"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greetings. The vast majority (58%) of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody as of June 30, 2018 had no criminal record. An even larger proportion – four out of five – either had no record, or had only committed a minor offense such as a traffic violation. Case-by-case records on each of these 44,435 individuals held in ICE custody were recently obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. These data provide a detailed snapshot of ICE custody practices.
Individuals were mainly from four countries. Forty-three percent were from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, while an additional 25 percent were Mexicans. At least 18 percent had resided continuously in the U.S. for ten years or more, and one out of four had been in the country for at least five years.
Many individuals had been held in ICE custody for a relatively short period of time. Forty-one percent had thus far stayed in ICE custody for 30 days or less. At the other extreme, almost 2,000 individuals had been detained for more than a year, and a few individuals had already been continuously detained according to ICE records for over ten years.
The data document the dominance of private for-profit prisons in the large-scale detention of ICE detainees. Overall, fully 71 percent of detainees were housed in facilities operated by private companies. The rest of the facilities were operated by government, including by counties, cities, and the federal government. Texas held 29 percent of all ICE detainees.
Access the brand new free web query tool to examine who ICE has in custody and where they are being held. Details on state, county, facility name, nationality, gender, length of time in the U.S., green card status, if convicted the most serious criminal offense, and much more are available at:
In addition, there are many additional TRAC free query tools – which track Border Patrol arrests, ICE detainers and removals, the Immigration Court’s backlog, the handling of juvenile cases and more. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:
TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
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Expensive, divisive, often counterproductive, and overall serving no discernible national interest: That’s the Trump immigration policy!
Recently I got involved in explaining how one could respond to this “restrictionist editorial” from Investor’s Business Daily, asserting that any Democrat who refused to buy into the Trump Administration’s draconian, and often illegal, immigration enforcement program was in favor of “open borders” and claiming to provide some (actually highly bogus) examples. “https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegal-immigration-democrats-open-borders/
Gotta hope that these dudes do a better job on investment news than they do on immigration policy! So here are some “talking points” that I prepared to help set the record straight!
Since Congressional Resolutions are nonbinding, they commonly are used as a political stunt by the party in control of a particular branch of Congress. The idea is to force members of the opposition party to “vote no” so that can be used against them in political campaigns. (Sadly, many voters have no idea what a “Resolution” is, so they are misled into thinking it’s opposition to an actual bill or law.)
So, given the bad reputation of ICE immigration enforcement, it’s hardly surprising that Democrats (and perhaps some thoughtful GOP legislators) don’t want to be “hoodwinked” into a political scheme of carte blanche endorsing an agency and its employees who have credibly been accused of many abuses.
Democrats don’t deny that civil immigration enforcement (apprehensions and removals) is necessary. But, it is certainly debatable whether ICE as currently structured, staffed, “branded,” and led is the right way to go about it. Even then, the “Abolish ICE” movement has not gained majority support among Democrat politicians. To view it as the “policy” of the Democratic Party or the majority of Democrats is simply wrong and misleading.
It’s possible to debate whether President Obama deserved his “Deporter-in- Chief” title.It’s also possible to debate the immigration enforcement strategies his Administration adopted. But, it’s beyond reasonable debate that Obama 1) gave immigration enforcement a very high priority; and 2) was in some enforcement areas, from a purely statistical basis, more effective than his predecessors and than Trump. Here’s a good analysis of the Obama immigration enforcement program: file:///Users/paulwickhamschmidt/Documents/The%20Obama%20Record%20on%20Deportations:%20Deporter%20in%20Chief%20or%20Not%3F%20%7C%20migrationpolicy.org.webarchive
Contrary to the false scenarios and manipulated statistics presented by the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice, and immigration restrictionists, the Government’s own statistics show that when released from detention and represented by counsel, asylum seekers show up for their hearings nearly all the time: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-family-asylum-20180817-story.html
In those cases where they don’t appear, it is often because of defective notices from overwhelmed Government immigration agencies or because nobody has clearly explained their rights and responsibilities to them in language they can understand. Indeed, many “in absentia” removal orders are subsequently vacated and reopened by the Immigration Courts.
Even in this highly anti-asylum administration, applicants who actually manage to get a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims win about one in three times, certainly a high enough chance of success to encourage most to show up.
Detention is both incredibly expensive and dehumanizing. DHS detention is tied up in numerous court cases. Since asylum applicants as a group are seldom either security or flight risks, looking for ways to process them outside detention makes more sense than building more expensive and substandard private jails.
“Sanctuary Cities” is largely a misnomer, because all jurisdictions provide some degree of cooperation to DHS consistent with law. Two things drive this phenomenon. First, courts have held that detainers issued by DHS for civil removal purposesare not legally enforceable because a judicial official does not issue them based on probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Second, ICE’s enforcement efforts aimed at non-criminal community members have sown fear and mistrust that has undermined local law enforcement. Victims are afraid to report serious crimes and individuals are unwilling to cooperate with local police or be witnesses in criminal prosecutions because of fear of deportation. Consequently, many localities have limited cooperation with DHS to that legally required: cooperating in the apprehension and removal of serious criminals, answering specific requests for information, or honoring criminal warrants issued by Article III Federal Judges.
Actually, it’s the Trump Administration not “Sanctuary Jurisdictions” that are scofflaws, engaging in illegal actions.
Whether or not all residents of San Francisco should be able to vote for school board is a local matter that is not indicative of any national position of the Democratic Party. All children in the United States, regardless of their status or the status of their parents, are entitled to public education under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe; and many undocumented individuals pay taxes, and nearly all would if there were a better system to allow them to do so. Therefore, on it’s face letting all residents have a say in how the local schools are run is hardly an unreasonable approach, regardless of whether or not it’s the best approach.
Moreover, what’s happening in San Francisco is by no means indicative of what Democrats elsewhere in the country think. Neither the Democratic Party nor the majority of Democrats has specifically endorsed letting undocumented individuals vote for school board.
Approximately 11 million individuals reside in the US without documents. The vast majority are law-abiding, productively employed members of our community, many with relatives who are citizens or Green Card holders. While those who have committed serious crimes or mean our country harm should of course be identified and removed (which has been a priority of every Administration over the past 50 years), the vast majority of the rest are not going to be forcibly removed no matter how nasty and cruel immigration enforcement policies become.
Therefore, developing some type of “earned legalization” that would either give them a path to citizenship, or at least make it possible for them legally to live, work, pay taxes and raise their families in the US makes more sense than forcing them to live in an underground status.
Unlike massive, ultimately ineffective enforcement programs, legalization programs are “self-funded” through application fees so they don’t add to the deficit like expanded enforcement programs.
In the long run, we need wiser leaders who will implement a larger and more realistic legal immigration system that gives more credence both to the forces abroad that force individuals to come here and the U.S. market forces that make employers in the U. S want and need to employ immigrants.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are not going to stop human migration; however, we could harness its power to maximize use of our legal immigration system, minimize the number of future migrants who come by way of the “extra legal” system, and make immigration enforcement more reasonable, achievable, and publicly acceptable.
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
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The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbusterNew York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
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I could see it in the mindless clapping, revolting laughter, and sickening glee in the eyes of the ugly, overwhelmingly White crowd (many of them women, although a few of the women didn’t seem amused) behind Trump as he denigrated and mocked Christine Blasey Ford this week.
Also in the angry, distorted snarl of Sen. Lindsey Graham as he absurdly called the Kavanaugh hearings “the most unethical” performance (LG, my man, where were you when Mitch, you, and your colleagues totally stiffed a much better qualified Obama appointment, , without even giving him the courtesy of a hearing?).
