"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.
“I don’t care who you are, you bite your god damn tongue!”
By Alex Edelman/Getty Images.
The December 2017 passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was thrilling to a great many people, among them Donald Trump, corporate America, and the uber-rich, whom the legislation was structured to disproportionately benefit. But in truth, the day belonged to one man: CrossFit devoteeand Eddie Munster doppelgängerPaul Ryan, who had fantasized about redistributing wealth to those at the top since his boyhood days in Wisconsin, devoted his entire career to making it happen, and promptly announced his retirement when it became clear that his other lifelong dream—dismantling the social safety net and cutting off the lazy takers—wasn’t going to happen ’til at least 2021. So we imagine it must have really frosted Ryan’s cookies when, in the midst of many a late night and early morning on the Hill devoted to dragging this suckeracrossthe finish line, Reverend Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain since 2011, had the stones to include these outrageous lines in one of his prayers:
“God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. . . . As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Ryan, one assumes, had never heard such sacrilegious words from a man of the cloth and was probably of a mind to drag Conroy out of the room by his collar and throw him out on the Capitol steps then and there. But because he is a disciplined lawmaker whose Holy Grail was so close he could taste it, he stayed focused and decided to deal with the blasphemy at a later time. And apparently that time came earlier this month, per The Hill:
House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan. Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.
“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.
While one source claimed that “some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn’t like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” others offered a more compelling reason: Ryan “took issue with a prayer on the House floor that could have been perceived as being critical of the G.O.P. tax cut bill.” According to a Democratic aide, Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by [the] speech on the tax bill that the speaker didn’t like.” The New York Times notes that a week after his sermon, a staffer from Ryan’s office told Conroy “We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” and that the next time he saw the Reverend in person, Ryan told him “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for the speaker, declined to explain the personnel decision, noting only Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiand her office “were fully read in and did not object.”
Now, could Ryan have forced the guy to resign for completely legitimate reasons? Sure! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is exactly the sort of thing that would constitute a bridge too far in his book. Stand up for neo-Nazis? Water off a duck’s back. But suggest that a $1.5 trillion tax cut should help all Americans and not just the already-rich? That’s obviously a (potentially!) fireable offense right there. And don’t bother saying sorry after the fact to Ryan, Reverend. Say sorry to God. As a major corporate shareholder and beneficiary of the legislation, you’re in the doghouse with him, too.
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Read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the link!
Obviously, it takes a very special type of pastor to provide spiritual counseling to a bunch of guys who have devoted their entire careers to taking from the underprivileged and giving to the over-privileged. It also takes a very special kind of theological scholarship, since almost all of Christian theology suggests that exactly the opposite is required and that greed, promoting inequality, and abusing the less fortunate are actually sins that could have serious repercussions in eternal life.
These dudes have to face the very real chance that they will pass into an another world where those whom they have dispossessed, mistreated, mocked, dumped on, and scorned in life will be the “honored ones” and the GOP lifetime grifters will be at their mercy. The day of reckoning for today’s GOP and their evangelical backers could get ugly — they almost have to hope that there is no God, or if there is, that She is not a “Just God” or they will have “Hell to Pay” so to speak! No wonder they are in need of serious spiritual help!
Ryan apparently had to act quickly to scotch the blasphemous rumors floating around the Hill: JESUS WASN’T REALLY A RICH WASP. HE WASN’T EVEN A CHRISTIAN, AND HE DIDN’T BELONG TO ANY CHURCH AT ALL. HE SUPPOSEDLY TURNED FISH INTO LOAVES OF BREAD AND DIDN’T EVEN DENY BREAD (let alone cake) TO THE LGBTQ GUYS IN THE CROWD!
Some misguided souls are even claiming that ”our very own” Jesus Christ actually was an indigent swarthy Palestinian disgruntled Jew who led a ragtag band of vagrants — some of whom had quit gainful employment and abandoned their families — around Palestine undermining legal authority, failing to respect THE LAW, and spreading seditious lies like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Blessed are the poor,” and “Fat Cats riding camels will never make it through the eye of a needle or pass through the gates of Heaven!” They were “takers” — non-self-supporting, non-contributors to the community, and lived on handouts and public charity!
Some apparently have the audacity to claim that Jesus spoke of a “spiritual kingdom” unrelated to material possessions and tax breaks where rich White Guys would be judged equally with everyone else. Shucks, what’s the purpose of being rich & White if it won’t even buy you preferential treatment? Heck, even a poor guy who wasn’t a lobbyist would have direct access to Mick Mulvaney under that scenario!
This obviously false Prophet reputedly was so poor that he couldn’t afford a lawyer for his trial, not even Rudy Guiliani. He tried to represent himself, and the result was pretty ugly.
False news, false news, false news! Gotta find a true minister who preaches the gospel according to Fox & Friends!
The attitude of President Trump toward federal law enforcement is, to put it mildly, mixed. The FBI refused to bend to his will. So the special counsel team is composed of “hardened Democrats” engaged in a “WITCH HUNT.” The FBI was, according to Trump, too preoccupied with the Russia investigation to prevent the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. The agency’s reputation “is in Tatters — worst in History!”
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has passed the loyalty test. ICE’s enforcement surge “is merely the keeping of my campaign promise,” the president tweeted. Referring to ICE acting director Thomas Homan, Trump said, “Somebody said the other day, they saw him on television. . . . ‘He looks very nasty, he looks very mean.’ I said, ‘That’s what I’m looking for!’ ”
This is territory more familiar in political systems of personal rule. The agency that defies the ruler must be discredited. The agency that does his bidding is viewed as a kind of Praetorian Guard.
Most of the professionals working in ICE would surely deny this characterization, pointing to an important legal role independent from any individual president. But they need to understand that their work is now being conflated with Trump’s nativism.
ICE’s 40 percent increase in arrests within the United States after Trump took office is now closely associated with the president’s political priorities. His sweeping executive orders on immigration broadened the focus of enforcement beyond serious threats to public order. Arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions have spiked. Routine “check-ins” with ICE officials can end with handcuffs and deportation. “Sanctuary cities” — a recurring presidential political obsession — are being targeted with additional personnel. Hundreds of children have been removed from parents seeking asylum and detained separately — compounding their terrible ordeal of persecution and flight. ICE recently announced a new policy that makes it easier to detain pregnant women. Asylum seekers have often been denied “humanitarian parole” while their cases are decided, effectively jailing them without due process.
Officials of the agency insist that their nonpolitical mandate hasn’t changed. But Homan has praised the Trump administration for taking “the handcuffs off law enforcement.” Whatever their intention, ICE agents are being used by the president to send a message of callousness. And they are tying themselves to Trump’s political fortunes in the process.
The job performed by ICE is essential to American security, and not easy. Agents must prevent some truly dangerous people from entering and staying in the country — gang members, drug dealers and terrorists. But it is also their job to deal with asylum seekers — men, women and children fleeing from gangs, targeted for death by drug cartels and oppressed by terrorist states. Some of the worst people in the world, and some of the most sympathetic people in the world, are processed by immigration officials. It takes care and discernment to make this distinction.
ICE is not an agency famous for its care and discernment. In releasing an immigration activist detained by ICE early this year, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest said, “It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust. . . . We are not that country.”
Accusations of abuse in ICE custody are numerous and serious, and they preexisted the Trump era. An investigation by ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported cases of racial profiling, fabricated evidence and warrantless searches — all given little scrutiny by overwhelmed immigration courts. During the past few years, there have been hundreds of accusations of sexual abuse, racial slurs, abusive strip searches and verbal harassment in ICE jails, prisons and detention centers. For an institution that claims “zero tolerance” for such practices, it seems to get a lot of serious complaints. One asylum seeker, Gretta Soto Moreno, has called the facilities worse than normal prisons because ICE “feels like it can treat immigrants any kind of way.”
This is the bitter fruit of dehumanization — in a facility, in a system, in a country. It is unclear whether Trump would even regard such a reputation as undesirable. He has effectively given permission for bullying.
This is an issue ripe for more rigorous congressional oversight — even an independent commission to investigate charges of physical and sexual abuse in the ICE system. But this would require a critical mass of elected Republicans to give a damn about the rights and dignity of migrants. It is a distant dream.
