"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.
His defense of the indefensible went over like a lead balloon with those whose lives have been upended by the radical right Justices’ political agenda!
Every time a GOP politico or media sycophant preferences remarks with “I’m not a racist,” you know that some outrageous racist statement is about to follow. What they are doing is dishonestly attempting to preemptively “shift the blame and focus” to those who call out their vile, dishonest conduct!
Over the weekend, Chief Justice John Roberts, drifted down a similar discredited path of disingenuous “preemptive denial.” In a ludicrously tone deaf statement that echoed Tricky Dick’s “I’m not a crook” speech, Roberts lamely attempted to defend the legitimacy of his Court’s stripping of fundamental human rights from women. In doing so, he basically reinforced critics’ points about the Court’s illegitimate, extralegal, right-wing, political war on individual and human rights with a good bit of misogyny thrown in!
Nixon’s “I’m not a crook speech” convinced many that he was, indeed, a crook. Roberts’s “My Court isn’t illegitimate just because it advances a far-right political agenda speech” is heading in the same direction! PHOTO: Twitter
Never mind that the Court basically aligned itself with authoritarian theocrats promoting “forced birth” and overt subjugation of a woman’s fundamental right to decide whether or not to reproduce. Indeed, advancing that minority political agenda was the fundamental reason why Roberts and his GOP crew are on the Court in the first place! To pretend otherwise is off the wall!
There are some strong moral, societal, economic, andmedical arguments to be made about why women should or should not choose to have children. Under the First Amendment, both those who favor abortion and those who oppose it have always been free to argue their points.
But, the idea that these choices should be removed from those directly concerned and placed in the hands of political and religious authorities is preposterous. Lacking convincing arguments to persuade all women facing that choice to their side, the far right theocracy did a preemptive strike! And, their “wholly-owned Justices” went along!
Needless to say, Roberts’s insultingly disingenuous defense of the indefensible did not fare well with informed critics.
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, now an MSNBC analyist, On Meet the Press:
On Sunday, McCaskill – an MSNBC political analyst – tore into Roberts for taking the country backward and recalled that the jurists who signed onto Alito’s originalist rationalization misled the public during their respective Senate confirmation hearings.
“He’s so so out of touch. I mean really, this interview shows why the numbers for the Supreme Court are so bad. For him to say something like that, he just doesn’t get it. You don’t take away a right that’s been around for 50 years and you don’t have a party go to extremes of trying to make sure rape victims have to have forced birth,” McCaskill said.
“You don’t do that and not have it splash back on the Supreme Court,” she continued. “And they all said they respected precedent when they were confirmed. I heard them. America heard them. Clearly, they didn’t, and you can feel me getting angry at John Roberts right now because he knows better when he says that stuff.”
Professor (and former prosecutor) Joyce White Vance, Professor Leah Litman, Professor Stephen I. Vladeck, Political Scientist Norman Ornstein:
“Roberts’s failure to understand why the court has lost credibility with so many Americans smacks of ‘Let them eat cake,’ ” Joyce White Vance, a former prosecutor and a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama law school, told me. “The Supreme Court has a proud history of defending our rights, not taking them away. The Roberts court will go down in history as the first one” to strip away people’s rights.
University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman said: “I would be embarrassed to say something that naive and divorced from reality if I had said it as a first-year law student. For the chief justice to say it is just an insult to the intellect of everyone who knows anything about the court, American democracy and politics.”
. . .
If Roberts and the conservative bloc were to engage in just a tiny amount of self-reflection, they would understand that their own actions have brought them to this point. Law professor Stephen I. Vladeck, of the University of Texas school of law, asked me rhetorically: “If the court’s legitimacy doesn’t come from public acceptance of the principled nature of its decision-making, where does it come from?”
While Roberts might not have written the most egregious opinions, he has joined in them, from the abortion ruling in Dobbs, to the prayer-in-schools ruling in Bremerton, to a Brnovich decision on voting rights, written by Alito, that “blatantly ignored the plain language of the law and rewrote it to fit his partisan and ideological views,” as political scientist Norman Ornstein told me. Moreover, Ornstein said, it is Roberts who has “ignored Clarence Thomas’s blatant conflicts of interest and continues to oppose applying the judicial code of ethics to the Supreme Court, even as its credibility plummets.”
