“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

Dead Refugee Child
Dead Refugee Child Washes Ashore in Turkey — Stephen Miller Hopes To Kill More Refugees in The Americas
Stephen Miller & Wife
Mr. & Mrs. Stephen Miller Look Forward to Planning Together for More “Crimes Against Humanity” Targeting World’s Most Vulnerable Refugees

“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

 

“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah”

 

— From “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors (1971)

 

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Feb. 24, 2019

 

I have been getting “unverified hearsay” reports from Courtside readers and others across the country that an emboldened and now totally unrestrained Trump regime actively is planning an all-out extralegal, extrajudicial onslaught against established asylum laws. It’s likely to claim the lives of many of the most vulnerable and deserving asylum seekers in the United States.

 

Predictably, this atrocious attack on humanity and human dignity is the “brainchild” of newly married neo-fascist White Nationalist hate monger Stephen Miller. Although unconfirmed, these reports have come from diverse enough sources and sound so consistent with the regime’s nativist, xenophobic approach to asylum that I, for one, give them credence. It’s time to start sounding the alarm for the regime’s latest vile assault on the rule of law and our common humanity!

 

I have gleaned that there is a 200-page anti-asylum screed floating around the bowels of the regime’s immigration bureaucracy representing more or less the nativist version of the “final solution” for asylum seekers. The gist of this monumental effort boils down along these lines:

 

[W]ould ban the grant of asylum claims involving PSGs defined solely by criminal activity, terrorist activity, persecutory actions, presence in country with generally high crime rates, attempted recruitment by criminal, terrorist, persecutors, perception of wealth, interpersonal disputes which government were not aware of or involved in and do not extend countrywide; private criminal acts which government was not aware of and do not extend countrywide; status as returned from U.S. and gender. Note the inclusion of “gender” at the end.

 

Thus, in one “foul swoop” the regime would illegally: 1) strip women and the LGBTQ community of their decades-long, hard-won rights to protection under asylum laws; 2) eliminate the current rebuttable regulatory “presumption of countrywide future persecution” for those who have suffered past persecution; 3) reverse decades of well-established U.S. and international rulings that third party actions that the government was unwilling or unable to protect against constitute persecution; and 4) encourage adjudicators to ignore the legal requirement to consider “mixed motivation” in deciding asylum cases.

 

There is neither legal nor moral justification for this intentional distortion and rewriting of established human rights principles. Indeed, in my experience of more than two decades as a judge at both the appellate and trial levels, a substantial number, perhaps a majority, of the successful asylum and/or withholding of removal claims in Immigration Court involved non-governmental parties and/or gender-based “particular social groups.” They were some of the clearest, most deserving, and easiest to grant asylum cases coming before the Immigration Courts.

 

At the “pre-Trump” Arlington Immigration Court, many of these cases were so well-documented and clearly “grantable” that they were “pre-tried” by the parties and moved up on my docket by “joint motion” for “short hearing” grants. This, in turn, encouraged and rewarded multiparty cooperation and judicial efficiency. It was “due process with efficiency, in action.”

 

Consequently, in addition to its inherent lawlessness, cruelty, and intentional inhumanity, the regime’s proposed actions will stymie professional cooperation between parties and inhibit judicial efficiency. This is just one of many ways in which the regime has used a combination of wanton cruelty and “malicious incompetence” to artificially “jack up” the Immigration Court backlog to over 1.3 million pending and “waiting” cases, even with the hiring of hundreds of additional Immigration Judges.

 

In a functioning democracy, with an independent judiciary, staffed by judges with knowledge, integrity, and courage, you might expect a timely judicial intervention to block this impending legal travesty and humanitarian disaster as soon as it becomes effective. But, as Justice Sotomayor recently pointed out in a blistering dissent, Chief Justice Roberts and his four GOP colleagues appear to have “tilted” in favor of the regime.

 

They can’t roll over and bend the laws fast enough to “greenlight” each new immigrant-bashing gimmick instituted by the regime. Moreover, as I’m sure is intended, once these new anti-asylum regulations are railroaded into force, the USCIS Asylum Offices will deny “credible fear” in nearly all cases, thus preventing most asylum applicants from even getting a day in court to properly challenge the regulations. All this will happen while the life-tenured Article III Courts look the other way.

 

For Stephen Miller, the coming Armageddon for defenseless asylum seekers must represent the ultimate triumph of fascism over democracy, hate over reason, and racism over tolerance. Miller was recently quoted in a New Yorker article about how screwing asylum applicants, and presumably knowing that they and their families would suffer and die, be tortured, or be otherwise harmed by his unlawful acts, was, in effect, his “life’s dream.” “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life,” said Miller after a meeting in which he had promoted a fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreement” with El Salvador, a country he acknowledged was without a functioning asylum system.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/stephen-miller-immigration-this-is-my-life.html.

 

It appears that even Miller’s forlorn “love life” has taken an upturn. Although the Trump Administration has been a “coming out party” for racists, White Nationalists, and White Supremacists of all stripes, the “hater dater circuit” has remained somewhat “restricted.” Evidently, not everyone “gets off” on the chance to get “up close and personal” with “wannabe war criminals.”

 

Nevertheless, in the middle of all the suffering he has caused, Miller finally found somebody who apparently hates and despises humanity just as much as he does, in Vice Presidential Press Secretary Katie Waldman. They were recently married at the Trump Hotel in D.C. with the “Hater-in-Chief” himself attending the festivities. How can America “get any greater,” particularly if you have the good fortune not to be a refugee condemned to rape, torture, abuse, family separation, beatings, disfiguration, burning, cutting, extortion or other horribles by this cruel, scofflaw, and “maliciously incompetent” regime?

 

 

 

 

COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/18/judges-meeting-trump/

Fred Barbash
Fred Barbash
Legal Reporter
Washington Post

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

By

Fred Barbash

Feb. 18, 2020 at 3:16 a.m. EST

The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.

Republicans defend Barr as Klobuchar looks forward to testimony

Lawmakers and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway commented Feb. 16 on President Trump’s tweets and the conduct of Attorney General William P. Barr. (The Washington Post)

On Sunday, more than 1,100 former Justice Department employees released a public letter calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case.

More than 1,100 ex-Justice Department officials call for Barr’s resignation

A search of news articles since the group’s creation revealed nothing like a meeting to deal with the conduct of a president or attorney general.

Rufe, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, could not be reached for comment late Monday.

The action follows a week of turmoil that included the president tweeting his outrage over the length of sentence recommended by career federal prosecutors for his friend Roger Stone and the decision by Barr to withdraw that recommendation.

In between, Trump singled out the judge in the Stone case, Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for personal attacks, accusing her of bias and spreading a falsehood about her record.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe said to USA Today. “We’ll talk all this through.”

Trump began disparaging federal judges who have ruled against his interests before he took office, starting with U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. After Curiel ruled against Trump in 2016 in a pair of lawsuits detailing predatory marketing practices at Trump University in San Diego, Trump described him as “a hater of Donald Trump,” adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.”

Trump keeps lashing out at judges

President Trump has a history of denouncing judges over rulings that have negatively affected him personally as well as his administration’s policies. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)

Faced with more than 100 adverse rulings in the federal courts, Trump has continued verbal attacks on judges.

Rufe’s comments gave no hint of what the association could or would do in response.

Some individual judges have already spoken out critically about Trump’s attacks generally, among them U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a colleague of Jackson’s in Washington, and most recently, the chief judge of the court in Washington, Beryl A. Howell.

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

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!

Will Trump & Barr eventually separate Article III Judges’ families or send them to danger zones in Mexico or the Northern Triangle to “deter” rulings against the regime? Will Mark Morgan and Chad Wolf then declare “victory?” Will their families be scattered to various parts of the “New American Gulag” with no plans to reunite them? Will they be put on trial for their lives without access to lawyers? Are there costs for failing to take a “united stand” for the rule of law, Constitutional Due Process, human rights, and the human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

Why does it take the case of a lifetime sleaze-ball like Roger Stone to get the “life-tenured ones” to “wake up” to the attacks on humanity and the rule of law going on under noses for the past three years?

Complicity has costs!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-18-20

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?

Linda Greenhouse
Linda Greenhouse
Contributing Opinion Writer
NY Times

 

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
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!

Priscilla Alvarez
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.

 

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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

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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

3

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 illpregnant, 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.

 

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

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!”

Elora Mukherjee
Elora Mukherjee
“American Hero”
Clinical Professor of Law & Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic
Columbia Law School

 

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
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.

 

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

Alison Leal Parker
Alison Leal Parker
Managing Director, U.S. Program
Human Rights Watch

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 21st Century.

 

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

44 Then 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?’ 45 Then 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.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

 

Amen!

