims a compelling interest in preventing defendants from interfering with a border enforcement strategy of deterrence by death. This gruesome logic is profoundly disturbing.”

The headline on this column promises some thoughts about the Supreme Court, so I’ll now turn to the court. The country’s attention was focused elsewhere two weeks ago when five justices gave the Trump administration precisely what it needed to put into effect one of the most meanspirited and unjustified of all its recent immigration policies. This was the radical expansion of the “public charge” rule, which bars from admission or permanent residency an immigrant who is “likely at any time to become a public charge.”

The concept of “public charge” in itself is nothing new. It was part of the country’s early efforts to control immigration in the late 19th century, where it was used to exclude those likely to end up in the poor house or its equivalent. That historic definition — “primarily dependent on the government for cash assistance or on long-term institutionalization” — was codified in 1999 “field guidance” issued to federal immigration officers.

Last August, the administration put a new definition in place. Any immigrant who receives the equivalent of 12 months of federal benefits within a three-year period will be deemed a public charge, ineligible for permanent residency or a path to citizenship. The designated benefits include nutrition assistance for a child under the SNAP program; receipt of a Section 8 housing voucher or residence in public housing; and medical treatment under Medicaid. The new rule, titled Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds, aggregates the benefits — that is, three of the benefits received in a single month count as three months of the 12.

States, cities, and nonprofit organizations around the country promptly filed lawsuits, with varying preliminary outcomes. The plaintiffs argued that the drastic change in definition was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating the Administrative Procedure Act’s core requirement of “reasoned decision making.”

In October, a federal district judge in New York, George Daniels, ruled in favor of two sets of plaintiffs, one group headed by New York State and the other, a coalition of nonprofit organizations. Judge Daniels noted that the government was “afforded numerous opportunities to articulate a rational basis for equating public charge with receipt of benefits for 12 months within a 36-month period, particularly when this has never been the rule,” but that its lawyers “failed each and every time.” He explained that “where an agency action changes prior policy, the agency need not demonstrate that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one. It must, however, show that there are good reasons for the new policy.”

And Judge Daniels added: “The rule is simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification. It is repugnant to the American dream of the opportunity for prosperity and success through hard work and upward mobility.” Noting that the policy would immediately cause “significant hardship” to “hundreds of thousands of individuals who were previously eligible for admission and permanent residence in the United States,” he issued a nationwide injunction to block its implementation.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit put the government’s appeal on a fast track but refused, in the interim, to grant a stay of the injunction. So, predictably, the administration turned to its friends at the Supreme Court and, equally predictably, got what it wanted. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court granted a stay of the injunction to last through a future Supreme Court appeal.

Granting a stay at this point was a breathtaking display of judicial activism. The Second Circuit will hear the case promptly; briefs are due on Friday. More to the point, the court’s summary action, without full appellate review, changes the lives of untold numbers of people for the worse, people who immigrated legally to the United States and who have followed every rule. Being kicked off the path to citizenship puts them directly on the path to deportation, without any explanation from the highest court in the land of why this should be the case.

Of the five justices in the majority — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — only Justices Gorsuch and Thomas deigned to write anything. In a four-page concurring opinion, they made clear their determination to hold up this case, Department of Homeland Security v. New York, as an example of “the gamesmanship and chaos” that they said was attendant on “the rise of nationwide injunctions.”

I don’t remember such hand-wringing a few years back when anti-immigrant states found a friendly judge in South Texas to issue a nationwide injunction against President Barack Obama’s expansion of the DACA program to include parents of the “Dreamers.” The Supreme Court let that injunction stand.

Do the justices realize how they are being played? I started this column by mentioning psychological projection, a distorted view of others engendered by a distorted view of oneself. That’s Donald Trump, seeing himself the innocent victim of attacks from vicious and mean people. There’s another kind of projection, the image reflected when light strikes a mirror. Who do these five justices see when they look in their mental mirrors? Could it be Donald Trump?

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

Eventually, the New Due Process Army will win the war to restore justice, Due Process, and the rule of law to our Republic. And one of the lessons should be: Better Federal Judges driven by fairness, scholarship, practicality, compassion, kindness, respect for all persons, and the courage to speak out for the rights of the people against tyranny and corruption.

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

Yes, Linda, I think the Supremes’ Justices and other Article IIIs who aid the “dehumanization” and “Dred Scottification” of migrants, asylum seekers, and “the other” by the regime know full well that they are “being played.” They are willing, sometimes as in the case of the recent totally gratuitous nonsense about targeting nationwide injunctions flowing off the pens of Gorsuch and Thomas actually eager, to “go along to get along” — even when it often means hanging braver lower court colleagues who had the courage to speak truth to power and stand up to tyranny “out to dry.”

Like judges during the Jim Crow era and other disastrous episodes of legal history, they think they can hide out in their ivory towers behind legal gobbledygook that most first-years law students can recognize as the nonsense “cop out” that it is. They also knowingly and intentionally betray the legions of courageous, ethical lawyers, many working pro bono in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, to uphold the rule of law in America and to defend human rights and human decency.

Hopefully, our Republic will survive this dark time, and these folks “working at the retail level,” many “charter members” of the New Due Process Army, will form the core of a future, better judiciary that will put Due Process and humanity first, above party loyalty and bizarre, often nonsensical, right wing theories used to justify lawlessness, injustice, unfairness, and invidious discrimination.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-15-20

THE “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” HAS FALLEN FOR BILLY BARR’S LATEST “CON JOB” HOOK, LINE & SINKER — But YOU Shouldn’t — Bess Levin @! Vanity Fair Decodes Billy’s Real Message to His Don: “Let [me] turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!“ — Plus, My Bonus “Friday Essay” — “Don’t Believe A Word Billy Barr Says!”

Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/william-barr-trump-doj-tweets

Bess writes:

Even before he was hired as Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr made it clear that he would be acting as the president’s lackey first and the chief lawyer for the United States second, having auditioned for the role by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department calling the Russia inquiry “fatally misconceived” and describing Robert Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible.” Since then, Barr has told Congress it’s perfectly okay for the president to instruct aides to lie to investigators, suggested that Mueller’s report fully exonerated Trump, which of course it did not, and attempted to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s impeachment proceedings.

Now, if it were up to Barr, he’d happily carry on doing the president’s dirty work, but for one problem: Trump, with his flapping yap and quick trigger finger, has been making it a little too obvious that the DOJ, in its current form, exists to punish his enemies and spare his friends. The most recent example of this, of course, came this week, when the president tweeted, at 1:48 a.m., that the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for his longtime pal Roger Stone was “horrible,” “very unfair,” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Then, after Barr’s DOJ intervened with a new filing calling for a much lighter sentence—which prompted the four prosecutors on the case to withdraw from it—the president tweeted his thanks, congratulating the attorney general on getting involved in matters relevant to his personal interests.

For many people long aware of Barr’s status as a boot-licking hack, this was a bridge too far. The calls for him to resign or be impeached were swift. And they got so bad that on Thursday, the attorney general felt compelled to sit down with ABC News and send the message to the president that if he’d like the DOJ to continue to do his dirty work, he needs to stop tweeting about it. Do criminals tell their social-media followers “Check out this sweet scam I just pulled”? No! Of course, rather than stating directly that the president’s penchant for telling the world about the many ways he’s corrupted the government have made it difficult for that corruption to continue, Barr had to pretend his comments were all about ensuring the DOJ’s independence, which would be a funny, not-at-all-believable thing for him to start caring about now.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody….whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president,” Bill Barr tells @ABC News.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

http://

abcn.ws/39yd9bE

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” Barr insisted to ABC News chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. “Whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. I’m gonna do what I think is right. And you know…I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.” Just in case that extremely obvious hint was lost on its intended audience, Barr added: “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Maybe it’s not the tweets damaging his integrity but the nakedly partisan and quasi-legal decisions he’s made on the tweeter’s behalf? Just a thought.

AG Bill Barr: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” He says Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.” via @ABC @PierreTABC @alex_mallin

Asked about the decision to reverse the sentencing recommendation for Stone, Barr insisted that it definitely had nothing to do with the guy being a longtime friend of Trump’s, claiming that he came to the unbiased conclusion on his own that the seven-to-nine-years call was excessive and that he was planning to file an update even before Trump tweeted about it being “horrible and unfair.” (He was not asked about the NBC News report that he additionally removed a U.S. attorney from her post for failing to punish Trump’s enemy Andrew McCabe, or that the Justice Department also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for convicted criminal and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.)

Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long. “Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.

Barr also told ABC he was “a little surprised” that the entire Stone prosecution team had resigned from the case—and one from the DOJ entirely—which presumably has something to do with the fact that after using your department to do the president’s bidding for so long, you sometimes forget that other people will take issue with such behavior.

Asked if he expected Trump to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr responded: “I hope he will react.”

“And respect it?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Barr said. You hear that, Mr. President? Let the man turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!

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

DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

Even smart folks like The NY Times’ David Leonhardt are babbling about, perhaps, giving Billy “the benefit of the doubt.” Come on, man!

As Bess Levin points out, Barr’s faithfully been doing Trump’s “dirty work” for him since even before he set foot inside the DOJ again. It’s not like he’s suddenly had a “moral awakening” or discovered human decency.

No, Trump is the “unitary Executive” that Billy and some of his GOP righty neo-fascists have always salivated over. But, understandably he’d prefer more privacy as he deconstructs the DOJ and undermines fair and impartial justice, including, of course, further trashing the Immigration Courts that, incredible as it might seem in a country that actually has a written Constitution supposedly guaranteeing Due Process to “all persons,” belong exclusively to him.

Remarkably, and quite stunningly to anyone who has actually studied the law, the Article III Courts, all the way up to the feckless Supremes, have gone along with this absurd charade. You get the message: Immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers aren’t really “persons” at all. They have been dehumanized by the regime and “Dred Scottified” by the Article IIIs.

There is no particular legal rationale or justification for this ongoing miscarriage of justice. It’s just a matter of enough folks in black robes being too cowardly or self-absorbed, or maybe in a few cases too ignorant, to stand up for the Constitutional and human rights of the most vulnerable among us.

To paraphrase an expression from the world of religion: “What would Jesus think about this blindness to human suffering?” Nothing good, I’m sure!

If he’s actually out there among us today, he’s undoubtedly among those suffering in the regime’s “New American Gulag” or waiting in squalor along the Mexican border for a “fixed hearing” that’s probably never going to happen anyway. I know where he isn’t: among the sign waving crazies shouting hateful slogans glorifying human rights abuses at the “hate fests” z/k/a “Trump rallies!”

In Immigration Court, the conflicts of interest and threats to human decency aren’t just “implied” or “apparent.” They are very real, and they are destroying real human lives, even killing innocent folks, every day.

And, unlike U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, whose life tenure allows her to “ignore the noise and do what she thinks is right” (as Trump’s GOP toadies love to point out), Immigration Judges are “wholly owned commodities” of Billy and the regime: disposable, subservient, and told to “follow orders.” They can’t even schedule their own cases without political interference, let alone apply the law in a way that conflicts with Billy’s unethical precedents or those entered by his “wholly owned appellate body,” the Board of Immigration Appeals!

The latter has recently gone out of its way to show total subservience to the regime’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, anti-due-process, anti-immigrant agenda. Indeed, they have even drawn the ire of at least one conservative GOP-appointed Article III Judge by contemptuously disobeying a direct court order in favor of a footnote in a letter from the Attorney General.

This remarkable, yet entirely predictable, event was first highlighted in “Courtside.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/25/contempt-for-courts-7th-cir-blasts-bia-for-misconduct-we-have-never-before-encountered-defiance-of-a-remand-order-and-we-hope-never-to-see-it-again-members-of-the-board-must-count-themse/

It was also the subject of a highly readable analysis by my good friend and NDPA leader Tess Hellgren, at Innovation Law Lab, certainly no stranger to scofflaw behavior by EOIR and “go along to get along” complicity by Article IIIs. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

More recently, EOIR’s trashing of judicial norms under Billy Barr has been highlighted in another fine article in CNN by Professor Kimberly Wehle, herself a former DOJ prosecutor.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/12/a-conservative-judge-draws-a-line-in-the-sand-with-trump-administration-114185

“Shocking” as this professional malpractice and contempt for the justice system might be to those journalists and former DOJ employees who haven’t been paying attention, it’s nothing new to those of us involved in immigration. For the last three years, the regime has been actively and unethically “gaming” the unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system against the very migrants and asylum seekers whose legal rights and human dignity they are actually supposed to be protecting! How is this “just OK?”

Feckless Article III Courts have largely “gone along to get along,” although they might be showing less patience now that the scofflaw actions and disrespectful attitudes promoted by Billy and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions are directed at them personally rather than just screwing vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers.

While it’s nice that at least some Article III Judges are finally reacting to being “given the finger” by Barr, Trump, and their gang of White Nationalist thugs, outrage at their own disrespectful treatment pales in comparison with the death, torture, rape, extortion, and the other parade of horribles being inflicted daily on vulnerable migrants by the Immigration “Courts” and the human rights criminals in the Trump regime while the Article IIIs fail to step in and save lives.

In the end of the day, as history will eventually show, human lives, which are the key to the “rule of law,” will prove to be more important than “hurt feelings” among the Article III “lifers” or the kind of legal gobbledygook (much of it on “jurisdiction” which often translates into “task avoidance”) that Article IIIs, particularly those from the right wing, like to throw around to obscure their legal tone-deafness and moral failings from their fellow humans.

Due Process Forever; Complicity in the Face of Tyranny Never!

PWS

02-14-20

EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!

CNN Digital Expansion 2019, Priscilla Alvarez
Politics Reporter, CNN

Trump administration puts pressure on completing deportation cases of migrant children

By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

Updated 6:57 PM ET, Wed February 12, 2020

(CNN)The Trump administration is reinforcing a tight deadline for immigration cases of unaccompanied migrant children in government custody in an effort to make quicker decisions about deportation, according to an email obtained by CNN.

The message seems designed to apply pressure on immigration judges to wrap up such cases within a 60-day window that’s rarely met and falls in line with a broader effort by the administration to complete immigration cases at a faster speed.

Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said deadlines are “putting the judge between a rock and a hard place.”

“The only thing that can get done within 60 days is if someone wants to give up their case or go home or be deported,” Tabaddor told CNN.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system, sent the email last month to assistant chief immigration judges, reminding them that unaccompanied children in government custody are to be considered the same as detained adults for purposes of scheduling cases.