He concluded: “John G. Roberts Jr. is far from the worst justice undermining the fundamental legitimacy of the court, but he is surely culpable.”
The court has failed to regulate itself and instead has abused its power. None of the six right-wing justices acknowledge, nor do they signal they want to halt, the conduct that has lost the public’s confidence.
So it’s up to Congress and the president to shore up the court’s credibility. Allocating more seats to correct the damage done by Sen. Mitch McConnell’s court-packing, imposing term limits on all justices and enacting a mandatory code of ethics would be good places to start.
But it’s not just the outcome, which decimated a right Americans had held for five decades and put a variety of other privacy rights in jeopardy. It’s the way that decision — and others on guns, climate change, and religion — recently came to pass.
In this case, Roberts would have done better to confine himself to “calling balls and strikes.” Sadly, he and his GOP colleagues have gotten out from behind the plate and taken the field in their “Federalist Society” uniforms. He’s going to have to learn to live with objections and catcalls from those in the stands who see what’s really going on here and are understandably upset about the Court’s overreach, substandard legal performance, lack of accountability, absence of self-awareness, and, yes, lack of legitimacy.
Better judges for a better, fairer America — from the Immigration Courts to the Supremes!
By the way, we can’t change the Supremes overnight. But, Biden, Harris, & Garland COULD have reformed, repaired, and legitimized the Immigration Courts, including the BIA, that they control. That they have failed to do so is the biggest “unforced error” of the Biden Administration — one that will haunt Democrats and Americans for ages!
Every day Garland’s parody of a court system, still largely bearing the unmistakable stamp of White Nationalists Sessions, Barr and Miller, continues to run roughshod over individual rights, often in life or death cases, while degrading the judicial process. Misogyny and racism are also on full display, as a disproportionate brunt of their unprofessional, wrong-headed, result-oriented “any reason to deny” decision-making falls on refugee women of color (and often on their accompanying children).
There is a very direct connection between “DHS agents in robes” in our Immigration Courts and “right-wing politicos in robes” at the Supremes. Part of the idea is to “normalize” injustice directed at “the other” — just so long as YOUR life isn’t directly affected, who cares? It’s also known as “Dred Scottification.” It’s the “polar opposite” of Dr. Martin Luther King’s observation that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If Dems don’t “connect the dots,” they might not be able to save our democracy!
This is merely the latest example of Trump’s leveraging of the powers of the presidency to avoid legal accountability. Over the past four years, he has deployed the Justice Department to try to stop a New York grand jury from conducting a criminal investigation into the president’s businesses; Congress from investigating his financial entanglements; and several litigants from requiring the president to divest his financial stake in hotels and businesses that create conflicts of interest — investments that may even violate the Constitution. Now, Trump is using a federal agency to try to ensure that he faces no consequences for — if Carroll’s account is true — lying about an incident that she describes as rape.
The legal theory that the Justice Department is pursuing now is also at odds with another theory that the department has advanced to help the president avoid accountability, in a case involving whether Trump can block critics on Twitter. In that instance, the department has argued that the president can block people on the social media site because his Twitter feed amounts to purely private speech, not official actions. That’s a bold claim — made bolder when the department insists that Trump’s comments about a private citizen, about an episode from the 1990s, constitute actions within the scope of his duties as president.
The goal is the same, though the methods vary: Protect Trump at all costs. It’s one thing for lawyers in private practice to pursue contradictory and outlandish tactics like these. It’s quite another for the Justice Department to do so, at taxpayers’ expense.
Leah Litman is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and host of the podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” about the Supreme Court.
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Read the rest of Leah’s article at the link.
The DOJ’s position is nonsense. But, with a corrupt and complicit DOJ led by Billy the Bigot, a feckless Congress, and listless Federal Courts, who’s going to stop Barr and Trump from destroying American justice?