 

PWS

02-11-20

LETTER FROM 21 DEMOCRATIC SENATORS HIGHLIGHTS  FRAUD, “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN TRUMP REGIME’S BOGUS “SAFE THIRD COUNTRY AGREEMENTS” WITH SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS AND INHOSPTABLE COUNTRIES FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS!

Trump Refugee Policy
Trump Refugee Policy

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.02.05%20Letter%20to%20State,%20DOJ,%20DHS%20about%20Northern%20Triangle%20Asylum%20Cooperative%20Agreements.pdf

 

The Honorable Michael R. Pompeo Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20037

The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001

The Honorable Chad F. Wolf
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security U.S. Department of Homeland Security 3801 Nebraska Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20528

tinitrd ~tatrs ~rnatr WASHINGTON. DC 20510

February 5, 2020

Dear Secretary Pompeo, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Secretary Wolf:

We write regarding the “asylum cooperative agreements”1 (ACAs) that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has signed in recent months with Guatemala? El Salvador,3 and Honduras,4 countries collectively referred to as the “Northern Triangle.” These agreements outline a framework that could enable the United States to expel asylum seekers to each ofthese countries, regardless of where the migrants are from or which countries they have transited en

1 Sometimes referred to as “safe third country agreements.” U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-20 19-11-19/pdf/20 19-25137.pdf.

2 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Republic of Guatemala on Cooperation Regarding the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed July 26,2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6232982-Signed-Agreement- English.html#document/p 1.

3 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative- Agreement.html.

4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic of Honduras for Cooperation in the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed September 25, 2019, https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/47/a5/85ea59444cb89bb2f3eca15880f3/us-honduras- asylum-cooperative-agreement.pdf.

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route to the United States.5 The Trump Administration’s approach to asylum seekers is not only inhumane and potentially illegal; it could also overwhelm the asylum systems ofGuatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and further destabilize those countries. As such, these agreements could have serious and detrimental implications for U.S. national security.

There is significant evidence that the Northern Triangle countries are unlikely to provide safety or adequate protection for asylum seekers, both because ofthe pervasive violent crime and targeted persecution there as well as their governments’ weak or practically non-existent asylum capacities. We are also concerned that expelling asylum seekers under this framework raises serious legal and procedural questions, including the degree to which the Administration complied with relevant law in producing and signing these agreements.

As you know, the Northern Triangle countries have some ofthe highest homicide rates in the world and are experiencing massive forced displacement both internally and across borders.6•7•8 The Department of State’s own human rights reports for these countries describe the dangers of rape, femicide, forced child labor, and threats against the LGBTQ community.9 Gang violence is pervasive and often transcends borders; some ofthese criminal organizations are so dangerous that even some police forces trained to combat gang violence are themselves fleeing to the United States.10 Despite these troubling facts, on November 21,2019, the Administration expelled a Honduran man to Guatemala in the first transfer under these agreements.11 ·

The Administration has since expelled more than 250 migrants from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala.12 At first, the Administration said it would transfer only single adults.13 However,

5 The agreements do not allow for returning an asylum seeker to the country oftheir own nationality. But they allow, for example, for a Honduran or a Cameroonian asylum seeker to be deported to Guatemala. U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19,2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019-25137.pdf.

6 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide 2019,” July 2019, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html.
7 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018,” June 20, 2019, p. 48, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/5d08d7ee7/unhcr-global-trends-2018.html. (In 2018, over 282,000 people from the Northern Triangle countries had asylum applications pending adjudication worldwide)
8 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Painting the Full Picture: Persistent data gaps on internal displacement associated with violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” November 2019, pp. 10-15, http://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/painting-the-full-picture-displacement-data-gaps-in-the-ntca.
9 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustoin/420abb692c/.
10 Washington Post, “It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country,” Kevin Sieff, March 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the americas/its-so-dangerous-to-police-ms-13-in-el- salvador-that-officers-are-fleeing-the-countrv/2019/03/03/e897dbaa-2287-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084 stmy.html

11 Reuters, “Shifting asylum ‘burden’: U.S. sends Guatemala first Honduran migrant,” Sofia Menchu, November 21, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-guatemala/shifting-asylum-burden-us-sends-guatemala- frrst-honduran-migrant-idUSKBN1XV1 WM.
12 The Intercept, “One year into ‘Remain in Mexico,’ the U.S. is enlisting Central America in its crackdown on asylum,” Sandra Cuffe, January 29, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/remain-in-mexico-year-anniversary- central-america/.

13 LA Times, “In a first, U.S. starts pushing Central American families seeking asylum to Guatemala,” Molly O’Toole, December 10, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-10/u-s-starts-pushing-asylum- seeking-families-back-to-guatemala-for-first-time.

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the Administration has begun to transfer children and families, including a Honduran mother with two children who had been hospitalized.14 Reportedly, many ofthese migrants are not even aware in advance ofthe country to which they are being transferred. Upon arrival, they are told that they have 72 hours to either apply for asylum or leave, but are reportedly given practically no information about the process.15

Because ofthe lack ofprotection offered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, these agreements raise serious legal questions. On November 18,2019, the Department ofJustice and DHS released an interim fmal rule (“Rule”) amending departmental regulations in order to implement the ACAs.16 The Rule, effective November 19, 2019, characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides that asylum seekers may be removed under the following conditiop.s:

“[I]fthe Attorney General determines that the alien may be removed, pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement, to a country (other than the country ofthe alien’s nationality or, in the case ofan alien having no nationality, the country of the alien’s last habitual residence) in which the alien’s life or freedom would not be threatened on account ofrace, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and where the alien would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection, uilless the Attorney General fmds that it is in the public interest for the alien to receive asylum in the United States.”17

The Rule provides that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security will make “categorical” determinations as to whether the Northern Triangle countries offer access to a “full and fair procedure” for determining asylum claims. Written information provided to our offices by the Administration indicates that “[t]he Attorney General and Secretary ofHomeland Security determined that Guatemala’s asylum system provides full and fair access to individuals seeking protection, as required by U.S. law, prior to the ACA entering into force on November 15.”18

The notion that Guatemala or the other two Northern Triangle countries offers such a procedure strains credulity-their systems for determining asylum claims are, at best, deeply flawed and under-resourced, and at worst, practically non-existent. According to the State Department’s human rights reports, in Guatemala, “identification and referral mechanisms for potential asylum seekers were inadequate… [and] migration and police authorities lacked adequate training

14 Associated Press, “Advocates: Honduran mother, children deported to Guatemala,” Nomaan Merchant, January 21, 2020, https://apnews.com/583a7dl0644f407e8035e5b6eddlc8f7.
15 Washington Post, “The U.S. is putting asylum seekers on planes to Guatemala- often without telling them where they’re going,” Kevin Sieff, January 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/worldlthe americas/the-us- is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre- going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-llea-alff-c48cld59a4a1 story.html.

16 U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019- 25137.pdf.

17 8 USC§ 1158(a)(2)(A). Emphasis added.
18 U.S. Department of State, Answer to Question for the Record to Deputy Secretary of State Nominee Stephen Biegun by Senator Bob Menendez (#235), Submitted November 20, 2019.

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concerning the rules for establishing refu,gee status.”19 Guatemala does not have a dedicated office for resolving asylum cases; instead, a commission offour officials from several ministries and the immigration department.meet a few times a year to decide cases.20 Reportedly, these officials did not resolve a single case in the first seven months of2019.21 Honduras and El Salvador do not have a single full-time asylum officer. By contrast, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has about 500 asylum officers who are currently tasked with adjudicating over 300,000 pending asylum cases.22 Thus, the Northern Triangle countries are not remotely equipped to fully and fairly handle even a small fraction ofthese cases.

The lack of asylum capacity poses a grave risk that these Northern Triangle governments w ill- whether inadvertently or willfully-return asylum seekers to their country ofpersecution, constituting the serious human rights violation of refoulement that is prohibited under Section 208(a)(2)(A) ofthe U.S Immigration and Nationality Act.

