"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
What follows is an excerpt from my book which will be published on Oct. 12. (I also published an excerpt this week in the Times magazine.) The book is a meditation on the 1965 Immigration Act, which I argue is the starting point of the multiethnic society we live in today.
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On Oct. 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stood in front of the Statue of Liberty and said something that would be proved wrong: “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” He was referring to the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, a landmark piece of legislation that lifted restrictive quotas on immigration from Asia, Africa and southern and Eastern Europe.
Its opponents at the time it was finally passed described apocalyptic scenarios in which the United States and its white population would be overrun by a horde of foreigners. Johnson, for his part, assured the public that the easing of restrictions would have only a mild effect on the demographics of the country. Most people, he believed, would stay in their home countries.
Over the next five decades, the Hart-Celler Act would bring tens of millions of immigrants from Asia, southern and Eastern Europe, and Africa. No single piece of legislation has shaped the demographic and economic history of this country in quite the same way.
I have spent much of my legal career, inside and outside the government, seeking to ensure that the United States abides by its non-refoulement obligations under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (“CAT”), and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Protocol”), which modifies and incorporates the terms of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Convention”). Article 3 of the CAT categorically prohibits State Parties from expelling, returning, or extraditing any person, without exception, to any State where there are “substantial grounds for believing he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Article 33 of the Refugee Convention, subject to certain narrow exceptions, flatly prohibits State Parties from expelling or returning (‘refouler’) refugees in any manner whatsoever to “the frontiers of territories” where their life or freedom would be threatened on one of [the designated grounds].
I write first, because I believe this Administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return (“refouler”) individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti. Second, my concerns have only been heightened by recent tragic events in Haiti, which had led this Administration wisely to extend temporary protected status (TPS) to Haitians already in the United States. Third, lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist, and there are approaching opportunities in the near future to substitute those alternatives in place of the current, badly flawed policy.
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First, let me assure you that the DOS’s ridiculous claim that Koh’s departure was “long planned,” and its equally ludicrous suggestion that he would continue to play a meaningful role as a fake “consultant” is pure, unadulterated BS!💩 Indeed, I’d encourage the DOS Inspector General to investigate and report on just what are Koh’s new “consulting duties,” his compensation arrangements, and exactly what he produces after today!
You don’t hire high level Administration officials with “a long planned expectation” that they will depart in fewer than nine months. Come on, man, how dumb do you think we are?
Losing someone of Koh’s reputation and abilities is a huge, yet well deserved, “black eye” for an Administration that has ditched the progressive human right experts who helped them get into the dance in the first place!
And, for what? It’s not that so-called “moderates,” fickle “independents,” and GOP nativists have been lining up to congratulate Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and Garland on their continuation of bogus, racially charged restrictionist policies at the border. Abandoning your stated values, dissing campaign promises, pissing off your allies, while still earning slings and arrows from your opponents has to be the world’s dumbest policy!
Second, what’s also pure unadulterated BS 💩 is the Administration’s assertion, unethically defended by Garland’s DOJ, that misuse and gross abuse of Title 42 in a cowardly attempt to thwart asylum seekers of color has anything whatsoever to do with science or public health.
The truth is is stark as it is ugly:
There was no science involved, only anti-immigrant and anti-asylum animus. “That was a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” a former Pence aide told the AP.
Of course there wasn’t! Even Stephen Miller didn’t pretend very hard that there was.
He just counted on a complicit Supremes and enough right wing toady judges afraid to do their jobs to get away with it. He was dead wrong about District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
But, in the end, that didn’t make any difference. Although he probably hadn’t predicted it, Miller found a key ally in “what me worry, not my family, only some non-white asylum seekers” AG Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland’s ancestors were saved! Why should he worry about the people of color he condemns without due process in his dysfunctional and biased Immigration “Courts” and by defending Stephen Miller’s neo-Nazi anti-asylum, White Nationalist border policies? PHOTO: Wikipedia Commons
Garland inexplicably and despicably took up Miller’s unethical, illegal, and immoral cause and found some bad judges on the DC Circuit willing to help trash Black Haitians and other migrants of color. This was certainly not one of American law’s better episodes, as history will eventually document.
There is no sugar coating it! When it comes to treatment of asylum seekers of color at our Southern Border, the Biden Administration is carrying out the “Miller Lite” version of neo-Nazi Stephen Miller’s deadly White Nationalism. Shame!🤮 We’re no closer to a coherent, practical, moral, legal asylum policy at our Southern Border today than we were on Jan. 20!
As Koh points out, there have been better alternatives on asylum seekers and the border since day one of the Administration! They have just refused to take them!
Also, a complicit AG Garland who has consistently failed to stand up for the human and legal rights of migrants of color and to“just say no” to Stephen Miller’s illegal policies and contrived, clearly pretextual justifications, has been a major cause of this ongoing political, moral, legal, and humanitarian disaster.
“I believe when I go to do this work, I need to integrate myself into the lives of the people I’m covering,” he says. “I don’t want them to see me as above them. We’re on the same level; we’re human.”
That context is needed to understand why Dennison entered the Darién Gap several weeks ago and why, unlike other photographers and videographers, he didn’t take any security guards with him.
That decision would end up giving him a different experience from that of others who have gone there to document the harrowing passage. They have left that jungle and come home with photos that show the horrific struggles of others. He almost didn’t leave the jungle, and he came home with only a fraction of the photos he took and with his own horrific story.
“What he’s been through is horrible and really disturbing,” says Erika Pinheiro, a lawyer who is the litigation and policy director of Al Otro Lado, an advocacy and legal aid organization that serves migrants, refugees and deportees on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The organization has been working with Dennison to create a film that captures the experiences of U.S.-bound Black migrants.
“The only way to understand it is to see it, and that’s what he’s providing,” Pinheiro says. “It’s really important that people understand what’s happening, and that it’s not over in Del Rio.”
The Biden administration recently cleared out a border camp in Del Rio, Tex., where an estimated 15,000 migrants, most of them Haitian nationals seeking asylum, had gathered. The clearing out of the camp came after viral images and video footage showed Border Patrol agents on horseback grabbing migrants and charging at them. In one video, a young girl in a mint-green dress scrambles to get out of the way of a horse heading toward her.
President Biden decried the agents’ actions, and the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into the incident.
But what happened in Del Rio captures only part of what many Haitians experience to get to the United States. Many pass through the Darién Gap, some with children in tow and infants strapped to their backs or chests. Officials in Panama have said that a record 70,000 people traveled the 66 miles through the terrain this year.
Before going, Dennison did extensive research on what to expect: spiders with bites that can cause death within six hours, criminals who routinely rob travelers, and polluted water that if not filtered can sicken you. But nothing, he says, could have prepared him for what he experienced.
“When you’re in the jungle, you’re no longer a filmmaker,” he says. “You’re no longer a humanitarian. It becomes about survival.”
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Read the full story at the link.
Sad as truth is, it’s not rocket science:
Desperate people do (and will continue to do) desperate things;
For forced migrants, the dangers of staying will always exceed those of leaving;
“Die in place” isn’t a “policy;”
“Deterrence only” can’t work in the long run;
While institutionalized racism has a long history in U.S. immigration policy, it’s never been a good policy for America, nor will it ever be!
Honestly, where does the Biden Administration get these folks who don’t “get the obvious,” lie about it, and then expect good results?
Right now, after nearly eight months, the Biden Administration still appearsto be in no better position to process the next border influx than they were on January 20, despite numerous warnings and eight months of graphic practical and humanitarian failures. Racially charged rhetoric and more cruel, wasteful, dishonest enforcement and removals won’t do it!