So, defending misogyny is an essential part of the “religiously woke” America that theocrat, autocrat, anti-democracy activist Billy the Bigot envisions with his perverted view of a right-wing, intolerant, shove it down your throat Christianity that Jesus would never recognize? What a crock!
In June 1939, about 900 Jewish refugees sailed close to Florida on the St. Louis in hopes of finding protection in the United States. U.S. authorities refused to let the ship dock. Desperate passengers sent cables to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never responded.
A State Department telegram stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible in the United States.” Nearly all the passengers had already been refused admission to Cuba. Canada rejected them too. They had no choice but to return to Europe, where 254 of the passengers were eventually killed in the Holocaust.
Eighty years later, a modern version of this tragedy takes place daily at our southern border. This time, most of these people are fleeing rape, assault and death from the northern triangle of Central America — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — as well as political oppression in Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere. They are fleeing to save their lives and their children’s lives. They hope to find safety in the United States. When they get to America, U.S. authorities turn them around.
I spent a week recently in Juárez, Mexico, with four of my law students. We visited shelters across the city and its outskirts to provide pro bono legal services to some of the estimated 20,000 migrants there who are trying to apply for asylum in the U.S.
We met political dissidents from Cuba who had been jailed and beaten for refusing to join party meetings, mothers from Central America who had survived excruciating years of domestic violence and fled to save their children’s lives, and fathers with the courage to resist the ever-increasing violence of gangs in their communities. Nearly all genuinely feared being harmed and killed in their home countries.
Why are they in Juárez? A slew of policy changes enacted over the last year by the Trump administration has made it nearly impossible for asylum seekers to enter the United States through the southern border. Among them is the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which requires asylum seekers who try to enter the United States through the southern border to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases are processed in U.S. immigration courts. Since last January, when the new protocols were put in place, more than 60,000 asylum seekers have been stranded in Mexico.
The new rules make it nearly impossible for asylum seekers to find lawyers who can represent them in immigration court. Hardly any lawyers are willing to cross into Juárez to represent asylum seekers. Given the complexity of immigration law and language and cultural barriers, the process of seeking asylum when someone is in the United States is hard enough. Requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico makes navigating the process virtually impossible. Ninety-six percent of individuals stranded in Mexico do not have a lawyer to help them apply for asylum.
Of the 29,309 cases that had been completed under MPP as of December, just 187 people had been granted asylum — a reflection of the almost insurmountable barriers imposed by the new protocols. U.S. law requires asylum seekers to be given “credible fear” interviews to allow them into the U.S. while they go through the asylum process; MPP has eliminated that step.
While asylum seekers, including thousands of children and women, wait in Mexico they have become targets for vicious crimes by local and transnational gangs and cartels. According to a recent report from Human Rights First, there have been at least 816 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults, including 201 cases of children being kidnapped or nearly kidnapped. These numbers almost certainly understate the violence since many victims don’t report crimes committed against them for fear of reprisal.
When U.S. officials rejected the St. Louis, the horrors that would befall the passengers were foreseeable. Congress and the U.S. State Department eventually apologized for refusing to let in the refugees on board — but it was 70 years too late.
One year after the inception of MPP, we clearly see the dangers befalling asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico. U.S. government officials know that these regions of the border are extremely dangerous. The U.S. State Department’s travel advisories warn U.S. citizens not to travel to some of the same Mexican border towns where American authorities send asylum seekers. These areas are designated as level 4 risks — the same danger assessment as for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The Trump policy is not only inhumane and dangerous, it is also illegal. Under U.S. immigration law, asylum seekers are not to be turned away at the border when they have credible fears of persecution. As the union representing DHS asylum officers explained, “MPP abandons our tradition of providing a safe haven to the persecuted and violates our international and domestic legal obligations.”
We can’t turn a blind eye to the daily tragedies inflicted by Migrant Protection Protocols. The Asylum Seeker Protection Act, which would prohibit the use of federal funds to carry out MPP, has been pending in Congress for months. It’s time to uphold our nation’s core commitment to protecting those seeking safety in this country.
Elora Mukherjee is the Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and director of its immigrants’ rights clinic.