While the 60-day deadline cited in the email is not new, it’s difficult to meet for cases of unaccompanied kids, in part, because of the time it takes to collect the relevant information for a child who comes to the United States alone. As a result, cases can often take months, if not years, to resolve.

Last year, an uptick in unaccompanied children at the US-Mexico border strained the administration’s resources. Over the course of the 2019 fiscal year, Border Patrol arrested around 76,000 unaccompanied children on the southern border, compared to 50,000 the previous fiscal year.

Unaccompanied children apprehended at the southern border are taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security and referred to Health and Human Services. While in care at shelters across the country, case managers work to place a child with a sponsor in the United States, like a parent or relative.

Like adults and families who cross the US-Mexico border, unaccompanied children are put into immigration proceedings to determine whether they can stay in the United States.

The email from EOIR, dated January 30, says unaccompanied migrant children who are in the care of the government should be on a “60-day completion goal,” meaning their case is expected to be resolved within 60 days. It goes on to reference complaints received by the office of the director, but doesn’t say who issued the complaints or include a punishment for not meeting the completion goal.

EOIR spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly told CNN that she could not comment on internal communications.

Golden McCarthy, deputy director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which works with unaccompanied migrant children, said “it does take time to reach out to” a child’s caretaker or adults in the child’s life.

“We all know that many times the child doesn’t necessarily have the full picture of what happened; it does take time to reach out to caretakers and adults in their lives to understand,” McCarthy said.

Initiatives designed to quickly process cases have cropped up before.

The Obama administration tried to get cases scheduled more expeditiously but deferred to the judges on the timeline thereafter, whereas the Trump administration’s move seems to be an intent to complete cases within a certain timeframe, according to Rená Cutlip-Mason, chief of Programs at the Tahirih Justice Center and a former EOIR official.

The Trump administration also appears to be getting cases scheduled faster. In Arizona, for example, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Project has begun seeing kids called into immigration court earlier than they had been before.

In a statement submitted to the House Judiciary Committee in January, the group detailed the cases of children, one as young as 10 years old, who appeared before an immigration judge within days of arriving to the US.

“I think our clients and the kids we would work with are resilient,” McCarthy, the deputy director at the project, said. “But to navigate the complex immigration system is difficult for adults to do, and so to explain to a kid that they will be going to court and a judge will be asking them questions, the kids don’t typically always understand what that means.”

It can also complicate a child’s case since he or she may eventually move to another state to reunify with a parent or guardian, requiring the child’s case to move to an immigration court in that state.

Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has rolled out a slew of other policies — such as imposing case quotas — to chip away at the nearly one million pending cases facing the immigration court system. Some of those controversial policies have resulted in immigration judges leaving the department.

In its latest budget request to Congress, the White House called for $883 million to “support 100 immigration judge teams” to ease the backlog.

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

How to build a 1.3 million case backlog with no end in sight: Anatomy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling:”

2014: Obama Administration “prioritizes” unaccompanied minors, throwing existing dockets into chaos;
2017: Trump Administration “deprioritizes” unaccompanied minors, creating more docket chaos;
2020: Trump Administration “reprioritizes” unaccompanied minors, creating more docket chaos;
Result:
- Unfairness to unaccompanied minors rushed through the system without due process;
- Unfairness to long-pending cases continuously “shuffled off to Buffalo:”
- Gross inconvenience to the public;
- Demoralized judges whose dockets are being manipulated by unqualified bureaucrats for political reasons;
- Growing backlogs with no rational plan for resolving them in the foreseeable future.

This reminds me of my very first posting on immigratoncourtside.com – from Dec. 27, 2016 —

SAVING CHILD MIGRANTS WHILE SAVING OURSELVES

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

They cross deserts, rivers, and territories controlled by corrupt governments, violent gangs, and drug cartels. They pass through borders, foreign countries, different languages and dialects, and changing cultures.

I meet them on the final leg of their trip where we ride the elevator together. Wide-eyed toddlers in their best clothes, elementary school students with backpacks and shy smiles, worried parents or sponsors trying to look brave and confident. Sometimes I find them wandering the parking garage or looking confused in the sterile concourse. I tell them to follow me to the second floor, the home of the United States Immigration Court at Arlington, Virginia. “Don’t worry,” I say, “our court clerks and judges love children.”

Many will find justice in Arlington, particularly if they have a lawyer. Notwithstanding the expedited scheduling ordered by the Department of Justice, which controls the Immigration Courts, in Arlington the judges and staff reset cases as many times as necessary until lawyers are obtained. In my experience, retaining a pro bono lawyer in Immigration Court can be a lengthy process, taking at least six months under the best of circumstances. With legal aid organizations now overwhelmed, merely setting up intake screening interviews with needy individuals can take many months. Under such conditions, forcing already overworked court staff to drop everything to schedule initial court hearings for women and children within 90 days from the receipt of charging papers makes little, if any, sense.

Instead of scheduling the cases at a realistic rate that would promote representation at the initial hearing, the expedited scheduling forces otherwise avoidable resetting of cases until lawyers can be located, meet with their clients (often having to work through language and cultural barriers), and prepare their cases. While the judges in Arlington value representation over “haste makes waste” attempts to force unrepresented individuals through the system, not all Immigration Courts are like Arlington.

For example, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (“TRAC”), only 1% of represented juveniles and 11% of all juveniles in Arlington whose cases began in 2014, the height of the so-called “Southern Border Surge,” have received final orders of removal. By contrast, for the same group of juveniles in the Georgia Immigration Courts, 43% were ordered removed, and 52% of those were unrepresented.

Having a lawyer isn’t just important – it’s everything in Immigration Court. Generally, individuals who are represented by lawyers in their asylum cases succeed in remaining in the United States at an astounding rate of five times more than those who are unrepresented. For recently arrived women with children, the representation differential is simply off the charts: at least fourteen times higher for those who are represented, according to TRAC. Contrary to the well-publicized recent opinion of a supervisory Immigration Judge who does not preside over an active docket, most Immigration Judges who deal face-to-face with minor children agree that such children categorically are incompetent to represent themselves. Yet, indigent individuals, even children of tender years, have no right to an appointed lawyer in Immigration Court.

To date, most removal orders on the expedited docket are “in absentia,” meaning that the women and children were not actually present in court. In Immigration Court, hearing notices usually are served by regular U.S. Mail, rather than by certified mail or personal delivery. Given heavily overcrowded dockets and chronic understaffing, errors by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) in providing addresses and mistakes by the Immigration Court in mailing these notices are common.

Consequently, claims by the Department of Justice and the DHS that women and children with removal orders being rounded up for deportation have received full due process ring hollow. Indeed a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council using the Immigration Court’s own data shows that children who are represented appear in court more than 95% of the time while those who are not represented appear approximately 33% of the time. Thus, concentrating on insuring representation for vulnerable individuals, instead of expediting their cases, would largely eliminate in absentia orders while promoting real, as opposed to cosmetic, due process. Moreover, as recently pointed out by an article in the New York Times, neither the DHS nor the Department of Justice can provide a rational explanation of why otherwise identically situated individuals have their cases “prioritized” or “deprioritized.”

Rather than working with overloaded charitable organizations and exhausted pro bono attorneys to schedule initial hearings at a reasonable pace, the Department of Justice orders that initial hearings in these cases be expedited. Then it spends countless hours and squanders taxpayer dollars in Federal Court defending its “right” to aggressively pursue removal of vulnerable unrepresented children to perhaps the most dangerous, corrupt, and lawless countries outside the Middle East: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), the institution responsible for enforcing fairness and due process for all who come before our Immigration Courts, could issue precedent decisions to stop this legal travesty of accelerated priority scheduling for unrepresented children who need pro bono lawyers to proceed and succeed. But, it has failed to act.

The misguided prioritization of cases of recently arrived women, children, and families further compromises due process for others seeking justice in our Immigration Courts. Cases that have been awaiting final hearings for years are “orbited” to slots in the next decade. Families often are spread over several dockets, causing confusion and generating unnecessary paperwork. Unaccompanied

children whose cases should initially be processed in a non-adversarial system are instead immediately thrust into court.

Euphemistically named “residential centers” — actually jails — wear down and discourage those, particularly women and children, seeking to exercise their rights under U.S. and international law to seek refuge from death and torture. Regardless of the arcane nuances of our asylum laws, most of the recent arrivals need and deserve protection from potential death, torture, rape, or other abuse at the hands of gangs, drug cartels, and corrupt government officials resulting from the breakdown of civil society in their home countries.

Not surprisingly, these “deterrent policies” have failed. Individuals fleeing so-called “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have continued to arrive at a steady pace, while dockets in Immigration Court, including “priority cases,” have mushroomed, reaching an astonishing 500,000 plus according to recent TRAC reports (notwithstanding efforts to hire additional Immigration Judges). As reported recently by the Washington Post, private detention companies, operating under highly questionable government contracts, appear to be the only real beneficiaries of the current policies.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could save lives and short-circuit both the inconsistencies and expenses of the current case-by-case protection system, while allowing a “return to normalcy” for most already overcrowded Immigration Court dockets by using statutory Temporary Protected Status (known as “TPS”) for natives of the Northern Triangle countries. Indeed, more than 270 organizations with broad based expertise in immigration matters, as well as many members of Congress, have requested that the Administration institute such a program.

The casualty toll from the uncontrolled armed violence plaguing the Northern Triangle trails only those from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. TPS is a well- established humanitarian response to a country in crisis. Its recipients, after registration, are permitted to live and work here, but without any specific avenue for obtaining permanent residency or achieving citizenship. TPS has been extended among others to citizens of Syria and remains in effect for citizens of both Honduras who needed refuge from Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and El Salvador who needed refuge following earthquakes in 2001. Certainly, the disruption caused by a hurricane and earthquakes more than a decade ago pales in comparison with the very real and gruesome reality of rampant violence today in the Northern Triangle.

Regardless, we desperately need due-process reforms to allow the Immigration Court system to operate more fairly, efficiently, and effectively. Here are a few suggestions: place control of dockets in the local Immigration Judges, rather than bureaucrats in Washington, as is the case with most other court systems; work cooperatively with the private sector and the Government counsel to docket cases at a rate designed to maximize representation at the initial hearings; process unaccompanied children through the non-adversarial system before rather

than after the institution of Immigration Court proceedings; end harmful and unnecessary detention of vulnerable families; settle ongoing litigation and redirect the talent and resources to developing an effective representation program for all vulnerable individuals; and make the BIA an effective appellate court that insures due process, fairness, uniformity and protection for all who come before our Immigration Courts.

Children are the future of our world. History deals harshly with societies that mistreat and fail to protect children and other vulnerable individuals. Sadly, our great country is betraying its values in its rush to “stem the tide.” It is time to demand an immigrant justice system that lives up to its vision of “guaranteeing due process and fairness for all.” Anything less is a continuing disgrace that will haunt us forever.

The children and families riding the elevator with me are willing to put their hopes and trust in the belief that they will be treated with justice, fairness, and decency by our country. The sole mission and promise of our Immigration Courts is due process for these vulnerable individuals. We are not delivering on that promise.

The author is a recently retired U.S. Immigration Judge who served at the U.S. Immigration Court in Arlington Virginia, and previously was Chairman and Member of the Board of Immigration Appeals. He also has served as Deputy General Counsel and Acting General Counsel of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, a partner at two major law firms, and an adjunct professor at two law schools. His career in the field of immigration and refugee law spans 43 years. He has been a member of the Senior Executive Service in Administrations of both parties.

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Tragically, as a nation, we have learned nothing over the past more than three years. Things have actually gotten much, much worse as we have unwisely and unconscionably entrusted the administration of our laws to a cruel, corrupt, scofflaw regime that sees inflicting pain, suffering, and even death on children and other vulnerable seekers of justice as an “end in an of itself.” They actually brag about their dishonesty, racism, selfishness, contempt for human decency, and “crimes against humanity.”

So far, they have gotten away nearly “Scot-free” with not only bullying and picking on vulnerable children and refugee families but with diminishing the humanity of each of us who put up with the horrors of an authoritarian neo-fascist state.

History will, however, remember who stood up for humanity in this dark hour and who instead sided with and enabled the forces of evil, willful ignorance, and darkness overtaking our wounded democracy.

Due Process Forever; Child Abuse & Gratuitous Cruelty, Never.

PWS

02-13-20

AS MARK MORGAN AND OTHER REGIME HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSERS CELEBRATE THEIR “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,” & THE SUPREMES, THE 9TH CIRCUIT, & OTHER ARTICLE III COURTS CONTINUE THEIR IMMORAL COMPLICITY, NEW HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT DOCUMENTS HARM TO CHILDREN FROM “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” CHARADE – “A United States government program exposes children, as well as their parents, seeking asylum to serious risk of assault, mistreatment, and trauma while waiting for their cases to be heard, Human Rights Watch said today in a joint investigation report.”

Remain in Mexico — A girl peers out from an encampment at the U.S.-Mexico border where she and several hundred people waited to present themselves to U.S. immigration to seek asylum. / Photo by David Maung

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/12/us-remain-mexico-program-harming-children#

(Washington, DC) – A United States government program exposes children, as well as their parents, seeking asylum to serious risk of assault, mistreatment, and trauma while waiting for their cases to be heard, Human Rights Watch said today in a joint investigation report.

Human Rights Watch, working with Stanford University’s Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Program and Willamette University’s Child and Family Advocacy Clinic, found that the US Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, commonly known as “Remain in Mexico,” compelled families with children to wait in unsafe environments in Mexico for many months. Parents said that prolonged immigration court proceedings, fear of being incarcerated, and uncertainty about the future took a toll on their family’s health, safety, and well-being. Many described changes in their children’s behavior, saying they became more anxious or depressed after US authorities sent them to Mexico to await their hearings.

“The conditions, threats to safety, and sense of uncertainty asylum seekers face while waiting in Mexico creates chronic and severe psychological stress for children and families,” said Dr. Ryan Matlow, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “We know that these forms of pervasive, unresolved complex trauma can lead to significant long-term negative consequences for child development and family functioning.”

Human Rights Watch and other investigators interviewed parents and children from 60 families seeking asylum between November 2019 and January 2020. Most families were from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, with a few from Cuba, Ecuador, and Peru. The investigators also spoke with lawyers, doctors, shelter providers, faith leaders, and Mexican officials.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, US immigration officials have required most Spanish-speaking asylum seekers who arrive in the US through Mexico to go to Mexico while their cases are heard. Parents said that while waiting in Mexico, they or their children were beaten, harassed, sexually assaulted, or abducted. Some said Mexican police had harassed or extorted money from them. Most said they were constantly fearful and easily identified as targets for violence.