We need reopened legal border ports of entry staffed with more and better Asylum Officers overseen by a pragmatic progressive corps of expert Immigration Judges and a BIA composed of progressive asylum experts with the guts to knock heads and get our broken border legal system back to functionality. To state the obvious, that would promote consistency, transparency, and take some of the pressure off of the Article III Courts!
Because neither Mayorkas nor Garland is committed to taking the bold actions necessary to change the dynamics at the border, America, the Biden Administration, and vulnerable legal asylum seekers appear headed for another four years of avoidable failure with all of its unhappy human and political consequences!
So far, defending this guy and his cruel policies is about the only thing that Judge Garland has done well at a DOJ that continues to treat “justice” for migrants of color as a joke! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.comUnlike Miller, the “losers” under Garland’s unconscionable policies often aren’t in a position to complain — at least in this world! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
On Thursday, a federal appeals court allowed the continued use of the Title 42 policy, pushed initially through the previous administration by Stephen Miller, that’s used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to quickly deport asylum-seekers, including thousands of Haitians who have arrived at the southern border in search of help.
The Biden administration was set to be blocked from using the policy against families, following a federal judge’s order earlier this month. That lower court order was set to go into effect Thursday. But the policy was saved by the Biden administration, which had shockingly appealed the lower court’s decision. To be clear, the administration could have let the lower court decision stand. But it decided to protect this scientifically unsound order for continued use.
“It’s troubling to see the court grant the government’s motion to reinstate Title 42 just days after the district court ruled that its policy violates U.S. law,” Oxfam America global policy lead Noah Gottschalk told NBC News. The group is among the organizations that have led lawsuits against the policy. “We all saw the horrific images of the abuse faced by Haitian asylum-seekers subjected to Title 42, and we cannot allow people to face further harm because of this xenophobic policy.”
Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas has claimed it is continuing Title 42 “out of a public health need.” Meanwhile, White House Press Sec. Jen Psaki has defended the policy as “a public health requirement.” That’s complete bullshit. “Vice President Mike Pence in March directed the nation’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus,” The Associated Press (AP) reported last October.
The previous administration got its way by twisting arms. There was no science involved, only anti-immigrant and anti-asylum animus. “That was a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” a former Pence aide told the AP.
And, as vaccines have become readily available, the supposed rationale to keep Title 42 in place has only gotten more flimsy. If this is truly all about public health, why not rescind the policy and offer families the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine? “Let me also remind the Biden administration that over 300,000 people cross the border from Mexico every day through ports of entry,” American Immigration Council Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in July. “None are given COVID tests, unlike migrants who all get tested and nearly all get vaccinated.”
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“Miller Lite” – Garland’s Vision of “Justice @ Justice” for Communities of Color — Progressive human rights experts and migrants of color haven’t been welcome at Garland’s DOJ “Happy Hours” where Stephen Miller’s policies, his judicial appointments, and his dysfunctional “star chamber” immigration courts are celebrated, defended, and even “enhanced!”
Read more about this legal, moral, and political travesty perpetrated by the Biden Administration with Garland’s support at the link.
When it comes to things like defending ending the reprehensible “killer-program” known as “Remain in Mexico” or protecting the DACA program, Garland’s litigation team has fared poorly.
They also have drawn raised eyebrows, even if not yet any ethical complaints, from Article III Judges for their questionable representations and disingenuous defense of wrongfully issued BIA final orders of removal.
Perhaps, part the problem is that after four years of “anything goes” often misleading, sometimes downright dishonest, defense of the Trump/Miller White Nationalist xenophobic, often misogynistic, dehumanizing agenda, their hearts aren’t in it. The other glaring problem is the obvious lack of commitment to progressive humanitarian values, due process for all, and “cleaning house” at a broken and dysfunctional DOJ that has been shown by Garland.
Obviously, Garland’s DOJ lawyers are more at home and more successful when when arguing for intellectually dishonest and unconstitutional dehumanization (or “Dred Scottification”) of “the other,” primarily individuals of color who are the most vulnerable among us.
What a totally disgraceful legacy for a guy that was once just “one Moscow Mitch” away from the Supremes! On the other hand, it now appears that the GOP right wingers wouldn’t have had much to fear from a guy who won’t stand up for liberal American democratic values or even simple human decency! I doubt that he would have presented much threat to the far-right, anti-American agenda!
The Slippery Slope of Systemic Racism in Immigration Law – Del Rio by Carrie Rosenbaum
When Senator Maxine Waters proclaimed that what we witnessed in Del Rio, Texas last week, Customs and Border Protection officers on horseback whipping black men, harkened back to slavery, she drew an age-old, but still relevant connection between slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-immigrant racism. In a press briefing, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated, “[w]e know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism.” Yet, if both are right, where are our equality, anti-racism principles and why haven’t they been enough to dismantle systemic racism? Should U.S. anti-discrimination law inhibit anti-black and anti-immigrant racism, in the U.S. and at the border? Does it? Is there a slippery slope, such that undeterred discrimination against immigrants at the border seeps beyond the immediate individuals at the border?
Senator Waters was right to blur the boundaries of citizenship and rights in her speech. Racism begets racism, and racism towards black Haitians at the border translates to anti-black racism within the United States, just as anti-Mexican racism does not confine itself to noncitizens, and never has. Examples abound including obvious examples, like Latinx lynching of the late 1840s through 1920s (which coincided with lynching of Blacks), mass expulsion or “repatriation” of persons of Mexican descent that included U.S. citizens in the early 1920s and 1930s again via “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s and more subtle ones like exploitation and expropriation of Mexican and Central American farm workers and laborers, whether authorized or not, and colorblind or race neutral policies that fall most heavily, even if not completely, on persons from Mexico and Central America, like border jails.
While the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. constitution does not limit itself to citizens, it falls vastly short in protecting racialized people of color, especially immigrants. The U.S. treatment of Haitians in Del Rio implicates the problem of anti-black and anti-immigrant racism, and is indicative of the express and implicit bias that continues to evade remedy. It runs much deeper than the disturbing images of CBP agents on horseback, and its impacts have ripple effects.
At the same time that DHS Secretary Mayorkas decried systemic racism, he spelled out the government’s potential argument that the exclusion of Haitians, and Central Americans, and Mexicans that accompanies such brutal treatment was not discriminatory pursuant to the current state of immigration equal protection. He stated, “if we are able to expel them under Title 42 … we will do so” and announced that its application was “irrespective of the country of origin, irrespective of the race of the individual, irrespective of other criteria that don’t belong in our adjudicative process and we do not permit in our adjudicative process.”
Yet this is precisely how systemic racism flourishes. The reality is, this provision has been used to exclude the same racialized immigrants who have been subject to the worst treatment under immigration law. However, because the law is colorblind, Mayorkas can suggest that there was no discrimination. Pursuant to the Supreme Court’s 1977 Arlington Heights decision, discriminatory impact has to be accompanied by proof of discriminatory intent. Just by saying that wasn’t his (or implying it was not Congress’) intent, he can erase what too many know to be real. A new immigration priorities memo by the Agency released today stated that ““We must ensure that enforcement actions are not discriminatory and do not lead to inequitable outcomes.” It is a step in the right rhetorical direction, but does little to meaningfully address the colorblind racism that plagues enforcement.