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Professor Leah Litman Assistant Professor of Law University of Michigan Law
Last Tuesday, in explaining her vote to acquit Donald Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Sen. Susan Collins suggested that the president had learned a “pretty big lesson” simply from being impeached and that he would be “much more cautious” about engaging in similar behavior again. By Friday, Trump had issued a series of firingsof public officials who had testified against the president during the impeachment inquiry, demonstrating his takeaway from impeachment: He can use the powers of his office to do whatever he wants. Having gotten away with abuses of power again and again, Trump is now unleashed to continue to corruptly use the powers of his office without consequence. He has already begun to show what that will look like over the remainder of his presidency.
In legal escapades outside of the realm of impeachment, for instance, Trump and his administration have internalized the lesson that if no one will stop you, there’s no reason to stop. Less than two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of the president’s ban on entry by nationals of several Muslim-majority countries (the “travel ban”). By upholding the ban, the court made clear that it would not stop the president from incorporating his bigotry into official immigration policy. Since then, the president has dramatically expanded the scope of the travel ban to other countries with substantial Muslim populations and has enacted several other immigration restrictions that disproportionately disadvantage nonwhite immigrants. After receiving a pass on xenophobia, the president has continued to do it again and again. Last week, he expanded the entry ban to cover five additional countries (Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, Eritrea, and Myanmar) with substantial Muslim populations. In one of those countries (Myanmar), a group of Muslims (the Rohingya) are fleeing religious persecution and genocide. The president had previously said, according to the New York Times, that Nigerians should “go back to their huts.”
With respect to impeachment, several senators came close to admitting that their impeachment votes signify that they are unwilling to stop the president from abusing his office. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee explained his vote against calling witnesses in almost exactly those terms. The senator claimed that there was no point in hearing from additional witnesses because he had already concluded that the president engaged in the conduct he was accused of. (The House has maintained that the president corruptly threatened to withhold financial assistance to Ukraine to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.) The senator explained that, in his final analysis, the president’s conduct mattered less than the Senate’s ability to continue to confirm more conservative judges and the risk that a Democrat would win the presidency.
That reasoning obviously invites the president to do the same thing—or worse—again and he wasted no time in retaliating against impeachment witnesses Lt. Col. Alex Vindman and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. If Republicans senators and their constituents value conservative judges and tax breaks for the wealthy more than holding a president accountable for wrongdoing, then the president will just keep doing wrong.
Again, it is not just the Senate that has failed to curb the president’s worst impulses and told the president that he can get away with even more than he’s already done. As a candidate, Trump had promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States. After his election, the president immediately suspended entry from several Muslim-majority countries without so much as informing, much less consulting, any relevant agencies. And his advisers admitted that the travel ban was an effort to make a Muslim ban that looked (somewhat) more legal. The Supreme Court ultimately blessed that effort in 2018 under a 5–4 vote that split along ideological lines.
The five conservative justices, much like the Republican senators, said they didn’t care. In fact, the justices, like the Republican senators, acknowledged that the entry ban may very well have been motivated by anti-Muslim animus. But they claimed that, in light of the president’s expansive powers over immigration, the court would uphold the entry ban so long as someone could think that the ban had a valid purpose (such as protecting national security) even if the ban actually had an illegitimate one (such as targeting Muslims). And, the court continued, a person could think the president’s entry ban had a valid purpose because the ban did not apply to all of the world’s Muslims, among other reasons.
Again, it does not take a genius to see how that decision signals that the court is unwilling to stop the president from making policy based on bigoted, thinly veiled Islamophobia or racism. The president received the message and has run with it. His expanded travel ban clearly targets countries based on race and religion. The odds of this Supreme Court reversing course and stopping him this time is virtually nil.
Indeed, the administration apparently felt so emboldened by the court’s earlier ruling that its expanded entry ban largely abandoned the original pretense of the rationale for the earlier entry ban. Previously, the administration stated it was responding to information sharing deficiencies in some countries. The administration now suggests it is trying to restrict immigration: Officials stated they are suspending entry from Nigeria because some Nigerians overstay their visas.
