"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Children catch bubbles Aug. 17 at a free barbecue organized by the Lewiston School Department to mark the end of its summer outreach program that provided numerous services for students and families. It also gave the School Department the opportunity to connect with students and parents, hand out schedules, sign students up and make connections before the start of school. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
With just a week to go before the first day of school, staff from Freeport schools headed to a local hotel to meet their newest students.
The 67 students, all from asylum-seeking families, had just moved to the Casco Bay Inn from the Portland Expo, where nearly 200 people had been staying in the temporary shelter before it closed. The families all decided to send their kids to Freeport schools instead of busing them to Portland to attend classes, said Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport.
“Our first goal is to get them enrolled and in a class,” she said. “That piece is done. Now we look at how to best serve their needs.”
The scramble to welcome new students and connect them with the services they need is becoming a familiar challenge in Freeport and other Maine communities where the families are settling.
For the past several years, school districts in southern Maine have had to make quick adjustments as they enroll dozens of students from asylum-seeking families, many of whom come from African countries and speak little or no English when they arrive. To meet their needs, they’ve had to hire more teachers for English learners, add social workers and support staff, and make sure translation services are in place to communicate with parents.
“For us, this is a new experience,” said Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, where 38 students enrolled in May when their families arrived in the city. There will be 55 students from asylum-seeking families in Sanford schools this year, he said.
School leaders say the work can be challenging and puts a significant strain on resources, but it’s also a privilege to welcome new students into the community.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Congrats to educational and political leaders in Maine for making the system work as it should! Immigrants becoming Mainers and settling down there is making a positive difference! Seems like the Feds, not to mention other states and localities, could use some of this same positive approach and enlightened, courageous leadership.
The Portland’s Press Herald’s Editorial Board echoed this view in an editorial published yesterday:
Our View: To invest in immigrant pupils is to invest in the future
A big effort by Maine schools to accommodate English language learners will have a big return for their communities.
A new experience.
That’s how Steve Bussiere, assistant superintendent in Sanford, described Sanford schools’ addressing the needs of 55 new students from asylum-seeking families this coming school year.
It’s a new experience for the kids, too, and thanks to thoughtful, time-intensive efforts by Bussiere’s colleagues and other schools around Maine – hiring additional teachers to teach English to English language learners, hiring more social workers and more support staff and refining translation services so that school staff and administrators can communicate with new pupils’ parents – it can be a good experience.
The focus on multilingual learners requires a serious effort and will make a serious difference to our state.
Thankfully, the Maine Legislature expressed its understanding of that fact in July, including $3.5 million for the support of English language learners – via the English Language Learner Hardship Fund – in the special supplemental budget.
This valuable funding becomes available to schools at the end of October. Portland’s public schools will receive more than $784,000; Lewiston, $631,000; South Portland, $302,000; Biddeford, $192,000, Brunswick, $150,000; Saco, $110,000; Freeport, $109,000, and Westbrook, $93,000.
In Freeport, arrangements have been made for 67 new students who recently moved with their families from the temporary shelter at the Portland Expo to the Casco Bay Inn. Jean Skorapa, superintendent of Regional School Unit 5 in Freeport, struck a crystal-clear and exceedingly warm note earlier this week – sounding like many other Maine educators on the same subject in recent years.
“We’ve had new Mainers with us over the past year and a half. They’ve made us a more well-rounded, diverse district,” Skorapa said. “They’re a wonderful addition to our school community and we welcome them with open arms and are thrilled to have them with us.”
In other school districts, efforts such as these have been up and running for a while. According to our reporting Monday, Lewiston schools work with students who speak a total of 38 languages. The school district there has a multilingual center that works with families and offers vital help with paperwork and orientation. Portland has been supporting new students from asylum-seeking families for years; in July, we reported that one-third of the district’s roughly 6,500 students were multilingual.
The numbers make it clear as day: The downside risk of underfunding English language learning is now way too steep for these parts of Maine to run. Yes, there’s a moral imperative here; it is also a legal requirement of our public schools. We trust that, on the strength of existing work in this realm, the practice of funding multilingual learning education becomes just that – a practice. Rep. Michael Brennan, D-Portland, House chair of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, expressed his commitment to continue funding the program “in the coming years.”
Appropriate investment in these students fosters a sense of belonging, reduces the risk of pernicious, hard-to-close learning gaps and, as students find themselves better and better equipped to support their families locally, has wide-reaching benefits. To say nothing of what it means for school graduates of the future. On top of that, successive studies have shown that the teaching techniques that assist English language learners assist all students.
That’s not to say there won’t be hurdles to overcome. In recent days, tense and ugly anti-immigrant rallies in Manhattan, Staten Island and Woburn, Massachusetts, laid bare the style of racist, isolationist thinking that continues to oppose even the most commonsense steps towards integration and inclusion.
Our schools need more support, and they need it to be specific. The calls for increased attention to the new members of the student body need to be sustained in their volume and their clarity. It makes sense, at every level, to seize this opportunity to enrich our classrooms and our communities.