Also in the incredibly arrogant, partisan, rude, condescending, and openly misogynistic way that Kavanaugh treated Senator Amy Klobuchar’s totally reasonable inquiry. Would Senator Susan Collins still have voted for “BKavs” if he had treated her that way? I doubt it! But, I guess her women colleagues don’t matter. And, it appears that “Chairman Chuckie” Grassley doesn’t really need or want any GOP women on his “Old Boys Club” (a/k/a Senate Judiciary Committee.) Only Democrat women can hack the stress and workload of serving on a daily basis with the GOP misogynists.
What do you call a party whose “base” glories in the pain and suffering of others? The 21st Century GOP!
It’s an existential threat to the future of our country! If decent folks don’t start using the ballot box to remove the GOP from power at every level, it might be too late for the majority of us to take our country back from the misguided minority who have taken power! Get out the vote in November!
A federal district court judge has ruled Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ conditions on grant funding to force so-called sanctuary cities to cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts as unconstitutional
Judge William Orrick, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sided with the state of California and city of San Francisco in their lawsuit challenging the requirements in granting their request for summary judgment Friday.
The conditions Sessions set in 2017 require sanctuary cities to give immigration officials access to their jails, notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of the planned release of a detainee, and follow a law that prohibits state and local governments from restricting how much information is shared with the Department of Homeland Security.
Orrick’s decision was in agreement with every court that has looked at these issues.
The judge said that the challenged conditions violate the separation of power and that the information-sharing law is unconstitutional.
Orrick said he is following the lead of the district court in a similar challenge brought by the city of Chicago and is issuing a nationwide injunction to block the Justice Department from enforcing its requirement and the law. But he said he is putting that stay on hold until the Ninth Circuit addresses the issue on appeal.
“Today’s ruling is a victory in our fight to protect the people of California,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement Friday afternoon.
“We will continue to stand up to the Trump administration’s attempts to force our law enforcement into changing its policies and practices in ways that that would make us less safe.”
Becerra’s office noted that the ruling marks the attorney general’s twenty-second legal victory against the Trump administration.
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When will he ever learn, when will he ever learn? And, how much of our tax money and Federal Court time will he waste with this counterproductive, semi-frivolous, and vindictive litigation.
Given Gonzo’s record of disregarding the law and mocking common sense, California might “top the century mark” in legal wins before the end of this Administration!
In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.
Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.
But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.
These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.
The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.
To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.
The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.
“It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.
Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.
“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”
But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.
The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.
The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.
Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”
Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.
At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.
The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.
Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.
The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.
Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.
Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.
The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.
“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.
“This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”
The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.
Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.
Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.
“Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.
Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.
The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.
Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.
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If you don’t want to turn back the clock to 1939, get out the vote to remove this scofflaw, White Nationalist, racist Administration from power before it’s too late!
Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Michael Hiltzik reports for the LA Times:
Another judge slaps down Jeff Sessions for trying to punish ‘sanctuary’ cities like L.A.
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions just can’t win in his attempts to punish local communities for “sanctuary” laws. (Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions must be getting tired of so much winning in his campaign to punish cities and states with the temerity to challenge his attempted crackdown on immigration.
In the latest episode, U.S. Judge Manuel L. Real of Los Angeles enjoined him from withholding more than $1 million in federal law enforcement assistance funding from L.A. because the city declared itself a “sanctuary” community. Real ruled that Sessions was way out of line in attempting to add conditions to a federal grant program designed to be based strictly on a community’s population and crime rates.
Real’s injunction tracks a nationwide injunction issued in April by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. In that case, brought by the city of Chicago, the appellate panel ruled 2-1 that Sessions’ actions “evince … a disturbing disregard for the separation of powers” principle enshrined in the Constitution.
The Attorney General repeatedly characterizes the issue as whether localities can be allowed to thwart federal law enforcement. That is a red herring.
7TH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS
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“The power of the purse does not belong to the Executive Branch,” the majority reminded Sessions. “It rests in the Legislative Branch,” which in this case didn’t delegate to Sessions the authority to impose conditions on the law enforcement grants.
Several federal courts have slapped down Sessions’ efforts to bludgeon local communities into doing the federal government’s dirty work of immigration enforcement, so it’s proper to take a quick look at Sessions’ viewpoint.
Sessions started throwing conniptions about sanctuary communities in March 2017, a couple of months after President Trump issued an executive order calling for federal funds to be withheld from communities that he said were out to thwart immigration agents. “Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States,” Trump asserted.
Trump’s order recognized that the law might constrain how the Department of Justice might act, so Sessions attempted to gin up a legal rationale. He asserted that jurisdictions across the nation were actively violating federal immigration laws, pumping undocumented immigrants back onto the streets even after their convictions for serious crimes. Sessions has cited two provisions of federal law, “Section 1373” and immigration detainers.
The first, enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton, prohibits anyone from interfering with the exchange of information with federal authorities about the immigration status of any person. The law says merely that once local officials have that information, they can’t be stopped from trading it to the feds. Nothing in the law, however, requires local officials to collect information about the immigration status of anyone they have in custody in the first place.
“Detainers” are requests by immigration officials that local police hold immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and suspected or accused of a serious crime for 48 hours, or until the immigration authorities can decide if they want to take further action themselves. The Congressional Research Service found in 2015 that local policies vary widely about when to honor detainers, with many honoring those for people held for serious felonies but not for suspects in minor misdemeanor cases. Some require commitments from the federal government to cover the cost of detention or even the locality’s legal liability. Demanding compliance with all detainers, some experts say, raises the possibility of federal commandeering of local resources for federal purposes, which happens to be unconstitutional.
Since Sessions began griping about sanctuary laws — many of which were enacted decades before Trump became president — federal judges have recognized consistently that localities have a legitimate interest in creating a trustful relationship between the police and the communities they serve. In communities with large populations of immigrants, that relationship can be easily destroyed if the cops become viewed as immigration agents. Residents will be reluctant to report crimes, much less help police find wrongdoers or testify against them. The result is more dangerous, not safer, communities.
In July, for example, Federal Judge John Mendez of Sacramento rejected the administration’s attempt to block three sanctuary laws enacted by the state Legislature in 2017. Mendez found that for the most part the laws fell squarely within the state’s authority to manage its own law enforcement resources and keep them from being “commandeered” by the federal government for its own purposes.
Nothing in the sanctuary laws “actively obstructs” federal officials, Mendez found; they only required state officials not to participate in federal immigration enforcement, except on their own terms. “Standing aside,” he wrote, “does not equate to standing in the way.”
Sessions hasn’t had any more success in trying to block federal funds for sanctuary cities. That’s the subject of the appeals court and Los Angeles cases. Both pertain to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, a federal program enacted in 2005 and named after a New York police officer slain while guarding an immigrant who had agreed to testify against drug dealers.
Congress established a strict formula for the Byrne funds, requiring that 50% be disbursed each year to states in amounts proportionate to their population and crime levels, with the remaining 50% tied to states’ proportions of violent crime. The city and county of Los Angeles, which were to receive a combined $1.9 million in the current fiscal year, planned to use the money for anti-gang programs, among other things.
Before making the disbursements, however, the DOJ said that applicants would have to certify their compliance with Section 1373 and agree to other forms of cooperation with immigration officials.
The appeals court in Chicago thought little of the DOJ’s arguments. “The Attorney General repeatedly characterizes the issue as whether localities can be allowed to thwart federal law enforcement,” the majority observed. “That is a red herring.” They ridiculed Sessions for being “incredulous that localities receiving federal funds can complain about conditions attached to the distribution of those funds.” But that was just too bad, they concluded: He simply doesn’t have the authority to attach any conditions to the program, other than those dictated by the formula.
Judge Real came to the same conclusion. Sessions’ policy faced Los Angeles with “an impossible choice: Either it must certify compliance with unconstitutional and unlawful directives that impinge on the City’s sovereignty, damage community trust, and harm public safety, or it will lose congressionally authorized Byrne JAG funding.” Real wasn’t inclined to force the city to make that choice.