The administration has created other immigration restrictions that likewise disadvantage nonwhite immigrants. They have refused to process asylum applications from Central American migrants who did not apply for asylum in other countries they passed through on their way to the United States. They have tried to prohibit asylum applications from people who enter the United States outside of ports of entry. And they have authorized immigration officials to refuse to admit immigrants who might ever use public benefits (even temporarily). The Supreme Court approved this last effort just two weeks ago, again through a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines.
With the Senate’s blessing, the president will continue to corruptly abuse the powers of his office to undermine elections and our rule of law—and, as demonstrated by the Friday Night Massacre, he will do so in even more aggressive and ostentatious ways. With the court’s blessing, the president will expand his racist, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim immigration practices with little limit to what he may try to enact.
Neither the Senate nor the Supreme Court has been willing to stand up to the president for abusing the powers of his office for personal benefit or to stoke bigotry for partisan ends. By failing to do so, they have encouraged Trump to abuse his powers even more. It is unclear what, if anything, can stop him now.
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Alison Leal Parker Managing Director, U.S. Program Human Rights Watch
Alison Parker is the managing director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch.
Asylum seekers in the United States face dangerous, even deadly, consequences when their claims are not taken seriously.
Those at risk are people like Santos Amaya, a Salvadoran police officer who had received death threats from gang members. He was deported from the United States in April 2018 and was shot dead, allegedly by gangs, that same month. People like a young Salvadoran woman who fled domestic violence and rape and was deported to El Salvador in July 2018. She now lives in fear, hiding from her abusers.
These lives hang in the balance while the Trump administration attacks every legal means of protecting them in the United States.
On Feb. 5, Human Rights Watch released a report that identified 138 cases of Salvadorans who had been killed since 2013 after being deported from the United States; more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted or tortured. These numbers are shocking but certainly an undercount, because no government or entity tracks what happens to deportees.
The Trump administration has put pressure on immigration judges to use overly narrow readings of the definition of a refugee. This approach may result in judges denying asylum to people like Amaya and the young Salvadoran woman — survivors of domestic violence, people who fear violence at the hands of gangs, or people who fear being targeted based on their family relationships. The administration has further proposed several new obstacles to gain asylum, including barring people convicted of illegal reentry into the United States, an offense often committed by people desperate to seek safety.
The Trump administration has tried to destroy the U.S. asylum process in other ways — among them by forcing people to remain in dangerous and inhumane conditionsin Mexican border towns while their claims are processed under its Migrant Protection Protocols. A Syracuse University analysis of government data revealed that as of December, 7,668 Salvadorans have been forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum claims to be processed. We have documented cases, included in a tallymaintained by Human Rights First, of Salvadorans who have been kidnapped and attacked while waiting.
The United States is also returning asylum seekers to Guatemala, after pressing its government to sign an “asylum cooperation agreement,” despite the fact that many Guatemalans are fleeing for the same reasons as their Salvadoran neighbors.
Salvadorans in the United States are at risk for reasons other than the Trump administration’s attempt to eviscerate the right to seek asylum. More than 220,000Salvadorans are affected by the administration’s decision to end temporary protected status and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. The administration also decided to end work authorization for Salvadorans with TPS, which allowed many Salvadorans to come to the United States in 2001 after a series of natural disasters.
These policies cover people who have worked, raised families, educated themselves and built their lives in the United States. This alone should be reason to value their relationship to the United States and regularize their legal status. But the killings and abuse that many Salvadorans will face if they are returned makes the need for Congress to enact legislation to protect recipients of these programs even more acute.
Former long-term residents of the United States face unique risks. Salvadorans who have lived in the United States are often extorted by gangs, as two cases we investigated in detail illustrate. In each, the person’s long-term residence meant that they were seen as having more wealth than most Salvadorans. They were repeatedly extorted by gangs and ultimately killed for their refusal to pay bribes.
But the Trump administration is not solely at fault here. Existing law, passed long before President Trump took office, has largely barred people with criminal convictions from seeking asylum, even when they face harm. They include a young man whose case we investigated, who at age 17, in 2010, fled gang recruitment and violence for the United States. After serving a sentence for two counts related to burglaries in the United States, he was denied protection, deported in 2017 and killed about three months later.