This provision ofU.S.law codifies U.S. obligations prohibiting the return ofrefugees to a territory where his or her life or freedom would be threatened as a state party to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The ACAs may also violate U.S. obligations as a party to the 1984 Convention against Torture.23 Indeed, in response to the publication ofthe Rule, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released a statement, saying it “has serious concerns about the new U.S. policy on asylum,” calling it “an approach at variance with international law that could result in the transfer ofhighly vulnerable individuals to countries where they may face life-threatening dangers.”24 A recently filed lawsuit details additional legal violations posed by the implementation ofthe ACAs.25

The ACAs recently signed by DHS appear to have been drafted in haste, with multiple typographical errors introduced into the agreements.26 There is little sign that they were

19 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustom/420abb692c/.
20 Wall Street Journal, “Asylum Seekers at U.S. Southern Border Can Now Be Sent to Guatemala Instead,” Michelle Hackman and Juan Montes, November 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/asy1um-seekers-at-u-s-southern- border-can-now-be-sent-to-guatemala-instead-11574187109.
21 Univision News, “Guatemala’s ’embryonic’ asylum system lacks capacity to serve as safe U.S. partner, experts say,” David C. Adams, August 2, 2019, https://www.univision.com/univision-news/immigration/guatemalas- embcyonic-asylum-system-lacks-capacity-to-serve-as-safe-u-s-partner-experts-say.
22 Government Executive, “Homeland Security Says It Will Dramatically Increase Asylum Workforce by Year’s End,” Eric Katz, October 23, 2019, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2019/10/homeland-security-says-it-will- dramatically-increase-asylum-workforce-years-end/160828/.
23 Protocol Relating to the Status ofRefugees, January 31, 1967; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 12, 1984; “Benchbook on International Law,” Diane Marie Amann (ed.), pp. ill.E-51, 2014, https://www.asil.org/sites/defau1t/files/benchbook/humanrights4.pdf.
24 UNHCR, “Statement on new U.S. asylum policy,” press release, November 19, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en- us/news/press/2019/11/5dd426824/statement-on-new-us-asylum-policy.html.
25 U.T. v. Barr, “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” United States District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.ac1u.org/sites/default/files/field document/complaint – u.t. v. barr 1 15 2020.pdf.
26 For example, the agreement with El Salvador refers to “El Salvadornian [sic] migration law, although this language is incorrect. A Google search for “El Salvadornian” produces zero results.:_the most common English- language demonym is “Salvadoran,” though “Salvadorian” and “Salvadorean” are also used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadorans. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the

4

negotiated in a meaningful way individually with each country. Furthermore, the President’s actions leading up to the agreements’ signing-including social media statements threatening to withhold, and subsequent withholding of, Congressionally-appropriated aid to the region- indicate that Central American officials may have accepted the terms under duress.27

~ Additionally, one news report indicated that, in a private meeting with President Trump, Secretary Pompeo criticized the agreement with Guatemala, “ca:lled the agreement flawed and a mistake,” and told the President that ”the Guatemalan government did not have the ability to carry out its terms.”28 This raises questions about the degree to which the State Department was involved in policy deliberations and decisions underlying these agreements.

Accordingly, please provide answers to the following questions by February 18, 2020:

  1. Did any officials within the State Department raise concerns abol)t the feasibility of implementing these ACAs due to the lack of capacity of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum systems, or for any other reason? Please provide any such memoranda or communications in which any such concerns were articulated.
  2. What specific concerns about the agreement with Guatemala were raised by Secretary Pompeo in the reported Oval Office meeting with the President? Have these concerns been addressed?
  1. Were any assessments of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum adjudication procedures made prior to the negotiation or conclusion ofthe ACAs? Please provide any documents related to any such assessments.
  2. The ACAs indicate that the parties shall develop standard operating procedures and plans regarding the implementation ofthese agreements. What is the status ofthese plans in each Northern Triangle coll.ntry?

4.. The ACAs indicate that they shall enter into force upon “exchange ofnotes” indicating that both countries have compl~ted the n~cessary domestic legal procedures for bringing the agreement into force. Which ofthe ACAs are in force? Please include copies ofany and all records related to this required exchange of notes.

  1. Reportedly, Honduran officials wanted to delay transfers until both countries “provided notification that they have complied with the legal and institutional conditions necessary for proper implementation of this agreement” but DHS officials wrote that this request read to them as an “escape-hatch not to implement the ACA.”29 Should this be taken as an indication that DHS considers the ACAs to be in force even in the absence of such “notification” by both countries?

Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, p. 2, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative-Agreement.html.
27 Politico, “Trump warns ofretaliation against Guatemala after immigration deal falls through,” Rishika Dugyala and Sabrina Rodrigues, July 23, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/23/trump-guatemala-retaliation- immigration-deal-1426722; NPR, “Trump Froze Aid To Guatemala. Now Programs Are Shutting Down,” Tim McDonnell, September 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/17/761266169/trump-froze- aid-to-guatemala-now-programs-are-shutting-down.
28 New York Times, “Trump Officials Argued Over Asylum Deal With Guatemala. Now Both Countries Must Make It Work,” Michael D. Shear and.Zolan Kanno-Youngs, August 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/safe-third-guatemala.html.
29 BuzzFeed News, “Trump Wants To Start Deporting Asylum-Seekers To Honduras By January,” Hamed Aleaziz, November 25, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/asylum-seekers-deportation-honduras- trump.

5

  1. The Rule indicates that the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security will make a categorical determination that each ofthe Northern Triangle countries offers a “full and fair procedure” for adjudicating asylum claims.
    1. Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland

Security determined do have a “full and fair procedure”? Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security determined do not have a “full and fair procedure”? For each country, when were any such determinations reached?

    1. How are the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security reaching these determinations? Please provide copies of any determinations made by DOJ and DHS and any related documentation ofdiscussions ofthis issue.
  1. The Rule characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Besides the ACAs, the only “safe third country” agreements signed in the 50 years since the enactment ofthe Immigration and Nationality Act was the agreement with Canada. Over two years elapsed between December 5, 2002, when that agreement was signed, and December 29, 2004, when it came into force.30 In contrast, less than four months elapsed between July 26, 2019, when the ACA with Guatemala was signed, and November 15,2019, when it came into force.
  1. In the ACA signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Guatemala’s Minister of Interior and Home Affairs said that “Guatemala is definitely clear on the responsibility that it has. We are clear that we have to make changes.”31 What changes, if any, did Guatemala make to strengthen their asylum procedures in these four months? Please provide any communications between the government of Guatemala.and the Administration related to improvements made to Guatemala’s asylum system since the agreement was signed in July.
  1. In order to ensure that the United States fulfills its obligations to refrain from sending a person to a place where such person will face harm, what procedures will the Administration follow if asylum seekers face torture, ill treatment, or persecution after being transferred to the Northern Triangle? ·
  2. Is DHS transferring asylum seekers under the ACAs to Northern Triangle countries on the same flights as deportees? How is DHS ensuring that asylum seekers are not transferred in the company of individuals who may threaten their life or freedom after their arrival in country?
  3. What, ifanything, was promised or offered by U.S. officials to the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras in exchange for their signing onto these agreements?

30 “AgreementbetweentheGovernmentofCanadaandtheGovernmentoftheUnitedStatesofAmericaFor cooperation in the examination ofrefugee status claims from nationals ofthird countries,” signed December 5, 2002, https://www.canada.ca/enlimmigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions- agreements/agreements/safe-third-country-agreementlfmal-text.html.
31 White House, “Remarks by President Trump at Signing ofSafe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala,” July 26, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-signing-safe-third-country- agreement-guatemala/.