US Department of Homeland Security guidance suggests that certain particularly vulnerable groups should not be placed in the program, but the guidance is vague and immigration agents interpret it variably. US Customs and Border Protection officials regularly return to Mexico families with infants and toddlers; indigenous families and Brazilians whose first language is not Spanish; and children and adults with serious health conditions.

Asylum hearings under the Migrant Protection Protocols raise various due process concerns, Human Rights Watch said. To get to court hearings in the United States, families must report to a designated border crossing point, which sometimes requires them to arrive as early as 3 a.m. in unsafe locations. Those sent to Mexicali or Piedras Negras must make journeys of 160 to 550 kilometers (100 to 340 miles) to reach their designated border crossing point.

All family members, including young children, must appear, and sit quietly for each court hearing. Families interviewed said that they were frequently required to wait for hours for a brief hearing, and agents have told parents they risked being sent back to Mexico without seeing a judge if their children made noise or could not sit still.

Families said that after each hearing, they were locked up in very cold, often overcrowded immigration holding cells, with men and teenage boys held separately, sometimes overnight or longer, before US officials returned them to Mexico. Some said they were considering abandoning their asylum cases because their children were afraid of being detained again.

A 27-year-old woman from Honduras described being detained in an El Paso holding cell with her daughter. “I asked for a blanket for the girl. They said no,” she said, saying that the guard did not give a reason.

Guards separate older boys under age 18 from their mothers and younger siblings, placing them with unrelated adults. A woman from Cuba said her 13-year-old son’s separation “had a traumatic effect on him.” Another described the effect of family separation on the boys he saw in his cell after his hearing: “It’s very inhumane. The guards don’t treat these boys like children, they treat them like adults. It’s illogical.”

“Locking families up in frigid, overcrowded cells and separating boys from their mothers is traumatizing,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch. “The US government should never inflict cruelty on children, especially not as the price of getting their day in court.”

All governments are obligated to respect the customary international law principle of nonrefoulement – the prohibition on returning a person to a country where they are at risk of persecution, torture, or other cruel or inhuman treatment. Governments are also obligated to extend specific protections to children, whether traveling alone or with families, including by giving primary consideration to their best interests.

The US government should immediately terminate the MPP program and cease all returns of non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico. Instead, it should revert to the global norm of allowing asylum seekers to remain in the country where their claims are heard. The government should safeguard asylum seekers’ right to a fair and timely hearing by establishing an adequately resourced, independent immigration court system with court-appointed legal representation for asylum seekers who are members of particularly vulnerable groups.

“‘Remain in Mexico’ is putting at risk families who are already facing desperate situations,” said Dr. Nancy Wang, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. “It’s inexcusable for the US government to subject children and families to crowded, unsanitary, insecure conditions with inadequate protection from infectious diseases – whether in US immigration detention or in overstretched shelters in Mexico.”

For additional information on the findings, please see below.

Migrant Protection Protocols Program

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico,” on January 29, 2019. Under the program, US immigration officers send most people seeking asylum who have entered the United States by land from Mexico to Mexican border towns while their cases are pending before US immigration courts. As of December, US officials sent more than 59,000 people to Mexico under the program, including at least 16,000 children.

Under the program, families with children are sent to Mexico regardless of the children’s ages. DHS has stated that people “in special circumstances,” including those with “[k]nown physical/mental health issues,” will not be placed in the program, but US immigration officials apply the DHS guidance inconsistently, with reports that people who are critically ill, pregnant, or living with disabilities have been sent to Mexico to await their asylum hearings. According to DHS guidelines, unaccompanied children should not be placed in the program. The program applied only to asylum seekers from Spanish-speaking countries other than Mexico, but DHS announced that beginning January 29, 2020, it had begun requiring Portuguese-speaking Brazilians who are seeking asylum to remain in Mexico.

In the year since the program began, US officials have sent children in families seeking asylum to Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, Mexicali, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Tijuana, and, as of January 2, to Nogales.

Sent to Danger

Asylum seekers interviewed said they or their children had been violently attacked, robbed at knifepoint, or extorted in Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, Mexicali, Nuevo Laredo, and Tijuana while transiting through these cities before they sought asylum, or after US officials sent them to those cities. Three families said they had been abducted for ransom, in Nuevo Laredo; one family for eight days. Four families said their children had been sexually assaulted after US officials sent them to Mexico.

Two women said they were raped after being sent to Mexico, including one who was abducted and raped the day US officials sent her to Mexico. Two families said they were abducted and held for ransom almost immediately after arriving. Another woman described being robbed by armed men as she crossed into Mexico from the United States.

These accounts are in addition to 29 reports of harm to asylum seekers in Ciudad Juárezdocumented by Human Rights Watch in a July 2019 report.

An October 2019 study by the US Immigration Policy Center of the University of California San Diego found that one-quarter of more than 600 asylum seekers returned to Mexicali and Tijuana were threatened with physical violence while they waited in Mexico for their immigration court hearings.

Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 violent attacks on people seeking asylum, including cases of murder, rape, and abduction for ransom, in the year since the program began. That figure includes at least 200 cases of alleged kidnapping or attempted kidnapping of children.

In the current investigation, some families described extortion and other harassment by Mexican police. Edwin F. (all names are pseudonyms), a 28-year-old from Honduras staying in a shelter in Ciudad Juárez with his wife and 5-year-old son, said in January 2020: “Yesterday the police stopped a group of us. They asked all of us where we were from. They searched through our phone history as if we were coming to do harm to the country. They held us close to half an hour while they searched us, even our son. They asked for money. I didn’t have any.” His wife, Marisela, 21, said that when the police officers searched her: “I had some sanitary pads in a shopping bag. They dumped them out on the ground. Everything I had, they dumped out on the ground.” The encounter traumatized their 5-year-old. “He became really anxious,” his father said. “He started to cry uncontrollably.”

Under DHS policy, people seeking asylum should receive an interview with an asylum officer, known as a “credible fear” interview, if they tell immigration agents they fear harm in Mexico. DHS guidance states that “a third-country national should not be involuntarily returned to Mexico . . . if the alien would more likely than not be persecuted. . . or tortured.”

Many families said these interviews were by telephone and not face-to-face. Assessing these interviews, a former asylum officer wrote: “[The MPP] process places on the applicants the highest burden of proof in civil proceedings in the lowest quality hearing available.”

“If you say you’re afraid of going back to Mexico, they put you in a cell in the hielera [the “freezer,” referring to an immigration holding cell],” said Nelly O., a 27-year-old Honduran woman. “You wait for a call. They call this a ‘credible fear’ interview. When the call comes, it could be nighttime. You spend the entire night in the hielera.”

The families who spoke to the investigation team said they received an interview, but organizations working in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana told Human Rights Watch that many asylum seekers had not. “People are now being denied interviews, with no reason given and no documentation of denial,” said Tania Guerrero, an attorney with the Estamos Unidos Asylum Project of CLINIC. She said she had heard of more than 10 such cases in El Paso in a single week in January.

Every family we interviewed said immigration officials did not actively ask them if they feared being sent to Mexico, and DHS guidance does not require them to. “They didn’t really ask us what our case was or why we left our countries,” said Maria Q., a 41-year-old from Honduras, of her hearing in San Diego in October. “They said they couldn’t do anything. They just handed us some papers. They didn’t pay attention to what we needed or what we said.”

Marisela F., a 21-year-old from Honduras, said that at her hearing in El Paso in December with her husband and their 5-year-old son: “The officials didn’t ask about Mexico.” While one of the papers they received before they were sent to Ciudad Juárez stated, “Attached is a credible fear worksheet,” they had no memory of ever receiving such a worksheet and had no copy of one among the papers from their legal proceedings.

Similarly, the US Immigration Policy Center found that more than one-third of people seeking asylum were not asked by US immigration officials if they feared being sent to Mexico. Of those who were asked, nearly 9 out of 10 told immigration agents they feared harm if returned to Mexico; nearly 60 percent of them were not given a secondary interview to explain their fears.

Families returned to Mexico despite their expressed fears of harm said they were afraid to request interviews during subsequent court hearings. They said their initial experience suggested that they would not be believed and that requesting an interview would only mean more time detained. Julián M., a 28-year-old Honduran man, said that the second time he and his family went for their court hearing, they decided not to ask for a call to explain their fear of returning to Mexico. “If we did, we would have to wait another night in the cell,” he said.

Ordeal Getting to Immigration Court

Asylum seekers sent to Mexicali must find transportation to Tijuana, 180 kilometers (110 miles) west, to report at the border for immigration court hearings in San Diego. Families sent to Piedras Negras must travel an equivalent distance to Laredo for hearings.

“From Mexicali, we had to make our way here [to Tijuana],” Maria Q. said. “The immigration agents didn’t give us any directions. They didn’t tell us where there were shelters.”

Children and families sent to Nogales will have to make their way to Ciudad Juárez, a 550-kilometer (340-mile), seven-and-a-half-hour journey by the most direct route through Mexico, for hearings.

If children and families cannot or do not make the long, potentially dangerous journey, an immigration judge can reject their asylum claim and in their absence order them deported.

Families said that immigration agents told them they had to arrive at the border crossings between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. for hearings beginning at 8 a.m.

Families in Tijuana said that because of the difficulty and danger of traveling from their shelters in the middle of the night, especially with children, they stayed in hotel rooms if they could afford to. Many, including young women with toddlers, said they did not have the money and spent the night on the street outside the border crossing. Some families described concerns about being stalked or profiled while looking for hotels or waiting in the street and feared that they could be extorted or kidnapped.

Once allowed to enter US territory, families undergo health screenings, including lice checks, then are transported to the immigration court. If all family members do not pass the health screening, including the lice checks, the family is rescheduled for another hearing, often a month or more later.

“We wait in a hallway, seated in chairs,” said Nuria J. “The kids are right there with us. There’s nowhere else for them. They can’t play. The guards don’t permit them to move around. They reprimand you if the kids get out of the chairs. You sit all day. It’s a long time.” Another woman said: “If you have a baby and you need to change your baby’s diapers, they’ll give you a diaper. But there’s no place to go. You have to change your baby on the floor, right there in the hallway.”

Blanca M., 31, attended her first immigration court hearing in August with her husband and their three daughters, all under age 5. “We had nothing to eat from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” she said. “The officials wanted us to keep the kids quiet. Really I was at the point of giving up.” Her husband added: “One guard kept saying, ‘Those of you with children, control them. If your children are fucking around, I can take away your court hearing.’ It’s almost impossible to get a 1-year-old to stay seated in a chair.” They said the same thing happened inside the courtroom.

Some families said they were thinking of abandoning their asylum claims because the process was so traumatic for their children.

A Bewildering Process and Little Access to Counsel

Families interviewed in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana described a chaotic, confusing process once they saw an immigration judge.

Most expected that they would be able to explain their situation to a judge immediately, but the first hearing, a “master calendar” hearing, is a brief session to handle preliminary matters and set a date for a longer individual hearing. Asylum seekers who need more time to prepare or to seek legal representation are often rescheduled for an additional master calendar hearing. Some families said they had three brief master calendar hearings. Most we spoke to said they were sent to Mexico after each hearing with very little understanding of what had happened and what they needed to do to pursue their claims.

Most papers they received were in English. They must submit their asylum applications in English, with all supporting documentation translated into English.

Associated Press reporters who visited immigration courts in 11 cities, including El Paso and San Diego, described what they saw as “nonstop chaos” – overcrowded courtrooms, evidence misplaced in stacks of paper files, and hearings without interpreters, among other shortcomings.

People seeking asylum in the United States are not guaranteed legal representation. Instead, US law states that they have the “privilege of being represented (at no expense to the government).” Pro bono or low-cost legal representation is difficult to find even for those inside the country. For the tens of thousands of families sent to Mexico, obtaining counsel is nearly impossible – with nowhere near enough pro bono lawyers to meet the need. Only 14 of the 1,155 cases decided in the program’s first five months, 1.2 percent, had legal representation.

Immigration officials provided a woman who attended a hearing in Laredo a list of legal service providers – showing lawyers in Dallas, 700 kilometers (430 miles) away.

Some asylum seekers alleged that abuses by US immigration agents directly affected their ability to present their claims. Nicola A. said a uniformed US border agent tore up the documents corroborating her account of persecution in her home country. She now fears that she will not have sufficient proof to support her asylum claim.

Detention in Frigid US Immigration Holding Cells

Most of the families interviewed said that they spent at least one night and sometimes more after their court hearing in the immigration holding cells known as the hieleras.

These holding cells are notoriously cold, with temperatures reaching as low as 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit). People detained in these cell have frequently been subjected to substandard conditions and abusive treatment, as Human Rights Watch and other groups have consistently reported.

“When we entered, the guards turned the air conditioning up,” said Maria Q. “They took away our sweaters and said they would wash them, but they never returned them.”

Wendy G., 32, from Honduras, was held in the hielera with her 12-year-old daughter and 10 and 8-year-old sons in August and again in September after each of her court hearings. “It was really cold both times,” she said. “Some of the guards shouted at us…They would give us food that was still frozen. They told us we risked being locked up more days if we misbehaved.”

Families said immigration holding cells could be very overcrowded, consistent with reports in June by lawyers and the DHS Office of Inspector General. Edwin F. said that after his family’s court hearing in December, “We were held in the [border station] cells…My wife was held with our son, I was in another cell. There were 17 of us in a small space. It was hard to lie down.” Because their court date was on December 23, they stayed in the holding cells for four days, returning to Ciudad Juárez on December 27.

Julián M. said that after he and his family had a court hearing in October, they were held in an El Paso immigration holding cell:

The cell I was in had a capacity of 38. There was a sign. It was in English, but I understood the word “capacity,” and right next to it was the number 38. We all counted ourselves. There were 112 of us in that cell. At first there were 99. Then the guards brought 13 more. The 13 didn’t fit. We were all sleeping on the floor. An official told us to get up so everyone could fit in the cell. He had a stun gun. He threatened us with it, saying, “If you don’t get up, I’ll shoot you with the stun gun.” Of course everyone immediately got up. Nobody slept that night.