For a federal officer charged with upholding the law, Jeff Sessions seems to need an awful lot of reminding of what the law says. It’s time he took the lessons he’s getting from federal courts to heart.
Michael Hiltzik
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik writes a daily blog appearing on latimes.com. His business column appears in print every Sunday, and occasionally on other days. As a member of the Los Angeles Times staff, he has been a financial and technology writer and a foreign correspondent. He is the author of six books, including “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age” and “The New Deal: A Modern History.” Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
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Once upon a time, many years ago, I worked at a U.S. Department of Justice that functioned like “America’s law firm.” Every adverse decision was carefully studied by the agency, the litigator, and the Solicitor General’s Office. When the reviewing court appeared to have “the better view of the law,” or when the agency position was repeatedly rejected and there was no “Circuit split,” the rules, regulations, BIA interpretations, and even the statute sometimes were changed to adopt the Federal Courts’ “better-reasoned view of the law.”
Indeed, while serving in the Legacy INS General Counsel’s Office under then General Counsel Sam Bernsen, I remember drafting successfully enacted legislation (known as the “INS Efficiency Act”) that actually adopted into law some Federal Court decisions that had reversed INS and also tried to fashion some “legislative compromises” that we thought would pass muster in the Article IIIs. Amazingly, it was enacted into law with only minor modifications to my original draft.
Yup, it wasn’t always popular with the “operating divisions” of the INS. But, it was the job of “us lawyers” to “sell them” on why compliance with legal standards was important. And, indeed, I remember getting the essential support of “upper level management” — at that time the Commissioner, General Leonard Chapman, Jr., and his Deputy Jim Greene, certainly supporters of strong immigration enforcement, for the legislative changes our Office drafted.
In other words, we were trying to make Government work effectively within legal boundaries rather than continuing to bother the Federal Courts with untenable or legally weak positions. Folks committed to “Good Government.” Imagine that!
Nowadays, under Jeff Sessions, the DOJ has abandoned any semblance of good lawyering or legal excellence and has, with a few exceptions (possibly Bob Mueller’s operation and the FBI under Director Chris Wray), been turned into a “White Nationalist propaganda factory.” Today’s hollow semblance of a DOJ consistently presents “jaw dropping” legal positions that are both bad policy and supported by weak to nonexistent legal arguments that sometimes fail to pass the “straight fact test.”
That’s because Jeff Sessions doesn’t operate as a lawyer. No, he’s a “Minister of Propaganda” who spreads racially-driven bogus views, false narratives, and misleading statistics, then feigns shock and outrage when the “real” Federal Courts consistently “stuff” him and apply the actual law and Constitution. When your legal positions are not drawn from the law, the Constitution, input from career lawyers, and consultation with experts in the field, but rather taken from “cue cards” prepared by widely discredited White Nationalist restrictionist groups, the results are bound to be ugly.
The only surprising thing is that such a stunningly biased and unqualified individuals as Jeff Sessions has been given the opportunity to destroy the integrity of the U.S. Department of Justice and to make it a subservient tool of his attack on American values and our entire justice system. Sen. Liz Warren tried to tell ’em. But they wouldn’t listen. Now, Jeff Sessions is dragging all of America down in the muck with him.
As many as 1,000 parents separated from their children are getting a second chance to stay in the US
In a huge reversal, the Trump administration is giving families another chance to claim asylum — and even some parents who’ve already been deported might be eligible.
A Honduran father and his 6-year-old son worship during Sunday mass on September 9, 2018, in Oakland, California. They fled their country seeking asylum in the US.Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Trump administration has just agreed to give parents who were separated from their children at the US-Mexico border earlier this year a second chance to make asylum claims in the US.
The Department of Justice has negotiated an agreement that covers three lawsuits filed against the government over the family-separation policy. Parents in the US who’d been ordered deported would get another chance to pass an interview demonstrating a “credible fear” of persecution — the first step in the asylum process.
If either the parent or the child passes the screening interview, families will be allowed to apply for asylum together. Some parents who don’t pass will be allowed to remain with their children in the US while the children’s cases are adjudicated.
And in some cases, the government is even willing to consider reopening cases for parents who were already deported from the US.
The agreement covers three lawsuits: Ms. L v. ICE, which forced the government to reunite separated families this summer; M- M- M- v. ICE, brought on behalf of children separated from parents; and Dora v. Sessions, a lawsuit from parents who had failed their initial asylum screenings because they were distraught after weeks of separation from their children.
If the agreement is approved by the federal judges overseeing the three lawsuits, it will result in a second chance for hundreds of parents. Muslim Advocates and the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represented the plaintiffs in Dora v. Sessions, believe it could give “well over 1,000” parents another chance at an asylum claim. And for many families, it will eliminate (or at least defer) the impossible choice between giving up a child’s legal case, and separating the family again by keeping the child in the US while the parent is deported.
Separating families made it much harder for parents to seek asylum
Under the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a parent who wanted to seek asylum in the US had one chance: to pass a “credible fear” screening interview with an asylum office.
If a parent passed the credible fear screening, he or she was given a chance to seek asylum before an immigration judge; if the parent failed, he or she could appeal the decision to an immigration judge, with much worse odds. Losing the appeal, or agreeing to drop the case, led to an order of deportation.
Generally, most asylum seekers pass their credible fear screenings. But evidence suggests that parents who were separated from their children often failed their interviews. Parents were often so consumed by grief over their separation from their children that they weren’t able to answer asylum officers’ questions fully and effectively, according to the lawsuit filed in Dora v. Sessions.
“Explaining the basis for an asylum claim is very difficult under the best of circumstances,” said one source familiar with the interview process but not professionally authorized to speak on the record. “When someone is a) detained, b) almost certainly unrepresented, and c) beside herself with fear and desperation because of having had her child taken from her,” the source continued, “it is almost impossible.”
By the time nearly 2,000 parents and children were reunited in July (thanks to Judge Dana Sabraw’s rulings in the Ms. L case ordering family reunification), the overwhelming majority of parents had already lost their cases and been ordered deported. But their children — who’d been placed on a separate legal track as “unaccompanied alien children” after being separated from their parents — often still had ongoing cases and a real chance of winning some form of legal status in the US.
So upon being reunited, hundreds of families were faced with the choice between returning to their home country together (and facing possible peril or persecution), and keeping the child in the US in hopes of winning asylum or another form of legal status — and separating the family anew. (Some parents alleged they weren’t even given this chance, and were coerced into withdrawing their children’s legal claims — and forcibly reseparated without warning if they refused to comply.)
None of this would have happened if families hadn’t been separated to begin with. Under normal circumstances, if either a parent or a child passed an asylum interview, the government would allow them both to file asylum claims. And obviously, parents who weren’t traumatized by family separation might have had a better chance with their interviews. But simply reuniting the family didn’t solve the problem.
The government is agreeing to give reunited families the same chance they’d had if they’d never been separated
Here is what the agreement proposed by the government would actually do, if approved:
Parents who passed their initial “credible fear” interviews for asylum will be allowed to continue; this agreement doesn’t change those cases.
Parents who had lost their cases and been ordered deported will be given a full review to reassess whether or not they have a credible fear of persecution. This review will include a second interview for “additional fact-gathering” — during which a lawyer can be present (or can dial in by phone). Parents will be allowed to do this even if they didn’t ask for a credible fear interview when they were first arrested.
Parents who fail their credible fear screenings will be allowed to remain in the US and apply for asylum if their child passes his or her credible fear screening. The reverse is also true: If a child fails her asylum screening but the parent passes his, both parent and child will be allowed to apply for asylum. This is the way things normally work when families are apprehended together; by instituting it now, the government is essentially wiping away the legal side effects of family separation.
Parents who aren’t eligible for a credible fear interview because they had been deported before and were returning will still be allowed to avoid deportation if they meet a higher standard (“reasonable fear”) and qualify for something called “withholding of removal.” Even if they fail that standard, they will be allowed to stay in the US while their children are going through their asylum cases.