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Sincerely,

un· ed States Senator

k4-/a…~ Richard Blumenthal
United States Senator

~~~~

Kirsten E. Gillibrand Benjamin L. Cardin

United States Senator

United States Senator

‘0…=.>–·-topher S. Murphy United States Senator

United States Senator

~%Markey ·~ United States Senator

Edward J.

Bernard Sanders United States Senator

Thomas R. Carper United States Senator

~~

United States Senator

7

Tim Kaine
United States Senator

Christopher A. Coons United States Senator

8

Cory A. Booker United States Senator

 

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

All good points. But, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a reply from the regime.

Obviously, in the process of selling out America, the GOP just authorized the regime to “give a big middle finger” to any type of Congressional oversight.

Once you get beyond the fraud, lawlessness, and intentional cruelty of the regime’s agreements, here’s the reality of what’s awaits those illegally “orbited” to dangerous failed states in the Northern triangle: death, torture, rape, extortion, etc.:

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

This isn’t “normal.” It’s politically and judicially enabled neo-fascism unfolding right in front of us.

PWS

02-10-20

 

 

JIM WALLIS @ SOJOURNERS: Trump Uses National Prayer Breakfast To Deliver Totally Inappropriate Self-Serving Rant! — “At the National Prayer Breakfast, Donald Trump extolled his own self-defined accomplishments — then he asked attendees to vote for him. Prayer, confession, love for our neighbors and enemies, and humility before God were entirely absent.”

Jim Wallis
Jim Wallis
American Theologian
Founder & Editor, Sojourners

http://go.sojo.net/site/R?i=Xw3ZwvLwGW9IUlZj-j0dCw

I did not attend the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, though I have done so in the past. The longtime Washington tradition brings together members of Congress from both political parties along with thousands of faith leaders, and every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has attended. But this is not a time in our nation for habitual or vague prayers for an audience, given the moral and political crisis we now find ourselves in — or one that starts with the president of the United States holding up a newspaper headline saying “Acquitted,” and quickly invoking an impeachment process corrupted by partisan politics.

While I agree that different political philosophies and opinions and honest partisan differences can be overcome by prayer and fellowship between believers, there is much more involved here. Donald Trump began a National Prayer Breakfast by celebrating his personal political success in a shamefully partisan process, underscoring that the moral health of our public life, the very soul of our democracy, and the integrity of faith are at stake.

Fortunately, keynote speaker Arthur Brooks spoke about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and attacked the “contempt” for each other that now defines our culture and politics. But the president’s speech that followed kicked off with him saying, “I don’t know if I agree with Arthur,” revealing his contempt for those who disagree with him and again demonstrating the arrogance, lies, corruption, and contempt that has taken over our public life. At the National Prayer Breakfast, Donald Trump extolled his own self-defined accomplishments — then he asked attendees to vote for him. Prayer, confession, love for our neighbors and enemies, and humility before God were entirely absent. Toward the end of his speech, Trump, off script, briefly admitted he still has a lot to learn. Thank God.

In one of the bright moments of the morning, Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) gave the closing benediction (by video since his cancer prevented his presence). He quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “I have decided to stick with love, for hate is too heavy a burden to bear.” This icon of the civil rights movement spoke of how he was beaten almost to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on Bloody Sunday, and then said, “But I never hated the people who beat me because I chose the way of peace, the way of love, and the way of nonviolence. For the God Almighty helped me.”

Lewis ended with an admonition to all the attendees — and to the nation — to “go in peace, go in love, and we commit to treating each other as we would treat ourselves. Amen.”

So, I was glad that I stayed home from the prayer breakfast — to pray on my own. Here is my prayer.

Dear Lord,

First, I ask you, Lord, for the courage that comes from faith — courage to stand up to the intensity of constant political corruption, the growing divisiveness in our culture, the spreading of fear, the downward spiral of hatred, and the ugly spirit of anger and even violence that is now shaping our politics.

I ask you, Lord, to defend the truth over the perpetual lies in Washington, D.C. And I pray that you heal the politics of grievance and blame and racial hostility that make people want to believe the lies. May we come to know what Jesus taught us: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” And may we come to understand that losing the truth will mean losing our freedom, that the opposite of the truth that sets us free are the lies that lead us to bondage — from presidential lies to political party lies to social media lies.

I ask you, Lord, to remind all of us who say we are your followers of your two great commandments:

To love God with our whole hearts, minds, and souls, with our whole selves — which must set us free from our nationalist idolatry of putting America first, and of white supremacy, militarism, and materialism, the three giant triplets of evil that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King prophetically called out.

To love our neighbor as ourselves, to treat others as we want to be treated, to love those who are different from us, as Jesus instructed us to do when asked, “Who is my neighbor?” This must set us free from ignoring or even targeting our neighbors who are not like us. And, yes, to extend that neighbor love even to our enemies.

May we reread and obey Jesus’ clear teachings that the “least of these” are the most important — the opposite of what we see in Washington, D.C. May we each ask you, Lord, what we must all do now if what Matthew’s Gospel says is true — that how we treat the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger (the immigrant and refugee), the sick, and the prisoner is how we treat Christ himself.

Teach us to say to all our fellow citizens increasingly ruled by fear what Jesus says to us, “Be not afraid.” Free us Lord from what Timothy’s epistle calls the “spirit of fear,” which is now a campaign strategy in American politics.

Remind us, Oh Lord, of what you taught us about leadership — defined by service, not by dominance. Teach us what is means for us to be servant leaders and to look for that in our elected leaders.

In a culture increasingly ruled by conflict and polarization, teach us what it would mean and cost for us to follow Jesus who says, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Lord, help us to find the strength to be those children of God who show love and not contempt for our enemies and seek to resolve our deepening conflicts.

In particular, on this day, in this week of political tumult, I give thanks for the human examples of courage based on faith.

I give thanks for Sen. Mitt Romney who became the first senator ever to vote to impeach a president from his own party saying, “I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.” And I am grateful for the long poignant pause, taken in the Senate chamber, when this senator emotionally talked about his faith.

I also give thanks for Alabama Sen. Doug Jones for risking his political career, which we seldom see in either political party, by voting for what he believed was “right over wrong.”

I pray for those presidential candidates of the opposition Democratic Party to live by their own faith and values and to not mimic the spirit and tactics of the president they oppose.

And, as we are biblically instructed, I pray for all our leaders, including our President Donald Trump, that he might learn the ways of Jesus, experience the continual conversion to Christ that changes all of us, and find the forgiveness and humility that we all need in the presence of God.

I pray for both parties to not be selective over who is entitled to life and dignity. Our theology of who bears the image of God must be consistent.

I pray for Christian believers to not put their political divisions first, but enter into a new conversation about Jesus — what he said, what he meant, and what that means now in our public life. Let us enter into those honest and vital conversations about who Jesus is and who he wants us to be, especially between our black, brown, and white churches.

I pray that citizens of different political persuasions refrain from attacking each other’s character, but rather try to understand each other’s deep concerns and hopes for their futures. In particular, help us to talk together about our hopes and fears for our children’s lives and learn that we want the same things for our kids’ futures.

I pray that religious believers in the United States put their faith over their politics, that citizens put their country over their political party, and that nobody in our country be exempt from the rule of law and the principles of our constitutional democracy.

In the midst of what is now a political, constitutional, moral, and spiritual crisis, with no certainty of how it will be resolved, we all pray, “Lord have mercy.”

Oh Lord, replace our feelings of helplessness and hopelessness with a commitment to courageous action and the hope that we believe can only come from you.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1

Amen

 

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

Amen!

PWS

02-06-20

 

U.S. JUDGE THWARTS (FOR NOW) TRUMP REGIME’S PERSECUTION/PROSECUTION OF HUMANITARIAN AID WORKERS – Regime’s Religious Hypocrisy Runs Deep!

Carol Kuruvilla
Carol Kuruvilla
Religious Affairs
Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-no-more-deaths-religious-liberty_n_5e3adf4ec5b6d032e76d1313

 

Carol Kuruvilla in HuffPost:

 

A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration, which often boasts about defending religious liberty, has violated the religious rights of a group of volunteers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration has spent years cracking down on the work of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a Unitarian Universalist ministry in Arizona that provides water and food to migrants crossing a treacherous stretch of desert along the border where dozens have died. Various members of No More Deaths have faced fines and even jail for what they consider to be faith-based, life-saving humanitarian aid.

But for the second time in months, a judge has ruled that the government shouldn’t be punishing these volunteers for putting their faith into practice.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez ruled Monday that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” As a result, the government substantially burdened the volunteers’ religious liberty by prosecuting them for this work, Marquez said.

“Given Defendants’ professed beliefs, the concentration of human remains on the [refuge], and the risk of death in that area, it follows that providing aid on the [refuge] was necessary for Defendants to meaningfully exercise their beliefs,” the judge wrote.

Márquez’s ruling reversed the decision of a lower court, where another judge dismissed the volunteers’ religious liberty claims and sentenced them to probation and fines last March.

A federal judge has ruled that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” From left, they are Natalie Hoffman, Madeline Huse, Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, and Oona Holcomb.

The case against the four volunteers ― Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick ― goes back to December 2017, a year when 32 sets of human remains were recovered from the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The volunteers were charged with misdemeanors for entering the wildlife refuge without proper permits and leaving behind jugs of water and cans of beans, which the government called abandonment of property.