Most of the families interviewed said they were detained for one or two days after their hearings, but some families described periods lasting three or four days or longer. Nuria J. said that when she was in the hielera with her son and daughter: “[t]here was one guy, maybe 35 years old, who said he had spent seven days locked up after his court hearing.”

Families in immigration holding cells have no opportunity to bathe. Many described the cells as “dirty” and “filthy.”

Some described significant health concerns in the holding cells. Nicola A., who has public health training, said that while she and her family were in immigration holding cells, “I noticed that there were numerous people carrying lice, as well as people showing signs and symptoms of varicella [chicken pox]. Nonetheless, we were all kept together in the same rooms – these conditions were extremely unsanitary.

Previous reports and inspections of immigration holding cells by government inspectors, Human Rights Watch, and others have also found unsanitary and otherwise substandard conditions, including flu, lice, scabies, shingles, and chicken poxtransmission, overcrowding, and inadequate food. A San Antonio-based group of volunteer doctors, nurses, and social workers, Sueños Sin Fronteras, found that new medical conditions arose while in immigration holding cells, including “a lot of boils and skin rashes, attributable to the lack of hygiene, and severe constipation, attributable to the dehydration and poor food intake” and near-universal “complaints of flu symptoms or respiratory problems or both.”

Adverse Consequences for Mental Well-Being

The combined trauma of families’ flights from persecution, and the dangers they faced on their journeys to the United States, and now face in Mexico, have had serious negative effects on their mental well-being.

“The children and families we saw showed incredible strength and resilience,” Dr. Ryan Matlow said. “At the same time, the conditions they face while waiting for their asylum hearings continuously erode the resources and protective influences that would help them maintain their physical and psychological health. Trauma and adversity have a cumulative impact on health, meaning that chronic stress over time, along with repeated exposure to threats increase the prevalence and severity of possibly long-lasting negative physical and mental health outcomes.”

The families interviewed described their despair, hopelessness, anxiety, and deteriorating family relationships. “Families are doing their best to survive and adapt to the circumstances they are placed in, but the sense that they are under chronic threat and danger leads to long-term experiences of anxiety, mistrust, hypervigilance, behavioral reactivity, withdrawal, and fatigue,” Matlow said. He said that children were especially susceptible to trauma, which is associated with learning difficulties, behavior problems, health impairment, and shortened life expectancy.

“It’s hardest on our son,” said Edwin F., choking up as he described the changes in his 5-year-old son during the three months they had been in Mexico. “He isn’t prepared mentally for these things. We’ve seen a change in him… Before he was more easygoing. Now he’s easily bothered, more irritable, gets angry easily. He’s anxious and impulsive now, he doesn’t control himself. He was more well-behaved in Honduras. Now he misbehaves. We’ve seen a complete change in the boy. We didn’t want this life for our son.”

Tania Guerrero, the CLINIC project attorney, said: “The women I speak to tell me, ‘Nobody understands what we’re going through here [in Ciudad Juárez].’ They have been here eight months. They’re exhausted, alone, miserable. They want to get on with their lives. The level of disillusionment and despair they feel is profound.”

Nicola A. said:

We are constantly under stress by our inability to request asylum and find shelter in a safe place. We are afraid and anxious in Mexico, given that our kidnappers are still pursuing us. We are afraid of being separated and detained again in the horrendous conditions in immigration detention… We experience these fears every day. We have ongoing health concerns and we are running out of money to pay for medication and treatment… This entire experience has had a negative impact on our family.

Our son appears traumatized and is more quiet, depressed, and withdrawn than I have ever seen him before. My husband and I are constantly anxious and irritable due to the constant stress. We are desperate, and we are losing hope that we will be able to find safety and refuge from the persecution and victimization that we have experienced. We are starting to believe that there is no safe place where we can go and be accepted.

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The stain of America’s widespread, intentional, illegal abuse of vulnerable refugees, the arrogance of human rights abusers like Trump, Miller, Morgan, Barr, Pompeo, Sessions and their accomplices, and the cowardly failure of the Supremes and too many other Article III Judges to defend the Constitution and protect humanity in the face of tyranny will be indelible.

The truth is out there. While it might not set us free or save the lives of those being targeted by our Government, it will not go away and they will not escape moral accountability for their betrayal of human decency.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-12-20

“IT’S 1939” & WHITE NATIONALIST AMERICA IS FAILING HUMANITY AGAIN: THE ST. LOUIS REPLAY: History Will Neither Forget Nor Forgive Us For Wrongfully Sending Refugees To Their Doom – Nor Will The Complicit Roles Of The Supremes & Other Life-Tenured Federal Judges Be Buried Beneath Their Cowardly Legal Gobbledygook! — “Extermination As Deterrence” Is Not “OK Policy!”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=14f192a9-02bd-4521-b658-bdd38b64edb6&v=sdk

Elora Mukherjee in the LA Times:

In June 1939, about 900 Jewish refugees sailed close to Florida on the St. Louis in hopes of finding protection in the United States. U.S. authorities refused to let the ship dock. Desperate passengers sent cables to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never responded.

A State Department telegram stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible in the United States.” Nearly all the passengers had already been refused admission to Cuba. Canada rejected them too. They had no choice but to return to Europe, where 254 of the passengers were eventually killed in the Holocaust.

Eighty years later, a modern version of this tragedy takes place daily at our southern border. This time, most of these people are fleeing rape, assault and death from the northern triangle of Central America — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — as well as political oppression in Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere. They are fleeing to save their lives and their children’s lives. They hope to find safety in the United States. When they get to America, U.S. authorities turn them around.

I spent a week recently in Juárez, Mexico, with four of my law students. We visited shelters across the city and its outskirts to provide pro bono legal services to some of the estimated 20,000 migrants there who are trying to apply for asylum in the U.S.

We met political dissidents from Cuba who had been jailed and beaten for refusing to join party meetings, mothers from Central America who had survived excruciating years of domestic violence and fled to save their children’s lives, and fathers with the courage to resist the ever-increasing violence of gangs in their communities. Nearly all genuinely feared being harmed and killed in their home countries.

Why are they in Juárez? A slew of policy changes enacted over the last year by the Trump administration has made it nearly impossible for asylum seekers to enter the United States through the southern border. Among them is the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which requires asylum seekers who try to enter the United States through the southern border to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases are processed in U.S. immigration courts. Since last January, when the new protocols were put in place, more than 60,000 asylum seekers have been stranded in Mexico.

The new rules make it nearly impossible for asylum seekers to find lawyers who can represent them in immigration court. Hardly any lawyers are willing to cross into Juárez to represent asylum seekers. Given the complexity of immigration law and language and cultural barriers, the process of seeking asylum when someone is in the United States is hard enough. Requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico makes navigating the process virtually impossible. Ninety-six percent of individuals stranded in Mexico do not have a lawyer to help them apply for asylum.

Of the 29,309 cases that had been completed under MPP as of December, just 187 people had been granted asylum — a reflection of the almost insurmountable barriers imposed by the new protocols. U.S. law requires asylum seekers to be given “credible fear” interviews to allow them into the U.S. while they go through the asylum process; MPP has eliminated that step.

While asylum seekers, including thousands of children and women, wait in Mexico they have become targets for vicious crimes by local and transnational gangs and cartels. According to a recent report from Human Rights First, there have been at least 816 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults, including 201 cases of children being kidnapped or nearly kidnapped. These numbers almost certainly understate the violence since many victims don’t report crimes committed against them for fear of reprisal.

When U.S. officials rejected the St. Louis, the horrors that would befall the passengers were foreseeable. Congress and the U.S. State Department eventually apologized for refusing to let in the refugees on board — but it was 70 years too late.

One year after the inception of MPP, we clearly see the dangers befalling asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico. U.S. government officials know that these regions of the border are extremely dangerous. The U.S. State Department’s travel advisories warn U.S. citizens not to travel to some of the same Mexican border towns where American authorities send asylum seekers. These areas are designated as level 4 risks — the same danger assessment as for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

The Trump policy is not only inhumane and dangerous, it is also illegal. Under U.S. immigration law, asylum seekers are not to be turned away at the border when they have credible fears of persecution. As the union representing DHS asylum officers explained, “MPP abandons our tradition of providing a safe haven to the persecuted and violates our international and domestic legal obligations.”

We can’t turn a blind eye to the daily tragedies inflicted by Migrant Protection Protocols. The Asylum Seeker Protection Act, which would prohibit the use of federal funds to carry out MPP, has been pending in Congress for months. It’s time to uphold our nation’s core commitment to protecting those seeking safety in this country.

Elora Mukherjee is the Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and director of its immigrants’ rights clinic.

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

Professor Leah Litman
Assistant Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/supreme-court-senate-complicit-trump-unleashed.html

Leah Litman in Slate:

Last Tuesday, in explaining her vote to acquit Donald Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins suggested that the president had learned a “pretty big lesson” simply from being impeached and that he would be “much more cautious” about engaging in similar behavior again. By Friday, Trump had issued a series of firingsof public officials who had testified against the president during the impeachment inquiry, demonstrating his takeaway from impeachment: He can use the powers of his office to do whatever he wants. Having gotten away with abuses of power again and again, Trump is now unleashed to continue to corruptly use the powers of his office without consequence. He has already begun to show what that will look like over the remainder of his presidency.

In legal escapades outside of the realm of impeachment, for instance, Trump and his administration have internalized the lesson that if no one will stop you, there’s no reason to stop. Less than two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of the president’s ban on entry by nationals of several Muslim-majority countries (the “travel ban”). By upholding the ban, the court made clear that it would not stop the president from incorporating his bigotry into official immigration policy. Since then, the president has dramatically expanded the scope of the travel ban to other countries with substantial Muslim populations and has enacted several other immigration restrictions that disproportionately disadvantage nonwhite immigrants. After receiving a pass on xenophobia, the president has continued to do it again and again. Last week, he expanded the entry ban to cover five additional countries (Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, Eritrea, and Myanmar) with substantial Muslim populations. In one of those countries (Myanmar), a group of Muslims (the Rohingya) are fleeing religious persecution and genocide. The president had previously said, according to the New York Times, that Nigerians should “go back to their huts.”

With respect to impeachment, several senators came close to admitting that their impeachment votes signify that they are unwilling to stop the president from abusing his office. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee explained his vote against calling witnesses in almost exactly those terms. The senator claimed that there was no point in hearing from additional witnesses because he had already concluded that the president engaged in the conduct he was accused of. (The House has maintained that the president corruptly threatened to withhold financial assistance to Ukraine to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.) The senator explained that, in his final analysis, the president’s conduct mattered less than the Senate’s ability to continue to confirm more conservative judges and the risk that a Democrat would win the presidency.

That reasoning obviously invites the president to do the same thing—or worse—again and he wasted no time in retaliating against impeachment witnesses Lt. Col. Alex Vindman and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. If Republicans senators and their constituents value conservative judges and tax breaks for the wealthy more than holding a president accountable for wrongdoing, then the president will just keep doing wrong.

Again, it is not just the Senate that has failed to curb the president’s worst impulses and told the president that he can get away with even more than he’s already done. As a candidate, Trump had promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States. After his election, the president immediately suspended entry from several Muslim-majority countries without so much as informing, much less consulting, any relevant agencies. And his advisers admitted that the travel ban was an effort to make a Muslim ban that looked (somewhat) more legal. The Supreme Court ultimately blessed that effort in 2018 under a 5–4 vote that split along ideological lines.

The five conservative justices, much like the Republican senators, said they didn’t care. In fact, the justices, like the Republican senators, acknowledged that the entry ban may very well have been motivated by anti-Muslim animus. But they claimed that, in light of the president’s expansive powers over immigration, the court would uphold the entry ban so long as someone could think that the ban had a valid purpose (such as protecting national security) even if the ban actually had an illegitimate one (such as targeting Muslims). And, the court continued, a person could think the president’s entry ban had a valid purpose because the ban did not apply to all of the world’s Muslims, among other reasons.

Again, it does not take a genius to see how that decision signals that the court is unwilling to stop the president from making policy based on bigoted, thinly veiled Islamophobia or racism. The president received the message and has run with it. His expanded travel ban clearly targets countries based on race and religion. The odds of this Supreme Court reversing course and stopping him this time is virtually nil.

Indeed, the administration apparently felt so emboldened by the court’s earlier ruling that its expanded entry ban largely abandoned the original pretense of the rationale for the earlier entry ban. Previously, the administration stated it was responding to information sharing deficiencies in some countries. The administration now suggests it is trying to restrict immigration: Officials stated they are suspending entry from Nigeria because some Nigerians overstay their visas.

The administration has created other immigration restrictions that likewise disadvantage nonwhite immigrants. They have refused to process asylum applications from Central American migrants who did not apply for asylum in other countries they passed through on their way to the United States. They have tried to prohibit asylum applications from people who enter the United States outside of ports of entry. And they have authorized immigration officials to refuse to admit immigrants who might ever use public benefits (even temporarily). The Supreme Court approved this last effort just two weeks ago, again through a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines.

With the Senate’s blessing, the president will continue to corruptly abuse the powers of his office to undermine elections and our rule of law—and, as demonstrated by the Friday Night Massacre, he will do so in even more aggressive and ostentatious ways. With the court’s blessing, the president will expand his racist, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim immigration practices with little limit to what he may try to enact.

Neither the Senate nor the Supreme Court has been willing to stand up to the president for abusing the powers of his office for personal benefit or to stoke bigotry for partisan ends. By failing to do so, they have encouraged Trump to abuse his powers even more. It is unclear what, if anything, can stop him now.

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/10/us-deported-them-ignoring-their-pleas-then-they-were-killed/

Alison Leal Parker in WashPost:

Feb. 10, 2020 at 2:23 p.m. EST

Alison Parker is the managing director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch.

Asylum seekers in the United States face dangerous, even deadly, consequences when their claims are not taken seriously.

Those at risk are people like Santos Amaya, a Salvadoran police officer who had received death threats from gang members. He was deported from the United States in April 2018 and was shot dead, allegedly by gangs, that same month. People like a young Salvadoran woman who fled domestic violence and rape and was deported to El Salvador in July 2018. She now lives in fear, hiding from her abusers.

These lives hang in the balance while the Trump administration attacks every legal means of protecting them in the United States.

On Feb. 5, Human Rights Watch released a report that identified 138 cases of Salvadorans who had been killed since 2013 after being deported from the United States; more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted or tortured. These numbers are shocking but certainly an undercount, because no government or entity tracks what happens to deportees.