Parents who have already been deported will not have their cases automatically reviewed by the government. However, the plaintiffs in these lawsuits will have 30 days to present evidence to the government that particular parents should be allowed to return, and the government will consider those requests. (The agreement doesn’t make it clear whether deported parents will have their own cases reopened, or whether they will solely be allowed to return to stay with their children while the children’s legal cases are ongoing.)
If the agreement is approved, it will officially send the legal fight over family separation into its endgame phase. While hundreds of parents and children remain separated, the legal fight over reunification is largely about who’s responsible for carrying out various parts of the government’s reunification plan; the new agreement would set a similar plan up for the legal due process of parents and children making claims to stay in the US.
It would almost certainly run into similar implementation obstacles to the reunification plan, but it would set expectations that the government would provide this process by default, rather than moving forward with deportation.
The Trump administration is never going to wholly be able to erase the consequences of its decision to separate families as a matter of course. But it is now agreeing to give up the legal advantages that it accrued by separating parents’ and children’s cases — and forcing parents to go through interviews with life-or-death stakes without knowing when or whether they’d ever see their children again.
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I’ve been saying it over and over again. Why not just do it right, provide full Due Process, and follow the law?
Not only are the policies being promoted by Sessions, Trump, and the rest of the GOP White Nationalists unconstitutional, illegal, vile, and immoral, they are totally wasteful of limited Government resources (particularly in a time of GOP-fueled budget deficits) and unnecessarily tie up the Federal Courts. Contrary to Jeff Sessions’s false narratives, no court system anywhere has unlimited time for all the nonsense that the Government could potentially pursue. When common sense and sane prosecutorial discretion lose out, they whole system suffers.
Think what might have happened if, instead of wasting time and money on illegal family separation, unnecessary criminal prosecutions, and bending protection law out of shape, the Government had done the right thing and spent the money:
Working with NGOs and legal aid groups to release folks in locations where they could get legal assistance, virtually guaranteeing their appearance in Immigration Court;
Agreeing to grant the many domestic violence and other types of gang-related cases that could have been granted after proper preparation and documentation under a proper application of the law (before Sessions messed it up);
Taking all of the cases of long-term law-abiding residents off overloaded Immigration Court dockets so that the real contested asylum cases could be given priority without denying anyone Due Process or moving everything else back through “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”).
Any “bad guys,” or “true economic migrants” could have been given full hearings, denied, and removed. But, totally contrary to Sessions’s racist blather, most of the folks arriving are actually legitimate refugees. They could have been granted status and allowed to go out and work and study to make America better. I’ve found few individuals (including many native-born US citizens) more grateful and willing to work hard and contribute than those granted asylum.
The money spent on wasteful litigation and needless, cruel and inhuman, detention could instead have been used;
to establish a viable overseas refugee screening program in the Northern Triangle;
working with other countries to share resettlement responsibilities;
and trying to correct the situations in the Northern Triangle which gave rise to the refugee flows in the first place.
Sadly, this is hardly the first, and probably by no means the last, time that the US Government has been forced to reprocess large numbers of asylum seekers because of a failure to follow Due Process and do the right thing in the first place. Just check out the history of the ABC v. Thornburgh litigation and settlement (a case I was involved in during my time in the “Legacy INS” General Counsel’s Office).
Indeed, the Trump scofflaws are “doubling down” on every failed policy fo the past. They actually are at it again with their bone-headed proposal to thumb their collective noses at Judge Dolly Gee and withdraw from the Flores settlement and set up a “Kiddie Gulag” by regulation. Good luck with that. The Trump Scofflaws are already wasting your taxpayer money on more “tent cities in the Kiddie Gulag” that they almost certainly will be enjoined from using at some point. Then, cooler heads will prevail and we’ll undoubtedly have a “Flores II” settlement.
Also, compare the real role of immigration lawyers in enforcing the law and holding Goverment scofflaws like Sessions and Nielsen accountable with the totally bogus picture painted by Sessions in his false, unethical, and highly inappropriate speech to US Immigration Judges this week. Truth is exactly the opposite of nearly everything that Jeff Sessions says.
Our country can’t afford the scofflaw conduct, inhumanity, immorality, and wastefulness of Trump, Sessions, Miller and their racist White Nationalist cabal. Vote for regime change this Fall!
Dan De Luce and Julia Edwards Ainsley report for NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugeesdid not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News.
Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.
At a meeting in September 2017 with senior officials discussing refugee admissions, a representative from the National Counterterrorism Center came ready to present a report that analyzed the possible risks presented by refugees entering the country.
But before he could discuss the report, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand dismissed the report, saying her boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would not be guided by its findings.
“We read that. The attorney general doesn’t agree with the conclusions of that report,” she said, according to two officials familiar with the meeting, including one who was in the room at the time.
Brand’s blunt veto of the intelligence assessment shocked career civil servants at the interagency meeting, which seemed to expose a bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda. Her response also amounted to a rejection of her own department’s view, as the FBI, part of the Justice Department, had contributed to the assessment.
“She just dismissed them,” said the former official who attended the meeting.
The intelligence assessment was “inappropriately discredited as a result of that exchange,” said the ex-official. The episode made clear that “you weren’t able to have an honest conversation about the risk.”
A current DHS official defended the administration’s response to the intelligence assessment, saying immigration policy in the Trump administration does not rely solely on “historical data about terrorism trends,” but rather “is an all-of-the-above approach that looks at every single pathway that we think it is possible for a terrorist to come into the United States.”
A spokeswoman for DHS said, “If we only look at what terrorists have done in the past, we will never be able to prevent future attacks … We cannot let dangerous individuals slip through the cracks and exploit our refugee program, which is why we have implemented security enhancements that would prevent such violent individuals from reaching our shores, while still upholding our humanitarian ideals.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Following the dismissal of the assessment, anti-immigration hard-liners in the administration clashed with civil servants about how to portray the possible threat from refugees in documents drafted for inter-agency discussions, former officials said. In the end, the president’s decision last year to lower the ceiling for refugee admissions to 45,000 did not refer to security threats, but cited staffing shortages at DHS as the rationale. But once the decision was issued, the White House released a public statement that suggested the president’s decision was driven mainly by security concerns and said “some refugees” admitted into the country had posed a threat to public safety.
An Afghan refugee sleeps on the ground while another looks out a window in an abandoned warehouse where they and other migrants took refuge in Belgrade, Serbia, on Feb. 1, 2017.Muhammed Muheisen / AP file
“President Donald J. Trump is taking the responsible approach to promote the safety of the American people,” said the Sept. 29 statement.
Political appointees in the Trump administration then wrote a new report a few months later that seemed to contradict the view of the country’s spy agencies.
In a press release at the time, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the report showed the need for tougher screening of travelers entering the country and served as “a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists.”
But the report is being challenged in court by several former officials and rights groups who say it inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S. Two lawsuits filed in Massachusetts and California allege the report improperly excludes incidents committed by domestic terrorists, like white supremacists, and wrongfully includes a significant number of naturalized U.S. citizens and foreigners who committed crimes overseas and were brought to the United States for the purpose of standing trial.
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand speaks during the opening of the summit on Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking at Department of Justice in Washington, on Feb. 2, 2018.Jose Luis Magana / AP file
Mary McCord, former assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which prosecutes terrorism charges, said the January 2018 report is “unfortunately both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.”
“The result is a report that presents an inaccurate picture of the threat of terrorism in the United States,” McCord said.
When the report was released in January 2018, Trump tweeted that it showed the need to move away from “random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit based” because it showed that “the nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born.”
But the report only focuses on international terrorism, which is defined as a crime committed on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization. The document excludes domestic terrorism committed by groups such as white supremacists or anti-government militias, which are more likely to be supported by those born in the U.S.