There is a simple way to prevent the murders and abuse we spent the past year and a half investigating: Give all noncitizens a full and fair opportunity to explain what abuses they fear before deporting them. As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a statement after we released our report, the United States must stop “knowingly signing a death sentence by forcibly returning vulnerable people to the very place they fled.”
The right to a fair hearing on claims for protection should apply to everyone — including the more than 59,000 people waiting in dangerous and inhumane conditions in Mexican border towns, people who had been living under the TPS or DACA programs, or those who have paid their debt to society after serving criminal sentences.
Now U.S. authorities are on notice about what is likely to happen when they deport Salvadorans without adequately considering their cases. This shameful and illegal practice should stop.
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Unfortunately, Eleora,Leah, & Alison, the MPP (better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico”) is just the tip of the Trump/Miller neo-fascist iceberg here. As “fixed against them” as the Immigration Court hearing process for asylum seekers has now become at the Southern Border, with complicit Article IIIs looking the other way (so far), the regime as now come up with far more reliably deadly and “cost effective” alternatives.
Indeed, I’d argue that death, torture, rape, extortion, and exploitation of refugees from the Northern Triangle has always been a main objective of the Trump regime’s White Nationalist, anti-asylum policies, just like inflicting punishment through child separation and thereby achieving “deterrence” was the real objective of the “zero tolerance policy.”
Obviously, folks in charge lied about it to the press, the Congress, and to the U.S. courts. And, to date, they have gotten away with it. But, oppressors, particularly arrogant and self-righteous ones, usually leave “paper trails.” Despite shredding machines and “lost” databases, I imagine that the truth about Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Barr, Cuccinelli, and others will eventually come out when historians finally get their hands on the “Trump regime papers.” I’ll be long gone by then. But, I can virtually guarantee that the whole truth will be much, much worse than we can even imagine at this point.
It isn’t that the regime and even the Article III Federal Courtsdon’t know what happens or is likely to happen to those “orbited” to the Northern Triangle. It’s just that the don’t care. As I constantly point out, this is all about dehumanizationand “Dred Scottification“ of “the other.”If we dehumanize them, its easier to ignore what we’re doing to them. How else could anybody justify the absolute unconstitutional farce and mockery of fundamental fairness and the rule of law that unfolds in our Immigration “Courts,” run by an openly enforcement-driven DOJ every day, right in plain view. The evidence has always been “out there.” “Extermination as deterrence” has become part of our national policy right here in the 21st Century.
Matthew 25:44-46 English Standard Version (ESV):
44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Photo By: Kimberly April Photography www.kimberlyapril.com
Litman writes:
It took Attorney General William Barr only one week from the release of the Mueller report to bring obstruction of justice charges against two governmental officials for interfering in a federal investigation. But the charges have nothing to do with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election or the possible obstruction of that investigation.
Although the obstruction charges DOJ filed are not related to the Mueller report, they underscore just how far the attorney general bent over backward to spin the report in the president’s favor and how partisan the Department of Justice has become. The disparities between the two cases highlight how the Department of Justice, under Barr’s leadership, has become nothing more than a political arm of the Trump administration, particularly in its handling of possible obstruction charges stemming from the Mueller report.
The indictment against Judge Shelley Richmond Joseph, a Massachusetts district court judge, and Officer Wesley MacGregor, a Massachusetts trial court officer, alleges that the officers interfered with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement proceeding by preventing ICE from arresting an individual who was arrested on state charges and attended an arraignment hearing in state court. During the state court proceeding, Joseph asked an ICE officer to wait outside the courtroom while the court conducted the arraignment hearing. Earlier in the day, the judge had requested more information about one of the state charges in the case (a fugitive charge) after the prosecutor said the state would not seek to detain the defendant on the other charge (a drug charge).
Barr’s response to the obstruction issues raised by the Mueller report was partisan andunprincipled.