The Trump administration has put pressure on immigration judges to use overly narrow readings of the definition of a refugee. This approach may result in judges denying asylum to people like Amaya and the young Salvadoran woman — survivors of domestic violence, people who fear violence at the hands of gangs, or people who fear being targeted based on their family relationships. The administration has further proposed several new obstacles to gain asylum, including barring people convicted of illegal reentry into the United States, an offense often committed by people desperate to seek safety.

The Trump administration has tried to destroy the U.S. asylum process in other ways — among them by forcing people to remain in dangerous and inhumane conditionsin Mexican border towns while their claims are processed under its Migrant Protection Protocols. A Syracuse University analysis of government data revealed that as of December, 7,668 Salvadorans have been forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum claims to be processed. We have documented cases, included in a tallymaintained by Human Rights First, of Salvadorans who have been kidnapped and attacked while waiting.

The United States is also returning asylum seekers to Guatemala, after pressing its government to sign an “asylum cooperation agreement,” despite the fact that many Guatemalans are fleeing for the same reasons as their Salvadoran neighbors.

Salvadorans in the United States are at risk for reasons other than the Trump administration’s attempt to eviscerate the right to seek asylum. More than 220,000Salvadorans are affected by the administration’s decision to end temporary protected status and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. The administration also decided to end work authorization for Salvadorans with TPS, which allowed many Salvadorans to come to the United States in 2001 after a series of natural disasters.

These policies cover people who have worked, raised families, educated themselves and built their lives in the United States. This alone should be reason to value their relationship to the United States and regularize their legal status. But the killings and abuse that many Salvadorans will face if they are returned makes the need for Congress to enact legislation to protect recipients of these programs even more acute.

Former long-term residents of the United States face unique risks. Salvadorans who have lived in the United States are often extorted by gangs, as two cases we investigated in detail illustrate. In each, the person’s long-term residence meant that they were seen as having more wealth than most Salvadorans. They were repeatedly extorted by gangs and ultimately killed for their refusal to pay bribes.

But the Trump administration is not solely at fault here. Existing law, passed long before President Trump took office, has largely barred people with criminal convictions from seeking asylum, even when they face harm. They include a young man whose case we investigated, who at age 17, in 2010, fled gang recruitment and violence for the United States. After serving a sentence for two counts related to burglaries in the United States, he was denied protection, deported in 2017 and killed about three months later.

There is a simple way to prevent the murders and abuse we spent the past year and a half investigating: Give all noncitizens a full and fair opportunity to explain what abuses they fear before deporting them. As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a statement after we released our report, the United States must stop “knowingly signing a death sentence by forcibly returning vulnerable people to the very place they fled.”

The right to a fair hearing on claims for protection should apply to everyone — including the more than 59,000 people waiting in dangerous and inhumane conditions in Mexican border towns, people who had been living under the TPS or DACA programs, or those who have paid their debt to society after serving criminal sentences.

Now U.S. authorities are on notice about what is likely to happen when they deport Salvadorans without adequately considering their cases. This shameful and illegal practice should stop.

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

Unfortunately, Eleora, Leah, & Alison, the MPP (better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico”) is just the tip of the Trump/Miller neo-fascist iceberg here. As “fixed against them” as the Immigration Court hearing process for asylum seekers has now become at the Southern Border, with complicit Article IIIs looking the other way (so far), the regime as now come up with far more reliably deadly and “cost effective” alternatives.

Indeed, I’d argue that death, torture, rape, extortion, and exploitation of refugees from the Northern Triangle has always been a main objective of the Trump regime’s White Nationalist, anti-asylum policies, just like inflicting punishment through child separation and thereby achieving “deterrence” was the real objective of the “zero tolerance policy.”

Obviously, folks in charge lied about it to the press, the Congress, and to the U.S. courts. And, to date, they have gotten away with it. But, oppressors, particularly arrogant and self-righteous ones, usually leave “paper trails.” Despite shredding machines and “lost” databases, I imagine that the truth about Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Barr, Cuccinelli, and others will eventually come out when historians finally get their hands on the “Trump regime papers.” I’ll be long gone by then. But, I can virtually guarantee that the whole truth will be much, much worse than we can even imagine at this point.

The regime is now using fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreements” to illegally send asylum applicants to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, three of the most lawless and dangerous nations in the world, none with a functioning asylum system that provides even a semblance of due process. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/10/letter-from-21-democratic-senators-highlights-fraud-crimes-against-humanity-in-trump-regimes-bogus-safe-third-country-agreements-with-some-of-the-world/

As Human Rights Watch recently reported, and Alison reiterated above, the “kill rate” for returnees to El Salvador that HRW tracked was well over 50%, with many others raped, tortured, beaten, and/or extorted. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

It isn’t that the regime and even the Article III Federal Courts don’t know what happens or is likely to happen to those “orbited” to the Northern Triangle. It’s just that the don’t care. As I constantly point out, this is all about dehumanization and “Dred Scottification“ of “the other.” If we dehumanize them, its easier to ignore what we’re doing to them. How else could anybody justify the absolute unconstitutional farce and mockery of fundamental fairness and the rule of law that unfolds in our Immigration “Courts,” run by an openly enforcement-driven DOJ every day, right in plain view. The evidence has always been “out there.” “Extermination as deterrence” has become part of our national policy right here in the 21^st Century.

Matthew 25:44-46 English Standard Version (ESV):

⁴⁴Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Amen!

PWS

02-11-20

🤡CLOWN CAPITOL: J.R. PRESIDES OVER GOP CLOWN SHOW HE HELPED CREATE — Empowering The Koch Bros, Suppressing Minority Votes, Enabling GOP Gerrymandering, Ignoring Invidious Racial & Religious Motives, Turning A Blind Eye To Lies & Pretexts, It All Contributed To The Arrogant Display Of GOP Dishonesty & Impunity Now On Public Display In The Senate! — Plus Bonus Friday Mini-Essay: “Profiles in Fecklessness”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/22/sos-please-help-me-worlds-greatest-deliberative-body-falls-pettifoggery/

Dana Milbank in the WashPost:

S.O.S.! PLEASE HELP ME!’ The world’s greatest deliberative body falls to pettifoggery.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. arrives on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. (Sarah Silbiger/REUTERS)

By

Dana Milbank

Columnist

Jan. 22, 2020 at 10:36 p.m. EST

Senate chaplain Barry Black began Wednesday’s session of President Trump’s impeachment trial by praying for God to give senators “civility built upon integrity.”

It was too much to ask.

Just minutes into the session, as lead House impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) presented his opening argument for removing the president, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) displayed on his desk a hand-lettered message with big block letters pleading: “S.O.S.”

Impeachment trial live updates

In case that was too subtle, he followed this later with another handwritten message pretending he was an abducted child:

“THESE R NOT MY PARENTS!”

“PLEASE HELP ME!”

Paul wrote “IRONY ALERT” on another scrap of paper, and scribbled there an ironic thought. Nearby, a torn piece of paper concealed a crossword puzzle, which Paul set about completing while Schiff spoke. Eventually, even this proved insufficient amusement, and Paul, though required to be at his desk, left the trial entirely for a long block of time.

No one expected senators truly to honor their oath to be impartial. But Paul and some of his Republican colleagues aren’t even pretending to treat the proceedings with dignity.

Minutes before the trial opened in earnest on Wednesday, Paul took Trump up on the president’s stated wish to watch the trial from the “front row.” Paul tweeted a photo of a gallery ticket and said, “Mr. President, would love to have you as my guest during this partisan charade.”

Trump retweeted the message. (Unlike during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, gallery tickets make no mention of an impeachment trial.)

Some of Paul’s Republican Senate colleagues were only slightly better behaved as the House managers presented the evidence.

Opinion | Trump’s impeachment defense could create a dangerous precedent

President Trump doesn’t have to commit a crime to be impeached, says constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley. (Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome, Jonathan Turley/The Washington Post)

Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Joni Ernst (Iowa) read press clippings. (Blackburn had talking points on her desk attacking the whistleblower.) Sessions begin with an admonition that “all persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment,” but Ernst promptly struck up a conversation with Dan Sullivan (Alaska), who talked with Ron Johnson (Wis.). Steve Daines (Mont.) walked over to have a word with Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Tim Scott (S.C.), who flashed a thumbs-up.

Lindsey Graham (S.C.) variously shook his head in disagreement with the managers, picked his teeth and yawned. Tom Cotton (Ark.) ordered up a glass of milk, then another, then unwrapped a chocolate bar to share with Ernst. An aisle over, James Risch (Idaho), who fell asleep during Tuesday’s session, talked loudly enough to be heard in the press gallery.

“Mr. Chief Justice, I do see a lot of members moving and taking a break,” said House impeachment manager Jason Crow (D-Colo.), who was trying to speak. “Would you like to take a break?”

“I think we can continue,” replied Chief Justice John Roberts, who had been perusing printouts of emails.

In fairness, the proceedings were lengthy, and tedious. When Schiff, after two hours, uttered the phrase “now let me turn to the second article,” the press gallery erupted in groans. Democrats appeared restless, too; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) slouched low in his chair, head resting on chest, forehead in hand.

Some might have nodded off entirely but for Rives Miller Grogan, a conservative activist who burst into the chamber at 6 p.m. and screamed “Jesus Christ!” before police shoved him out. Grogan’s continued screaming — something about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) being the devil — could be heard in the chamber, where senators, jolted to alertness, shared a bipartisan chuckle.

Roberts only once rebuked the behavior in the chamber. As Tuesday’s session bled into the early hours of Wednesday, impeachment manager Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) warned senators against making a “treacherous vote” for a “coverup.” White House counsel Pat Cipollone, a member of Trump’s defense team, said Nadler “should be embarrassed” and called on the Senate to “land this power trip.”

Roberts, admonishing both sides “to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body,” cited the lofty example of a 1905 impeachment trial when use of the word “pettifogging” — defined as the bickering over trivialities — was disallowed as too pejorative.

Now, the world’s greatest deliberative body has devolved into a palace of pettifoggery.

Nadler was in the penalty box. When a reporter asked a question of Nadler at a news conference Wednesday morning, Schiff interrupted: “I’m going to respond to the questions.” Later, on the floor, a contrite Nadler thanked senators for “your temperate listening and patience last night.”

Patience, however, was in short supply as Schiff and his team made their case. Ignoring the impeachment managers, and the silence requirement, Graham chatted with Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.). Sen. John Boozman (Ark.) had a word with Sen. John Hoeven (N.D.), while Sen. David Perdue (Ga.) talked with Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). And on, and on.

Reading from Federalist 65, Schiff quoted Alexander Hamilton: “Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified” to conduct an impeachment trial with “the necessary impartiality”?

Clearly, Hamilton couldn’t have imagined this Senate. S.O.S.!

*********************
And, today, Milbank royally “nailed” the anti-democratic death spiral of American institutions that J.R. and his GOP colleagues have helped create.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/23/john-roberts-comes-face-face-with-mess-he-made/

Impeachment Diary

Opinion

John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made

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In an image taken from video, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. presides over the impeachment trial of President Trump on Thursday in the Senate chamber. (Senate TV via AP)

By

Dana Milbank

Columnist

Jan. 23, 2020 at 6:28 p.m. EST

This article has been updated.

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does the words are usually scripted and perfunctory:

“The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.”

“The chaplain will lead us in prayer.”

“The sergeant at arms will deliver the proclamation.”

“The majority leader is recognized.”

The latest Trump impeachment trial updates

Otherwise, he sits and watches. He rests his chin in his hand. He stares straight ahead. He sits back and interlocks his fingers. He plays with his pen. He takes his reading glasses off and puts them on again. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down. He roots around in his briefcase for something — anything? — to occupy him.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens Uniteddecision, plunging the country into the era of super PACsand unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

Opinion | The chief justice presides over impeachment, but don’t expect a lot from him

Columnist Ruth Marcus explains what the chief justice may or may not do in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. (Video: Danielle Kunitz, Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.

The consequences? Falling confidence in government, and a growing perception that Washington had become a “swamp” corrupted by political money, fueled Trump’s victory. The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy. And, expanding on earlier transgressions by Democrats, he blew up generations of Senate procedures and precedents requiring the body to operate by consensus so that he could confirm more Trump judicial appointees.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

Show with the complicit Chiefie presiding.

Milbank doesn’t even get to the absolute unconstitutional carnage and unending human misery the “Roberts Court” has created with its complicity in the Trump regime’s White Nationalist immigration agenda: a religiously-biased “Travel Ban” — fine with us; bogus invocation of “national emergencies” to illegally misappropriate money for a wall and otherwise dump on migrants’ rights — “no problema;” unconstitutional, unnecessary, and inhumane “civil” detention — no need to rush to judgment; illegal rewriting of asylum laws by Executive fiat — “right on;” disenfranchisement of African-American and Hispanic voters — not our problem; unwarranted shooting of an unarmed Mexican teenager by U.S. agent — tough luck, kid, your life is worthless to us; lawless and irrational termination of DACA — let’s let the kids twist in the wind for awhile; lies and pretexts for a racially motivated attempt to undercount people of color in the census — “tisk, tisk, naughty to lie to courts” (but, others among J.R.’s GOP judicial stooges where anxious to sweep the whole thing under the rug), disingenuous pleas by the Solicitor General to short-circuit the normal Federal Court litigation rules for the benefit of the regime — bring it on, and on an on.

Every day, the Trump regime conducts itself with disregard for the law and contempt for Federal Courts. The nation’s largest and, in many ways, most important Federal “court” system — the U.S. Immigration Court — isn’t a “court” at all, within any normal understanding of the word. Its structure and operation is blatantly unconstitutional — dissing the Due Process requirement for fair and impartial quasi-judicial adjudicators for “enforcement agents in robes” beholden to Chief Trump Toady Billy Barr, and, through him, to DHS Enforcement. J.R. and his “Complicit Five” are above it all.

The only human lives and rights for which the Supremes’ majority evinces any particular concern are the lives of the unborn and the rights of citizens to assault each other with high-power weapons. Only corporations appear to have rights worth protecting under J.R.’s skewed view of America. What’s wrong with this twisted and nonsensical picture of our once-proud legal system?

The only good news: America will have a chance (perhaps out last clear one) to vote at least some of the GOP clowns out of office in November!

Of course, J.R. and his GOP robed sell-outs are immune from accountability and far above the daily unfolding of the unconscionable legal, moral, and human disasters and tragedies they have countenanced and enabled. But, they are not immune from the judgment of history!