What is the solution? Aside from a more expansive interpretation of the Equal Protection doctrine in line with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the Trump era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals case, and modest progress at the district court level in the crimmigration context, Congress could take steps to stop racial harm inflicted via immigration law and policy. By creating a path to legal status for those who not only have been here, but who have suffered the greatest harms of systemic racism, Haitian immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and others, Congress could start to undo the damage. It could also stop the relatively new practice of detaining or imprisoning migrants at the southern border, who happen to be almost entirely from Mexico and Central America, or abolish immigration prisons entirely. The policies that result in the imprisonment of Mexicans and Central Americans at the southern border now started with expulsion and imprisonment of Haitians in the 1980 and 1990s. Instead of expulsions and rumored potential imprisonment at the notorious Guantanamo Bay as was done in response to Haitians fleeing violence after the U.S. supported overthrow of democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the U.S. could re-evaluate both its involvement in foreign affairs, and treatment of those who flee here after our interventions cause disruption and civil strife. The largest number of Black migrants come from Haiti and their mistreatment is rooted in anti-Black racism. Racializing anti-immigrant demonization does not confine itself to noncitizens, nor should the remedies. Immigration reform, and a more robust application of the Equal Protection doctrine to all those inside the country, and at our borders, is necessary to move towards meaningfully dismantling systemic racism.
Access my law review articles and scholarship on SSRN
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Very eloquently said, Carrie!
Compare this with the racist blather and White Nationalist nonsense of nativist pols like Abbott, DeSantis, Cruz, Cotton, and others who glorify Jim Crow and seek to force a sanitized, whitewashed version of American history down the throats of the public!
Also, compare this with the intellectually dishonest actions by Biden Administration officials. They disingenuously claim to be champions of racial equality and racial justice.
But, in reality, they operate “star chamber courts,” “New American Gulags,” and implement discredited, outmoded, and ineffective “Stephen Miller Lite” border enforcement policies that basically dehumanize people of color and deny them the due process and equal protection to which they are entitled under law. Also, think about the many Federal Judges who spinelessly enable that which most first year law students could tell you is illegal and unconstitutional, not to mention totally immoral!
What exactly does Assistant AG for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke do every day at the Civil Rights Division if unraveling the White Nationalist, racially tone deaf policies of her own Department, the DHS, and the “star chambers for people of color” being operated by her “boss” aren’t first and foremost on her “to do” list?
“Floaters” — The ugly reality of Biden’s “Miller Lite border strategy.” It’s mostly people of color floating face-down in the river, being illegally returned to danger zones, rotting in the “New American Gulag,” and being railroaded through Garland’s biased and dysfunctional “star chamber courts.” Right now, Garland and and the rest of of the Biden Administration have “zero (0) credibility” on racial justice and voting rights!
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
The biggest failure of the Biden Administration to date is their willful blindness to the obvious connection between lack of overall racial justice in America and running star chambers, gulags, and border enforcement policies that are unconstitutional, dehumanizing, and racially demeaning to individuals of color. Sadly, and tragically we seem to have gone from “zero tolerance” under Trump to “zero credibility” under Biden! “When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?”
Heidi Altman Director of Policy National Immigrant Justice Center PHOTO: fcnl.org
Haiti has been in turmoil for many years and the recent assassination of the Haitian president, political and economic insecurity, devastating storms, and an earthquake have further destabilized the nation.
Yet, Haitians seeking protection in the United States face treacherous journeys, racial abuse, violence from border patrol agents, detention, and deportation and expulsion back to the life-threatening situation they fled in Haiti.
All people—including Haitian migrants and asylum seekers—need freedom, shelter, dignity, and compassionate welcomes.
In the past couple of weeks, the Biden administration has expelled more than 4,600 people to Haiti. And they continue to deport and expel even more people.
The Biden administration has the authority to grant humanitarian parole and stop the deportations to Haiti. We at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) are teaming up with other organizations to urge them to do just that.
Thousands of Haitian migrants removed from a makeshift camp near Texas have been sent back to Haiti. Now we’re getting our first up-close look at what they are facing upon their arrival. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff reports for TODAY from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Sept. 30, 2021
Eleanor Acer Senior Director for Refugee Protection, Human Rights First
Human Rights First debunks myth that seekers present a COVID health threat:
ASYLUM DOES NOT THREATEN PUBLIC HEALTH
The last week saw more of the Biden administration’s despicable deportation of Haitians and use Title 42 to deny their right to seek asylum. The administration perpetuates the false claim that their use of Title 42 is not an immigration policy, but a public health one, despite the vehement disagreement of public health experts.
Courtesy Washington Times
Migrants, many from Haiti, wade across the Rio Grande
river to leave Del Rio, Texas to avoid possible deportation.
Human Rights First also responded to the administration’s plans to use Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention facility.
“Sending people who are seeking protection to a place that is notorious for being treated as a rights-free zone is the last thing that the Biden administration should do,” Eleanor Acer, Senior Director of Refugee Protection at Human Rights First told NPR. “It is nothing more than a blatant attempt to evade oversight, due process, human rights protections and the refugee laws of the United States.”
Maria Sacchetti Immigration Reporter, Washington Post
Even in rolling out otherwise more reasonable enforcement priorities for ICE, Mayorkas insisted on making the bogus claim that recent border arrivals present a “national security threat,” as reported by the WashPost’s Maria Sacchetti:
Mayorkas said in his memo Thursday that migrants who cross the border illegally, particularly those who arrived unlawfully over the past year or so, remain a “threat to border security” and a priority for removal. But the ACLU has argued in its lawsuit that migrants have a legal right to seek asylum.
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“Courtside’s” rating of Mayorkas’s claims: 🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥
Who would have thought that more than eight months into the Biden Administration, we’d still be arguing about basics like “migrants have a legal right to seek asylum in the US?” See, INA section 208.
There are enormous downsides to border disorder, to immigration policy paralysis and to leaving the fates of more than 11 million current immigrants without any path to a secure future — even beyond the reinforcement it provides to the United States’ growing international reputation for dysfunction. No one gains by the chaos except smugglers who soak desperate migrants financially on their way north in hopes of a better life. The losers include not only the “dreamers” brought to this country as children, who must live in perpetual anxiety, but also the country as a whole, which loses the value of immigrants, skilled and otherwise, who would turbocharge entrepreneurship, create jobs and help the economy grow.
There are available solutions if Congress could overcome its horror of bipartisan compromise. The goal should be to establish a realistic annual quota of immigrant visas for Central Americans, Haitians and others desperate to reach this country who otherwise will cross the border illegally — a number that recognizes the U.S. labor market’s demand for such employees. That must be supplemented by a muscular guest worker program that enables legal border crossing for migrants who want to support families remaining in their home countries.
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Read the complete editorial at the link.
It’s worth adding that the current “border disorder” is largely the result of White Nationalist, legally defective, anti-immigrant policies of the Trump regime compounded by the failure of Mayorkas and Garland to take the obvious, available, common sense steps necessary to reopen legal border ports of entry, to make the long overdue necessary reforms to establish a fair, efficient, and generous legal asylum system at the USCIS Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts, and to insist on the creation of a robust, functional refugee program for Latin America and the Caribbean.
None of the this is “rocket science!” 🚀 Plenty of great blueprints for administrative reforms and the potential expert leadership to implement them were “out there for the taking” at the beginning of the Biden Administration. By dawdling, tapping the wrong leaders, and continuing enforcement policies and bad judicial practices that were proven failures, the Administration predictably put itself “behind the eight-ball” in establishing order and implementing the rule of law at our borders!