The volunteers’ defense hinged on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The law states that if a defendant can prove that the government is substantially burdening her “sincerely held religious beliefs,” then the government has to show that it’s using the “least restrictive” path to achieving its goals.

This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe.Parker Deighan, spokesperson for No More Deaths

RFRA initially had broad bipartisan support. But more recently, the religious right has been using RFRA as a way to secure exemptions for conservative beliefs about abortion and LGBTQ rights. The evangelical Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores famously used RFRA to avoid paying for insurance coverage for contraception.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice has urged a narrow reading of RFRA claims made by people of faith who do not share the administration’s policy goals, according to Katherine Franke, faculty director of Columbia University’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project.

“The Trump Department of Justice has taken a biased approach to defending and enforcing religious liberty rights under RFRA, robustly protecting the rights of conservative Evangelical Christians while prosecuting people whose faith moves them to oppose the government’s policies,” Franke told HuffPost in an email.

Michael Bailey, the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for Arizona, said his team has no issue with Márquez’s finding that strong religious beliefs motivated the defendants’ acts.

“We highly value religious freedom without regard to where on the spectrum one’s beliefs might fall,” Bailey told HuffPost in a statement.

A volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths delivers water along a trail used by undocumented immigrants in the desert on May 10, 2019 near Ajo, Arizona.

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No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist ministry. But all four volunteers are technically religiously unaffiliated, which means they are part of a growing group of Americans who decline to identify with any specific religious tradition.

During testimonies, the four described feeling a spiritual calling to volunteer, inspired by beliefs about the sanctity of human life. They also spoke about taking moments of silence in the refuge to reflect on the suffering of those crossing the desert.

Holcomb said that she had constructed a “personal altar” at her home that included a ring of water bottles she picked up in the desert.

“There is … for me, I will say, like a deep spiritual need and a calling to do work based on what I believe in the world,” Holcomb testified, according to the judge’s opinion.

In its response to the volunteers’ appeal, the government argued that their beliefs were not truly religious because they didn’t explain how they fit into a “particular system of religious or spiritual beliefs.” The government also asserted that the volunteers were “draping religious garb” over “secular philosophical concerns.”

In her opinion, Márquez said that the volunteers’ RFRA claims can’t be dismissed just because they described their beliefs in broad terms and don’t belong to an established religion. She pointed out that religious and political motivations overlapped in the Hobby Lobby case. ThatSupreme Court verdict has shown that government faces an “exceptionally demanding” obligation to be minimally restrictive while imposing on a person’s religious exercise, Márquez said.

Ultimately, the government had failed to demonstrate that prosecuting the volunteers was the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling governmental interest, the judge said.

Scott Warren, a volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, walks into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to deliver food and water along remote desert trails used by undocumented immigrants on May 10, 2019, near Ajo, Arizona.

Márquez’s decision comes months after another No More Deaths volunteer, Scott Warren, was acquitted of a federal misdemeanor charge for leaving water jugs in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for migrants. The judge in that case also acknowledged that Warren’s action was protected by his right to religious freedom. That was one of the first times progressive religious beliefs related to immigration have been protected in this way, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project told HuffPost in November.

Franke said there are other cases where progressive people of faith are making religious exemption claims. The Rev. Kaji Douša, a New York pastor and immigrant rights activist, claims the federal government violated her religious freedom when she was detained and placed on a watch list for ministering to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.  The government has “trivialized” Douša’s RFRA claims and urged the court to dismiss them, Franke said.

In Philadelphia, the DOJ is trying to prevent a faith-based overdose prevention organization from opening a safe injection site, arguing that its “true motivation is socio-political or philosophical — not religious — and thus not protected by RFRA.”

Franke said that when Congress passed RFRA in 1993, the statute was meant to protect the religious liberty of people across a wide spectrum of beliefs, “not just some, and certainly not only those who hold religious beliefs that were shared with the current federal administration.”

Parker Deighan, a spokesperson for No More Deaths, told HuffPost that Márquez’s ruling on Monday reaffirms that “providing humanitarian aid is never a crime.”

“This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe,” she said. “We hope that that Judge Marquez’s ruling signifies a shift towards religious freedom exemptions being used to protect the work of people and organizations fighting on the side of justice, such as migrant solidarity organizations and indigenous peoples fighting for protection of their sacred lands and traditions, rather than protection for discrimination and bigotry.”

 

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So, here’s the deal.

The Trump (the least religious and most immoral President in U.S. History) regime uses a bogus “religious protection” rationale to cloak far-right programs of hate, intolerance, dehumanization, marginalization, and cruelty directed at people of color, the LGBTQ community, migrants, refugees, women, children, Muslims, Jews, and other vulnerable groups. According to the regime, “religious freedom” is limited to the “extremist religious right.”

Then, the regime attempts to misuse “the law” to punish those who actually “show Christ-like love in word and in deed.” To her credit, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez “just said no” to this disingenuous nonsense.

The only way to stop the intellectual dishonesty, mockery of religious humanitarian principles, and misuse of our laws is to oust Trump and his enablers from office at every level. Otherwise, we can expect the persecution and cruelty to continue.

And don’t be surprised if the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes find a way to manipulate the system to enable the persecution of others to continue and grow worse. It’s what complicit “judges” do in the face of tyrants.

While the regime is using your tax dollars to pervert the law to persecute humanitarian workers, they are simultaneously violating our Constitution, our statutes, and our international obligations, with the connivence of the Supremes and Federal Appeals Courts who choose to look the other way rather than standing up for individuals’ rights against authoritarian overreach.

It’s time to stand up for our Constitutional rights, human rights, and human decency. Throw the corrupt and immoral GOP and their collaborators out of office at the next election, and bring in Government officials, legislators, and life-tenured judges who are willing and able to stand up for their oaths of office!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-06-20

 

 

 

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/05/deported-danger/united-states-deportation-policies-expose-salvadorans-death-and

February 5, 2020

Deported to Danger

United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse

Summary

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February 5, 2020

US: Deported Salvadorans Abused, Killed

Stop Deporting Salvadorans Who Would Face Risks to Their Safety, Lives

The US government has deported people to face abuse and even death in El Salvador. The US is not solely responsible—Salvadoran gangs who prey on deportees and Salvadoran authorities who harm deportees or who do little or nothing to protect them bear direct responsibility—but in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm’s way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely.

Of the estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans living in the United States who are not US citizens, just under one-quarter are lawful permanent residents, with the remaining three-quarters lacking papers or holding a temporary or precarious legal status. While Salvadorans have asylum recognition rates as high as 75 percent in other Central American nations, and 36.5 percent in Mexico, the US recognized just 18.2 percent of Salvadorans as qualifying for asylum from 2014 to 2018. Between 2014-2018, the US and Mexico have deported about 213,000 Salvadorans (102,000 from Mexico and 111,000 from the United States).

No government, UN agency, or nongovernmental organization has systematically monitored what happens to deported persons once back in El Salvador. This report begins to fill that gap. It shows that, as asylum and immigration policies tighten in the United States and dire security problems continue in El Salvador, the US is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm.

Some deportees are killed following their return to El Salvador. In researching this report, we identified or investigated 138 cases of Salvadorans killed since 2013 after deportation from the US. We found these cases by combing through press accounts and court files, and by interviewing surviving family members, community members, and officials. There is no official tally, however, and our research suggests that the number of those killed is likely greater.

Though much harder to identify because they are almost never reported by the press or to authorities, we also identified or investigated over 70 instances in which deportees were subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm, usually at the hands of gangs, or who went missing following their return.

In many of these more than 200 cases, we found a clear link between the killing or harm to the deportee upon return and the reasons they had fled El Salvador in the first place. In other cases, we lacked sufficient evidence to establish such a link. Even the latter cases, however, show the risks to which Salvadorans can be exposed upon return and the importance of US authorities giving them a meaningful opportunity to explain why they need protection before they are deported.

The following three cases illustrate the range of harms:

  • In 2010, when he was 17, Javier B. fled gang recruitment and his particularly violent neighborhood for the United States, where his mother, Jennifer B., had already fled. Javier was denied asylum and was deported in approximately March 2017, when he was 23 years old. Jennifer said Javier was killed four months later while living with his grandmother: “That’s actually where they [the gang, MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha-13)] killed him.… It’s terrible. They got him from the house at 11:00 a.m. They saw his tattoos. I knew they’d kill him for his tattoos. That is exactly what happened.… The problem was with [the gang] MS [-13], not with the police.” (According to Human Rights Watch’s research, having tattoos may be a source of concern, even if the tattoo is not gang-related).

 

  • In 2013, cousins Walter T. and Gaspar T. also fled gang recruitment when they were 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were denied asylum and deported by the United States to El Salvador in 2019. Gaspar explained that in April or May 2019 when he and Walter were sleeping at their respective homes in El Salvador, a police patrol arrived “and took me and Walter and three others from our homes, without a warrant and without a reason. They began beating us until we arrived at the police barracks. There, they held us for three days, claiming we’d be charged with illicit association (agrupaciones ilícitas). We were beaten [repeatedly] during those three days.”

 