The Constitution requires the Chiefie to preside over the rest of the GOP Clown Show and “validate” the pre-announced violation of their oaths as openly biased jurors like Graham, McConnell, Paul, Cruz, and the other GOP Trump toadies have already flaunted in J.R.’s face.

Respect has to be earned. Unless and until the Chiefie starts enforcing the law, upholding Due Process in the face of Trump’s scofflaw behavior, and saving a few lives of the most vulnerable among us, J.R. will see a continued deterioration of his reputation and a harsh historical judgment of his complicity in the face of anti-American tyranny.

As MLK, Jr., once said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” I’m sure that J.R., student of history that he is, has read that quote; but, tragically, it seems to have gone in one ear and out the other! You don’t have to look very far or be #1 in your class at Harvard Law to see the Constitutional mockery and grotesque injustices, not to mention rudeness and inhumanity, taking place in our Immigration Courts, at our borders, and in our overall immigration system every day!

Time to wake up, get involved, and end the Clown Show, Chiefie! That’s what life-tenure is supposed to be about! That’s what courageous and exemplary historical legacies are built upon!

Due Process Forever; Feckless & Complicit Courts, Never!

PWS

01-23-20

NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

Sebastian Murdock
Senior Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-anti-immigration-op-ed-hate-group_n_5e21d9d8c5b673621f752f9c

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, is categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

BY SEBASTIAN MURDOCK

SENIOR REPORTER

HIUFFPOST

The New York Times published an op-ed decrying immigration by an author claiming to be a “liberal restrictionist” who is in fact attached to a known hate group.

The column, published Friday, was written by , “a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,” according to the biography listed under his byline.

CIS, which calls itself “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” is a known hate group that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant movement that hires racist writers and associates with white nationalists.

“I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” Kammer’s headline reads. The piece begins with an anecdote about how immigrants take the jobs of American-born workers and later claims “many liberal Democrats” want illegal immigration to run rampant:

Now many liberal Democrats, including those who call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seek to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Under the banner of inclusiveness, equality, human rights, racial reconciliation and reparations for American interventions in the third world, those liberals demand sanctuary for those who make it past the Border Patrol or overstay a visa. Few speak openly of open borders, but that is essentially what they are calling for.

Throughout the piece, Kammer seems set on reminding readers that he is liberal, even if his views might suggest otherwise.

“That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist,” Kammer, a former journalist, writes. “I have long considered myself a moderate liberal, in part because Democrats have always been the allies of working people.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, has cited CIS when speaking about immigration, and in 2011, the group released a report attempting to connect immigration with the creation of future terrorists, calling them “terror babies.”

The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science “research” papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language. According to the SPLC, “longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements.”

Running a column by an author employed by a known hate group is the latest in the Times’s run of publishing racist pieces in its opinion section. In December, columnist and known bedbug Bret Stephens cited a study by a white nationalist that falsely claimed Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other races. The study he cited “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the SPLC.

Do better, New York Times.

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

Ben Mathis-Lilley
Chief News Blogger
SLATE

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/times-op-ed-white-nationalist-center-for-immigration-studies.html

THE SLATEST

Times Taps White Nationalist Organization for Thought-Provoking Perspective on Immigration

By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY

JAN 17, 20206:42 PM

The New York Times opinion section under editor James Bennet ostensibly aims to challenge the paper’s predominately liberal readers by presenting them with thoughtful critiques of their worldview. In practice, it runs pieces like this recent argument that launching a war against Iran would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East—which was written by a veteran of the Bush administration who had predicted confidently in a 2003 piece also published by the Times that launching a war against Iraq would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East. There was no acknowledgment in the new piece of the old one, as an opinion section committed to intellectual honesty might require, nor was it particularly challenging in the sense of being difficult to rebut. But it did make people on the left feel bad, and like they were losing their minds, which is the bar that Bennet’s section requires an argument to clear.

The essay “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” published in the Times Thursday, may represent the nadir of this approach. It makes a familiar argument: that “the left” believes in a “post-national” system of open borders which sacrifices the interests of native-born working Americans to the interests of low-skilled foreign immigrants who drive down wages and disrupt the cultural cohesiveness of their communities. It argues for respecting a distinction between legal and illegal immigration and asserts that Donald Trump’s position on immigration can be appreciated, in a non-racist way, as “a patriotic battle to defend common people.” It accuses Trump’s critics of having had their minds addled by “tribal passions” and a fetish for conflict “between ethnic groups,” and it proposes a “conciliatory” policy that would offer amnesty to existing undocumented workers but institute a crackdown regime of visa enforcement that would prevent future undocumented individuals from finding jobs.

The familiarity of the article’s arguments is matched by the familiarity of its flaws. While large-scale immigration is, in fact, believed by some non-racists to flatten wages at the bottom of the pay scale, it’s also known to accelerate rather than retard economic expansion overall, and tends to be supported by progressives who advocate for other means of increasing working-class wages and sharing the benefits of GDP growth. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some ancient, race-agnostic pillar of global affairs, but rather a concept that was instituted in the United States in the early 20th century to explicitly discriminate against Asian, southern European, and eastern European individuals and expanded in the 1960s to explicitly discriminate against Mexicans. Trump’s support is strongest in areas where there are fewer undocumented immigrants, not more, and he lost four of the five states that have the highest undocumented populations per capita. Many of the most immigration-heavy and ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. are also the safest and wealthiest and are considered so desirable to live in by migrating native-born Americans that they are experiencing housing crises.

As to whether criticizing an administration that instituted the premeditated, systematic separation of young children from their parents after they applied legally for asylum is a matter of unseemly “tribal passions,” or whether support for the principles of inclusive American citizenship described on the Statue of Liberty constitutes “post-national” anti-patriotism, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

More concerning than any of these specific problems, though, is the piece’s provenance: It’s written by someone named Jerry Kammer, a fellow at a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies. Kammer has made a career out of covering immigration policy, he writes, for two reasons: “I was fascinated by its human, political and moral complexity. I also wanted to push back against the campaign by activist groups to label restrictionism as inherently racist.” He expresses regret that “odious people” with white-power affiliations have given the cause of cutting back on immigration a “bad name.”

What neither Kammer nor the Times discloses is that the Center for Immigration Studies was in fact founded by these people, most prominent among them a white nationalist named John Tanton who died last year. Tanton, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, believed that the United States needed to maintain a “European-American majority, and a clear one at that”; he founded CIS, he wrote in the 1980s, in order to give his ideas the appearance of independent “credibility.”

Kammer does write that he disagrees with “some of the center’s hard-line positions.” Among his more hard-line colleagues at CIS are a writer named Jason Richwine, who contributed to a journal founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer and who has said that “IQ” is the “most important” difference between racial groups. (As the SPLC has documented, CIS has circulated literally hundreds of articles by explicit white supremacists like Spencer via links in its weekly newsletter. Its director once accused Barack Obama of trying to “foment race war.”) A statement of purpose on the CIS website is credited to longtime Tanton collaborator Dan Stein, who once complained that mass immigration was a tool developed by “Ted Kennedy and his political allies” in approximately 1958 to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.”

In 1997, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Tanton in a piece called “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism.” It was a scathing article which noted that Tanton had once described the immigrant’s contribution to society as “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” The piece expressed concern that “otherwise sober-minded conservatives” and “reasonable critics of immigration” were affiliating themselves with his ideas. The author of that WSJ article, a 28-year-old journalist named Tucker Carlson, has since made the career-advancing decision to embrace Tanton-style nativism; he was in the news not too long ago for complaining in his role as a Fox News host that immigrants make the United States physically “dirtier.”

Whatever space ever existed between mainstream conservatism and white-power nationalism, Carlson demonstrates, has collapsed. And it turns out that the “odious people” that Kammer references in the Times are actually his colleagues and forebears, who created his organization so that policies intended to perpetuate “European-American” and “Anglo-Saxon” superiority could be laundered into the respectable discourse. What else is there to say but: It worked!

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

So, we have a White Nationalist in the White House assisted by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller actually turning nativism into “Government policy.” Other white supremacists are scattered in key positions throughout the Government, particularly the immigration bureaucracy. Trump tweets and right-wing media put out a constant barrage of nativist lies, misrepresentations, false narratives, and racial, ethnic, and religious slurs.

So, just why is it that the “mainstream media” owes White Nationalists yet another forum to spread their nativist propaganda?

It’s not limited, of course, to just the Times. The WashPost regularly publishes largely fact and value free right-wing blather from professional shills like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt under the guise of “op-eds.”

And Chuck Todd regularly invites GOP congenital liars and Trump toadies like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to spread their lies, false narratives, and debunked “conspiracy theories” from the “bully pulpit” of “Meet the Press.” To top it off, Chuck then appears to be flabbergasted that when he confronts these guys with truth and facts, they “double down” continuing to lie to his face, ignore established facts, and spread Putinesque conspiracy theories.

Fact is, most of the Trump agenda is corrupt, counterfactual, unethical, inhumane, divisive, and corrosive to American democracy. We receive enough of it from lots of sources every day, pretty much 24-7-365. Is it really necessary for those supposedly dedicated to truth and democracy to give more free “air time” to nativist shills spreading their racially corrosive, divisive, anti-democracy propaganda?

PWS

01-18-20

ROGER ALGASE @ ILW.COM: How The Trump Regime’s Gross Immorality, Inhumanity, & Illegality Have Replaced America’s Moral Leadership On The World Stage!

https://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BXLvi&m=fxzs.sAL1oeaGWA&b=YSYqSh1DOxFOlVXvkRos2A

ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post As asylum-seeker kills himself at the border, leading Jewish cleric condemns administration’s inhumanity toward desperate immigrants. Meanwhile, Trump ramps up hate for 2020 election By Roger Algase

01-10-2020, 09:08 AM

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Update: January 11 1:42 pm:

For another viewpoint on the urgency of defeating Trump’s politics of hate against immigrants and other minorities in he upcoming election this November, see Kristian Ramos in The Hill (January 11):

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

Update: January 11 at 9:15 am:

Two late-breaking January 10 news stories show that Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up the hate against legal non-European immigrants in preparation for this November’s election.

The Washington Post reports that Texas has become the first state to bar resettlement of refugees under Trump’s executive order giving them the authority to do so. Admission to the UIS of legal refugees this year is already at an historic low under the agenda of Trump and Miller. Miller reportedly didn’t want to any refugees at all to be admitted this year.

For more on this latest show of bigotry by Texas Republican governor Greg Abbot, see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2020/01/10/texas-becomes-first-state-publicly-reject-refugees-under-trump-order

On the same day, The Guardian reports that Trump is planning to add unspecified additional countries to his infamous Muslim ban order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/trump-travel-ban-expansion

Both of these developments, which involve barring legal immigrants whose ethnicity or religion doesn’t happen to fit in with Trump’s avowed goal of admitting only immigrants from “Countries like Norway” and with Miller’s goal (expressed in almost 1,000 recent emails) of taking America’s immigration system back to the openly racist 1924 regime (which Adolf Hitler expressed so much admiration for in Mein Kampf) show that exploiting and stirring up more hate against nonwhite immigrants, including those eligible to come to the US legally, will be the order of the day for Trump’s re-election campaign.

My earlier comment follows below:

While the media remain focused on Donald Trump’s apparently now-abandoned threat to commit a war crime by blowing up cultural heritage sites in Iran, as an end result of his dehumanizing 2017 Muslim Ban order; or on the travesty that Senate Republicans are planning in order to “acquit” Trump of cravenly timid Democratic impeachment charges which entirely ignore his High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the basic human rights of nonwhite immigrants, what could very arguably be considered a Crime Against Humanity that the Trump administration is carrying out against desperate asylum seekers at the Mexican border in service of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda is growing worse and worse.

The Guardian reports on January 9 that an obviously desperate Mexican asylum-seeker killed himself on the international bridge after being refused entry to the United States.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/mexico-asylum-seeker-refused-us-entry

This may be less surprising than it seems in light of the appalling, inhuman conditions that legitimate asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and other life-threatening conditions in Central America are forced to endure as a result of Trump’s racist and inhuman (as well as almost certainly illegal) “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy. See Vox (December 20, 2019):

In camps on the US-Mexico border, asylym-seekers have been abandoned

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/20/20997299/asylum-border-mexico-us-io,-unhcr-usaid-migration-international-humanitarian-aid-m…

See also: Slate:

Trump’s tent cities are on the verge of killing immigrant children

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

This horrendous display of inhumanity by the Trump administration as led to a protest by a leading Jewish religious leader, Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (in New York City) America’s leading institution for the Conservative branch of Judaism against what he calls America’s failure to carry out its moral obligation toward desperate asylum seekers and immigrants and other immigrants. See, The Hill, January 9:

https://the hill.com/opinion/immigration/477577/-our-moral-obligation-to-us-migrants-and-asylum-seekers

After visiting overcrowded immigrant border shelters , an ICE detention center and an asylum hearing courtroom along with other Jewish clergy, Eisen writes:

“What we saw was profoundly sobering. The predicament of those trapped at the Mexican border looks increasingly bleak as the federal government enacts more restrictive policies in the name of protecting Americans from the alleged invasion.”

Eisen then explains what motivated him to write:

“When people asked me why I was making this journey, my answer was simple: ‘Because I am a Jew.’ My grandparents arrived in this country seeking a better life, in some cases fleeing pogroms and persecutions, and the Torah’s command to care for the stranger summons me in a voice I dare not ignore. The Bible tells us that Jews are not permitted to stand by in the face of suffering and injustice.”

He then explains that this is not only a Jewish issue.:

“But the crisis at the border is a non-denominational issue and it should be non-partisan.”

Unfortunately, in today’s America, the crisis caused by the Trumps administration’s egregious violations of essential human rights of nonwhite immigrants is anything but non-partisan. One party is blindly following its Leader into making hatred of non-European immigrants, both legal and “irregular”, as the centerpiece of its agenda, while the other party’s leaders are too cowardly to mount an effective defense of immigrants’ human rights which are being trampled on.

Ironically, the driving force of this agenda of anti-immigrant persecution, Stephen Miller, is also the grandchild of a Jewish immigrant. What kind of understanding of the Jewish heritage of care and compassion for the suffering of the stranger in our midst is he showing?

And how much understanding of this tradition of essential humanity does Miller’s boss Donald Trump, who claims to be a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people, show in his immigration policy, which includes drastic measures against even the most highly skilled and educated legal immigrants, not only asylum seekers and unauthorized immigrants?