Until the Biden Administration ends its disgraceful, cowardly, illegal, cruel, ineffective, and inhumane reliance on bogus “Title 42” restrictions to suspend orderly legal processing at the border, they will continue to bobble the next predictable “border crisis.” The GOP will continue to spout nativist nonsense. Desperate people will continue to do desperate things. Only a tone-deaf Administration would continue to ignore this reality!
The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday defended the Biden administration’s decision to send thousands of Haitians to a home country they fled because of natural disasters and political turmoil.
White House criticizes border agents who rounded up migrants on horseback
Mayorkas told NBC’s Meet the Press the removals were justified because of the coronavirus pandemic, a point disputed by advocates and public health experts.
“The Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention, or CDC] has a Title 42 authority that we exercise to protect the migrants themselves, to protect the local communities, our personnel and the American public,” Mayorkas said.
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“The pandemic is not behind us. Title 42 is a public health policy, not an immigration policy.”
Since Donald Trump’s administration implemented Title 42 in March 2020, advocates and dozens of public health experts have called for its end.
Under Title 42, people who attempt to cross the border are returned to Mexico or deported to their home countries without an opportunity to test asylum claims.
In January, Joe Biden stopped the rule from applying to children. Despite that, at least 22 babies and children were deported to Haiti in February.
More than 30 public health experts wrote to Mayorkas and the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, earlier this month, saying Title 42 was “scientifically baseless and politically motivated”.
This coalition has repeatedly said the policy violates the right to seek asylum and ignores how basic public health measures can reduce the spread of Covid-19.
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“Title 42 runs counter to the government’s own commitment to address Covid-19 globally,” the coalition said. “The absence of effective Covid-19 mitigation services at the border and the expulsion of people to situations in which they may be exposed to Covid-19 and unable to practice prevention are contrary to the US government commitment to address Covid-19 globally.”
On Sunday, Mayorkas told CNN about 4,000 Haitians who arrived in the past two weeks have been expelled, 13,000 others had been allowed to enter the US to pursue their immigration cases in court and 8,000 had voluntarily chosen to return to Mexico.
NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd questioned Mayorkas about why thousands were being sent to Haiti even though they had traveled to the US from South America.
“These are Haitian nationals,” Mayorkas said. “Some of them don’t have documents from the countries from which they just left. So they are subject to removal.”
. . . .
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Of course, Haiti clearly is not a safe place to return migrants:
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
Haitian deportees arriving from Texas say they were ‘rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals’
Joe Parkin Daniels in Port-au-Prince
Published:
05:00 Sunday, 26 September 2021
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When Evens Delva waded across the Rio Grande with his wife and two daughters, he had dreams of starting a new life in Florida. But less than a week later, he and his family stepped on to the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, the sweltering and chaotic capital of Haiti, with nothing except traumatic memories and a feeling of bubbling anger.
Delva, along with nearly 2,000 other Haitians, was deported from southern Texas this week to Haiti, despite having lived in Chile for the past six years and having few remaining connections to his home country. His younger daughter, who is four, does not hold Haitian citizenship, having been born in Chile, and speaks more Spanish than Haitian Creole.
“I don’t know what we’ll do, we don’t have anywhere to stay or anyone to call,” the 40-year-old said, moments after getting off the plane in the blistering midday Caribbean heat. “All I know is that this is the last place I want to be.”
Evens Delva and his wife at Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti on Friday after being deported from Texas. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian
It is not hard to understand why. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is mired in overlapping crises. Gasoline shortages and blackouts are a daily reality, while warring gangs routinely kidnap for ransom and wage battle on the streets.
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The grim situation only worsened when the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his home on 7 July, triggering a political power struggle and further instability and street violence. On 14 August, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s poor southern peninsula, killing more than 2,200 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
US envoy to Haiti resigns over ‘inhumane’ decision to deport migrants
The Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitians under such circumstances drew opprobrium around the world, and prompted the US envoy to Haiti to resign in protest. Haiti is “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life”, he wrote in his resignation letter. “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”
Last week, the world was shocked by images of police officers on horseback charging at desperate Haitian migrants near a camp of 12,000, set up under the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. Delva was on his way to buy food and water for his family when the cavalry charge sent him and dozens of his compatriots running in a frenzy.
“We were rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals,” he said, having spent the six-hour flight from San Antonio with his hands and legs tied.
“They treated us like animals,” added Maria, his wife.. “We’ll never forget how that felt.”
. . . .
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David K.Shipler American Author PHOTO: Twitter
David Shipler does a great job of exposing the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Mayorkas and other Biden Administration immigration officials.
America’s Callous Border
By David K. Shipler
Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”
Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.
We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.
When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?
Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.
Instead, a new torment is found: Haitians with enough grit to leave their country a decade or so ago and build lives on the margins in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere are taken from their first steps onto U.S. soil and summarily—summarily, without due process—deported. And where to? To Haiti, a failed state where many have long since lost family or work or even places of shelter. To Haiti, which has collapsed into such violence and disarray that the State Department warns Americans on its website: “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19.”
What is wrong with the air in the White House? Is there not enough oxygen? What accounts for the impaired thinking that seems to transcend administrations, from Republican to Democratic. Where is the regard for human dignity? Why is it so often absent in the calculations that create policy?
Donald Trump wore callousness on his sleeve and was proud of it. His base hooted its applause at his vilification of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. By contrast, Joe Biden wears a badge of empathy. His mantra is compassion. “Horrible” and “outrageous” were the words he found to describe the photographed attacks on Haitians from horseback. He halted the use of horses and vowed that agents responsible “will pay.” He also said, “It’s simply not who we are.”
But it is who we are. The images have been compared to old photos of white overseers on horseback commanding enslaved Blacks in the fields. The Border Patrol in cowboy hats have been compared to Texas Rangers “who were celebrated for their excellent ‘tracking skills’ that were put to use to hunt and capture enslaved people,” said historian Monica Martinez of the University of Texas.
These are compelling analogies with painful resonance. They are also flawed as parallels, for the Black migrants at the border are not slaves. They are clamoring to be here, crossing illegally, seeing the border as a threshold. They were not brought here in chains against their will. Some are being removed in chains against their will.
Nevertheless, in a sense they are enslaved by their blackness. If white Canadians tried this up north, does anybody truly believe that they would be treated as the Black Haitians are? Animating America’s conscience should not require reaching back to the sin of slavery. The present ought to be enough.
Our borders always put our split personality on display: We are cruel and welcoming, hateful and helpful, defined by doors closed at times to entire ethnic groups and then opened to invigorate the nation with willing hands and vital contributions.
In fact, if the country is not sufficiently moved by simple morality, then it might consider self-interest. The U.S. population growth rate has been falling steadily since 2008, dropping to a mere 0.58 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many regions lack skilled workers, as homeowners and small business owners and even hospitals can testify from trying to hire carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, and nurses. We should have winced when one Haitian deportee was quoted as describing himself as a welder and carpenter.
Using abuse to manipulate determined people did not work under Trump—a lesson that Biden and his advisers might have learned. Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the border, his aides reasoning that families heading north would get the message and—what?–abandon their fortitude and survival instincts, turn around, and head back to life-threatening misery?
So, too Biden officials are reportedly figuring that tossing Haitian expatriates into Haiti’s maelstrom will dissuade others from coming. In other words, don’t be humane, and folks will give up. But they won’t give up. They will still roll the dice, because there’s always a chance, especially since some are being allowed to stay, at least for a while, pending proper examination of their asylum claims as the law requires. When your ship has sunk, you don’t stop clinging to a piece of flotsam just because some shipmates have slipped off into the sea.