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Dehumanization of migrants, who are among the most human of all among us, is certainly one of the most insidious aspects of the Trump/Sessions/Nielsen,/Homan regime. When we allow individuals like these who have both forgotten their proper roles in a democratic republic and arrogantly checked their humanity at the door, we essentially dehumanize ourselves.
Not surprisingly, migrants grow in moral stature as we shrink, individually and collectively. And the restrictionist (occasionally, as in the case of folks like Rep Steve King (R-IA) “neo-Nazi”) wing of the GOP is certainly a prime enabler of this reprehensible conduct. As even some GOP commentators have noted, there is a disturbing “empathy and humanity gap” evident when GOP politicos speak in dismissive and derogatory terms about migrants.
Only time will tell how soon we will be able to remove these unworthy public officials from the positions they now hold and replace them with responsible public servants who treat others with dignity, respect, humanity, and reasonableness. But, the speed and decisiveness with which we act will say much about America’s future prospects as a nation.
The Supreme Court’s final oral argument of the term will be one of its most important and potentially far-reaching, an examination of the president’s authority to protect the country by banning some foreigners who seek entry.
But, similar to a debate that has consumed Washington for the past 15 months, a major issue for the court is separating “the president” from “this president.”
The justices on Wednesday will consider President Trump’s third iteration of a travel ban that bars most nationals from a small group of mostly Muslim nations. It is the first time the court has considered the merits of a policy that has consumed the administration since its start, and raises deep questions about the judiciary’s role in national security issues usually left to the political branches.
The first version of the ban was issued just a week after Trump took office, and lower courts have found that it and each reformulated version since exceeded the authority granted by Congress and was motivated by Trump’s prejudice — animus, as courts like to say — toward Muslims.
The state of Hawaii, which is leading the challenge of the ban, told the Supreme Court:
“For over a year, the president campaigned on the pledge, never retracted, that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States.
“And upon taking office, the president issued and reissued, and reissued again, a sweeping and unilateral order that purports to bar over 150 million aliens — the vast majority of them Muslim — from entering the United States.”
Hawaii’s brief, by Washington lawyer Neal K. Katyal, cites not only Trump’s campaign comments, but also his actions as president, including the time he retweeted “three anti-Muslim propaganda videos” from a widely condemned far-right British organization.
This led to a response by the solicitor general of the United States to the justices of the Supreme Court that could have been written only in this era, about this chief executive:
“The president’s retweets do not address the meaning of the proclamation at all.”
Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco urged the court not to get distracted by the president’s bluster — he has said nice things about Muslims, too, the brief states — and to keep its examination on the law.
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Read Barnes’s full article at the link.
Trump has never shown any actual justification for the “bogus ban.” But, the standard of “facially bona fide and legitimate” is very permissive. As usual, from a legal standpoint, Trump would have done better to have kept his big mouth shut!
Justice report’s findings clash with Sessions’ actions
By Tal Kopan
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made overhauling the chronically backlogged immigration courts a top priority — but some of his moves seem to run counter to recommendations in a Justice Department-commissioned report made public on Monday.
While some of the recommendations, such as increasing staffing, have been part of his efforts, other steps — such as requiring judges to process a target amount of cases — run contrary to the study’s suggestions.
The report was written by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton last April after a yearlong analysis commissioned by the Justice Department’s immigration courts division. A redacted version was made public Monday as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Immigration Lawyers Association and American Immigration Council.
The report looks at the chronic inability of the immigration courts to keep up with the number of cases before them. Cases related to immigration status are handled in a court system separate from the typical criminal and civil courts in the US — a system that is run entirely by the Justice Department and in which the attorney general effectively functions as a one-man Supreme Court.
Because cases can take years to finish, undocumented immigrants can end up living and building lives in the US as they await a final decision on whether they are legally allowed to stay in the US — something the Trump administration has cited as a driver of illegal immigration.
The Booz Allen Hamilton analysis identifies a number of issues that contribute to the backlog, including staffing shortages, technological difficulties and external factors like an increasing number of cases.
Sessions has worked to hire more immigration judges and has ordered other upgrades like the use of an electronic filing system, as the report recommends.
But the American Immigration Lawyers Association expressed concern about a number of other recommendations that seemed ignored or on which opposite action was taken.
Responding to the report, a Justice Department official who requested not to be named said that the efforts of the department are “common-sense.”
“After years of mismanagement and neglect, the Justice Department has implemented a number of common-sense reforms in the immigration court system, a number of them address these issues and we believe that focusing our efforts on these reforms has been an effective place to start,” the official said.
The report’s recommendations include a performance review system for judges, who are hired and managed by the Justice Department, that “emphasizes process over outcomes and places high priority on judicial integrity and independence,” including in dialogue with the union that represents immigration judges. The Justice Department recently rolled out a performance metrics system, though, that requires judges to complete a certain number of cases per year and sets time goals for other procedural steps along the way, which immigration judges have strongly opposed as jeopardizing the ability of judges to make fair, independent decisions.
In a call with reporters, AILA representatives and a retired immigration judge argued that while the report doesn’t explicitly reject a quota system, it’s clear that putting one in place is contrary to the recommendation. They say that judges who are fearful of their job security and opportunity for advancement may be pressured to speed up hearing cases at the expense of due process for the immigrants, which could skew the outcome of the case.
A Justice Department official said the agency rejects the notion of a “false dichotomy” that improving efficiency sacrifices due process and said the agency has also put in place court-based metrics that lend itself to the recommendation of the report.
In another example, the report recommends that the Justice Department consider expanding legal orientation programs for immigrants and increasing their access to attorneys, so they can better navigate the system. The Justice Department recently put on hold a legal advice program for immigrants in the courts, saying it needed to be reviewed, though audits in the past had consistently shown it was productive and had saved the government money long-term. Officials say they may reinstitute the program if the audit shows it is effective.
The report also recommends limited use of video hearings, saying judges are stymied by technical difficulties and also are less able to read the subtle cues and nonverbal communications of witnesses and people involved in the hearings. Sessions’ immigration courts plan includes expanding the use of video hearings.
In another example, one of Sessions’ first moves in taking office was to send a number of judges to the border on a temporary assignment to handle cases there. The report says temporary assignments should be avoided, as they create more delays when judges have to catch up on their workloads back home.
The report also recommends administratively closing cases if they are being adjudicated in some other venue, like a visa petition or another court case. The Trump administration has sought to curtail the administrative closing of cases.
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DOJ’s ridiculous claim that Sessions’s actions are “common sense” is refuted by virtually everyone with expertise or true understanding of the Immigration Court system including those working in it, those stuck in it, and even ICE!
There can be no effective, Due Process oriented, “actual common sense” Immigration Court reforms so long as Jeff Sessions controls those courts.
Years-long wait lists, bewildering legal arguments, an extended stay in detention — you can experience it all in the Waiting Game, a newsgame that simulates the experience of trying to seek asylum in the United States. The game was created by ProPublica, Playmatics and WNYC. Based on the true stories of real asylum-seekers, this interactive portal allows users to follow in the footsteps of five people fleeing persecution and trying to take refuge in America.
The process can be exhausting and feel arbitrary – and as you’ll find in the game, it involves a lot of waiting. Once asylum-seekers reach America, they must condense complex and often traumatic stories into short, digestible narratives they will tell again and again. Their lives often depend on their ability to convince a judge that they are in danger. Judicial decisions are so inconsistent across the country, success in complicated cases can come down to geography and luck — in New York City only 17 percent of asylum cases are denied in immigration court; in Atlanta, 94 percent are. Increasingly, many asylum-seekers are held in detention for months or even years while going through the system. The immigration detention system costs more than $2 billion per year to maintain.
The Trump administration has tried to reframe the asylum system as a national security threat and a magnet for illegal immigration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions characterizes the American asylum process as “subject to rampant abuse” and “overloaded with fake claims.” He has aimed recent reforms at expediting asylum adjudications to speed up deportations and at making it more difficult for certain groups to qualify for protection, such as Central Americans who claim to fear gender-based violence or gang persecution.