Kids are our future. It’s definitely worth the effort!
A Helping Hand.jpg Image depicts a child coming to the aid of another in need. Once we have climbed it is essential for the sake of humanity that we help others do the same. It is knowing that we all could use, and have used, a helping hand. Safiyyah Scoggins – PVisions1111 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 White Nationalist Xenophobes like Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, & Ducey have abandoned Traditional Judeo-Christian values in favor of neo-fascism. But, the rest of us should hold true to our “better angels.”
On Friday, the New York Times reported that former Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli will be tapped for a role in the Trump administration. He will be put in charge of the country’s legal immigration system, as head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). While it had been earlier rumored that Cuccinelli would be placed in a new job as “immigration czar,” both the Times and the Washington Post noted that he now seems set for the top spot at USCIS.
No matter what job Cuccinelli ends up in, he is neither deserving nor qualified to play any role in shaping immigration policy. He is an immigration hardliner with views that are at odds with American values. He has a history of xenophobic, homophobic, and sexist comments. Ironically, one nice thing that can be said about Cuccinelli is that he fosters bipartisanship — he has generated opposition from both sides of the aisle.
Given that Cuccinelli could soon be presiding over USCIS, his comments on immigration are worthy of review. In 2018, he told Breitbart News Daily that states should use “war powers” to turn back migrants: “You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it,” he said. In 2015, appearing on a conservative radio station, he claimed that President Obama was encouraging an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants. In 2012, he compared immigration policy to pest control. He’s called the infamous Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) “one of my very favorite congressman.” So Cuccinelli is hardly someone who can be trusted to run USCIS in keeping with the agency’s core values, which include “respect” and “integrity.”
Most importantly, Cuccinelli has no significant experience in immigration policy, notwithstanding his failed attempt to end birthright citizenship as a state senator. He is not from a border state, nor has he been a credible voice in the immigration debate. His background is in law enforcement, not immigration law.
Cuccinelli’s prime qualification for his new job seems to be that he has been a tireless defender of the president on cable news. That could almost be seen as laughable if the stakes were not so high. Consider that as head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would wield tremendous power over immigrants like refugees, domestic abuse victims, and asylum-seekers. Or that our legal immigration system is byzantine and complicated, attracting the largest number of immigrants in the world. In FY 2017, the U.S. granted Legal Permanent Resident status to about 1.1 million people, including 120,000 refugees and 25,000 asylum-seekers.
Cuccinelli’s anti-LGBTQ record is especially troubling. As attorney general, he was against policies banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public colleges and universities. As a state senator, he unsuccessfully fought to criminalize sodomy, calling “homosexual acts… intrinsically wrong.” In 2008, he declared that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” The extreme views matter because LGBTQ people are among our most vulnerable immigrants. The Human Rights Campaign, for example, has documented “the precarious position of transgender immigrants and asylum seekers.” Sadly, it seems unlikely that Cuccinelli would respect their human rights, let alone treat LGBTQ immigrants with kindness and compassion.
There are myriad ways in which Cuccinelli has demonstrated that he is far out of the mainstream, so much so that handing him a huge job would be dangerous. The man who worried about getting his newborn son a social security number because he was concerned about the government tracking his family is probably not the ideal person to put in charge of E-Verify, the federal database that checks employment eligibility.
True, the president can choose whomever he likes for high-level positions. But Cuccinelli isn’t even a smart political pick. In addition to being unpopular with Democrats, he doesn’t have the full support of Republican lawmakers either. According to the website Vox, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not want to confirm Cuccinelli (the ill will stems from the fact that Cuccinelli headed up a political action committee that supported primary challenges to incumbent Republicans in 2014). Besides, on immigration most Americans are moving away from Trump. This January, the Pew Center found that 62 percent of Americans believe that immigrants strengthen our country. A restrictionist like Cuccinelli is not what the public wants or needs.
As head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would bring little to the job except a track record as a Trump loyalist. With his outdated and narrow views, he would be a disaster overseeing our legal immigration system.
Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, he is also a contributor to NBCNews.com and CNN Opinion. You can follow him on Twitter at @RaulAReyes, Instagram: raulareyes1.
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Let’s remember that fired hardliner L. Francis Cissna was the man who “took the ‘Services’ out of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.” His dismal anti-immigrant polices and undermining of public service have brought unprecedented backlogs to USCIS adjudications that are now under Congressional investigation. He also reportedly “tanked” employee morale at USCIS. Nevertheless, he wasn’t quite nasty enough for Trump and his neo-Nazi White Nationalist advisor Stephen MIller.
As a Virginia resident who suffered through “Cooch Cooch’s” disastrous tenure as Attorney General and his thankfully unsuccessful bid to become our Governor, I can testify that he is indeed without any redeeming social values. In other words, a perfect fit for the “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy.” But, “Cooch Cooch” has some powerful enemies in the GOP Senate. He pissed off Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and powerful Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) can’t be too pleased with Trump’s treatment of his former staffer Cissna.
In the meantime, it’s “chaos as usual” in the DHS/USCIS kakistocracy.