What the Biden White House needs is somebody in an influential position who has made this journey, who has shepherded family and children through jungles and ganglands to reach this supposedly promised land. That official might bring to the Oval Office a glimmer of understanding and respect for the force of personality and perseverance that drive a person toward our callous border.
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Something about the DHS Secretary job seem to require checking honesty, common sense, historical perspective, and humanity at the door, not to mention the true “rule of law.”
The Biden administration has condemned abuses at the border – while maintaining the policies underlying these abuses. That’s beyond cynical
Published:
06:22 Thursday, 23 September 2021
Follow Moustafa Bayoumi
You’ve probably seen a photograph haunting the internet this week: a white-presenting man on horseback – uniformed, armed and sneering – is grabbing a shoeless Black man by the neck of his T-shirt. The Black man’s face bears an unmistakable look of horror. He struggles to remain upright while clinging dearly to some bags of food in his hands. Between the men, a long rein from the horse’s bridle arches menacingly in the air like a whip. The photograph was taken just a few days ago in Texas, but the tableau looks like something out of antebellum America.
The image is profoundly upsetting, not just for what it portrays but for the history it evokes. What’s happening at the border right now puts two of our founding national myths – that we’re a land of liberty and a nation of immigrants – under scrutiny. To put it plainly, we don’t fare well under inspection.
US border patrol agents on horseback search for migrants trying to enter the United States along the US-Mexico border. Photograph: José Luis González/Reuters
. . . .
Without review, it’s impossible to know who is facing real threats of persecution when returned to Haiti. The United Nations human rights spokesperson, Marta Hurtado, said that the UN “is seriously concerned by the fact that it appears there have not been any individual assessments of the cases”. Why does the Biden administration not share her concern?
One has to wonder if the same policies expelling Haitians from the US today would be in effect if those arriving at the border were Europeans or even Cubans. If history is any guide – for decades, the US privileged Cubans over Haitians and other Caribbean peoples in immigration matters – the answer is no.
It’s one thing for the Biden administration to condemn abuses conducted by its own government that recall the worst parts of our national history. But it’s quite another to do so while maintaining the policies that enable those abuses. That’s not just cynical. It’s despicable.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
Foote’s sudden departure leaves a void in U.S. policy toward Haiti and adds another prominent, critical voice to the administration’s response to Haitians.
AP By Joshua Goodman and Matthew Lee, September 21, 2021
The Biden administration’s special envoy to Haiti has resigned, protesting “inhumane” large-scale expulsions of Haitian migrants to their homeland wracked by civil strife and natural disaster, U.S. officials said Thursday.
Daniel Foote was appointed to the position only in July, following the assassination of Haiti’s president. Even before the migrant expulsions from the small Texas border town of Del Rio, the career diplomat was known to be deeply frustrated with what he considered a lack of urgency in Washington and a glacial pace on efforts to improve conditions in Haiti.
Foote wrote Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he was stepping down immediately “with deep disappointment and apologies to those seeking crucial changes.”
“I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” he wrote. “Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”
Two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the resignation on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
One official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Foote had consistently sought greater oversight of Haiti policy and that the administration did not believe his requests were appropriate.
Foote’s sudden departure leaves a void in U.S. policy toward Haiti and adds another prominent, critical voice to the administration’s response to Haitians camped on the Texas border. The camp has shrunk considerably since surpassing more than 14,000 people on Saturday – many of them expelled and many released in the U.S. with notices to report to immigration authorities.
The White House is facing sharp bipartisan condemnation. Democrats and many pro-immigration groups say efforts to expel thousands of Haitians without a chance to seek asylum violates American principles and their anger has been fueled by images that went viral this week of Border Patrol agents on horseback using aggressive tactics against the migrants.
. . . .
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Goodman reported from Miami, Lee from New York on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly meetings.
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Read the complete article at the above link.
And, there are more “strange happenings” within the flailing Biden immigration/human rights bureaucracy.
Over at ICE, “Immigration pro” John Trasviña is out at OPLA after only a few months in office:
The Biden administration has appointed seasoned Boston immigration attorney Kerry Doyle to become its immigration enforcement agency’s top prosecutor.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed to GBH that Doyle, previously of Graves & Doyle, will be its principal legal advisor. The office she will lead is the largest legal program within the Department of Homeland Security, with over 1,250 attorneys and 290 support personnel.
The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor sends its prosecutors to litigate deportation cases before the Executive Office for immigration Review, the body that oversees the nation’s immigration courts.
Doyle has been an outspoken critic of the agency and has led many lawsuits against it.
She is a graduate of the American University Washington School of Law, and George Washington University. She started her career as a legislative assistant to former U.S. Rep. Bob Wise (D-W.Va.), and became an attorney for Legal Services for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers in 1993. She was managing attorney for the International Institute of Boston from 1998 to 2001, before founding Graves & Doyle with partner William E. Graves Jr.
The Boston-based firm handled a breadth of immigration issues, from citizenship, to business and family immigration, federal litigation, asylum, and deportation cases.
Doyle took the case of Iranian student Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, who was enrolled at Northeastern University and deported because it was assumed by Logan Airport border patrol agents that he would remain in the U.S. beyond the time frame of his student visa. She co-authored an op-ed in The Boston Globe about Abadi’s case, entitled “Customs and Border Protection gone rogue.”
Doyle has also been particularly outspoken against ICE on Beacon Hill, including one appearance in January 2020, where she called ICE “out of control” during a hearing over the Safe Communities Act, which would limit how state and local municipalities interact with federal immigration enforcement.
Doyle declined to comment on her appointment, asking GBH to speak with ICE’s media office, which did not return requests for comment.
Susan Church of Demissie & Church has known and worked with Doyle for over two decades.
“She actually taught me much of what I know about immigration law,” said Church. “I can’t imagine a better, more knowledgeable attorney to run that agency because she knows the immigration system in and out.”
Church and Doyle co-filed a 2017 federal lawsuit against former President Donald Trump with the American Civil Liberties Union after he banned entry to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries.
The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor has control over whether immigrants are released from detention, what financial amounts — or bonds — are set for them to be released, or whether a lawsuit gets postponed.
“There will be a tremendous opportunity to craft policy procedures, rules and the like to make sure that immigrants receive a fair day in court and a fair hearing and have a fair shot at getting a life in the United States,” said Church.
Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has been criticized for continuing to keep immigrants detained with high bond amounts, but Church thinks Doyle’s appointment shows there may be a shift.
“I think it’s clear that the Biden administration is following the path of the progressive district attorney and installing somebody in charge who cares about safety issues, but also cares deeply about the rights and the protections for immigrants,” she said, referring to the recent nomination of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins to be the U.S. attorney.
Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, also applauded the pick. “We hope Kerry Doyle’s outstanding track record of fighting for immigrants’ rights continues in her new position at ICE,” Rose said. But, she added, “the ACLU remains committed to holding this and other government agencies accountable.”
The former principal legal advisor John D. Trasviña announced his retirement at the beginning of September.
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On one hand, Kerry Doyle is well qualified and presumably will work to restore professionalism, common sense, and humanity to what had been a misdirected, counterproductive, and totally out of control agency under Trump and his toadies.
But, there has to be more to Trasviña’s “retirement” than meets the eye. One does not normally accept a senior level policy position in a new Administration while planning to “retire” within a few months.