The narrative that the system is overrun with fraud has long been pushed by groups that favor limiting immigration overall. They point to some 37 percent of asylum-seekers who annually miss their immigration hearings as evidence that people without legitimate fears of persecution game the system. They argue that allowing asylum-seekers to obtain work permits while they wait for a decision on their cases — which sometimes takes years — incentivizes baseless claims.
But another picture emerged when ProPublica spoke with more than 20 experts and stakeholders who study and work in the asylum system, including lawyers, immigration judges, historians, policy experts, an asylum officer, a former border patrol agent and a former ICE prosecutor.
When asked about changes to the system they’d like to see, many suggested providing asylum-seekers with better access to lawyers to support due process, expanding the definition of a refugee to cover modern-day conflicts,providing more resources to help the system process claims in a timely manner, and improving judicial independence by moving immigration courts out of the Department of Justice.
Most acknowledged some level of asylum-claim abuse exists. “In any system, of course, there are going to be some bad actors and some weaknesses people seek to exploit,” said Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000.
But they also argued for the importance of protecting and improving a national program that has provided refuge to hundreds of thousands of people. “If you are going to make a mistake in the immigration area, make this mistake,” said Bill Hing, director of the University of San Francisco’s Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic. “Protect people that may not need protecting, but don’t make the mistake of not protecting people who need it.”
Victor Manjarrez, a former border patrol agent from the 1980s until 2011, said he had seen human smuggling networks exploit the border over the years, but also many people who genuinely needed help.
“We have a system that’s not perfect, but is designed to take refugees. That is the beauty of it,” he said. “It has a lot of issues, but we have something in place that is designed to be compassionate. And that’s why we have such a big political debate about this.”
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Read the narrative and play the interactive “Waiting Game” at the above link!
Getting refuge often depends on getting the right:
Border Patrol Agent an Asylum Officer to even get into the system;
Lawyer;
Local Immigration Court;
Immigration Judge;
DHS Assistant Chief Counsel;
BIA Panel;
U.S. Court of Appeals jurisdiction;
U.S. Court of Appeals Panel;
Luck.
If something goes wrong anywhere along this line, your case could “go South,” even if it’s very meritorious.
I also agree with Professor Hing that given the UNHCR guidance that asylum applicants ought to be given “the benefit of the doubt,” the generous standard for asylum established by the Supremes in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca and implemented by the BIA in Matter of Mogharrabi, and the often irreversible nature of wrongful removals to persecution, the system should be designed to “error on the side of the applicant.”
Indeed, one of the things that DHS in my experience does well is detecting and prosecuting systemic asylum fraud. While a few individuals probably do get away with tricking the system, most “professional fraudsters” and their clients eventually are caught and brought to justice, most often in criminal court. Most of these are discovered not by “tough laws” or what happens in Immigration Court, but by more normal criminal investigative techniques: undercover agents, tips from informants, and “disgruntled employees or clients” who “blow the whistle” in return for more lenient treatment for themselves.
The moral sense is worth emphasizing. Trump’s White House is characterized not only by permanent chaos but also by constantly shifting flickers of vision — will it be right-populism, typical business conservatism, ultrapatriotic nationalism or something else altogether? One waits to find out each day, which doesn’t bode well for a regime contemplating military action. Moreover, Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — both rested on his gleeful indifference to people fleeing violence, be they immigrants from the global south or refugees from the Middle East. In what world could his administration be expected to become a just steward of their interests now? Is it really possible a government that can’t rush to turn back or exile the helpless fast enough has the moral capability to attempt any kind of just war, much less the practical means to carry it out? I doubt it.
And I worry. Careful restraint is harder than impulsive action; doubting one’s own moral capacities harder than ignoring the matter altogether. This means that governments least equipped to execute just action on the international stage may be the most likely to give it a try anyway, no matter its cost in blood and souls.
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Read the rest of Elizabeth’s article at the link.
The Syrian bombing has absolutely nothing to do with saving lives or taking a stand against the use of chemical weapons and everything to do with power and Trump’s ego. Trump sand his supporters have little difficulty turning their backs on desperate and dying Syrian refugees, including children, (who, unlike the children dying from chemical weapons attacks could actually be saved without too much trouble on the so-called “Western Powers” part) every day of the week.
Nor do they have any difficulty with proposing to truncate the already limited rights of refugee children arriving at our borders, sending them back to near certain abuse, death, or perhaps forced recruitment by gangs in the Northern Triangle. In other words, Trump and his GOP cronies Are “Immoral Situational Opportunists” who care nothing whatsoever for human life except in certain “staged” political contexts such as the abortion debate or debates over “death with dignity laws.” And, even then it has absolutely nothing to do with the lives supposedly at stake and everything to do with political capital to be gained by disallowing free will.
A scummy group won’t be made less scummy by going to war, no matter what the purported cause!
Ahmed Abdelbasit, a New Jersey teacher who faces a death sentence in Egypt for his pro-democracy activism, was detained last week outside his Jersey City apartment by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Three days later, a notice came in the mail saying his asylum case had been transferred to an immigration court.
On that Thursday morning, seven plainclothes ICE officers demanded that Abdelbasit get into an unmarked car. Confused, the physics teacher complied, all while frantically texting his friends and co-workers to let them he would not be in class that day at a private Islamic school in Union City.
HuffPost has learned that Abdelbasit, 33, was taken to a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he was forced to turn over his belongings and was given an orange jumpsuit to wear. Abdelbasit has been held there ever since.
ICE confirmed to HuffPost that he is being held at Elizabeth Detention Center on administrative immigration violations. ICE would not elaborate on what those violations were.
It was only after Abdelbasit was detained did his lawyer learn that his asylum case was transferred to immigration court in a notice that arrived three days after Abdelbasit’s arrest, HuffPost has learned, leaving the teacher and his lawyer with more questions than answers.
“It’s not clear why they would feel the need to detain somebody who has no criminal record in the United States, who has been living a very law-abiding life here and has been doing everything correctly,” Anwen Hughes, Abdelbasit’s lawyer and the deputy legal director at Human Rights First, told HuffPost. “It’s very unclear why this happened. What we’re trying to find out at the moment is what the actual basis is for this.”
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Read the complete report at the link.
Based on the information in the report, it’s not obvious why ICE would choose to detain this individual. But, of course, we don’t know all of the facts at this point.
Women from Syria walk with their children in a refugee camp in Cyprus in September.Petros Karadjias/AP
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The United Nations estimates that there are 5.5 million Syrian refugees. In the past three months, the United States has allowed two of them to enter the country—down from about 3,600 in the last threemonths of the Obama administration.
After kicking off his presidency by temporarily banning refugees, Donald Trump lifted the ban in late October. But at the same time, he increased scrutiny of refugees from 11 countries, requiring that they be admitted only if doing so fulfills “critical foreign policy interests.” Refugee advocates said that the language would effectivelyban refugees from a group of mostly Muslim-majority nations. Data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center reviewed by Mother Jones confirms their prediction.
The United States has taken in 44 refugees from the targeted countries since Trump issued his executive order, compared to about 12,000 during the same period last year. The countries are Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
The heightened vetting of people from those countries has driven down the totalnumber of Muslim refugees coming to the United States. About 550 Muslim refugees have been admitted to the United States since the executive order. More than 11,000 arrived during the same period last year. The share of admitted refugees who are Muslim has dropped from 48 percent at the end of the Obama administration to 11 percent in recent months.
Under Trump’s October executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would conduct a 90-day “in-depth threat assessment of each [targeted] country.” During that period, DHS said in a memo to Trump, it would only take refugees from the 11 countries“whose admission is deemed to be in the national interest and poses no threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”
The 90-day mark passed last week. ButSean Piazza, a spokesman for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a refugee resettlement agency, says the organization has not received any updates about the status of the temporary review now that the 90-day period has passed. It is unclear if it is still in effect, andDHS did not respond to a request for comment. DHS’ October memo stated that refugee admissions from the targeted countries are likely to “occur at a slower pace” beyond the 90-day deadline.
The Trump administration has tried to undermine support for accepting refugees by casting them as an economic burden. In September, the New York Timesreported that White House officials hadkilled a draft report from the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees have increased government revenue by $63 billion over the past decade. The report that was ultimately published had a different calculus, documenting how much it costs to provide services to refugees but not how much they pay in taxes.