  • In 2014, when she was 20, Angelina N. fled abuse at the hands of Jaime M., the father of her 4-year-old daughter, and of Mateo O., a male gang member who harassed her repeatedly. US authorities apprehended her at the border trying to enter the US and deported her that same year. Once back in El Salvador, she was at home in October 2014, when Mateo resumed pursuing and threatening her. Angelina recounted: “[He] came inside and forced me to have sex with him for the first time. He took out his gun.… I was so scared that I obeyed … when he left, I started crying. I didn’t say anything at the time or even file a complaint to the police. I thought it would be worse if I did because I thought someone from the police would likely tell [Mateo].… He told me he was going to kill my father and my daughter if I reported the [original and three subsequent] rapes, because I was ‘his woman.’ [He] hit me and told me that he wanted me all to himself.”

As in these three cases, some people deported from the United States back to El Salvador face the same abusers, often in the same neighborhoods, they originally fled: gang members, police officers, state security forces, and perpetrators of domestic violence. Others worked in law enforcement in El Salvador and now fear persecution by gangs or corrupt officials.

Deportees also include former long-term US residents, who with their families are singled out as easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse. Former long-term residents of the US who are deported may also readily run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.

Nearly 900,000 Salvadorans living in the US without papers or only a temporary status together with the thousands leaving El Salvador each month to seek safety in the US are increasingly at risk of deportation. The threat of deportation is on the rise due to various Trump administration policy changes affecting US immigration enforcement inside its borders and beyond, changes that exacerbated the many hurdles that already existed for individuals seeking protection and relief from deportation.

Increasingly, the United States is pursuing policies that shift responsibility for immigration enforcement to countries like Mexico in an effort to avoid any obligation for the safety and well-being of migrants and protection of asylum-seekers. As ever-more restrictive asylum and immigration policies take hold in the US, this situation—for Salvadorans, and for others—will only worsen. Throughout, US authorities are turning a blind eye to the abuse Salvadorans face upon return.

Some people from El Salvador living in the United States have had a temporary legal status known as “Temporary Protected Status” or “TPS,” which has allowed those present in the United States since February 2001 (around 195,000 people) to build their lives in the country with limited fear of deportation. Similarly, in 2012, the Obama administration provided some 26,000 Salvadorans with “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or “DACA” status, which afforded some who had arrived as children with a temporary legal status. The Trump administration had decided to end TPS in January 2020, but to comply with a court order extended work authorization to January 2021. It remains committed to ending DACA.

While challenges to both policies wend their way through the courts, people live in a precarious situation in which deportation may occur as soon as those court cases are resolved (at the time of writing the DACA issue was before the US Supreme Court; and the TPS work authorization extension to January 2021 could collapse if a federal appellate court decides to reverse an injunction on the earlier attempt to terminate TPS).

Salvadoran asylum seekers are also increasingly at risk of deportation and return. The Trump administration has pursued a series of policy initiatives aimed at making it harder for people fleeing their countries to seek asylum in the United States by separating children from their parents, limiting the number of people processed daily at official border crossings, prolonging administrative detention, imposing fees on the right to seek asylum, extending from 180 days to one year the bar on work authorization after filing an asylum claim, barring asylum for those who transited another country before entering the United States, requiring asylum seekers to await their hearings in Mexico, where many face dangers, and attempting to narrow asylum.

These changes aggravated pre-existing flaws in US implementation of its protection responsibilities and came as significant numbers of people sought protection outside of El Salvador. In the decade from 2009 to 2019, according to government data, Mexican and United States officials made at least 732,000 migration-related apprehensions of Salvadoran migrants crossing their territory (175,000 were made by Mexican authorities and just over 557,000 by US authorities).

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the number of Salvadorans expressing fear of being seriously harmed if returned to El Salvador has skyrocketed. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of Salvadoran annual asylum applicants in the US grew by nearly 1,000 percent, from about 5,600 to over 60,000. By 2018, Salvadorans had the largest number (101,000) of any nationality of pending asylum applications in the United States. At the same time, approximately 129,500 more Salvadorans had pending asylum applications in numerous other countries throughout the world. People are fleeing El Salvador in large numbers due to the violence and serious human rights abuses they face at home, including one of the highest murder rates in the world and very high rates of sexual violence and disappearance.

Despite clear prohibitions in international law on returning people to risk of persecution or torture, Salvadorans often cannot avoid deportation from the US. Unauthorized immigrants, those with temporary status, and asylum seekers all face long odds. They are subjected to deportation in a system that is harsh and punitive—plagued with court backlogs, lack of access to effective legal advice and assistance, prolonged and inhumane detention, and increasingly restrictive legal definitions of who merits protection. The US has enlisted Mexico—which has a protection system that its own human rights commission has called “broken”—to stop asylum seekers before they reach the US and host thousands returned to wait for their US proceedings to unfold. The result is that people who need protection may be returned to El Salvador and harmed, even killed.

Instead of deterring and deporting people, the US should focus on receiving those who cross its border with dignity and providing them a fair chance to explain why they need protection. Before deporting Salvadorans living in the United States, either with TPS or in some other immigration status, US authorities should take into account the extraordinary risks former long-term residents of the US may face if sent back to the country of their birth. The US should address due process failures in asylum adjudications and adopt a new legal and policy framework for protection that embraces the current global realities prompting people to flee their homes by providing “complementary protection” to anyone who faces real risk of serious harm.

As immediate and first steps, the United States government should adopt the following six recommendations to begin to address the problems identified in this report. Additional medium- and long-term legal and policy recommendations appear in the final section of this report.

  • The Trump administration should repeal the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP); the two Asylum Bans; and the Asylum Cooperation Agreements.
  • The Attorney General of the United States should reverse his decisions that restrict gender-based, gang-related, and family-based grounds for asylum.
  • Congress and the Executive Branch should ensure that US funding for Mexican migration enforcement activities does not erode the right to seek and receive asylum in Mexico.
  • Congress should immediately exercise its appropriation power by: 1) Refraining from providing additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless and until abusive policies and practices that separate families, employ unnecessary detention, violate due process rights, and violate the right to seek asylum are stopped; 2) Prohibiting the use of funds to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Asylum Bans,” or the Asylum Cooperation Agreements, or any subsequent revisions to those protocols and agreements that block access to the right to seek asylum in the United States.
  • Congress should exercise its oversight authority by requiring the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General to produce reports on the United States’ fulfilment of its asylum and protection responsibilities, including by collecting and releasing accurate data on the procedural experiences of asylum seekers (access to counsel, wait times, staff capacity to assess claims, humanitarian and protection resources available) and on harms experienced by people deported from the United States to their countries of origin.
  • Congress should enact, and the President should sign, legislation that would broadly protect individuals with Temporary Protected Status (including Salvadorans) and DACA recipients, such as the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, but without the overly broad restrictions based on juvenile conduct or information from flawed gang databases.

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History will neither forget nor forgive the many Article III Judges who have betrayed their oaths of office and abandoned humanity by allowing the Trump regime to run roughshod over our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency.

Future generations must inject integrity, courage, and human decency into the process for appointing and confirming Article III Judges. Obviously, there is something essential missing in the legal scholarship, ethical training, and moral integrity of many of our current batch of  shallow “go along to get along” jurists!  Human lives matter!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-06-20

AS THE “J.R. FIVE @ HIS SUPREMES” HELP USHER IN A “NEW JIM CROW ERA OF UNACCOUNTABILITY,” AFRICAN-AMERICANS ARE ALL TOO FAMILIAR WITH “SHAM TRIALS” RESULTING IN “FIXED ACQUITTALS” OF THE GUILTY WHO HOLD POWER IN AMERICA! – We’re Back To The Days When Empowered “Arrogant White Guys” & Their Enablers Can Boast of Their Public Abuses of Our Legal System & Their Impunity!

David Love
David Love
Professor, Writer, Journalist

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/opinions/impeachment-no-witness-no-evidence-american-history-love/index.html

David Love @ CNN:

 

An impeachment trial with no witnesses or evidence is very American

Opinion by David Love

Updated 9:53 AM ET, Tue February 4, 2020

 

Senator: This is a tragedy in every possible way 02:05

David A. Love is a writer, commentator and journalism and media studies professor based in Philadelphia. He contributes to a variety of outlets, including Atlanta Black Star, ecoWURD and Al Jazeera. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidALove. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is a relative rarity in American political history, and yet aspects of it have the haunting familiarity of a sham trial in the Jim Crow South, where black people were routinely criminalized and murdered in the name of “justice.” Yes, there are certainly obvious differences between this political trial and the ones that many black Americans have faced, but the common thread remains: going through a trial that has already been decided before it even began.

David A. Love

There is little precedent for how to conduct only the third presidential impeachment trial ever to take place. However, with the Senate vote by the Republican majority to exclude witnesses — likely including former national security adviser John Bolton and indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas — the impeachment trial became nothing more than a kangaroo court with a predetermined outcome, a very American ritual of injustice masquerading as due process.