So, something else is going on here. Many of us had applauded the appointment ofTrasviña, a high profile, nationally respected, experienced expert in immigration, civil rights, human rights, and racial justice, at OPLA. During his short tenure, he issued helpful memos and guidance expanding the use of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) at ICE. More aggressive and sensible use of PD is critical to controlling and eventually eliminating the largely Government-created 1.4 million case Immigration Court backlog.
Best wishes to Kerry in her new position!
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Immigration and human rights are a mess because Biden and his advisors ignored expert advice to move quickly and aggressively to restore robust refugee and asylum systems and to institute long overdue progressive reforms and personnel changes at EOIR. Right now, there appears to be neither an overall plan nor the dynamic progressive leadership and better Immigration Judiciary to carry it out.
It’s going to take more than a few intellectually dishonest expressions of “outrage” from Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki and a bogus “investigation” of Border Patrol Agents who were only carrying out the cruel, inhumane, and racist policies developed and approved at the highest levels of the Biden Administration, to wipe out the images of the abuse of asylum applicants at our border and the deep-seated racial prejudices and biases it represents. 🏴☠️It’s all about dehumanization and continuing “Dred Scottification” of the “other”🤮☠️ — predominantly courageous, yet vulnerable, people of color!
BTYB – Student Success, Equity, and Community and the Weissberg Program in Human Rights & Social Justice
The Office of Student Success, Equity & Community Ousley Scholar In Residency honors the legacy of Grace Ousley, the first black woman to graduate from Beloit College. It is a junior scholar/activist/organizer/intellectual committed to the theory and practice of social justice. They should embody the “academic hustler” who fights for “social justice” in all aspects of their work. Support for the residency comes from the Weissberg Program in Human Rights and Social Justice and the Office of Student Success. Equity & Community.
This promises to be a great program! And, the Ousley Residence Program is a fantastic contribution to educating and inspiring new generations of Americans about the many challenges still facing us in achieving social justice in our nation.
The abrogation of due process and dehumanization of people of color has, outrageously, become part of the dysfunctional U.S. Immigration Court System. The last Administration specifically encouraged and promoted this ugly, anti-democracy, phenomenon and then used it to spearhead an all-out assault on racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, religious tolerance, economic progress, voter rights, and humane progressive values throughout American society.
Unfortunately, many progressives have been slow to “connect the dots” and insist that meaningful social justice change start with fixing the racial and gender bias problems in our Immigration Courts, tribunals that are under the complete control of the Biden Administration!
For example, current Attorney General Merrick Garland rather incredibly claims to be standing up for women’s rights in Texas and defending voting rights for minorities while continuing to run misogynistic, regressive “Star Chambers” at EOIR, staffed with many judges hand-selected by Jeff Sessions and Billy Barr, and tossing vulnerable women refugees of color back across our Southern Border into harm’s way without any “process” at all, let alone “Due Process of Law.” Garland also continues to enable human rights abuses in the “New American Gulag” of DHS civil detention! We can see this process of dehumanization of the “other” before the law, called “Dred Scottification” by many of us, spreading throughout our legal system and being endorsed and “normalized” all the way up to the Supremes.
From the summary in the announcement above, it appears that Denea, based on her own inspiring life and achievements as a “Dreamer,” will help us to “connect the dots” between racial justice, immigrant justice, and equal justice for all. Immigrants’ Rights = Human Rights = Everyone’s Rights!
Norma Pimentel, a sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, is executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
Dear Mr. President:
I write today to appeal to your sense of morality, human dignity and as a fellow Catholic. While the Supreme Court has blocked your efforts to rescind the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, while litigation against it proceeds through the court system, I urge you to act. These legal complications, and our backlogged immigration courts system, cannot become an excuse to strand thousands of people in dire conditions, especially when other options are available.
I know from firsthand experience just how desperate the situation is. MPP was implemented in my community in early 2019. Its effect was to force thousands of people into a makeshift “tent city” along the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river as they awaited rulings on whether they would be granted asylum.
I would visit the camp almost every single day. It was a blessing that hundreds of compassionate Americans crossed the border between Brownsville, Tex., and Matamoros, Mexico, several times a day to bring tents, food, clothing, and to tend to these families’ medical needs and legal issues. While supported by the good nature and assistance that staff and others provided, I often worried about how the women, men and children at the camp could survive in such conditions. How could they stand the scorching heat of our region’s hot sun or the occasional torrential downpours that turned their encampment into a mud pit?
The lack of care for humanity and the sounds of human misery accompanied me daily as I moved through the camp. I know that reports of these conditions have reached your ears, too: I met your wife, Jill Biden, here in 2019 as she donned rubber boots to wade through the mud and see for herself the misery in which asylum seekers, including many women and children, lived for as long as two years.
So, I rejoiced when you declared an end to this immoral policy on your first days in office, and despaired when the Supreme Court required your administration to implement it once again.
I pray for the Supreme Court justices as I do for all leaders. But in my heart, I know that surely, we can do better than return to the conditions and suffering I witnessed in 2019.
. . . . .
I invite you to come and see for yourself, as your wife did in 2019, what is happening on the border. There are many layers to the immigration realities behind the strident political rhetoric that dominates and obscures the issue today. But we must find ways to counter what Pope Francis calls a “globalization of indifference.”
Mr. President, please demonstrate to the world that the words of Jesus — whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me — are the foundation of not only our faith, but of the moral structure of our country.
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Read the rest of Sister Norma’s letter at the above link.
She’s right: “We cannot allow a lack of creativity and fortitude to become an excuse to abandon the principle of compassion.” But, sadly, that’s exactly what the Biden Administration is doing by listening to the wrong advice from those wedded to the failed, illegal, and cruel concept of misusing the law and perverting process as a “deterrent.”
The experts, “practical scholars,” NGOs, intellectual leaders, and courageous progressive judicial talent who can solve this problem, folks like Sister Norma, Karen Musalo, Marielena Hincappie, Kevin Johnson, Michelle Mendez, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Lenni Benson, Michele Pistone, Geoffrey Hoffman, Jason “The Asylumist” Dzubow, and Judge Ilyce Shugall, are all “on the outside looking in.” Moreover, rather than working with them to fix the asylum system at the border and bring essential progressive reforms to our dysfunctional Immigration Courts, the Administration has actively alienated and disrespected their views in favor of recycling “guaranteed to fail, Miller-Lite” deterrence only policies of the past.
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Beyond bad GOP judges, corrupt and evil GOP State AGs, “Miller Lite” bureaucratic retreads, and feckless and timid Biden policy wonks, this is the harsh reality of our continuing, failed, “border deterrence” policies and our abrogation of asylum laws and human morality. EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
The solutions are out there! Too bad the Administration has become “part of the problem,” rather than having the guts and creativity to solve the problem while saving lives! No courage, no convictions, no solutions! It’s a formula for disaster☠️ and death!⚰️
As Sister Norma says, using the words of Jesus, in her powerful conclusion: “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me — are the foundation of not only our faith, but of the moral structure of our country.” Right now, He couldn’t be very pleased with the conduct of the GOP nativists, the Supremes, righty Federal Judges, horrible GOP AGs, and the feckless bureaucrats and timid policy officials of the Biden Administration!
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — According to the NYT, Biden immigration policy officials always shared this vision of “ultimate border deterrence” with Gauleiter Stephen Miller. Now, they are secretly relieved that Trump’s righty judges have “forced” them to continue running a lawless border and killing asylum seekers without legal process. EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
MATAMOROS, Mexico — When the Supreme Court effectively revived a cornerstone of Trump-era migration policy late last month, it looked like a major defeat for President Biden.