Overall, the United States in on track to resettle about 21,000 refugees this year, according to the IRC.That would be fewer than in any year since at least 1980—including 2002, when refugee admissions plummeted in the wake of 9/11. It is also less than half of the annual 45,000-refugee cap that the Trump administration set in September, which was the lowest cap ever. Historically, the United States has been considered a world leader in resettling refugees.
Before Trump assumed the presidency, it already took up to two years for refugees to be vetted and resettled, not including the time people spent fleeing their country for refugee camps. Henrike Dessaules, the communications director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, says the group has had clients who “were ready to travel, that had their medical checks, security checks, and interviews done.” Instead, “they have been completely stalled in the process,” she says.*
In 2016, the Obama administration placed its refugee limit at 85,000 people and used all but five of those slots. This year’s drop comes even though there were about 22.5 million refugees across the world in 2016, more than at any time since the United Nations’ refugee agency was founded in 1950.
Syrian refugees escape the war, but die from the cold
Refugees freeze to death in Lebanon02:48
Editor’s Note: This story contains extremely graphic images of dead and wounded people.
Bekaa Valley, Lebanon (CNN) — The rocky, plowed hillside is scattered with clues of what happened that January night. A woman’s scarf. A diaper. Empty cans of tuna fish. A plastic bag of sugar. An empty box of Turkish chocolate biscuits. A single cheap Syrian-made woman’s shoe. Several white, mud-spattered rubber gloves.
It was here, last month, that 17 Syrians froze to death in a night-time snowstorm while trying to cross the mountains into Lebanon.
Three-year-old Sarah is one of the few who survived. She now lies in a bed in the Bekaa Hospital in nearby Zahleh, two intravenous tubes taped to her small right arm. Frostbite left a large dark scab on her forehead. A thick bandage covers her right cheek. Another bandage is wound around her head to cover her frostbitten right ear.
Sarah doesn’t speak. She doesn’t make a sound. Her brown eyes dart around the room — curious, perhaps confused. Her father, Mishaan al Abed, sits by her bed, trying to distract her with his cell phone.
Sarah, 3, suffers from frostbite after smugglers abandoned her and her family as they were crossing into Lebanon.
No one has told Sarah that her mother Manal, her five-year-old sister Hiba, her grandmother, her aunt and two cousins died on the mountain.
“Sometimes she says, ‘I want to eat.’ That’s all,” Abed says. Sarah hasn’t mentioned anything about her ordeal, and he is hesitant to ask her.
An unfortunate reunion
Until now, Sarah hadn’t seen her father for two and a half years. He left Syria for Lebanon and found work as a house painter, leaving his family behind.
Mishaan al Abed sent money back to his wife and kids, who stayed outside the town of Abu Kamal, on the Syrian-Iraqi border.
ISIS controlled Abu Kamal from the summer of 2014 until last November, when it was retaken by Syrian government forces. Fighting still rages in the countryside around it, where Al Abed’s family lived.
After their house was damaged, Abed’s brother and his family, along with Abed’s wife and two children, fled to Damascus. There they paid $4,000 — a fortune for a poor family — to a Syrian lawyer who they were told had the right connections with the army, intelligence and smugglers.
The plan was for them to be driven to the border in private cars on military-only roads. From there, says Abed, they were to walk with the smugglers for half an hour into Lebanon, where they would be met by other cars.
The plan started to fall apart when snow began to fall. The smugglers abandoned the group. The family lost their way and became separated. In the dark and the cold, most of them died. It’s not clear how Sarah and a few others survived.
The only thing that is clear, says hospital director Dr. Antoine Cortas, is that “it is a miracle Sarah is still alive.”
Hidden by the darkness and the snow was a house just a few hundred steps down the mountain.
In January, a group of Syrians froze to death trying to cross into Lebanon during a snowstorm.
Abed was expecting his family to cross over, but became concerned when he didn’t hear from them. “I was told the army had arrested people trying to cross into Lebanon. I thought it must be them. Then the intelligence services sent me a picture. I identified her as my wife.”
He opens the picture on his cell phone. It shows a lifeless woman curled up on the snow amidst thorn bushes, a red woolen cap on her head.
A struggle to cross over, a struggle to remain
More than a million Syrians have taken refuge in Lebanon, straining the resources of a country with a population of around six million. The Lebanese authorities have, to some extent, turned a blind eye to those entering the country illegally. But they have refused to allow relief groups to establish proper refugee camps, unlike Jordan and Turkey, for fear they will become permanent.
What pass for camps — officially called “informal tented settlements” — are ramshackle affairs. Syrians typically pay $100 to a landowner to build drafty, uninsulated breezeblock shelters with flimsy plastic tarpaulins as roofs.
Abu Farhan, a man in his sixties from Hama, in central Syria, lives in one of those shelters in a muddy camp outside the town of Rait, just a few kilometers from the Syrian border. His wife Fatima is ill. She is huddled next to a kerosene stove under a pile of blankets. Between coughing fits, she moans loudly. Farhan has had to borrow more than two million Lebanese pounds — around $1,300 — for her medical treatment.
Denied proper refugee camps, many Syrian refugees live in informal tented settlements.
Illness is just one of the perils here. Vermin, he says, is another. “There’s everything here,” he chuckles bitterly, “even things I’ve never seen before. Rats. Mice. Everything!”
The dilemma that Syrians in Lebanon face is glaringly clear. They’re not welcome here, and it’s difficult to scrape by. According to a recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, 71% of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in poverty.
Point of no return
Some Syrians have returned home, but many, like Abu Musa, a man in his forties who lives in the same settlement as Farhan, insist that returning would be nothing short of suicidal. He comes from Maarat al-Numan, in Idlib province, where Syrian forces, backed by Russian warplanes, are waging an offensive against government opponents.
“Of course, I’d like to go back to Syria!” Musa exclaims, gesturing around his damp, cold hut as if that were reason enough to return home. “But Syria isn’t safe. They’re fighting in my town. My house has been destroyed.”
And thus, Syrians continue to try to make their way to Lebanon, despite the very real risks.
Over 70% of Lebanon’s 1 million Syrian refugees live in poverty
“The people who are walking across the mountains, and taking days to cross the mountains in the middle of winter, are a testament to the fact that Syria is not safe,” said Mike Bruce of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
“Until Syria is safe, until there is a lasting peace, people should not be going back to Syria.”
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With the election of the staunchly anti-American, White Nationalist, xenophobic, religiously bigoted Trump Administration, the United States forfeited any claim to moral leadership and humanitarianism on the world stage. Our anti-refugee policies also harm our allies in the region by forcing them to bear the entire responsibility for sheltering refugees.
Only the electoral removal of this truly un-American Administration and its GOP fellow travelers from power will allow us to begin the healing process. Selfishness and inhumanity are not policies — they are diseases that will consume us all if we don’t exercise our Constitutional and political rights by voting to remove the toxic leaders spreading them!
Philip Rucker and David Weigel report for the Washington Post:
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump spent his Easter morning here on an anti-immigrant tirade, declaring Sunday that there would be no deal to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” and threatening to exit the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico increases border security.
Trump thrust the future of millions of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children into peril by promising “NO MORE DACA DEAL,” and he directed congressional Republicans to pass tough anti-immigration legislation.
An hour after he wished Americans a “HAPPY EASTER,” Trump fired off three tweets in which he vented, sometimes in all caps, about immigration laws he derided as “ridiculous” and “dumb” and about border enforcement he deemed dangerously lax.
In his first of the immigration-related tweets, Trump wrote, “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
It was Trump who last fall canceled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was begun in the Obama administration to provide temporary protection to dreamers.
“A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA,” Trump told the traveling press pool. “They had a great chance. The Democrats blew it.”
The president added, “Mexico has got to help us at the border. . . . They flow right through Mexico; they send them into the United States. It can’t happen that way anymore.”