Comparing impeachment to Jim Crow jurisprudence, Rev. William J. Barber II of Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign summed it up when he tweeted: “In the old Jim Crow South, when racists harmed Black folks, the prosecutor & judge would conspire to have a fake trial & ensure the racists didn’t get convicted. We are seeing these same tactics play out in the impeachment trial under McConnell & it’s shameful.”

There is ample evidence the fix was in, that GOP senators had no intention of acting as impartial jurors. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said there was no chance the President would be removed from office, pledged to work closely and in “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment.

The Senate’s dangerous move 

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham said, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” And as some senators reportedly fell asleep and played with fidget spinners during the trial, Trump threatened to invoke executive privilege to block the testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton.

 

Boasting about hiding the impeachment evidence, Trump said “We have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

In a perfect example of jury nullification, Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexanderacknowledged Trump’s wrongdoing as “inappropriate,” yet supported acquittal and voted against witnesses. And Florida Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a Medium post, “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”

Trump’s impeachment defense lawyers gave campaign contributions to Sen. McConnell and other Republican jurors in advance of the trial, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Preventing first-hand witnesses from testifying and new documents from being entered into evidence is very typical of how trials were conducted in the Jim Crow South, when gerrymanderingvoter suppression and violence maintained white political rule, and all-white juries quickly convicted black defendants and exonerated white defendants without the need for evidence or deliberation.

For example, in 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — two white men — went on trial in Mississippi for the brutal kidnapping, murder and mutilation of Emmett Till — a black 14-year old boy from Chicago.

It was obvious then, as now, that the trial was for show, almost more a justification for what had happened to Till. A white woman, the wife of one of the defendants, alleged Till had whistled at her (decades later she admitted to lying).

A number of witnesses were called, including two black men, one of whom identified the killers, and both of whom were threatened with death for testifying. However, the sheriff reportedly placed other black witnesses in jail to prevent them from testifying. An all-white-male jury — black people were effectively not allowed to vote or serve on juries — deliberated for only 67 minutes to deliver a not guilty verdict. Even the jurors knew they were participating in theater; “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said.

Similarly, in 1931, nine black teens known as the Scottsboro boys were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. While the boys were awaiting trial, a white mob threatened to lynch them. With the exception of the 13-year-old, they were swiftly sentenced to death by an all-white-male jury. Although none were executed, they collectively served 100 years in prison. Some of the boys were retried and reconvicted, and the Supreme Court twice overturned the guilty verdicts.

Echoes of Jim Crow jurisprudence continue to the present day, and even with attempts to reform the criminal justice system, injustices plague the poor and people of color, who are disproportionately incarcerated. When black and Latino teens, known as the Central Park Five, were falsely arrested, interrogated and coerced in the brutal rape and beating a white woman in New York, Trump placed a full-page ad in four newspapers calling for the death penalty. Even after the accused were exonerated by DNA evidence linking another person to the crime, as recently as last year, Trump has declined to apologize for his actions.

It is not surprising that Trump’s GOP would work overtime to conduct a fake impeachment trial with their own narrative and set of facts and no witnesses to avoid accountability. This, despite a CNN poll showing that 69% of Americans want to hear new witness testimony, and a Quinnipiac Poll in which 75% say witnesses should be allowed to testify. A recent Pew poll found a slight majority of Americans supporting Trump’s removal from office, with 63% saying he has definitely or probably broke the law, and 70% concluding he has done unethical things.

However, if the Senate does not reflect the will of most Americans, it is because the Senate is a fundamentally undemocratic institution that exercises minority rule. For example, on a strictly 53-47 party line vote, the Senate voted to reject a series of amendments to subpoena documents and witnesses (for the vote that decided whether to allow witnesses, two Republicans voted with Democrats in a vote that failed 49-51 to allow witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial).

Those 53 Republican senators in the first vote, as author and reporter Ari Berman noted, represent 153 million Americans, as opposed to the 168 million people the Democratic senators represent. Minority rule is subverting democracy and the rule of law and undermining the popular will, resulting in unjust policies and decisions. This, as Republicans who control the Senate with a minority of popular support block the impeachment of a President who was elected with nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than his opponent. Jim Crow segregationists employed voter suppression, violence and coups to maintain power. Similarly, today’s GOP must rely on anti-democratic methods to cling to power in a changing America, and prop up a President who will most certainly stay in office through malfeasance, playing to xenophobic fear and threats of violence. 

Meanwhile, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has assumed the role of a potted plant throughout most the proceeding, helped create this mess by playing an active role in the erosion of democracy and the legitimacy of the political system. Under Roberts’ leadership, the high court has sanctioned gerrymandering, eviscerated voting rights, and allowed for unlimited money in our elections, including potentially from foreign sources.

If the Republicans hope for an end run around democracy with a kangaroo court, this is nothing new. Following in the footsteps of those who played a part in sham trials in the Jim Crow South, the Trump party cares little about justice, and everything about breaking the rules to maintain power in perpetuity. Unfortunately, sham trials are as American as apple pie.

 

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By aligning himself with the totally corrupt, lawless, and immoral Trump and his various scofflaw schemes, Roberts seems intent on following in the footsteps of the now reviled Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision.

Obviously, given a chance at a Second Term, a Senate of toadies, and a complicit, willfully tone-deaf Supremes, Trump has every intention of “Dred Scottifying” immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, political opponents, and other large segments of America.

“Corruption, impunity,” those are words that those of us who actually decided immigration cases saw often in country background information on third word dictatorships and autocracies. Now, thanks to Trump, his Senate toadies, and Article IIIs “go alongs,” those are also words that can be used to describe the American justice system.

 

 

PWS

02-05-20

 

THE LATEST FROM HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE:  Rethinking Chevron In The Era Of Weaponized Immigration Courts Acting As Adjuncts Of DHS Enforcement, & Further Adventures Of The Round Table!

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
jeffreyschase.com
In the present climate, immigration lawyers must continue to present judges with creative, intelligent arguments; to present the public with proof of what is wrong with the current system; and to present those in power to change what is wrong with solutions.

I’ve added posts that address each these points. First, I discuss some recent articles in which scholars raise creative legal arguments as to the limits of Chevron deference in appeals to the federal courts. I have also posted a statement of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges to the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship subcommittee that was made part of the record of its hearing last Wednesday on solutions to the present crisis in the immigration courts.

I have also posted the group statement of our Round Table on the one-year anniversary of the MPP, or “Remain in Mexico” policy that was drafted by former Immigration Judge Ilyce Shugall, who has volunteered her time to travel to Texas to observe MPP hearings that is meant to raise awareness of the need to end this awful program.

SUN, FEB 02

Rethinking Chevron?

The powers of the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals to influence law by issuing binding precedent decisions is greatly enhanced by what is known as Chevron deference.  The principl

Read More
TUE, JAN 28

Statement to the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration Court Reform

On Wednesday, January 29 at 9:30 am, the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee is holding a hearing entitled “Courts in Crisis:  The State of Judicial Independence and

Read More
TUE, JAN 28

Statement on the One Year Anniversary of the MPP Program

January 28, 2020

The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges is comprised of former immigration judges who are dedicated to due process in the immigration system.  As former immigration judges, we

Read More
jeffreyschase.com, 500 4th Ave., Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Another article that ties in well with a critical re-examination of Chevron in immigration cases is Tess Hellgren’s recent wonderful short article: “Faced with the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the immigration courts against asylum-seeking individuals, the role of the federal courts is more important than ever.” I recently republished it here: 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/

As we see the results of the regime’s Article III-enabled and encouraged nativist, racist policies like an expanded “Travel Ban” that now includes a large portion of Africa, new non-legislative restrictions on legal immigration, unmitigated expansion of the deadly “New American Gulag,” intentional mistreatment of children, and the continuing abrogation of both Due Process and our binding obligations to protect refugees at our Southern Border and elsewhere, Tess’s last sentence is particularly prophetic:

As the Attorney General and other executive officials attempt to expand their authority to define the terms of immigration adjudication, federal courts should heed the Seventh Circuit’s decision – and remember the foundational legal principle that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

So far, the Supremes and the Circuits have largely “vacated the province and shirked their duties” to the nation and our laws by shrinking and cowering in the face of the regime’s continuing lawlessness, bullying, bias, and tyranny. Indeed, the Supremes have shown a disturbing favoritism to unjustified requests by Trump’s Solicitor General to short-circuit the litigation system and the rules that bind all others. 

Not since the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback” (obviously one of the regime’s “models” of lawless disregard for human and legal rights, not to mention basic morality) has our national Government shown such overt racism and contempt for migrants of color. Yet, rather than standing tall and delivering a united, powerful, intellectually courageous defense of our Constitution, the “GOP Gang of Five Supremes” backed the dehumanization and demonization of migrants on racial and religious grounds for transparent and invidious political reasons in the “Travel Ban case.” They basically invited and then approved a demonstrably false and “bad faith” national defense “pretext” which the Administration has “jumped on” to justify other attacks on the rule of law.  