After all, Mr. Biden had condemned the policy — which requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico — as “inhumane” and suspended it on his first day in office, part of an aggressive push to dismantle former President Donald J. Trump’s harshest migration policies.
But among some Biden officials, the Supreme Court’s order was quietly greeted with something other than dismay, current and former officials said: It brought some measure of relief.
Before that ruling, Mr. Biden’s steps to begin loosening the reins on migration had been quickly followed by a surge of people heading north, overwhelming the southwest border of the United States. Apprehensions of migrants hit a two-decade high in July, a trend officials fear will continue into the fall.
Concern had already been building inside the Biden administration that the speed of its immigration changes may have encouraged migrants to stream toward the United States, current and former officials said.
In fact, some Biden officials were already talking about reviving Mr. Trump’s policy in a limited way to deter migration, said the officials, who have worked on immigration policy but were not authorized to speak publicly about the administration’s internal debates on the issue. Then the Supreme Court order came, providing the Biden administration with the political cover to adopt the policy in some form without provoking as much ire from Democrats who reviled Mr. Trump’s border policies.
Now, the officials say, they have an opportunity to take a step back, come up with a more humane version of Mr. Trump’s policy and, they hope, reduce the enormous number of people arriving at the border.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Natalie’s article at the link.
Who would have thought that neo-Nazi Stephen Miller would be the real winner of the 2020 election?
When he ”wins,” America and humanity “lose.” But, apparently that’s “A-OK” with some Biden Administration officials who lack the expertise, ability, courage, and political will to establish the rule of law for asylum seekers at our Southern Border! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com.
Five decades of experience, including plenty of wall and fence building, civil detention, expedited dockets, restrictive interpretations, criminal prosecutions, family detentions, toddlers without lawyers, money to corrupt foreign governments, “don’t come, we don’t want you and care nothing about your lives messages,” in English and Spanish, says the Biden version of the “Miller Lite” approach will fail and ultimately expand the extralegal population of the U.S.
Of course, it also will kill more desperate humans in the desert, in Mexico, in squalid “camps,” and back in their home countries. Just so long as it’s “out of sight, out of mind.” The great thing about desert deaths is that often the bodies are never found or identified. Therefore, nothing can be proved, and it’s like these people “never happened.” It’s a real bureaucratic triumph! Foreign deaths are almost as good, as they seldom get much “play” in U.S. media and always can be blamed on something other than failed U.S. policies or foreign interventions.
I’d already observed that the DOJ’s “defense” of undoing Trump immigration policies seemed as half-hearted as it was ineffective. Perhaps their lackadaisical approach came right from the top!
And, the “policy geniuses” in the Biden Administration who think “Miller-Lite Time” will be a political “happy hour” (at humanity’s expense) should remember that the right will still successfully label them as “open borders” just as they did when Obama established himself as “deporter-in-chief!”
Meanwhile, their former progressive supporters will see through the false humane rhetoric. Does it really matter if we call individuals “foreign nationals” rather than “illegals” while we’re illegally exterminating them?
I’m afraid we know the answer to “Casey’s question:” NO!
”Sorry, Casey! Not only can’t anyone in the Biden Administration ‘play this game,’ they don’t even have the guts to suit up! They view a ‘forfeit’ to “Team Miller” as good as a ‘W.’ Remember, it’s not THEIR family, friends, or relatives dying at our border. It’s just ‘the other guys,’ so who cares? When it comes to U.S. immigration policy, foreign nationals all too often find that their lives and human dignity are just another form of expendable political capital.” PHOTO: Rudi Rest Creative Commons
Heather Cox Richardson Historian Professor, Boston CollegeFrances Perkins (1880-1965) U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45) PHOTO: Public realm
From “Letters From An American:”
September 5, 2021
By Heather Cox Richardson
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and people screaming. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.
“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The… weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”
By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.
Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.
By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”
“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.
The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”
The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.
She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission ’till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”
And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.
Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people, dead at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.
“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”
Aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) ILGWU Archives Public Realm
Get more from HCR at the above link!
Perkins is one of the most important and under-recognized heroes of modern American history. Perkins believed that Government was there to promote the public good.
But, it wasn’t just a hollow slogan like those spouted by many of today’s politicos. She actually “walked the walk,” using her powerful intellect, energy, talent, advocacy skills, persistence, and influence with FDR to make America a much better place.
Just think of it: “unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor.” An amazing list of accomplishments for which she has received far, far too little credit from historians. Today, most Americans probably think of Perkins, if at all, as the “first female Cabinet Secretary.” But she was more than that. Much more!
Perkins also used her position as Labor Secretary (prior to WW II the cabinet officer with responsibility for immigration) creatively in an attempt to save Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Although she won a major legal battle on the positive use of “charge bonds” to assist refugees, the actual effects of her humanitarian efforts appear to have been unfortunately limited.
In the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, isolationist America of the 1930s, she also became a target of the far right for her strong commitment to human rights. In 1939, Congressional xenophobes initiated an unsuccessful impeachment attempt.
In 1940, FDR transferred responsibility for immigration from the Labor Department to the Department of Justice. That spelled not only the end of Perkins’s efforts to help Jewish refugees, but also was a death sentence for many who might have been saved.
The DOJ threw up a powerful combination of restrictive requirements and bureaucracy to guarantee the death of more European Jews in the Holocaust. Indeed, the DOJ went one better by putting Japanese-American U.S. citizens in concentration camps based on “national security” claims that have since been shown to be both bogus and racially motivated. Sound familiar?
You can read all about this disgraceful chapter in American history and Perkins’s largely fruitless attempts to “swim against the tide” here, in this article by Rebecca Brenner Graham in Contingent Magazine: https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/08/23/no-refuge/.
Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham Teacher, Author, Historian PHOTO: Rebeccabrennergraham.com
I really enjoyed Rebecca’s very lively, accessible historical writing that brings to life one of the ugliest episodes in modern American history, now largely swept under the carpet by today’s nativist revisionists. It’s also covered in the a Holocaust museum, an exhibit that contains much of the same bogus “America is full” xenophobic rhetoric spouted by too many of today’s GOP nativists.
This really horrible response by Western democracies to lives in peril was what gave rise to the Geneva Refugee Convention, the basis for the Refugee Act of 1980 and our current refugee and asylum system! How quickly we forget! The Trump Administration, with help from the Supremes, basically abrogated the legal system for refugees and asylees, without legislation. Despite promises to restore the rule of law, the Biden Administration has basically allowed most of Trump’s illegal and immoral policies to continue damaging humanity and diminishing us as a nation.
What would Frances Perkins have done? Certainly more than Garland and Mayorkas! At any rate, I enjoyed Rebecca’s historical writing and look forward to more!
A few years ago, Cathy and I had the pleasure of touring the Perkins Family Homestead, near Damariscotta, Maine, now owned by the Frances Perkins Center, with our dear, now departed Boothbay Harbor neighbor Sue Bazinet. It certainly opened my eyes to what true progressive values, lived and acted upon, were and still are!
Frances Perkins Homestead Damariscotta, ME PHOTO: Francis Perkins Center
We could use more leaders like Perkins today! Many thanks to the always-fabulous HCR for highlighting this great American!
REYNOSA, Mexico — When Joe Biden was running for president, he promised to close a squalid border tent camp in Mexico where thousands of migrants had been left to await the outcome of their immigration cases by the Trump administration.
Last spring, Biden emptied the camp, allowing most of the migrants to claim asylum and enter the U.S. even as his administration continued enforcing a Trump pandemic policy that effectively barred most other asylum seekers.