President Trump’s position on DACA has taken several twists and turns over the years.(Meg Kelly, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)
Trump in the past has promised to show “great heart” in dealing with DACA. In his comments Sunday, he appeared to be confused about the rules of the program. To qualify, immigrants must have lived in the United States since 2007, have arrived in the country before age 16 and have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012. No one arriving in the country after that date is eligible.
After canceling DACA, Trump said he would like to reach a deal with Congress to protect dreamers from deportation in exchange for funding to build his long-promised wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The president, however, went on to reject immigration proposals from congressional Democrats in recent months.
“Catch and release” is not a law, but shorthand for immigration officials freeing up detention center space by allowing immigrants to remain at large if they are not seen as security risks. The Trump administration has frequently claimed that the policy ended when the new president took office.
But detention centers have continued releasing low-risk immigrants, as the backlog of immigration court cases reaches the hundreds of thousands. On March 5, Attorney General Jeff Sessions informed immigration court judges that they could rule against asylum seekers without full hearings, which conservatives see as a way, in the long term, to open more space in detention centers.
Trump — who has spent his time in Palm Beach hanging out with family, playing golf with friends and watching television — may have tweeted in response to commentary on Fox News Channel, which he is known to view regularly.
“Fox & Friends” aired a segment earlier on Sunday morning about Central American migrants traveling through Mexico en route to the United States. It carried the headline: “CARAVAN OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS HEADED TO U.S.”
Trump’s Sunday comments may have been mere musings by an impassioned “Fox & Friends” viewer and may not signal a substantive shift in administration policies. Still, White House officials have long said Trump’s tweets are official presidential statements, and he has been known to use Twitter to preview formal policy pronouncements.
Trump sent his tweets on the fourth and final day of his vacation in Palm Beach, Fla., where he has been staying at his private Mar-a-Lago Club with a small coterie of aides. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly did not travel with him, but senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a proponent of hard-line immigration policies, has been with Trump.
The president also has been spotted spending time — both over dinner Friday at Mar-a-Lago and on Saturday at the nearby Trump International Golf Club — with Fox host Sean Hannity. An outspoken immigration hard-liner, Hannity is a Trump booster and informal presidential adviser, in addition to hosting a radio show and prime-time Fox show.
Trump’s tweets baffled some Democrats, who had seen the president distinguish between DACA recipients and other immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“Time and time again, the president has walked away from bipartisan proposals that are exactly what he asked for,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “When an agreement to protect the Dreamers is reached, it will be despite this president rather than with his leadership.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said on Twitter that Trump had once again revealed a racial animus behind his immigration policy. “The mask of deceptions and lies with which Trump has tried to gaslight the country for months just fell away: ‘no more DACA deal.’ ” Beyer tweeted. “His true position was always anti-immigrant.”
Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), a leading advocate for a DACA deal in the House, tweeted that Trump had “demonstrated his complete ignorance” on immigration policy.
“Everyone who qualifies for DACA must show they lived in US almost 11 years ago,” he wrote. “Apparently every day is April Fool’s Day at White House.”
Conservative reaction to the tweets was relatively muted, and no Republican member of Congress had a comment or statement Sunday afternoon. At Breitbart, the tweets were reported as Trump refusing to “negotiate a deal between the GOP establishment and Democrats,” in “a return to his ‘America First’ immigration agenda.”
On Facebook, the conservative author Ann Coulter, who had condemned Trump for not securing border wall funding so far this year, urged the president to show and not tell.
“Try to get a message to the commander in chief for that wall,” she wrote.
But some Republicans joined the chorus of criticism. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a GOP primary opponent of Trump in 2016 and possibly again in 2020, tweeted in response: “A true leader preserves & offers hope, doesn’t take hope from innocent children who call America home. Remember, today is Easter Sunday. #DACA #Hope”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a supporter of immigration reform who represents Miami and is retiring this year, took a sarcastic approach: “Such a strong message of love and new beginnings from @realDonaldTrump on Easter Sunday.”
By calling for Republicans to use the “Nuclear Option” to pass tough immigration measures, Trump seemed to urge a parliamentary procedure by which Senate Republicans could pass legislation with a simple majority of 51 votes as opposed to the 60-vote majority required to end debate and bring a vote to the floor.
But in mid-February, just 36 of the Senate’s 51 Republicans backed an immigration bill that mirrored White House demands. Congressional negotiations on DACA stalled just weeks later, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision that prevented the Trump administration from denying new program renewals.
The court’s move effectively nixed a March 6 deadline that the administration had set for ending DACA. Before leaving for Easter recess, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill with no DACA fix, even though advocates saw that as the best must-pass vehicle for one.
Trump lashed out at Mexico in his second of the three tweets Sunday. He threatened to “stop” NAFTA unless Mexican authorities do more to secure the border with the United States.
Trump wrote: “Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!”
And in the third tweet, the president wrote, “These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!”
Trump’s tweets come amid tense negotiations over NAFTA between his administration and that of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. A call between the two men in February became testy after Trump refused to publicly affirm Peña Nieto’s position that Mexico will not pay for the wall’s construction, leading the Mexican leader to cancel a planned visit to Washington.
Philip Rucker is the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.
David Weigel is a national political correspondent covering Congress and grass-roots political movements. He is the author of “The Show That Never Ends,” a history of progressive rock music.
DACA obviously has nothing to do with any “exodus” now on the way. Rather, those arriving appear to be mostly refugees from the Northern Triangle — primarily scared women and children. And, they are being driven north not by DACA, but by unrelenting persecution and violence by gangs fueled by the Trump Administration’s own wrongheaded and tone-deaf policies. Sometimes, folks reap what they sow!
Most of the new arrivals probably can establish a legal right to refuge under the law. That’s why Sessions is so anxious to manipulate and “game” the existing asylum system against them. But, that move is likely to be tied up in the Federal Courts, perhaps for decades and with a good chance of grinding the entire immigration enforcement system to a halt.
The “Con-Man-In -Chief” seems to have forgotten that his “enforcement overload legislative proposal” failed miserably in the Senate — garnering only 40 votes. Even if the Senate were to change the “60 vote rule” — something which neither party seems inclined to do — it’s virtually impossible that Trump would be able to round up the necessary 11 additional votes for his “mega enforcement only” program. His problem is that his proposals have offended enough members of the GOP that they are basically DOA in the Senate.
While “The Wall” likely would have little impact on either immigration or drugs, fact is that Trump could have gotten “His Wall” in exchange for relief for the Dreamers. He just was too biased or inept (or both) to close the deal.
Trump has already claimed to have eliminated the inaptly named “catch and release” program. If there is a problem now, it’s with his own policies. Moreover, to the extent that releasing aliens on bond is a function of their being determined to be neither dangers to the community nor flight risks, that appears to be constitutionally required. Trump and the GOP can fume all they want, but they can’t eliminate the US Constitution.
Trump now appears to be backing away of his premature claim that his “get tough rhetoric and policies on immigration enforcement” had single-handedly closed down exgtra-legal migration. Human migration is driven by forces far more powerful than Donald Trump.
Mexico has been known to use some methods that violate human rights to enforce migration restrictions. Encouraging them to do that puts Trump and his buddies squarely on the side of human rights violators. On a more practical note, even assuming that there were legal measures that Mexico could take to stem the flow of northward bound migrants, Trump’s disparaging and inflammatory rhetoric has done little to encourage such action on the part of the Mexican Government. And using NAFTA to threaten Mexico is hardly likely to increase Mexico’s inclination to help.
As a country that imports more than it exports, we need NAFTA more than Mexico does. If the US wants to “dis” one of its primary trading partners, I have little doubt that countries like China, the EU, Canada, and even India will be happy to step in and fill the void. I imagine that the Chinese would love to stick some factories just south of the Mexico-US border, for all sorts of reasons.
Trump’s mean-spirited and idiotic approach to immigration, as well as his inappropriate and unhinged tweets, are a continuing embarrassment to our country and create real questions as to both his intelligence and his mental stability.
“Washington (CNN)Gold Star father Khizr Khan wrote a personal appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday to strike down President Donald Trump’s travel ban, using his family’s story to argue the ban is unconstitutional and “desecrates” his son’s sacrifice.
Known for his impassioned speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Khan is a lawyer and the father of Capt. Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed when he moved to stop a car containing suicide bombers headed toward his base in Iraq, for which he was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star.