Because of the way the terrorism statute is written, those who support domestic organizations like anti-government or white supremacists groups cannot be charged with terrorism, even if the groups they support have committed crimes. Only supporters of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the State Department can be charged with “material support” of terrorism.
Still, Trump has repeatedly stated that the overwhelming majority of terrorists in the United States came from overseas, even before the 2018 report.
In his first speech to Congress in February 2017, Trump said that the “vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our own country.”
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, MSNBC legal analyst and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, took issue with that statement and sued the Justice Department to provide documents that backed up the president’s claim. But the Department was unable to locate any records.
“There are a lot of domestic terrorism cases, and they are generally not committed by people born abroad. To the extent that those cases were excluded — white supremacist violence, anti-abortion terrorism and militia violence — the inquiry is grossly biased,” Wittes wrote on Lawfare.
Wittes said that almost 100, or about a quarter, of the 402 individuals listed as foreign-born terrorists committed their crimes overseas and were brought to the U.S. to face trial.
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller at roundtable discussion on California immigration policy at the White House on May 16.Evan Vucci / AP file
During her time in government as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Barbara Strack said her staff worked diligently to thoroughly vet refugees for any possible terrorist links. But she said there was no information she came across that indicated refugees posed a significant security threat.
“I did not see evidence that refugees presented an elevated national security risk compared to other categories of travelers to the United States,” she told NBC News.
The administration must decide by the end of the month how many refugees to allow in the country in the next fiscal year. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, known for his hawkish stance on immigration, has been pushing for a drastic reduction in the ceiling.
The cap was set at 45,000 last year, but the number of refugees allowed in the country has fallen far below that ceiling, with only about 20,000 resettled in the United States since October 2017. Rights advocates and former officials accuse the White House of intentionally slowing down the bureaucratic process to keep the numbers down, overloading the FBI and other government agencies with duplicative procedures.
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This level of total intellectual dishonesty, overt racism, and policy driven solely by a White Nationalist philosophy and political agenda by an Attorney General is unprecedented in my experience at the DOJ.
If you remember, Brand escaped to a “soft landing” in the private sector earlier this year. One of my theories is that she was trying to protect herself and her reputation for a future Federal Judgeship. If and when that happens, I hope that those serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee will remember her completely sleazy role in carrying Sessions’s racist-polluted water on this one. Someone with no respect for facts, the law, humanity, or professional expertise definitely does not deserve to be on the Federal Bench!
And for Pete’s sake don’t credit Sessions with any integrity whatsoever in not resigning under pressure from our “Mussolini Wannabe.” He’s not “protecting” the Mueller investigation or anything else worthy in the DOJ. In fact, he has wholly politicized the DOJ and taken it down into the gutter. The reason he “hangs on” is not because he respects the Constitution or rule of law. Clearly, he doesn’t! No, it’s because he wants to do as much damage to civil rights and people of color as he can during his toxic tenure.
Make no mistake, that damage he has done, as has been reported elsewhere, is very substantial. It has set the goals that Dr. Martin Luther King and others fought for and even gave their lives for back by decades. Despicable!
Sessions’s White-Nationalist driven lies and false narratives about refugees are described above. For the truth about refugees and immigrants and all of the great things they have done and continue to do for our country, see my recent post at https://wp.me/p8eeJm-313.
Nothing will stop him from discarding the dog whistle and grabbing a bullhorn in his racist tweets and shouts.
Whatever happens to Donald Trump, however long it takes before he’s out of office, there’s one area where it will be hard to stop the spread of his poisonous politics: his stoking of racial hatred.
Trump and Republicans keep trying to turn the murder of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts, allegedly done by an immigrant who may have been in the United States illegally, into a campaign issue, trying further to stir up anger and raise fears about immigrants among Trump’s base. But they conveniently ignore the murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson on a BART train in Oakland, California, allegedly committed by a white supremacist.
It’s not hard to figure out their reasoning: Tibbetts was white, and her accused killer is Latino. Wilson was African-American, and her accused killer is white. Crimes by “others” are by definition bad and scary, to a racist’s way of thinking. Crimes by whites must be a sign of mental illness, right?
Multiple reports and analyses show that the number of hate crimes against minorities have risen since Trump became president, and that the number started rising the day after the election in 2016. “There were more reported hate crimes on Nov. 9 than any other day in 2016, and the daily number of such incidents exceeded the level on Election Day for the next 10 days,” says a report from The Washington Post.
Even the increase in hate crime numbers is no doubt understated, because hate crimes are always underreported. But they have been rising all over the country, in cities, in small towns, and on college campuses, ever since Trump’s election. Victims encompass all minorities: African-American, Latino, Muslim, LGBT, Asian-American, and immigrants of multiple nationalities. Except, of course, for immigrants from Western European countries like Norway. Immigrants from “shithole countries” are obviously still fair game.
Over the last decade, extremists committed 387 murders in the United States, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. Of those, 71 percent were done by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists. Islamic extremists were responsible for only 26 percent.
When do hate crimes occur? There’s no shortage of bigoted remarks and bombastic insults at his campaign rallies, often rousing his supporters into shouts against whatever minority group he currently has in his cross hairs, whether that’s the media, immigrants, Muslims, or whatever his outrage du jour.
But often, says one study, hate crimes occur right after a bigoted Trump tweet.
An online paper published on the Social Science Research Network found a pattern of an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes after particularly virulent anti-Muslim tweets. From the paper’s abstract:
We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign.
A commentary on the study in Scientific American cautioned that the link between Trump tweets and anti-Muslim hate crimes is correlational and not necessarily causal. Still, the researchers “point out that their findings are consistent with the idea that Trump’s presidency has made it more socially acceptable for many people to express prejudicial or hateful views that they already possessed prior to his election.”
Making such prejudicial and hateful views “socially acceptable” is the crux of the problem. We all know that racism exists and always has existed. With Trump’s ascendancy, people with those racist views have ripped away the layer of social responsibility, giving them (in their own eyes) permission to express racism openly, with little fear of repercussion. The abundance of cell phone videos distributed on social media showing insults, harassment, arrests, attacks, and even some killings illustrates the fact that harassment toward people who are merely #LivingWhileBlack is an everyday occurrence.
Though Trump and Fox News fearmonger Tucker Carlson will always be able to find inflammatory cases of young white women killed by sinister brown men, studies overwhelmingly show that immigrants, including illegal immigrants, commit crime at far lower rates than do native-born citizens. As the percentage of foreign-born increased in the United States from 7 percent to 13 percent between 1990 and 2013, violent crime rates fell 48 percent.
Politically, though, what matters is the first statistic — the increase in foreign-born. […]
The always fraught challenge of incorporating this generation of immigrants — assimilating, learning from, being enriched by — will be that much harder and take that much longer. It will happen; most of those people are not going away, no matter how much Trump dreams of deportation, and the country’s adaptive genius will be stronger than the Trump poison.
But the poison will linger. And when history considers how the Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans acquiesced to Trump’s many depredations, it will be their failure to stand up for respect and tolerance between one human being and another that will be judged most harshly.
Since he stepped on the political stage, Donald Trump has electrified the radical right. Through his words and actions, he continues to deliver for what he clearly sees as his core constituency. As a consequence, we’ve seen a rise in hate crimes, street violence and large public actions organized by white supremacist groups that have been further emboldened by the president’s statements about “shithole countries” and his policies targeting refugees and immigrants of color.
Nothing will stop Trump from exploiting the racial and ethnic fear and hatred he has espoused for decades and brought out into the open when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015, spouting nonsense about Mexico sending rapists and drug dealers to the U.S. Nothing will stop his base from cheering about a nonsensical wall that will never be built (and Mexico certainly will never pay for). Nothing will stop him from discarding the dog whistle and grabbing a bullhorn in his racist tweets and shouts.