Roger Algase

Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 01-11-2020, 01:43 PM.

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

Unfortunately, for America and the world, Roger has it pegged exactly right. Humanity, compassion, decency, and equal justice for all have disappeared from U.S. foreign and domestic policy under Trump. That’s the essence of a White Nationalist kakistocracy. And, as Roger also recognizes, there is more than a little anti-semitism and racism mixed in and driving these policies. It just so happens that Hispanics and folks with brown skins are the current “target of the day.”

But, actually, nobody is safe in the “Age of Trump” as his sycophants and supporters have found out (see., e.g., Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kristjen Nielsen, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, et al.). The only thing or person that Donald Trump has ever cared about is (surprise): Donald Trump. Everybody else, including our nation, the environment, and world civilization, is expendable.

I also appreciate Roger’s “outing” of bigoted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his ridiculous and disingenuous attempt to “bar” refugee resettlement in Texas. For the record, quite contrary to Abbott’s racist whining, few states have benefitted more than Texas from migrants, whether they be refugees, asylum recipients, documented, or undocumented. See, e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-texas

In the “race to the bottom,” never count out Donald Trump and his GOP stalwarts!

PWS

01-13-20

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-07/great-race-passing-trump

Ford writes:

OPINION

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

By CLYDE W. FORD

JAN. 7, 2020

3:01 AM

The images horrify.

On the banks of the Rio Grande, a child floats lifelessly, her arm around her father, both drowned while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe regularly drown. A Honduran mother dragging children flees from tear gas at the U.S. border. Children in cages.

The policies terrify. A border wall. Family separation. The purgatory of waiting for asylum in a third country.

In December, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to use migrant children in detention as bait. Adults who show up to claim them would be targeted for arrest and deportation.

The words incite fear. “Bad hombres.” “Rapists.” “Criminals.” “Shithole countries.” When uttered by a U.S. president, they carry even greater weight.

Britain, Poland, Italy, the United States. Around the world, countries once proud of welcoming immigrants seem determined to find ever more devious ways to keep them out. Are these signs of a newly ascendant nationalism? Or the last gasps of existential fear?

The worldwide immigration crisis — and the racism apparently driving it — can trace its roots in part to a century-old book, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.”

In publishing a centenary edition of the 1916 work, white nationalist Ostara Press praised the book as a “call to American whites to counter the dangers both from non-white and non-north Western European immigration.” Grant proposed a “Nordic race,” loosely centered in Scandinavia, as principally responsible for human social and cultural development. He feared immigration and intermarriage would dilute this race, dooming it to extinction.

Grant’s fears of his “great race” passing are very much alive today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing study of emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart News in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election document his affinity for white nationalism. Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, lauds former President Calvin Coolidge for signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which hardened non-white immigration and eased white immigration from Western Europe. It also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the predecessor of Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Grant’s writing is credited as part of the inspiration for the creation and passage of that 1924 Act. Hitler called Grant’s book, “my bible.” Grant’s ideas defined apartheid. His book fueled the U.S. eugenics movement.

Eugenics is a pseudoscience of race that seeks to breed and maintain a “Nordic stock” of human beings, while culling undesirables — blacks, Jews, Asians, South Americans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally ill, and others — through measures ranging from forced sterilization to death.

In Grant’s day, eugenics attracted the rich and famous — Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Kelloggs of Corn Flakes fame. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, saw birth control work as eliminating “human weeds” and Alexander Graham Bell presided over the scientific directors of the Eugenics Records Office, a research institute in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Eugenics is very much in vogue among white nationalists and far-right groups worldwide, though refashioned now into broader conspiracies like “replacement theory,” which originated in France with the writings of Renaud Camus and proposes that U.S. and European whites are being intentionally “replaced” through low birth rates and liberal immigration policies.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in 2017. A gunman in Norway who murdered 80 people in 2011 portrayed the act as a defense of the Nordic race from the scourge of Islamic immigration. Similar “replacement theory” fears influenced mass shooters in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Charleston.

Surprisingly, Grant was as an early conservationist who saw in the fate of endangered species — the moose, the buffalo, the redwood tree — a similar fate awaiting his “Nordics.” He helped establish the U.S. National Park system. Modern-day environmental and climate movements have roots in Grant’s work, leading to a convoluted, bizarre specter:

The U.S. and European countries that Grant lauded manufacture the “greenhouse gases” threatening the environment that Grant sought to protect. Meanwhile, the climate crisis produces refugees from countries that Grant abhorred, seeking shelter in countries with draconian immigration policies that Grant helped to create.

Yet Grant was right. His “great race” is passing. Studies cite 2050 as the tipping point, when U.S. whites will become a statistical minority, and most Americans will be people of color. Whether crafted in overtly racist language or couched in covertly racist immigration policies, fear of the “great race” passing is used to win elections, cling to power, manipulate public opinion and grow organizational membership.

Immigrants built America. This new wave is no different. They are the face of the future, deserving new lives in a country that helps them succeed.

Yes, the “great race” is passing. Good riddance. And we should turn to finding ways to help everyone accept this inevitability — and thrive from it.

Clyde W. Ford is the author of “Think Black,” a memoir about his father, the first black software engineer in America.

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

Like those who were behind or “went along to go along” with horrible parts of our history like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, or Jim Crow, Trump’s supporters and enablers eventually will have much to answer for in the “court of history.”

“Fake news.” “alternative facts,” false narratives, and internet myths might be gospel to Breitbart, Fox News, GOP sycophants, and Trump voters, but eventually, particularly in an age of information and documentation, “truth will out.” And, it won’t be pretty for the “Modern Day Jim Crows” any more than it was for the segregationists and other racists who preceded them.

PWS

01-10-20

FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.html

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

By Frank Rich

@frankrichny

Photo: Getty Images

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.

Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.

That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Rich’s article at the link.

“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!

Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .

But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.

I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”

PWS

01-09-20

ROLLING STONE: HOW STEPHEN MILLER & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST CABAL TOOK OVER OUR GOVERNMENT’S IMMIGRATION APPARATUS: “We used [CIS material] to spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” McHugh told Hatewatch. “We never fact-checked anything. We never called up other organizations to get any other perspective about those studies…. It was understood. You just write it up.”

https://apple.news/Ai9__HexTRd-ZH51tL17Maw

Andy Kroll reports for Rolling Stone:

New Emails Expose How Stephen Miller and His Pals Push Trump’s Agenda

For nearly three years, Stephen Miller has used his White House seat to orchestrate the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in almost a century. But he hasn’t done it alone.

A loose network of lawyers and advisers embedded throughout the Trump administration has worked closely with Miller to carry out the daily effort of pushing through draconian and often inhumane policies like separating migrant families at the border, detaining young migrants in cagelike facilities, and drastically reducing the number of immigrants allowed entry into the country. In other words, Miller, with his white-nationalist mindset and fervor to enact xenophobic policies, is far from an isolated actor. He’s the leader of a broad operation spread across the federal government.

Newly released emails provided to Rolling Stone offer a glimpse of the working relationship between Miller and one of his internal allies and fellow ideologues: a senior adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement named Jon Feere. Feere has been a fixture in Miller’s immigration working group where new ideas for cracking down on immigration get conceived. Reading the emails, Feere comes across like Miller’s point man inside ICE, enjoying unfettered access to arguably the most influential aide in the Trump White House, working long hours to advance the administration’s extreme and often inhumane immigration policy.

In the emails, Feere strategizes with Miller about how to use the federal government to amplify their anti-immigration message; tees up potential attacks on prominent Democratic politicians; directly briefs Miller in great detail about upcoming enforcement actions and policy changes in the works; and recommends to Miller people the administration should hire to expedite its immigration agenda. The emails also show that on at least one occasion Feere bypassed his superiors at ICE to deliver updates and advice directly to Miller.

Related

Trump Caves to Kim Jong-un (Again)

Democrats Charge Trump with Abuse of Power and Defying Congress in Two Articles of Impeachment

“Stephen Miller didn’t cut ties with the extremists when he joined the government — he brought them with him,” says Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a government watchdog group run by former members of the Obama administration. American Oversight first obtained Feere’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request and provided them to Rolling Stone.

ICE and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Before he joined the administration, Feere’s bio says he worked for more than a decade at the rabidly anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, which has played an instrumental role in shaping the administration’s immigration policies. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled CIS an active hate group. (In January, CIS filed a civil racketeering suit against SPLC’s leaders, but a district judge dismissed the suit.) As a policy analyst there, Feere took hardline positions critical of birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and of President Obama’s policies like DACA. He accused Obama of opening the border “to more STDs,” and gave testimony to Congress about restricting birthright citizenship. He wrote favorably of Arizona’s infamous “Show Us Your Papers” law and condemned the DREAM Act, cities that adopt sanctuary status, and Obama’s DACA policy. In 2015, he penned an op-ed titled “How Trump Could Change Birthright Citizenship.”

Feere’s outspokenness didn’t go unnoticed: He advised the 2016 Trump campaign on immigration for several months before taking a job inside the administration. On the morning of Trump’s inauguration, he hit send on a tweet: “It’s time to make immigration policy great again.”

The partnership between Feere and Miller was a natural one. Miller is a big fan of the Center for Immigration Studies. During a keynote address at a CIS event in 2015, he applauded the group for spurring “a debate that far too often operates, like illegal immigrants, in the shadows.” A recent investigation by SPLC’s Hatewatch revealed that Miller shaped Breitbart News’ immigration coverage leading up to the 2016 election by sending at least 46 emails that mentioned CIS research, employees, or contributors to a Breitbart editor named Katie McHugh. Miller sent McHugh the phone number of CIS’s research director and pushed McHugh to use CIS research in her stories, which she often did. (Breitbart fired McHugh in 2017. She says he has since disavowed right-wing extremist politics.)

“We used [CIS material] to spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” McHugh told Hatewatch. “We never fact-checked anything. We never called up other organizations to get any other perspective about those studies…. It was understood. You just write it up.”

After Trump’s victory, Miller brought fellow immigration hardliners with him into the new administration. In addition to Feere, there was Julia Hahn, a Breitbart writer who took a job in the White House, and Julie Kirchner, a former staffer at another prominent anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), who became an adviser to the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and later the top ombudsman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Because Feere, Hahn, and Kirchner took advisory roles, that meant they didn’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, where they probably would’ve faced harsh questioning for their extreme views.

An active Twitter user before he went into government, Feere’s account went dark after his Inauguration Day tweet. That’s why the emails between Feere, Miller, and other Trump administration officials are useful — they give a rare glimpse at how key figures in the administration have worked behind the scenes to enact the largest crackdown on immigration in this country since the 1920s and ’30s.

“We’ve had quite draconian politics in the past,” says Daniel Tichenor, a professor at the University of Oregon. “But I don’t think we have ever had a modern presidential administration that looked back so longingly to the 1920s and ’30s as the good old days.”

The Feere-Miller emails released to American Oversight run to nearly 500 pages and are heavily redacted. But they’re still one of the few opportunities to see the administration and some of its most hardline members in action on the policy that Trump will be most remembered for: immigration.

One of the most striking emails is a December 22th, 2017, message that Feere sent to Miller and three other administration staffers. It’s a 10-point bulleted memo in which he updates Miller on a slew of different actions underway that he and his colleagues had worked on in the preceding week. The memo is notable because it appears to show how much latitude Feere has at ICE to not only brief the White House but drive forward the administration’s immigration agenda.

Feere says he led a meeting about crafting a new agreement between ICE and the Department of Labor on worksite immigration enforcement actions that would be “more favorable to ICE’s mission” of tracking down and deporting undocumented residents. He describes helping plan an upcoming ICE raid in the Bay Area, and tasking a field office to investigate a New York-based Pakistani American accused of supporting ISIS with bitcoin. He says he stopped an administration response to Amnesty International report on immigration enforcement; located ICE officers and operations “worth highlighting in speeches” for White House speechwriters; and assisted a Fox News contributor and “friendly NGO” on messaging after a draft proposal about separating migrant families had leaked to the media.

What’s notable as well about Feere’s December 22nd memo to Miller is that, according to emails, Feere apparently sent the message straight to Miller and other White House officials without clearing it by his bosses at ICE, who learned about the memo after the fact. “Here is Jon providing a weekly report to [redacted] that neither you or I saw before he sent it,” reads a follow-up email sent to ICE Acting Director Tom Homan by what appears to be Homan’s chief of staff, Tom Blank. (The redacted name is likely Miller’s. Homan declined to comment for the story.)

John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under Obama and reviewed the emails between Feere and Miller, says it’s not uncommon for an agency official like Feere to aggressively try to get credit for accomplishments and make the White House aware of what he’s doing. But Sandweg adds that it’s “a little strange” to see an adviser like Feere delivering updates and advice directly to the White House, as Feere did.

“You might have someone like [Feere] coordinating it, doing the grunt work, preparing it,” Sandweg says. “But going directly from him to the White House — that’s unusual. If you’re reporting that kind of detail to the White House, the director wants to sign off on that.”

In another email, sent on February 26th, 2018, Feere appears to forward the name and résumé of a Treasury Department employee for an opening at the Social Security Administration. In a follow-up email, Feere writes: “If we can get [name redacted] into SSA, it would help with information-sharing issues.” Greater access to Social Security information, immigration experts say, could assist ICE in its efforts to track down and deport undocumented residents in the U.S. Feere recommends to Miller that the applicant get a title of “Senior Advisor or similar [which] will ensure he has some clout over there.”

Other emails, while heavily redacted, show Feere’s efforts to build the case against DACA, which defers deportation for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children and allows them to receive temporary work permits. He writes in one memo: “DACA recipients include murderers, child molesters, individuals involved in fraud schemes, gang members, and many other types of criminals.” In another email, he writes to Miller on November 30th, 2017, to say that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom were “silent” on the acquittal of an undocumented resident who was alleged to have shot and murdered 32-year-old Kate Steinle in July 2015, teeing up a potential attack on two nationally known Democrats.

And still other messages show a close working relationship and rapport between Feere and Miller. In one message, Feere asks Miller for a public defense of ICE’s then-acting director, Tom Homan, after Breitbart had published a series of stories that were critical of Homan, who had previously worked in the Obama administration. In another email Miller sends Feere his cellphone number and tells him to call over the weekend. In another, Feere gives Miller a list of “ideas for swift action,” at 7:30 p.m. (The substance of that email is redacted.) And in yet another message, with the subject line “Appropriations,” Miller thanks Feere for his work and tells him to “keep pushing.”