Originally from Pakistan and a Muslim, Khan filed the legal brief on Friday because, in his view, Trump’s travel ban “not only desecrates Humayun Khan’s service and sacrifice as a Muslim- American officer in the United States Army, but also violates Khizr Khan’s own constitutional rights,” his attorney wrote in the brief.
The brief also notes Trump’s comments on the campaign trail that he wanted to institute a “Muslim ban,” a key component of critics’ arguments that the administration’s travel ban is a thinly veiled attempt to target Muslims.
“The taint of discrimination has not been washed away,” the brief argues, saying the latest travel ban and its predecessors all flow from that original idea.
“The message is that Muslims are unwelcome outsiders,” it continues. “And that message has been received loud and clear — not only by Muslims like Mr. Khan, but by those who have been denigrating and attacking Muslims with increasing frequency and vehemence since President Trump called for, and then began trying to implement, his unconstitutional Muslim Ban.”
“The message is that Muslims are outsiders, regardless of the depth of their devotion to the Constitution, and despite paying the ultimate price to defend it. That message is painfully clear to Mr. Khan,” the brief states.
Khan’s attorney, Dan Jackson, said the Gold Star father felt compelled to weigh in because of the impact of the travel ban on his son’s legacy, and added Khan has a “fierce devotion” to the Constitution.”
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Go on over to CNN at the link to read Tal’s complete article.
The rich irony here is that the individuals who “designed” the “travel ban” — Trump, Sessions, Miller — have shown a total disdain for our Constitution. Time and time again, they have failed in their duty to protect the rights of everyone in America, regardless of race, religion, gender, or status. What kind of country disrespects the memory of those who have died in its defense while allowing itself to be governed by biased, morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest individuals who reject the very notion of a Constitutional republic?
The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.
White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
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Read the rest of McElwee’s well-written and very provocative article at the link.
Not going to happen! Yet the out of control misconduct by ICE and its leadership during this Administration certainly helps McElwee make a powerful moral, if not practical political, case for elimination. Definitely worth a read.
Sessions tests limits of immigration powers with asylum moves
Tal Kopan
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Updated 8:01 AM ET, Sat March 10, 2018
Washington (CNN)The US immigration courts are set up to give the attorney general substantial power to almost single-handedly direct how immigration law is interpreted in this country — and Jeff Sessions is embracing that authority.
Sessions quietly moved this week to adjust the way asylum cases are decided in the immigration courts, an effort that has the potential to test the limits of the attorney general’s power to dictate whether immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in the US and, immigration advocates fear, could make it much harder for would-be asylees to make their cases to stay here.
Sessions used a lesser-known authority this week to refer to himself two decisions from the Board of Immigration Appeals, the appellate level of the immigration courts. Both deal with asylum claims — the right of immigrants who are at the border or in the US to stay based on fear of persecution back home.
In one case, Sessions reached into the Board of Immigration Appeals archives and overturned a ruling from 2014 — a precedent-setting decision that all asylum cases are entitled to a hearing before their claims can be rejected. In the other, Sessions is asking for briefs on an unpublished opinion as to how much the threat of being the victim of a crime can qualify for asylum. The latter has groups puzzled and concerned, as the underlying case remains confidential, per the Justice Department, and thus the potential implications are harder to discern. Experts suspect the interest has to do with whether fear of gang violence — a major issue in Central America — can support asylum claims.
A Justice official would say only on the latter case that the department is considering the issue due to a “lack of clarity” in the court system on the subject. On the former, spokesman Devin O’Malley said the Board of Immigration Appeals’ 2014 holding “added unnecessary cases to the dockets of immigration judges who are working hard to reduce an already large immigration court backlog.”
Tightening asylum
Sessions referring the cases to himself follows other efforts during his tenure to influence the courts, the Justice Department says, in an effort to make them quicker and more efficient. In addition to expanding the number of Board of Immigration Appeals judges and hiring immigration judges at all levels at a rapid clip, the Justice Department has rolled out guidance and policies to try to move cases more quickly through the system, including possible performance measures that have the judges’ union concerned they could be evaluated on the number of closed cases.
“What is he up to? That would be speculation to say, but definitely there have been moves in the name of efficiency that, if not implemented correctly, could jeopardize due process,” said Rená Cutlip-Mason, until last year a Justice Department immigration courts official and now a leader at the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that supports immigrant women and girls fleeing violence.
“I think it’s important that the courts balance efficiencies with due process, and any efforts that are made, I think, need to be made with that in mind,” she added.
The Board of Immigration Appeals decisions could allow Sessions to make it much harder to seek asylum in the US.
Asylum is a favorite target of immigration hardliners, who argue that because of the years-long backlog to hear cases, immigrants are coached to make asylum claims for what’s billed as a guaranteed free pass to stay in the country illegally.
Advocates, however, say the vast majority of asylum claims are legitimate and that trying to stack the decks against immigrants fleeing dangerous situations is immoral and contrary to international law. Making the process quicker, they argue, makes it harder for asylum seekers — who are often traumatized, unfamiliar with English and US law, and may not have advanced education — to secure legal representation to help make their cases. The immigration courts allow immigrants to have counsel but no legal assistance is provided by the government, unlike in criminal courts.
Reshaping the immigration courts
Beyond asylum, Sessions’ efforts could have far-reaching implications for the entire immigration system, and illustrate the unique nature of the immigration court system, which gives him near singular authority to interpret immigration laws.
Immigration cases are heard outside of the broader federal court system. The immigration courts operate as the trial- or district-level equivalent and the Board of Immigration Appeals serves as the appellate- or circuit court-level. Both are staffed with judges selected by the attorney general, who do not require any third-party confirmation.
How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants
How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants
In this system, the attorney general him or herself sits at the Supreme Court’s level, with even more authority than the high court to handpick decisions. The attorney general has the authority to refer any Board of Immigration Appeals decision to his or her office for review, and can single-handedly overturn decisions and set interpretations of immigration law that become precedent followed by the immigration courts.
The power is not absolute — immigrants can appeal their cases to the federal circuit courts, and at times those courts and, eventually, the Supreme Court will overrule immigration courts’ or Justice Department decisions. That’s especially true when cases deal with constitutional rights, said former Obama administration Justice Department immigration official Leon Fresco. Fresco added that the federal courts’ deference to the immigration courts’ interpretation of the law has decreased in the past 10 years, though that could change as more of the President’s chosen judges are added to the bench.
But Sessions could be on track to test the limits of his power, and the moves might set up further intense litigation on the subject.
“From what I can see, Sessions is really testing how far those powers really go,” said Cutlip-Mason. “The fact that the attorney general can have this much power is a very interesting way that the system’s been set up.”
Retired immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt, who served for years in federal immigration agencies and the immigration courts, said that to say the immigration courts are full due process is “sort of a bait and switch.” He says despite the presentation of the courts’ decisions externally, the message to immigration judges internally is that they work for the attorney general.
“I think due process is under huge attack in the immigration courts. Every once in a while Sessions says something about due process, but his actions say something quite different.”
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The idea that the U.S. Immigration Courts can fairly adjudicate asylum cases and provide Due Process to migrants with Jeff Sessions in charge is a bad joke.
America needs an independent Article I Immigration Court.
Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all of us.
In its decisions involving claims for protection under Article III of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the BIA defines “government acquiescence” to include “willful blindness” by government officials.
In its recent decision in Matter of J-C-H-F-, the BIA addressed the criteria an immigration judge should use in assessing the reliability of a statement taken from a newly-arrived non-citizens at either an airport or the border. The BIA largely adopted the criteria set out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in its 2004 decision in Ramsameachire v. Ashcroft.
Ramsameachire set out four reasonable factors for consideration: (1) whether the record of the interview is verbatim or merely summarizes or paraphrases the respondent’s statements; (2) whether the questions asked were designed to elicit the details of the claim, and whether the interviewer asked follow-up questions to aid the respondent in developing the claim; whether the respondent appears to have been reluctant to reveal information because of prior interrogation or other coercive experiences in his or her home country; and (4) whether the responses to the questions suggest that the respondent did not understand the questions in either English or through the interpreter’s translation.