Ultimately, that will be Donald Trump’s legacy: MARA—Make America Racist Again
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White Nationalist racism is at the core of the Trump/Sessions/Miller immigration agenda. I don’t see how one can push that agenda while denying its underlying ugly intent.
From Mollie Tibbetts’ father: Don’t distort her death to advance racist views
Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate
Ten days ago, we learned that Mollie would not be coming home. Shattered, my family set out to celebrate Mollie’s extraordinary life and chose to share our sorrow in private. At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.
Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., “heartless” and “despicable.”
Make no mistake, Mollie was my daughter and my best friend. At her eulogy, I said Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate. She may not be able to speak for herself, but I can and will. Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.
Throughout this ordeal I’ve asked myself, “What would Mollie do?” As I write this, I am watching Sen. John McCain lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and know that evil will succeed only if good people do nothing. Both Mollie and Senator McCain were good people. I know that both would stand up now and do something.
The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.
To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.
My stepdaughter, whom Mollie loved so dearly, is Latina. Her sons — Mollie’s cherished nephews and my grandchildren — are Latino. That means I am Hispanic. I am African. I am Asian. I am European. My blood runs from every corner of the Earth because I am American. As an American, I have one tenet: to respect every citizen of the world and actively engage in the ongoing pursuit to form a more perfect union.
Given that, to knowingly foment discord among races is a disgrace to our flag. It incites fear in innocent communities and lends legitimacy to the darkest, most hate-filled corners of the American soul. It is the opposite of leadership. It is the opposite of humanity. It is heartless. It is despicable. It is shameful.
We have the opportunity now to take heed of the lessons that Mollie, John McCain and Aretha Franklin taught — humanity, fairness and courage. For most of the summer, the search for Mollie brought this nation together like no other pursuit. There was a common national will that did transcend opinion, race, gender and geography. Let’s not lose sight of that miracle. Let’s not lose sight of Mollie.
Instead, let’s turn against racism in all its ugly manifestations both subtle and overt. Let’s turn toward each other with all the compassion we gave Mollie. Let’s listen, not shout. Let’s build bridges, not walls. Let’s celebrate our diversity rather than argue over our differences. I can tell you, when you’ve lost your best friend, differences are petty and meaningless.
My family remains eternally grateful to all those who adopted Mollie so completely and showered us with so much care, compassion and generosity. Please accept our desire to remain private as we share our loss. We love Mollie with all our hearts and miss her terribly. We need time.
Backlogs in U.S. immigration courts are up 38 percent since Trump took office
Backlogs in U.S. immigration courts are up 38 percent since Trump took office, with the biggest increases in Maryland, Massachusetts and Georgia
U.S. immigration courts have had a 38 percent increase in case backlog since President Trump took office
Nationwide, there are 746,049 pending cases before 351 immigration judges, up from 542,411 in January 2017
The Department of Justice has recently hired 23 new judges and streamlined the process for hiring judges, but many experts say other Trump administration policy changes continue to exacerbate the system
PUBLISHED: 13:43 EDT, 30 August 2018 | UPDATED: 10:25 EDT, 31 August 2018
The U.S. immigration court system is straining to accommodate cases, with a 38 percent increase in the backlog since President Trump took office, according to a new analysis of government data.
Nationwide, there were 746,049 pending cases as of July 31 – up from 542,411 at the end of January 2017, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
‘It’s a fairly remarkable increase – nearly 40 percent in 18 months,’ former immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt told DailyMail.com. ‘It shows that the policies being followed by this administration are making things worse rather than better.’
The increase in caseload has occurred unevenly, with 10 states responsible for the majority of the growth in backlogged cases.
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While not every state has immigration court, immigrants living in each state have cases before an immigration judge. This map illustrates where people with pending immigration cases are living
Maryland had the highest increase (96 percent), with 33,384 backlogged cases as of July 31, compared to 17,074 at the end of January 2017.
Massachusetts followed, with a 76 percent increase to 26,782 cases, compared to 15,208 cases 18 months earlier.
No sane person would look at this and think that throwing more cases into this system would be a good idea. -Former immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt
Georgia had the third highest increase at 67 percent (rising to 23,249 cases from 13,955), followed by Florida with a 57 percent increase (up to 50,544 pending cases from 32,233). California had a 48 percent increase and the highest overall backlog of any state with 140,676 unresolved cases, up from 95,252.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sought to address the problem through a number of steps, however many experts say changes under the Trump administration are exacerbating the backlog.
‘No sane person would look at this and think that throwing more cases into this system would be a good idea,’ Wickham Schmidt said.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, announced earlier this month that it has hired 23 new immigration judges in an effort to take on the backlog and to offset the retirement of judges.
That change brings the total number of immigration judges to 351, with Department of Justice officials expecting to add another 75 in the fall.
Sessions says he has also introduced a ‘streamlined’ approach for hiring judges – a historically lengthy process – to bring the average hiring time down to 266 days, compared from 742 days in 2017, according to Department of Justice data.
In addition, the DOJ has introduced a new quota that would require immigration judges to close 700 cases a year.
Quotas ‘would threaten the integrity and independence of the court and potentially increase the court’s backlog,’ according to the National Association of Immigration Judges, the union representing the judges.
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Ten states were responsible for a majority of the increase in case backlogs within U.S. immigration courts since President Trump took office
Despite those efforts, experts say that a number of policy changes under the Trump administration continue to compound the backlog and more recent actions could worsen the situation in years to come.
‘The problem is basic policy decisions in managing the workload,’ said Susan B. Long, co-director of TRAC, which published the analysis. ‘Historically backlogs have been rising for a very long time, so this is not a new problem, but they have accelerated since President Trump assumed office.’
Throwing a couple hundred thousand cases back into an already overloaded system is obviously going to have an impact. -Former immigration Judge Jeffrey S. Chase
Under the current administration, the DOJ has ended an Obama-era practice that gave the government prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases, which allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys to prioritize certain cases and deprioritize others by taking them off the docket indefinitely.
For example, officials could deprioritize cases in which an immigrant has been living in the country for many years without committing any crimes, who is also paying taxes and has close relatives who are U.S. citizens.
The goal was to allow the DOJ to focus more time and energy prosecuting immigrants who were convicted of other crimes, engaged in gang activity, or who had just crossed the border.
Long told DailyMail.com that ‘tens of thousands’ of cases could be reintroduced to the docket now that prosecutorial discretion has been eliminated.
Sessions also issued a decision earlier this year that takes away the authority of immigration judges to administratively close cases. Similar to prosecutorial discretion, administrative closures allowed a judge to close low-priority cases to make room on the docket for more serious offenses.
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The backlog of immigration cases has risen steadily over the past decade
From Oct. 1, 2011 through Sept. 30, 2017, 215,285 cases were administratively closed, according to Sessions’ decision.
Now those cases are being added back to the docket, former Immigration Judge Jeffrey S. Chase told DailyMail.com.
‘Throwing a couple hundred thousand cases back into an already overloaded system is obviously going to have an impact,’ he said.
In addition, the Trump administration is planning to terminate Temporary Protected Status for people from El Salvador in September 2019 and Haiti in July 2019. TPS is a designation for people from certain countries for whom it would be unsafe or not feasible for them to return home. Chase said putting an end to the program will add to the backlog in the future.
Long said that the increase in immigration crackdowns at workplaces and at the Southern U.S. border are primarily being handled by criminal courts, so those aren’t having a huge impact on the backlog.
In many cases simple case ‘churn’ – when cases are postponed because a judge isn’t available or unable to get to all scheduled cases in a day – is the cause of backlog, Long said.
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Susan Long and Jeffrey have hit the nail on the head. Sessions has replaced a nascent but very promising prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) system instituted by DHS toward the end of the Obama Administration with more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.” “Churning,” as used by Susan is another term for “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” or “ADR” for short.