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, a Penn State law professor and director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, says that Feere’s and CIS’s role in carrying out the administration’s immigration policy marks an ascent to power for one of the most extreme voices — a rise that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. “They used to be called the loud minority,” Wadhia says. “The fact they’re now helping make immigration policy should be concerning to everyone.”

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Remember: When Article III Federal Judges use concepts like “jurisdiction,” “deference,” “textualism,” “delegation,” “plenary power,” “discretion,” and “national security” to uphold the Trump/Miller assault on migrants, the rule of law, and our Constitution, what they are really doing is knowingly advancing the White Nationalist agenda while disguising their actions or inactions with often opaque legalisms. How can you rewrite the laws without Congress and in clear disregard of the Constitution, Due Process, Equal Protection, and prohibitions on racial and religious discrimination? Easy, when when the judges who are supposed to stand up for the law against tyranny instead look the other way.

How do you think that Jim Crow survived for at least a century with nary a peep from the Article IIIs about its obvious racist unconstitutionality? That’s the same type of corrupt judicial complicity that Trump, Miller, Barr, and the rest of the White Nationalist gang are counting on here. And, recently, they have been “right on.”

It’s also why despite all the recent revelations and calls by Democrats and opinion writers for his removal, Stephen Miller and his White Nationalist agenda aren’t going anywhere. Much as most Democrats and most pundits don’t want to admit it, Miller now represents the “real” GOP. The idea that GOP politicos will some morning wake up and find themselves appalled by illegality, racism, misogyny, and pandering to the hate agenda, and rediscover human decency, is a dangerous myth.

Note that no matter how outrageously racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, misogynist, or otherwise hateful and demeaning Trump’s or Miller’s utterances might be, they draw no real condemnation from the GOP. At most, a smattering from the GOP might mutter something like “not useful” or “I wish he had chosen different words.”

And these days, most Federal Appeals Courts find ways to “go along to get along” without acknowledging what’s really going on here. I guess too many Federal Appellate Judges are incapable of seeing themselves and their families as being on the same level of humanity as Trump’s and Miller’s current targets. So, dehumanization and “Dred Scottification” of “the other” is OK by them. That’s both a shame and a national disgrace.

PWS

12-11-19

HISTORY W/ HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Remembering Dec.7, 1941, Exposing Those Who Betray Its Legacy —“The interests of reactionary American leaders and Russian president Putin run parallel.”

Heather Cox Richardson
Historian
Professor, Boston College

December 7, 2019

Dec 8

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship. In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller sheltered the captain behind the ship’s conning tower. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower. Miller had not been trained to use the guns because, as a black man, his naval assignment was to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

That night, America declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, Italy and Germany both declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and Nationalist Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the mongrel Americans had been corrupted by Jews and “Negroes,” and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War One inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This system of government was called “fascism,” after the Latin word “fasces,” which were a bundle of sticks bound together. The idea is that each stick can be easily broken alone, but as a bundle are unbreakable. (It was a common symbol: in fact, Lincoln’s hand rests on fasces in the statue at the Lincoln Memorial.) Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War Two to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men from 18-50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that Hitler’s codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t— but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Based in the principle that all men are created equal, democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities—a mongrel population– the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

In June 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that democracy is obsolete. He believes that a few oligarchs should run the world while the rest of us do as we are told, and he is doing his best to destroy both American democracy and the international structures, like NATO, that hold it in place. The interests of reactionary American leaders and Russian president Putin run parallel. Astonishingly, that affinity has recently come out into the open. Some of our leaders are publicly echoing Putin’s propaganda, apparently willing to work with him to undermine the principles on which our nation rests so long as it means they can stay in power.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality. He did so until 1943, when he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the U. S. S. Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank in minutes, taking two-thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the oligarchs will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

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Who would have thought that Putinist fascism would take over such a large portion of the U.S. Government without firing a shot?

“Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?” Interesting question on which, unfortunately, the jury is still out.

Anyone who watched Ted “Out Of Cruz Control” (R-RUS) suck up to and double down on V. Putin’s & Trump’s favorite false narrative about the Ukraine on “Meet the Press” yesterday couldn’t be too optimistic for the survival of our democracy if the GOP has any say in the matter! Chuck Todd was left almost speechless by Cruz’s outright lies and Putinist propaganda!

PWS

12-09-19

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

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

Rachel Morris writes in Highline:

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

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

PWS

11-26-19

THE HATER-IN-CHIEF: “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.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-has-spread-more-hatred-of-immigrants-than-any-american-in-history/2019/11/07/7e253236-ff54-11e9-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

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.

Those racist restrictions were rescinded in 1965. When Lyndon Johnson sat at the feet of the Statue of Liberty and signed legislation that ended the discriminatory quotas, he predicted that the federal government would “never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.” But Johnson could not have imagined a president like Trump.

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

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

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.

PWS

11-11-19

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX NEWS: Trump Brings Ignominious End To Six Decades Of U.S. Global Leadership On Refugees – Functionally Ends One Of America’s Most Successful, Beneficial, & Enriching Programs!

https://apple.news/AIdY3RXXGRp2vAq_TNEIM1w

Trump’s cuts to the refugee program signal the end of an era.

By Nicole Narea | October 1, 2019 7:30 am

The United States’ refugee program once served as a global model of how a powerful country should support the world’s most vulnerable people. But under President Donald Trump, America is now accepting fewer refugees than ever, signaling that not even they are immune to the president’s restrictionist immigration policies.

On Thursday, the administration announced that the US will accept 18,000 refugees at most over the next year, the fewest in history and down from a cap of 110,000 just two years ago. A new executive order from Trump will allow state and local authorities to block refugees from settling in their areas.

The Trump administration claims that lowering refugee admissions would allow the US to take in more asylum seekers: people fleeing violence and persecution who apply for protection when they are already in the US, unlike refugees, who are processed by international organizations.

But the administration is also doing everything it can to keep asylum seekers out of the US. Migrants can be returned to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum applications, barred from obtaining asylum if they passed through another country before arriving in the US, or sent back to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to seek protections there.

During his campaign, Trump painted refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war as national security threats. In office, his administration hasn’t distinguished among asylum-seekers, refugees, and other migrants. It’s painted them all as a threat to or drain on American society and has crafted policies that try to keep as many people out of the US as possible.

The Trump administration is setting up the admission of refugees and asylum seekers as a “zero-sum game.” But in reality, it’s just trying to block immigration across the board, said Elizabeth Foydel, deputy police director at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

The US has the capacity to take in both more refugees and more asylum seekers. But the Trump administration is sending a message: The US is no longer the same safe haven it once was. The policies are in line with acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli’s amendment to Emma Lazarus’s famous poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”

During the campaign, Trump helped stoke anti-refugee sentiment

The refugee program has historically flourished under Republican presidents. Even in previous Republican administrations seeking to curtail immigration, no one has ever set the cap on refugee admissions as low as Trump has. Former President George W. Bush briefly cut the number of refugees admitted after the 9/11 attacks, but even then the limit was set at 70,000.

But the bipartisan consensus on maintaining a robust refugee resettlement program began to unravel after the Paris terror attacks in late 2015, said Yael Schacher, senior US advocate for Refugees International, when suicide bombers — reportedly sanctioned by the Islamic State — killed 130 civilians in explosions and mass shootings throughout the city.

There was speculation that one of the attackers was a refugee, one of 5.6 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011 by the still-ongoing civil war. It was later confirmed that all of the perpetrators were citizens of the European Union. But the rumors were enough to spark a panic about Syrian refugees and start a movement among governors, mostly Republicans, to cut back US admissions of Syrian refugees and resettlement efforts more broadly.

Governors from 31 states, all Republican but for New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, said they no longer wanted their state to take in Syrian refugees. In 2016, Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana, also tried to prevent refugee resettlement agencies in his state from getting reimbursed for the cost of providing social services to Syrian refugees.

But states didn’t have the legal authority to simply refuse refugees; that’s the prerogative of the federal government. Pence ultimately had to back down after a federal court ruled against his decision to withhold the reimbursements.

Trump, then campaigning for president, stirred up more fear, suggesting that Syrian refugees were raising an army to launch an attack on the US and promising that all of them would be “going back” if he won the election. He said that he would tell Syrian children to their faces that they could not come to the US, speculating that they could be a “Trojan horse.”

“Military tactics are very interesting,” Trump said. “This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe. Or if they sent 50,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 … That could be possible. I don’t know that it is, but it could be possible.”

When Trump eventually took office, he delivered on his promise to slash refugee admissions from Syria, suspending refugee admissions altogether from January to October 2017. From October 2017 to October 2018, the US admitted only 62.

State leaders lined up behind him: The Tennessee legislature, for instance, filed a lawsuit in March 2017 claiming that the federal government was infringing on states’ rights by forcing them to take in refugees (a court challenge that also failed).

Trump’s executive order Thursday may vindicate the states that wanted to turn refugees away. (The International Refugee Assistance Project said it is contemplating challenging the order in court.) Under the executive order, local governments that do not have the resources to support refugees in becoming “self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance” will be able to turn them away.

It’s not clear how it will play out in practice. States won’t just be able to refuse refugees from certain nations, such as Syria, Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell Law, said. Immigration law provides that state and local governments must provide aid “without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political opinion.”

But it could prove complicated when states and municipalities disagree over whether to accept refugees. It’s possible that states will be able to override local governments. Take, for example, cities like Dallas, which has historically taken in many refugees but is located in Texas, which has previously sought to prohibit them.

The executive order would also create inconsistent refugee policies across the country, making it next to impossible for the federal government to properly plan for refugee settlement, Schacher said.

“We are one nation,” she said. “The idea that governors can direct where refugees can first resettle not only undermines federalism but divides us on a policy which is fundamentally a national one.”

Trump’s refugee policy reflects his broader attitude toward immigrants

The Center of Immigration Studies (CIS), which advocates for lowering immigration levels overall, has influenced many of the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies. The refugee cap is no exception.

The organization has gained influence in the Trump era, with some of its former researchers assuming senior positions in the administration. CIS threw support behind the movement to block Syrian refugees in 2016, casting doubt on whether the United Nations’ refugee office could actually vet them for security threats before they arrive in the US.

The organization has also claimed that the current system allows the federal government to impose too much financial burden on states to carry out refugee resettlement. And it has called into question why the US should dedicate resources to resettling refugees rather than focusing on the southern border.

Trump’s most recent refugee policy moves are “long overdue,” in particular his executive order allowing states the opportunity to refuse refugees, CIS senior researcher Nayla Rush writes.

“Refugees are not just parachuted into a void,” she said. “Positive reception and orientation are, therefore, necessary for a successful integration.”

It all fits in with one of the broader ideas guiding Trump’s immigration policy: that immigrants “exploit public assistance” without offering the US anything in return, Foydel said.

In the same vein, the Trump administration has published a rule, set to go into effect October 15, that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to weigh certain immigrants’ use of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing assistance, and federally subsidized housing against them in their applications for green cards or visas. The rule will primarily affect a small proportion of family-based green card applicants, but immigrants are already disenrolling from public benefits out of fear that they will be penalized.

Trump has justified it as a means of ensuring that immigrants are “financially self-sufficient” and to “protect benefits for American citizens.”

“I am tired of seeing our taxpayer paying for people to come into the country and immediately go onto welfare and various other things,” Trump said when announcing the rule. “So I think we’re doing it right.”

Foydel said that Trump is trying to abdicate federal responsibility for the most vulnerable immigrants, forcing states that already serve as immigrant “sanctuaries” to step up. He threatened to release detained immigrants into sanctuary cities in April, and Thursday’s executive order also requires states that agree to receive refugees to publish their “consent letters” publicly, which some have questioned as a means of politically targeting immigrant-friendly areas.

“The positions of different states might be politicized and used to foment anti-refugee sentiment,” Schacher said.

It’s a mischaracterization to say that immigrants take advantage of welfare programs, Foydel said.

In her experience, refugees have no desire to be on public assistance for any longer than necessary and start working as soon as they can. She also pointed to research that refugees end up contributing more in taxes than what it costs to resettle them: on average, $21,000 among refugees who entered the US as adults between 2010 and 2014, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“I think that there are a number of policies we’ve seen that have this language of economic self-sufficiency,” Foydel said. “It’s part of a false narrative about refugees and also immigrants more broadly exploiting public assistance when the data says it’s not true.”

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

Trump‘s cowardly attacks upon the world’s most vulnerable, aided and abetted by morally corrupt GOP policitos, and “masterminded” by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller (taxpayers are actually supporting this evil clown — talk about abuse of public assistance!), ends what had been one of our most important and long-lasting bipartisan policy successes.

And, since much of the expertise and hard work that made the program so successful were contributed by NGOs and (real, not Trumpian) religious organizations, those programs are now being dismantled and the expertise and resources directed elsewhere. Literally decades of irreplaceable knowledge, expertise, and organizational talent has been lost almost overnight.

Even when a wiser, more humane, decent Administration finally wants to “restart” these critically important programs, it will be no easy task. It basically took nearly half a century to build up the current expertise. Once dissipated, it won’t be easily re-created – certainly not overnight. Obviously, there are serious, long-term consequences to allowing a kakistocracy to take over the government of our nation.

PWS

10-08-19

Category: Holocaust Museum

Due Process Forever!

DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!

How to build a 1.3 million case backlog with no end in sight: Anatomy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling:”

SAVING CHILD MIGRANTS WHILE SAVING OURSELVES

Due Process Forever; Child Abuse & Gratuitous Cruelty, Never.

Due Process Forever!

John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made

Profiles in Fecklessness

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for Courtside

Jan. 24, 2020

Due Process Forever; Feckless & Complicit Courts, Never!

NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

ROGER ALGASE @ ILW.COM: How The Trump Regime’s Gross Immorality, Inhumanity, & Illegality Have Replaced America’s Moral Leadership On The World Stage!

FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

HISTORY W/ HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Remembering Dec.7, 1941, Exposing Those Who Betray Its Legacy —“The interests of reactionary American leaders and Russian president Putin run parallel.”

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

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

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

THE HATER-IN-CHIEF: “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.”

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX NEWS: Trump Brings Ignominious End To Six Decades Of U.S. Global Leadership On Refugees – Functionally Ends One Of America’s Most Successful, Beneficial, & Enriching Programs!

Due Process Forever!

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DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

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How to build a 1.3 million case backlog with no end in sight: Anatomy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling:”

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Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

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