Both the Second Circuit in Ramsameachire and the BIA in J-C-H-F- applied these criteria to the statement in question in their respective cases; both found the statement reliable, which led to an adverse credibility finding due to discrepancies between the statement and later testimony. But there is a big difference between the two cases. Ramsameachire was decided one year before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is part of the U.S. government, published the first of its two reports (in 2005 and 2016) assessing the expedited removal system in which Bureau of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers encounter arriving asylum seekers. USCIRF conducted field research over several years before issuing each report. As I wrote in an earlier blog post summarizing these reports, USCIRF’s first recommendation to EOIR was to “retrain immigration judges that the interview record created by CBP is not a verbatim transcript of the interview and does not document the individual’s entire asylum claim in detail, and should be weighed accordingly.”
As I already noted in my prior post, USCIRF described its findings of the airport interview process as “alarming.” It found that the reports were neither verbatim nor reliable; that they sometimes contained answers to questions that were never asked, that they indicate that information was conveyed when in fact it was not. USCIRF found that although the statements indicated that they were read back, they usually were not, and that a CBP officer explained that the respondent’s initials on each page merely indicated that he or she received a copy of each page, and not that the page was read back to the respondent and approved as to accuracy.
The Second Circuit in Ramsameachire would have no way of knowing any of this, and therefore reasonably considered the statement to be a verbatim transcript which had been read back to the respondent, whose initials on each page were deemed to indicate approval of the accuracy of its contents. But the BIA in 2018 could claim no such ignorance. USCIRF had specifically discussed its reports at a plenary session of the 2016 Immigration Judge Legal Training Conference in Washington D.C., where the report’s co-author told the audience that the statements were not verbatim transcripts in spite of their appearance to the contrary. As moderator of the panel, I pointed out the importance of this report in adjudicating asylum claims. The person in charge of BIA legal training at the time was present for the panel, and in fact, had the same panelists from USCIRF reprise its presentation two months later at the BIA for its Board Members and staff attorneys. I personally informed both the chair and vice-chair of the BIA of the report and its findings, and recommended that they order a hard copy of the report. The report was even posted on EOIR’s Virtual Law Library, which at the time was a component of the BIA, under the supervision of the vice-chair (along with training and publication). I can say this with authority, because I was the Senior Legal Advisor at the BIA in charge of the library, and I reported directly to the BIA vice-chair.
In spite of all of the above, J-C-H-F- simply treats the statement as if it is a verbatim transcript, and noted that the pages of the statement were initialed by the respondent; in summary, the Board panel acted as if the two USCIRF reports did not exist. Very interestingly, sometime in 2017, the USCIRF report was removed from the EOIR Virtual Law Library. Based on my experience overseeing the library, I can’t imagine any way this could have happened unless it was at the request of the BIA vice-chair. But why would he have required the report’s removal?
If any reader has information as to when J-C-H-F- was first considered for possible precedent status by the BIA, please let me know via the contact link below.
Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
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I can largely corroborate what Jeffrey is saying. I, of course, have been gone from “The Tower” for 15 years.
But I know 1) that BIA judges and staff were present during the USCIRF sessions at the Annual Immigration Judges Conference (in fact, I believe it was “required training” on religious asylum claims), 2) as an Immigration Judge I had access to the Annual Reports of the USCIRF and used them in my adjudications; 3) I was well aware, and believe that any competent EOIR judge would also have been aware, that airport statements and statements taken by the Border Patrol were a) not verbatim, and b) often unreliable for a host of reasons as pointed out by the USCIRF.
I am certainly as conscious as anyone of the precarious positions of BIA Appellate Immigration Judges as administrative judges working for the Attorney General. I’m also very well aware of the human desire for self-preservation, job preservation, and institutional survival, all of which are put in jeopardy these days by siding with immigrants against the DHS in the “Age of Trump & Sessions,” where “the only good migrant is a deported migrant.”
But, the job of a BIA Appellate Immigration Judge, or indeed any Immigration Judge, is not about any of these things. It’s about “guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”
That means insuring that migrants’ rights, including of course, their precious right to Due Process under our Constitution, are fully protected. Further, an EOIR judge must insure that the generous standards for asylum set forth by the Supreme Court in Cardoza-Fonseca and by the BIA itself in Matter of Mogharrabi are fully realized, not just “rote cited.”
If standing up for migrants’ rights turns out to be job threatening or institutionally threatening, then so be it. Lives are at stake here, not just senior level US Government careers, as important as I realize those can be!
Unfortunately, I think today’s BIA has become more or less of a “shill” for the enforcement heavy views of Jeff Sessions, DHS, the Office of Immigration Litigation, and the Trump Administration in general.
What good is “required training” in adjudicating asylum requests based on religion if the BIA and Immigration Judges merely ignore what is presented? It isn’t like DHS or CBP had some “counterpresentation” that showed why their statements were reliable.
Indeed, I had very few DHS Assistant Chief Counsel seriously contest the potential reliability issues with statements taken at the border. And never in my 13 years on the bench did the DHS offer to bring in a Border Patrol Agent to testify as to the reliability or the process by which these statements are taken.
I can’t imagine any other court giving border statements the weight accorded by the BIA once the problems set forth in the USCIRF Report were placed in the record. And, I’m not aware that the DHS has ever set forth any rebuttal to the USCIRF report or made any serious attempt to remedy these glaring defects.
We need an independent Article I United States Immigration Court that guarantees Due Process and gives migrants a “fair shake.” Part of that must be an Appellate Division that functions like a true appellate court and holds the Government and the DHS fully accountable for complying with the law.
“Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez was widely viewed as an anticlimax. The case involves a group of immigrants being held in custody without any hope of bail. They argue that their indefinite detention violates due process, but the majority declined to resolve the constitutional question, sending the case back down to the lower court. In a sense, the plaintiffs are back where they started.
Justice Stephen Breyer, however, saw something far more chilling in the majority’s opinion. Taking the rare and dramatic step of reading his dissent from the bench, Breyer cautioned that the court’s conservative majority may be willing to strip immigrants of personhood in a manner that harkens back to Dred Scott. The justice used his impassioned dissent to sound an alarm. We ignore him at our own peril.
Jennings involves three groups of noncitizen plaintiffs: asylum-seekers, immigrants who have committed crimes but finished serving their sentences, and immigrants who believe they’re entitled to enter the country for reasons unrelated to persecution. A high percentage of these types of immigrants ultimately win the right to enter the U.S. But federal law authorizes the government to detain them while it adjudicates their claims in case it secures the authority to deport them instead.
The detention of these immigrants—often in brutal facilities that impose inhuman punishments—has, in practice, dragged on for months, even years. There is no clear recourse for detained immigrants who remain locked up without a hearing. In 2001’s Zadvydas v. Davis, the court found that a similar scheme applied to “deportable aliens” would almost certainly violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. To avoid this constitutional problem, the court construed the law as limiting detention to six months.
But in Jennings, the court’s five-member conservative majority interpreted another federal law to permit indefinite detention of thousands of aliens, with no apparent concern for the constitutional problems that reading creates. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, revealed from the outset of his opinion that he dislikes Zadvydas, dismissing it as a “notably generous” holding that avoided the constitutional issue in order to secure due process for immigrants. Unlike the Zadvydas court, Alito has no interest in protecting the constitutional rights of noncitizens. Instead, he read the current statute as stingily as possible, concluding that it did, indeed, allow the government to detain all three groups of immigrants indefinitely.
This theory justifiably fills Breyer with righteousdisgust.
Oddly, Alito then chose not to address whether this interpretation of the statute rendered it unconstitutional. Instead, he sent the case back down to the lower courts to re-examine the due process question. But in the process, the justice telegraphed where he stands on the issue by attempting to sabotage the plaintiffs on their way out the door. In the lower courts, this case proceeded as a class action, allowing the plaintiffs to fight for the rights of every other similarly situated immigrant. The government didn’t ask the Supreme Court to review whether it was proper for it to litigate the plaintiffs’ claims as a class. But Alito did it anyway, strongly suggesting that the lower court should dissolve the class and force every plaintiff to litigate his case by himself.