Soon after the Matamoros camp was bulldozed last March, a new camp formed about 55 miles west across from the border bridge to the more dangerous, Gulf crime cartel stronghold of Reynosa. Now that camp and another in Tijuana are home to thousands of asylum seekers, many with spouses and children in the U.S. They’re expected to grow after federal courts reinstated Trump’s so-called Remain in Mexico program last week, making it even harder for asylum seekers to enter the U.S. legally.
“We all thought this would get better when Biden got the presidency,” said Brendon Tucker, who works at the camp clinic run by the U.S.-based nonprofit Global Response Management, which also ran a clinic at the Matamoros camp.
Instead, he said, Biden’s pandemic ban on asylum claims, “is creating worse conditions in Mexico.”
About 2,000 migrants were living at the camp in Reynosa, Mexico, last week.(Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times)
A White House spokesman declined to comment about the migrant camps, referring questions to the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security said in a statement that, “This administration will continue to work closely with its interagency, foreign, and international organization partners to comply in good faith with the district court’s order [on Remain in Mexico] while continuing our work to build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that upholds our laws and values.”
In Reynosa, where about 2,000 migrants were living last week, conditions are in many ways worse than they were in Matamoros, Tucker said. There’s less potable water, fewer bathrooms, showers and other sanitation that U.S.-based nonprofits spent months installing in Matamoros. Mexican soldiers circle in trucks with guns mounted on top. Migrants face not only cartel extortion and kidnapping, but also COVID-19 outbreaks and pressure to leave from Mexican authorities. Fewer U.S. volunteers, including immigration lawyers, are willing to cross the border to help due to security concerns. Few at the camp understand their rights and U.S. pandemic restrictions, although they say they asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about them before they were expelled.
“They didn’t tell us anything, they just left us here,” said Salvadoran migrant Emerita Alfaro Palacios, 34, who’s been living at the camp with her 17-year-old daughter Pamela since June, hoping to join her brother in Houston.
Migrants call the camp Plaza Las Americas, the name of the park it occupies. The first to arrive last spring holed up inside the central gazebo. Those who followed pitched tents outside, their warren of droopy tarps and clotheslines expanding daily. Gone were the mariachis who used to congregate in the park, in the shade of a dilapidated casino that still draws throngs on weekends. Last week, only the gazebo’s spindly roof was visible, like the center of an enormous, patched circus tent. Taxis and vendors still circled, selling fruit popsicles, tacos, pupusas and other dishes catering to hungry migrants, mostly Central Americans. Many said they came to the border hoping Biden would allow them to claim asylum. Some had seen reports about how he helped those at the camp in Matamoros.
Many Reynosa residents and officials consider the camp an eyesore.
Standing on the roof of a nearby building overlooking the camp last week, maintenance worker Hector Hernandez Garrido, 33, said it was the responsibility of the U.S. to accept the asylum seekers. He said he feared the camp was contaminated by COVID-19 and other diseases.
Two weeks ago, Reynosa authorities removed cook stoves from the camp kitchen, citing safety risks. They pressured U.S. volunteers to stop cordoning off a section of the camp for migrants who had tested positive for COVID-19, and have threatened to cut the camp’s electricity and water supply.
“They want us out,” said Gina Maricela, a Honduran single mother and nurse at the GRM clinic.
It’s not clear where the migrants would go. Last month, Reynosa officials also launched a legal battle to demolish the city’s primary nonprofit migrant shelter, already home to hundreds, arguing it lies in a floodplain. Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, who has been crossing the border daily to help migrants at the Reynosa camp through her nonprofit Sidewalk School, said they rented a 20-room hotel for those who are COVID-positive to quarantine. They may build a new camp, she said, but that would take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s exactly like Matamoros, but with less support,” Rangel-Samponaro said. “Cut what you like, that’s not going to stop the encampment.”
As in Matamoros and other border cities in the surrounding Tamaulipas state, it’s not city officials or even migrants who ultimately control the plaza — it’s the cartel. Migrants who enter or leave the city without paying a smuggler risk getting kidnapped and held for ransom. So do those who leave the camp, even for a few hours to shop or look for work.
Honduran migrant Lesly Pineda, a factory worker, said she and her 11-year-old son Joan were kidnapped with eight other migrants in July and released only after she paid a $2,000 ransom. A single mother, Pineda, 33, then took her son to the border and sent him across the Rio Grande with a smuggler. He remained at a federal shelter in Texas last week, she said. She had left her two oldest children, ages 15 and 14, with her mother in Honduras.
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“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Will U.S. policy makers ever get beyond this jaundiced view of the “proper place” for asylum seekers in modern society? So far, despite Biden’s and Harris’s campaign rhetoric, the “reality on the ground” (or “in the river,” as the case might be) has remained disturbingly unchanged! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Read Molly’s full report at the link.
The Trump kakistocracy considered the legal asylum system to be a “loophole” in their White Nationalist agenda. So, they just overtly violated the law. Thanks to an indulgent “Dred Scott” Supremes’ majority, they largely got away with it!
The Biden Administration considers complying with asylum laws, due process, and the rule of law, essentially a “political option” that they are working on (slowly, and incompetently).
In the meantime, they simply continue the Trump Administration’s illegal policies. Because, hey, it’s not real humans whose rights, lives, and humanity are being stomped upon here. Just “foreign nationals” and mostly “people of color” at that. Let ‘em continue to twist in the wind, while the Administration gets its act together. That’s particularly convenient if it’s happeningsouth of the border where, except for a few courageous folks like Molly and some NGOs and religious workers, the human trauma is largely “out of sight out of mind.”
If all else fails, we can always blame Trump. Like Trump, Biden has largely ceded control of southern border policies and migration from Latin America to cartels, smugglers, and traffickers. When the legal system fails, the underground and the black market take over.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that restoring the legal asylum system and actually, for perhaps the first time,administering it fairly, lawfully, generously, and with competent expert Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges (“new blood” required) would result in a substantial number of border arrivals being granted legal asylum or other forms of protection.
We’d actually be able to screen individuals, know who we have admitted, where they are going, have them in possession of legal work authorization, in a position to pay taxes, and in many cases have them on a path to eventual full integration into our society. And, by all legitimate accounts, after four years of Trump’s legal immigration disaster and a falling birth rate, we certainly can use more legal immigration.
Instead of looking at asylum seekers as a self-defined “problem,” why not look at saving them and integrating their skills and undoubted courage, energy, and perseverance into our society in a constructive manner as an “opportunity?” Because, that’s exactly what it is!
Human migration will continue, as it always has been, to be a major force in the 21st Century. “Smart money” is on the countries that best learn how to adapt and take advantage of its realities and embrace its opportunities as the “winners of the future.”
Given a fair, functional, generous system, many asylum seekers would be motivated to apply in an orderly fashion at ports of entry, or even abroad (if we actually had a robust functioning refugee program for Latin America, which we don’t). With an honest system that treats them fairly, listens carefully, and provides reasoned understandable decisions, even those who don’t qualify would be more likely to accept the result and consider constructive alternatives.
If the U.S. stepped up, fulfilled our legal obligations, and set a good example, other countries in a position to accept refugees and asylum seekers might also be motivated to improve their performance.
But, what we’re doing right now to those we falsely promised to treat fairly won’t be swept under the carpet forever. Historians are likely to highlight the cowardly abrogation of our legal duties to refugees and asylum seekers, by Administrations of both parties, as alow point in the American story.
From “Letters From An American:”