Now the “ban” has remarkably, but predictably, been extended to a large part of Africa, including its largest economy, Nigeria. Hardly a whimper as Trump disembowels both Constitutional norms and human decency. What’s next on the agenda, Supremes, a bogus Executive ban on all non-White, non-Christian immigration? Who’d be surprised at this point?

Of course, with “constitutional de-personification” well under way with Article III approval, the next targets will be US citizens of color and others who “dare to differ” like the LGBTQ community, women, political opponents, journalists, lawyers, and, finally, judges themselves once their usefulness to Trump and his authoritarian regime is exhausted. The all-powerful, unrestrained, “unitary Executive” has no need of legislature, judiciary, or the people except to “ratify” their authoritarian abuses.

The failure to defend and reinforce the courageous legal community challenging the regime’s authoritarian overreach and the pathetically weak defense of the integrity of judicial colleagues who have tried to hold the regime accountable by Roberts has done nothing  but confirm and reinforce Trump’s pre-existing  belief that courts are “his” tools and judges “his toadies.”

America deserves better from its life-tenured judiciary! What’s the purpose of a supposedly independent life-tenured judiciary that sides with powerful, dishonest, lawless, bullies over the rights of individuals and is unwilling to stand up for the rights and human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

PWS

02-04-20

🤡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
Dana Milbank
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

Dana Milbank in the WashPost:

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

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

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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.!

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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)
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)

 

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

WILLIAM SALETAN @ SLATE: “Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity” – “But Trump’s election and his persistent approval from more than 40 percent of Americans are a reminder that nothing in our national character protects us from becoming a rapacious, authoritarian country. What protects us are institutions that stop us from doing our worst.” 

William Saletan
William Saletan
Writer & Political Journalist
Slate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/trump-remorseless-advocate-crimes-against-humanity.html

 

Saletan writes:

It’s hard to keep up with President Donald Trump’s scandals. One day he’s covering up taxpayer-funded travel expenses for his family. The next, he’s stealing money for his border wall. The next, he’s being implicated by an accomplice in the extortion of Ukraine. But one horror is right out in the open: Trump is a remorseless advocate of crimes against humanity. His latest threats against Iran, Iraq, and Syria are a reminder that he’s as ruthless as any foreign dictator. He’s just more constrained.

Trump admires tyrants and defends their atrocities. He has excused North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s mass executions (“Yeah, but so have a lot of other people”) and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murders of journalists and dissidents (“At least he’s a leader”). As a presidential candidate, Trump shrugged off the gravity of using chemical weapons. “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy,” he joked.

At home, Trump has encouraged religious persecution and political violence. He called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States (he later imposed a modified version of the ban) and for collective punishment of Muslims who live here. As a candidate, Trump urged his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters. In 2018, at a political rally, he praised a Republican congressman for criminally assaulting a reporter. “Any guy that can do a body slam,” said Trump, “he’s my guy.”

Trump has long advocated war crimes. He has endorsed torture not just for information, but because our enemies “deserve it.” As a candidate, he proposed that for the sake of “retribution,” the United States should “take out” the families of terrorists. Wives and children were legitimate targets, he argued, because by killing them, we could deter terrorists who “care more about their families than they care about themselves.” Two months ago, he intervened in legal and military proceedings to thwart punishment of three American servicemen who had been indicted for or convicted of atrocities. Then he deployed the men in his reelection campaign.

Trump agrees with past presidents that we and our terrorist adversaries have played by “two [different] sets of rules.” But unlike his predecessors, he takes no pride in America’s higher standards. He sees them as a needless impediment, defended by “weak” and “stupid” people. In 2016, Trump complained that ISIS was “cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind.” Torture laws should be relaxed, he argued, “so that we can better compete with a vicious group of animals.” “You have to play the game the way they’re playing the game,” he explained.

Trump takes no pride in America’s higher standards. He sees them as a needless impediment, defended by “weak” and “stupid” people.

Some presidents have caused pain through recklessness or indifference. Trump inflicts pain on purpose. To deter migration from Latin America, his administration separated migrant parents from their children. Trump argued that the separation was a “disincentive.” Too many people, he explained, were “coming up because they’re not going to be separated from their children.” Later, he used the same sadistic logic to force a migration in Syria. He boasted that by facilitating Turkey’s invasion of that country, he had precipitated the “pain and suffering” necessary to compel Syrian Kurds “to leave.”

In Africa and the Middle East, Trump proudly advocates plunder. In October, he said the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil to make sure we were “paid back” for the costs of our occupation of that country. In Syria, he stationed U.S. forces at oil fields, explaining that he viewed those fields as a revenue stream. (“$45 million a month? Keep the oil.”) He proposed a business arrangement to exploit Syria’s oil: “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” Last Friday, in a Fox News interview, the president repeated that he cared only about the oil. “I left troops to take the oil,” he told Laura Ingraham. “The only troops I have are taking the oil.”

Two weeks ago, the United States killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.
To deter retaliation, Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s cultural sites—an explicit war crime. “If Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets,” he tweeted, “we have targeted 52 Iranian sites … some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” In an exchange with reporters, Trump dismissed legal objections to his threat. “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people,” he fumed. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”

Iraq’s Parliament, furious that Trump had killed Soleimani on its soil and without its consent, voted to expel American troops. But Trump refused to comply unless Iraq paid ransom. “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there,” he told reporters. “We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” He threatened to “charge them [the Iraqis] sanctions like they’ve never seen before.” Later, Trump told Ingraham that Iraq would also “have to pay us for embassies.” When she asked him how he planned to extract the payment, Trump replied, “We have $35 billion of their money right now sitting in an account. And I think they’ll agree to pay. … Otherwise, we’ll stay there.”

Trump views the military as a mercenary force he can send around the world for hire. A Very Stable Genius, the new book by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, describes a White House meeting at which Trump said American troop deployments should yield a profit. Trump told Ingraham he’s doing exactly that: “We’re sending more [troops] to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia’s paying us for it.” He recounted his business pitch to the Saudis: “You want more troops? I’m going to send them to you, but you’ve got to pay us.” And he proudly reported that the Saudis had accepted the deal. “They’re paying us,” he told Ingraham. “They’ve already deposited $1 billion in the bank.”

Trump’s amorality—his complete indifference to rules against theft, abuse, exploitation, and killing—is a public relations problem for his apologists. They struggle to cover it up. First they softened his Muslim ban to a “travel ban” on certain majority-Muslim countries. Then they concocted non-sadistic rationales for his family-separation policy. Last week, after Trump threatened Iran’s cultural sites, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the public that Trump would obey the law. Pompeo also whitewashed Trump’s threats against Iraq, insisting that American troops were in that country to protect its “sovereignty.” Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, claimed that when Trump spoke of Saudi Arabia paying for U.S. troop deployments, “What the president is referring to is burden sharing.”

But Trump refuses to be silenced. Hours after Pompeo promised that the president wouldn’t target Iran’s cultural sites, Trump repeated that he would. Later, Trump stiff-armed Ingraham’s attempts to clean up his language about stealing Syrian oil. “I left troops to take the oil,” he told her. She tried to correct him: “We’re not taking the oil. They’re protecting the facilities.” Trump shrugged off this reformulation. “Well, maybe we will, maybe we won’t,” he said. “Maybe we should take it. But we have the oil.”

Having an evil president doesn’t make the United States evil. We have a lot to be proud of: a culture of freedom, a strong constitution, vigorous courts, democratic accountability, and laws that protect minorities and human rights. On balance, we’ve been a force for good in the world. But Trump’s election and his persistent approval from more than 40 percent of Americans are a reminder that nothing in our national character protects us from becoming a rapacious, authoritarian country. What protects us are institutions that stop us from doing our worst.

Thanks to Magda Werkmeister and Daijing Xu for research assistance.

 

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

I’d argue that far from being a strong bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian tyranny, our democratic institutions – Congress, Article III Courts, the bureaucracy, and even much of the media — are in a state of constant meltdown under his regime’s relentless attacks. We can see that graphically played out every day in the GOP’s largely fact free and totally dishonest defense of Trump’s running roughshod over both the Congress and our Constitution.

I can’t detect a sliver of desire on the part of the GOP and its enablers to hold Trump accountable for any misdeed — even soliciting foreign interference in our electoral process and then lying to cover it up. The facts really aren’t in dispute here. Whether the U.S. could survive another four years of Trump and remain a democratic republic is still, unfortunately, an open question.

We can hope for the best. But, without “regime change” in November 2020, the worst might still be ahead.

In the meantime, the Article III Courts should do their constitutional duty and stop “coddling” the regime’s various schemes and gimmicks to commit, encourage, and enable “crimes against humanity.” We certainly aren’t going to get any accountability or restraint on Trump’s misconduct and open contempt for American institutions from a Congress where the Senate is led by “Moscow Mitch” and his enablers.

 

PWS

01-22-20