Alito’s antics infuriated Breyer, who dissented along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. (Justice Elena Kagan recused, presumably because she worked on the case as solicitor general.) Using Zadvydas as a jumping-off point, he interpreted the statute to require a bail hearing for immigrants after six months’ confinement—provided they pose no risk of flight or danger to the community. “The Due Process Clause foresees eligibility for bail as part of ‘due process,’ ” Breyer explained. By its own terms, that clause applies to every “person” in the country. Thus, the Constitution only permits the government to detain these immigrants without bail if they are not considered “persons” within the United States.
That is essentially what the government argued, asserting that immigrants detained at the border have no rights. This theory justifiably fills Breyer with righteous disgust. “We cannot here engage in this legal fiction,” he wrote. “No one can claim, nor since the time of slavery has anyone to my knowledge successfully claimed, that persons held within the United States are totally without constitutional protection.” Breyer continued:
Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States? The answer is that the Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention. And the reason that is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.
Unfortunately, Breyer is not quite right that “no one” could claim, at least since “the time of slavery,” that noncitizens held in the U.S. “are totally without constitutional protection.” Just last October, Judge Karen L. Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit argued exactly that. In a stunning dissent, Henderson wrote that a pregnant, undocumented minor held in custody was “not entitled to the due process protections of the Fifth Amendment” because “[she] has never entered the United States as a matter of law … ” (The Due Process Clause protects women’s rights to abortion access.) In fact, the minor had entered the country and lived here for several months. But because she entered illegally, Henderson asserted that she had no constitutional rights. That’s precisely the “legal fiction” that Breyer rejected. It’s shockingly similar to the theory used to justify slavery and Dred Scott.
Do the Supreme Court’s conservatives agree with Henderson that undocumented immigrants detained in the U.S. have no constitutional protections? Breyer seems to fear that they do. In a striking peroration, Breyer reminded his colleagues that “at heart,” the issues before them “are simple”:
We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have “certain unalienable Rights,” and that among them is the right to “Liberty.” We need merely remember that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause protects each person’s liberty from arbitrary deprivation. And we need just keep in mind the fact that … liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail. It is neither technical nor unusually difficult to read the words of these statutes as consistent with this basic right.
We should all be concerned that Breyer found it necessary to explain these first principles to the court. So many rights flow from the Due Process Clause’s liberty component: not just the right to be free from arbitrary detention and degrading treatment, but also the right to bodily integrity and to equal dignity. Should the court rule that undocumented immigrants lack these basic liberties, what’s to stop the government from torturing them, executing them, or keeping them imprisoned forever?
If that sounds dramatic, consider Breyer’s somber warning about possible starvation, beatings, and lashings. The justice plainly recognizes that, with Jennings, the court may have already taken a step down this dark and dangerous path.”
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As an appellate judge, I remember being infuriated by the callous attitude of some of my “Ivory Tower” colleagues and some trial judges who tended to minimize and sometimes trivialize human pain and suffering to arrive at nonsensical legalistic definitions of what constituted “persecution” or “torture.”
They simply didn’t want to recognize truth, because it would have resulted in more people being granted relief. In frustration, I occasionally privately suggested to staff that perhaps we needed an “interactive session” at the Annual Immigration Judges Conference (back in the days when we used to have such things) where those jurists who were immune to others’ pain and suffering would be locked in a room and subjected to some of the same treatment themselves. I imagine they would have been less stoic if it were happening to them rather than to someone else.
I doubt that any of the five Justices who joined the tone-deaf majority in Jennings would last more than a few days, not to mention years, in the kind of intentionally cruel, substandard, and deplorable conditions in which individuals, the majority of whom have valid claims to remain here under U.S. and international law, are detained in the “New American Gulag.” So, why is there no obvious Constitutional Due Process problem with subjecting individuals to so-called “civil” immigration detention, without recourse, under conditions that no human being, judge or not, should be forced to endure?
No, “Tone-Deaf Five,” folks fighting for their lives in immigration detention, many of whom lack basic legal representation that others take for granted, don’t have time to bring so-called “Bivens actions” (which the Court has pretty much judicially eliminated anyway) for “so-called “Constitutional torts!” Come on man, get serious!
Privileged jurists like Alito and Thomas speak in undecipherable legal trivialities and “pretzel themselves up” to help out corporate entities and other members of the privileged classes, yet have no time for clear violations of the Constitutional rights of the most vulnerable among us.
A much wiser, more humble, and less arrogant “judge” than Justice Alito and friends once said “Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” When will the arrogant ever learn, when will they ever learn? Maybe not until it happens to them! Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all of us! We should all be concerned that Justice Alito and his fellow judicial “corporate elitists” have “dissed” the Due Process Clause of our Constitution which protects everyone in America, not just corporations, gun owners, and over-privileged, under-humanized jurists!
Based upon recent statistics, approximately one person per month will die in the “DHS New American Gulag” while this case is “on remand” to the lower courts. How would Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, and Gorsuch feel if it were their loved ones who perished, rather than some faceless (to them) “alien” (who also happens to be a human being)? Dehumanizing the least among us, like the Dred Scott decision did, de-humanizes all of us! For that, there is no defense at the bar of history and humanity.
“NEW YORK― President Donald Trump’s State Department has been ordered to strip language about women’s reproductive rights from its annual global human rights report, Politico reported on Thursday.
The report, compiled each year with information from U.S. embassies around the world, typically details the lack of contraception and abortion access in various countries and sheds light on racial and sexual discrimination.
This year, a senior aide to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has reportedly directed the department to remove much of that information from the document. The new report will focus instead on forced sterilization and abortions, and the “Reproductive Rights” subsection in the report will be renamed “Coercion in Population Control.”
The section on racial and sexual discrimination will be pared down, according to the Politico story.
“This development is a transparent attempt by the Trump administration to not only deprioritize reproductive rights, but effectively erase them from the broader conversation on human rights,” said Tarah Demant, director of gender, sexuality, and identity at Amnesty International USA.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the department is “better focusing some sections of the report for clarity,” and sharpening it to spotlight “the most egregious issues.”
The administration’s proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year, released earlier this month, would cut nearly $2.5 billion from the Global Health Programs Account, slashing global family planning funding by half.
Trump also reinstated and massively expanded the Global Gag Rule, restricting $8.8 billion in U.S. foreign aid funding for international health programs that provide or even mention abortion services. And he defunded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a global maternal health organization that provides contraception and pregnancy care to low-income women in 150 countries.
Girls aren’t able to get contraception, and they’re starting to come back pregnant, suicidal, bereftLisa Shannon, a global women’s rights advocate who works with reproductive health clinics in East Africa.
Women’s health workers around the world are already seeing the effects of Trump’s policies on women and girls, who are seeking dangerous and sometimes deadly back-alley abortions as family planning clinics are forced to shut down. Unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality globally.
“Girls aren’t able to get contraception, and they’re starting to come back pregnant, suicidal, bereft,” said Lisa Shannon, a global women’s rights advocate who works with reproductive health clinics in East Africa. “They’re desperate, and they’ll do whatever it takes.”
Stripping language about reproductive rights from the U.S. government’s annual report is more than symbolic. Because the U.S. is the largest donor to women’s health groups in the world, effectively holding the purse strings for many non-profits and international organizations, any move the administration makes on the issue can have a chilling effect on contraception and abortion access in developing countries.
Brian Dixon, a spokesman for Population Connection, said the State Department is using the report “to provide cover to violations of women’s fundamental human rights rather than to provide a tool for accountability.”
“Denial of care isn’t ― as Trump and [Vice President Mike] Pence would have it ― an act of faith; it’s an act of violence,” he told HuffPost. “And the refusal to acknowledge that in a report created to hold autocrats and oppressors accountable is just disgraceful.”
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Advocates for women asylum seekers are going to have to fight the Trumpsters every inch of the way! In the end, abandoning an honest, largely objective approach to human rights will be costly to the US, as we continue to sink toward “Third World” status. The full ugliness of “Trumpism” and a White Nationalist, largely misogynistic agenda are coming into focus. And, as I have pointed out in other areas, once the Country Reports lose credibility, it probably never will be regained.