After recalling the case, the judge observed that ICE was in the courthouse. The prosecutor then informed the court that the state did not believe the defendant was the fugitive from Pennsylvania for whom there was an arrest warrant and therefore believed that the fugitive charge was an error, which would mean that the defendant would be free to leave. The defense attorney, however, noted that ICE was convinced otherwise and suggested they would likely take the client into custody. The defense attorney then suggested that “the best thing for us to do is to … release him … and hope that he can avoid ICE.”
At that point, the judge noted the other alternative was to recall the proceedings again the next day and asked “ICE is gonna get him?” before directing the clerk to go off the record. The recording was turned off for 52 seconds, and when it resumed, the prosecutor renewed the claim that the defendant was not the person with a Pennsylvania warrant out for his arrest and moved to dismiss the fugitive charge against him. Because the state had already stated it would not seek to detain the defendant on the drug charges, the defendant was released, and the trial court officer escorted him through the back door.
This evidence provided the basis for Barr’s Department of Justice to indict the state judge and state officer for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Yet all of the reasons Barr has previously cited for opposing an obstruction investigation against the president suggest the Department of Justice should not have brought obstruction charges against Joseph and MacGregor either.
For example, in June, Barr wrote a memo as a private citizen arguing that obstruction laws should not “reach facially-lawful actions taken by the President in exercising the discretion vested in him by the Constitution.” Yet that is exactly what the obstruction-of-justice charges against Joseph and MacGregor cover. State judges do not persist with criminal charges that the district attorney has dropped, and state law does not require judges to detain individuals on the drug charges that remained. It was therefore “facially legitimate” and within the “discretion” of the judge not to detain the individual based on the drug charge. The judge also has total control of her courtroom and can decide through which doors to instruct people to come and go. And the state judge’s motive shouldn’t matter to the analysis because under Barr’s theory of obstruction, government officials can’t be charged with obstruction “based solely on his subjective state of mind” for “simply exercising his discretion in a facially lawful way.”
Or take Barr’s statement—given at a bizarre press conference just prior to the release of the Mueller report last week—that the president did not corruptly intend to obstruct the investigation because the president “was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.” A similar exculpatory argument could be made on behalf of Joseph and MacGregor. They, too, may have been “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that” ICE’s investigations and presence in state courthouses undermined the integrity of state court proceedings. Or perhaps they were frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that ICE’s enforcement efforts were the result of the president’s apparent bias and animosity toward the Latino community.
Ultimately, the Justice Department’s indictment of Joseph and MacGregor is a reminder about how aggressively the federal government often reads the federal obstruction statute. For example, the indictment confirms that obstruction does not have to be particularly sophisticated or successful in order to constitute a crime—the trial court officer merely let the defendant out the back door, and the defendant was subsequently apprehended and now faces deportation.
It also demonstrates a contrast in the kind of evidence that often suffices to establish an obstruction-of-justice charge. In the case of Joseph and MacGregor, DOJ has some snippets of a courtroom conversation that indicated the judge wanted to do something she did not want publicly recorded and less than a minute without a recording. In the case of President Donald Trump and his associates, special counsel Robert Mueller compiled dozens of witnesses, contemporaneous notes, 10 separate incidents, 182 pages of a report, multiple instances of officials lying to investigators or not being forthcoming with them, and several damning instances of the president lying in an apparent effort to cover his tracks. All of this led Barr to his four-page summary conclusion that Trump had not committed a crime—a conclusion that flew in the face of Mueller’s findings.
The stark difference between the attorney general’s treatment of the obstruction case against Joseph and MacGregor and the obstruction cases at the heart of the Mueller report serves as a pointed reminder that Barr’s response to the obstruction issues raised by the Mueller report was partisan and unprincipled.
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Golly gee, who woulda thought that a guy who “auditioned” for his job by promising to turn the DOJ into “Trump’s personal law firm” to be used against the United States of America and its people while being paid by same USA would turn out to be exactly the type of unethical hack that he promised to be? I mean we expect Trump sycophants to lie about everything. But, Barr only lies about the law when it suits Trump’s purposes — he’s made good on his promise to help Trump degrade and destroy American democracy.