The “spiggot” of Immigration Court cases is under the sole control of ICE. No court reform is likely to succeed unless it includes an element of responsible and prioritized use of court time — the process followed by every other law enforcement agency in America that I’m aware of except ICE. Sessions — and let’s be honest, he’s running both immigration enforcement through DHS and the courts at DOJ despite the glaring conflict of interest — is moving in exactly the opposite direction with his bone-headed “zero tolerance” and “deport ’em all” pronouncements.
By 1) eliminating policies favoring the prudent use of court time; 2) removing the authority of Immigration Judges to close cases that could be better handled by USCIS off the courts’ active dockets; 3) disrupting settled asylum law and discouraging ICE from stipulating or otherwise settling cases, making most cases “full three-hour merits hearings;” and 4) overemphasizing detention, thereby shifting judicial resources from non-detained courts where all of the backlog exists to detained courts, Sessions has virtually guaranteed a continued growth in backlog.
The most telling fact: even with dozens more Immigration Judges on the bench than during any time in the Obama Administration, and all sorts of sophomoric “just pedal faster, shame and blame” invectives directed at the Immigration Judges themselves, as well as embattled private attorneys, the Trump Administration has never been able to complete more Immigration Court cases than it has docketed. That’s the definition of an out of control backlog.
Another sobering stat: Assuming that the 350 Immigration Judges now on duty worked on nothing but backlog — no new cases — and that each of them achieved their “quota” of 700 cases annually, it would take until nearly 2022 just to complete all of the cases in the current backlog!
No, the answer isn’t to blame the victims: the migrants exercising the legal rights to which they are entitled, the attorneys (many serving pro bono) trying to help them, and the beleaguered judges themselves and their overwhelmed court staff.
The answer is in the exercise of some prosecutorial discretion by the DHS to get “low priority” individuals and cases off the docket.At some point, that must be combined with a legislative program that allows those undocumented individuals with clean records, equities, and who are effectively part of and important contributors to our society to remain in some type of legal status. In my view, that should involve a path to a green card. But, even a more limited, renewable “TPS-type” status that allowed individuals to reside, work, study, and pay taxes in the US would be a big step in the right direction.
Not going to happen under Trump & Sessions? Yeah, that’s likely true. All the more reason to replace them with non-White Nationalists capable of recognizing the many important contributions of all kinds of migrants and governing wisely in the overall public interest.
If you follow the news about immigration, you probably know Stephen Miller. He’s a Senior Policy Advisor to President Trump, and he’s supposedly the nefarious driving force behind many of the Administration’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies.
Last week, Dr. David S. Glosser–Mr. Miller’s uncle and a retired neuropsychologist who volunteers with refugees–penned a powerful article refuting his nephew’s raison d’etre: Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. The article discusses the immigration history of Mr. Miller’s family, and points out that the policies espoused by Mr. Miller would have prevented his own ancestors from escaping persecution in Europe. Here’s Dr. Glosser’s money shot:
Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.
Can you guess which one is Stephen Miller?
It’s a powerful piece, in part because of Dr. Glosser’s relationship to Stephen Miller, and in part due to the juxtaposition of these two men. Dr. Glosser speaks from his personal experience dealing with refugees. He sees the story of his parents and grandparents in the stories of modern-day refugees. He has absorbed the lessons of the past, particular with regard to ethnic and religious demonization. Mr. Miller, on the other hand, seems inured to the suffering of his fellow humans and immune to the lessons of history. I have never heard him articulate a fact-based justification for his cruel policies. But he persists in advocating for those policies nevertheless. Mr. Miller’s background and how it influences (or fails to influence) his thinking are important questions, as is the “grim historical irony” of his views.
Here, however, I want to discuss a different question: Is it accurate to call Mr. Miller and the President hypocrites because their policies would have blocked their own ancestors from immigrating to the United States? A second, perhaps more important question, is this: Why does the first question matter?
A hypocrite is a person who pretends to be something that he is not. It’s an epithet often used for politicians who claim to be virtuous and honest, but who, in reality, are the opposite. The word derives from the Greek “hypokrites,” which means “actor,” and there’s a long and rich history of contempt for hypocritical politicians (Dante, for example, relegates the hypocrites to the eight circle of hell, which is pretty close to the bottom).
I don’t think that Mr. Miller or Mr. Trump are hypocrites simply because their immigration policies would have blocked their own ancestors from coming to the U.S. They may be bigots and bullies, whose policies are based more on falsehood than fact, but that is not hypocrisy. Indeed, Mr. Trump has repeatedly articulated his disdain for Muslims, Mexicans, people from “shit-hole countries,” etc., and so the fact that he enacts policies to exclude such people seems perfectly consistent with his world view. He and Mr. Miller may hold ignorant and racist views, but that does not make them hypocrites.
Why does any of this matter?
Aside from the fact that words should be used properly (or as Inigo Montoya might say, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”), it seems wrong to try to limit what people can do by shaming them as hypocrites based on their ancestry. Is the decedent of slave owners a hypocrite if she supports Affirmative Action? Would a Native American be a hypocrite if he became an immigration lawyer? Is the daughter of a candy store owner acting hypocritically if she becomes a dietician? You get my point. We are who we are because of, and in spite of, our progenitors. But I don’t think we should be condemned for the choices we make that are not consistent with the choices they made.
Further, with regards to a complex topic like immigration policy, labels such as “hypocrite” seem inapplicable and designed to shut down–rather than encourage–discussion. Even a person who personally benefited from U.S. refugee policy, for example, has a right to oppose the admission of additional refugees. Economic and political circumstances change, as does the population of refugees seeking admission to our country. Maybe you support admitting some types of refugees (those like you) and oppose admitting others. Such a position is likely based on ignorance of “the other,” but I don’t think it is necessarily hypocritical.
So condemn Mr. Miller for his bigotry and his lies. Call out the irony of his policies, which would have blocked his own ancestors from finding refuge in our country. But don’t call Stephen Miller a hypocrite. Sadly, he is exactly what he purports to be.
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I personally think that racist, White Nationalist, and White Supremacist, as well as disingenuous are the best terms to describe Miller. And, it’s no coincidence that he once worked for Jeff Sessions.
Stephen Miller is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.
By DAVID S. GLOSSER
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.
It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hard-working immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.
What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser, is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.
I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limitingcitizenship for legal immigrants— been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.
Acting for so long in the theater of right wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump’s grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the USA and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)
These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and suffering of thousands our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global non-profit agency that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hope that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.
In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”
Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.
Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil, and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.
Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.
President Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. These immigrants became the workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.
Most damning is the administration’s evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin, and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meanwhile the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America. Immigration reform is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion cannot be trusted to do so. As free Americans, and the descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.
A week after announcing a mysterious new “religious liberty task force,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions once again addressed the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on Wednesday. He assured them that he does not believe they are a hate group for constantly advocating for discrimination against LGBTQ people, and then claimed that his Department of Justice does not “partner with any groups that discriminate.”
Sessions previously spoke to ADF last June, and his at-the-time secret address caused quite a backlash as many in the media pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. His remarks were later made public, and ADF took a conservative media tour to claim that they were a victim of this false accusation.
This time, Sessions addressed the controversy head on. After mentioning “the ordeal faced bravely by Jack Phillips,” the baker ADF represented in Supreme Court who blatantly discriminated against a same-sex couple, Sessions told the group that people of faith are facing “a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith.”
“You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts,” he said. “They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals. No, they just call people names—like ‘hate group.’”
Sessions claimed that groups like the SPLC wield the “hate group” designation to “bully and intimidate” conservative groups “that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience.” He noted, for example, that the label led Amazon to disqualify ADF from its Smile fundraising program.
“You and I may not agree on everything — but I wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: you are not a hate group,” he said.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeats ‘Lock her up!’ chant during speech to students
Contrary to Sessions’ claims, there are ample facts to substantiate ADF’s designation as an anti-LGBTQ hate group — so much so that it’s pure gaslighting to say otherwise. The group has defended wedding vendors challenging nondiscrimination laws, parents and schools that want to reject transgender students, and businesses that want the right to refuse to even employ LGBTQ people. They have even repeatedly advocated for the criminalization of homosexuality. Media Matters recently published a massive report cataloging the litany of ways ADF has demonized LGBTQ people and lobbied against their basic civil rights.
Sessions had made similar remarks about hate group designations at last week’s religious liberty summit, and the SPLC responded. In a letter to Sessions, SPLC President Richard Cohen highlighted some of the facts that led to hate group designations for groups like ADF and the Family Research Council (FRC). “Linking the LGBT community to pedophilia as the FRC and the ADF have done is not an expression of a religious belief,” he wrote. “It is simply a dangerous and ugly falsehood. As you know, FBI hate crime data show that the LGBT community is the minority group most likely targeted for violent hate crimes.”
“If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail,” Cohen wrote. “It’s inappropriate for the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lend the prestige of his office to this group. And it’s ironic to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.”
Sessions rescinds workplace protections for transgender people
Sessions may also have been trying to protect his own reputation. In the same speech to ADF, he also insisted that the DOJ “will not partner with hate groups. Not on my watch.”
But of course the DOJ partners constantly with ADF. The Trump administration has backed ADF’s position in multiple cases, ADF’s representatives were front and center at last week’s religious liberty summit (including former ADF staff who now work for the DOJ), and Sessions even consulted with ADF when drafting the “religious freedom” guidance that the new task force will enforce. It’s just that Sessions himself has long advocated against LGBTQ equality, so he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong or hateful when it comes to taking such positions.
Anti-LGBTQ conservatives were quite flattered to have the U.S. attorney general’s support. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist, as examples, were quick to praise Sessions’ remarks and join the pile-on to smear the SPLC. Rather than respond to the detailed critiques the SPLC provides about their prejudiced positions, anti-LGBTQ hate groups have instead campaigned to besmirch the historic civil rights organization’s reputation.
With Sessions constantly catering to these groups, they have only been more emboldened to express their discriminatory beliefs — further confirming the legitimacy of the SPLC’s designation.
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Yeah, pretty much says it all about our totally unqualified AG. Pumping up hate groups on the eve of a White Supremacist rally. Just what the country needs from its chief law officer! But, I suppose what you’d expect from a unrepenitent child abuser. Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to tell America who Jeff Sessions really is. But she was silenced and smeared by Mitch McConnell and the GOP, just like the SPLC is being smeared by Sessions.
I actually do have some “higher ideals” to propose — stop misusing the loving, inclusive, foregiving teachings of Jesus Christ in support of hate campaigns against the LGBTQ community; tolerate and respect all people as they are; stop discriminating against LGBTQ individuals; let transgender kids use the bathroom; stop trying to criminalize consenting sexual relations between adults; stop defending business people who bring their religion into the public marketplace by refusing to supply goods and services to members of the LGBTQ community based on so-called “religious beliefs.” Fundamentally, it’s no different than a lunch counter owner claiming that his “religion” forbade him to serve African Americans or Jews.
This story is “Classic Gonzo.” Confronted with facts — ADF is a hate group — and the law — ethics considerations forbid the AG from speaking to hate groups, Sessions lies — says ADF isn’t a hate group — implicitly blames the victims — the LGBTQ community,— and smears their defenders — the SPLC — who happened to be on the side of truth. He also, as he no doubt intended, sent a strong message to all hate groups in America, from White Supremacists on down — Don’t worry, I’ve got your back! As if there were ever any doubt!
Fortunately, Sessions and his disingenuous cohorts won’t be able to evade the judgment of history. That’s why it’s important to keep making the record about who he really is and what he really believes in. And, I can guarantee you it’s not the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, human decency, or American democracy!
WHEN ACCOUNTS of abuse emerged in June from a detention center for migrant minors in Virginia — children as young as 14 stripped naked, shackled, strapped to chairs, their heads encased in bags, left for days or longer in solitary confinement, and in some cases beaten and bruised — it sounded like a scene from the Soviet gulag. This institution, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, near Staunton, couldn’t possibly be in America. And if it was, it had to be an extreme outlier — a place that, while overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, simply could not typify the federal government’s handling of children, undocumented or not, who make their way into this country.
But abuses alleged at that jail in Virginia turn out to be no worse than those inflicted, on even younger children, at another facility under ORR’s purview in Texas. Last Monday, a federal judge, incensed that underage migrants at the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center, south of Houston, had been routinely administered psychotropic drugs without parental consent, denied water as a means of punishment and forbidden from making private phone calls, ordered undocumented minors there transferred elsewhere.
Not the Soviet gulag. These things are taking place in America.
Not just coincidentally, it is President Trump’s America. True, documented abuses at both facilities pre-date Mr. Trump’s administration; at Shiloh, in particular, there have been harrowing reports of mistreatment for years. Yet the president, who has referred to illegal immigrants as “animals” and “rapists” who “infest” the United States, is a serial, casual dehumanizer of immigrants, particularly Hispanic ones. The signals he sends, amplified by Twitter, are heard everywhere. If unauthorized immigrants are vermin, as the president implies, then it’s legitimate to treat them as such — to tie them up, lock them away solo, dehydrate and drug them.
The most recent findings, concerning Shiloh, run by a private contractor and overseen by ORR, are shocking. Staff members there admitted they had administered psychotropic medication to children without bothering to seek consent from parents, relatives or guardians. Officials said “extreme psychiatric symptoms” justified medicating the children on an emergency basis — a fine explanation, except that the drugs were administered routinely in the morning and at night. (And sometimes the children were told the drugs were “vitamins.”) The children’s testimony led U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee to reject the government’s arguments, wondering how “emergencies” could occur with such clocklike precision.
Some of the minors confined at Shiloh, which houses 44 children, three-quarters of them immigrants, described abjectly cruel treatment, prompting the judge to order officials at the facility to provide water as needed to those confined there and permit them private phone calls. That a necessity so basic as the provision of water is the subject of a judicial order is a measure of the official depravity that has gripped Shiloh.
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Opinion | Trump’s anti-immigrant tactics are eerily familiar to some Japanese Americans
The tools that normalized Japanese American imprisonment during World War II are being deployed against asylum-seeking immigrants today.(Kate Woodsome, Gillian Brockell, Konrad Aderer/The Washington Post)
HHS officials make a point of sounding compassionate when they describe their concern for the thousands of migrant children under their supervision. Those fine words are belied by actual conditions in real-world facilities for which the department is responsible.
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There are plenty of villains here. But the primary culprits are Sessions, Trump, and Miller who have continued to push a racially motivated program of dehumanization of Hispanic migrants, and illegal, immoral, and damaging detention of children and families in the face of clear evidence of its impropriety and its ineffectiveness as a deterrent.
I’m not saying that other DHS and ORR officials don’t belong in jail. Obviously, the evil clown who went before Congress and compared “Kiddie Gulags” to summer camps belongs behind bars. Trump might well be unreachable except for impeachment. But, Sessions, Nielsen, Lloyd and others responsible for these grotesque abuses enjoy no such protections.
Yes, this is ORR. But the Department of Justice is responsible for taking affirmative action to end these abuses by the Government. Instead, Sessions has been second only to Trump in promoting racism, false narratives, child abuse, xenophobia, and disregard of the legal rights and human rights of migrants, particularly the most vulnerable — children, women, LGBTQ, the mentally ill, etc. In the case before Judge Gee, he unethically ordered his DOJ lawyers to “defend the indefensible.”
What kind of nation refuses to hold blatant, unrepentant, public child abusers accountable for their crimes?
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