"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.
On Monday, President Donald Trump made it clear: He was not answerable to any law, constitutional or otherwise. “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself,” he tweeted. His attorney, Rudy Giuliani, even said that Trump could shoot former FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office and, legally, be in the clear.
Many were stunned. They shouldn’t have been.
The rule of law has been under siege for a long time. Most Americans haven’t noticed because it appeared that they weren’t directly affected, and that the system worked. But African Americans have lived with the reality of abuse of power and contempt for the law for generations. For more than a century, each lynching, each murder, each ethnic cleansing, each wink, wink, nod, nod “not guilty,” especially in the face of overwhelming evidence, loosened and discredited the norms of a law-abiding society and put American democracy in Trump’s crosshairs.
That is what should stun so many who are now apoplectic about his threat. The destruction of the rule of law has actually been going on for a long, long time.
The destruction of the rule of law has actually been going on for a long, long time.
In 1918, Walter White, the associate secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, futilely demanded that Georgia’s governor bring to justice the known killers of Mary Turner, who had lived near Valdosta. Turner, eight-months pregnant at the time of her murder, was stripped naked, hanged upside down and burned to death; her stomach was cut open to let her baby fall to the ground and its head was stomped into the red Georgia dirt. Her murderers never spent a day in jail.
In 1921, whites burned and bombed black Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the ground, destroying a thriving, vibrant community and killing up to 300 African Americans. One photo of the destruction happily proclaimed “running the Negro out of Tulsa.” Pleas from Walter White went unheeded. As did the 21st-century work of Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, who attempted to wrench from the warped system some semblance of justice for the surviving victims. Over the span of more than 80 years, though, despite the carnage and the destruction, the lawyers, the politicians and the courts couldn’t fathom that any law had been broken.
In 1951, Florida Sheriff Willis McCall, who saw himself as the alpha and omega of the law in citrus-growing Lake County, was determined to stem the tide of liberalism that appeared to be encroaching on his world. He loved running slave labor camps for the growers. He loved having interracial couples taken into the woods and savagely beaten by his deputies. And he loved putting “uppity” Negroes in their place. When a white woman falsely accused several black men of rape, he was ready for their execution, until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial. An angry McCall then drove two of the men into the woods and gunned them down. One survived to tell the grisly story of murder and attempted murder. McCall, however, as I previously wrote in LitHub,“kept his job for twenty-one additional years until he finally lost a re-election bid (but was found ‘not guilty’) after bludgeoning yet another black man to death.”
OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Black residents search through rubble after the Tulsa Race Riot of June 1921.
As the deaths in Valdosta, Tulsa, and Florida make clear, the rule of law, one of the bedrocks of American democracy, was brutally and willfully trampled on, then dismissed. The justice system looked at the killers ― sheriffs, deputies, store owners, salesmen, and farmers ― and saw nothing untoward, nothing villainous, nothing murderous. Nothing except white respectability.
Even the incredible power of the Civil Rights Movement and the seismic transformation of American society couldn’t shake that reality and make the rule of law viable.
Even the incredible power of the Civil Rights Movement couldn’t make the rule of law viable for black citizens.
In 1969, the Chicago Police Department, aided by the FBI, raided the apartment headquarters of Black Panther Fred Hampton, killing him and fellow Panther Mark Clark, and seriously wounding four others. The next day the Cook County state’s attorney, Edward V. Hanrahan, told the tale of a massive gun battle in which the Panthers opened fire, their shotguns blasting through the door. In this retelling, the police had no choice but to defend themselves with deadly force. Hanrahan pointed to pictures of bullet holes that riddled the small apartment, leaving plaster and wood looking like dirty Swiss cheese.
The Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton speaks at a rally in Chicago’s Grant Park in September 1969. Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark were killed by police later that year.
This isn’t ancient history or living in the past. This is the condition of justice and the rule of law right now. It was apparent when four NYPD officers fired 41 shots at unarmed Amadou Diallo in 1999 and were found “not guilty” of any wrongdoing. And when George Zimmerman walked out of court a free man, although the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, whom he had stalked through the neighborhood with a loaded 9 mm in 2013, lay dead with a bullet in his heart. And when 12-year-old Tamir Rice… when 7-year old Aiyana Stanley Jones… when Jonathan Ferrell… when Philando Castile…
This willingness on the part of court systems, law enforcement and the respectable folk in society to ignore or explain away egregious violations of the law has consequences beyond the black lives it ruins. Eventually, rampant but selective disregard for the rule of law taints and corrupts the entire system ― it leads to a culture of impunity. Trump’s recent boast makes clear that lawlessness can’t be contained to cops on the ground killing black people.
Eventually, rampant but selective disregard for the rule of law taints and corrupts the entire system.
Nevertheless, many whites believed for so long that they were safe; that this contempt didn’t and couldn’t affect them. They were wrong. A culture of impunity is dangerous and seductive. It creates a heady sense of immunity ― so heady that a presidential candidate can brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose a single vote. Trump is already in the habit of circumventing procedures without consequence, having pardoned Joe Arpaio, a known torturer who defied a federal court order. He also pardoned I. Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, who was convicted of outing a CIA agent and lying to federal authorities about it. Just last week, he pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a blatant racist and anti-Semite who used straw donors to make illegal campaign contributions.
Trump now insists that he has more pardons in his pocket, including one for himself, for whatever crimes he may or may not have committed. The president of the United States, a man long accustomed to circumventing the rules that apply to most other people, looks around and sees a system that hasn’t deigned to hold the powerful accountable.
And so, he declares that he might make himself president for life, and appears to exchange U.S. national security for some Chinese trademarks for his daughter, and rails against “fake news” and calls the media “the enemies of the American people,” and attacks the Department of Justice and special counsel Robert Mueller because they won’t do his bidding. When he does those stunning-to-some things, remember that this unrelenting assault on the rule of law is just another version of the same contempt for the nation’s statutes and American democracy that left Mary Turner hanging upside down, disemboweled and burning.
The canary in the American mine is once again gasping for breath. The air is toxic and the poison of lawlessness is likely to take us all down. Maybe this time America will listen.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and the forthcoming One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.
*****************************
The White Nationalist approach to the Constitution and law has been with us since the founding of our republic (by a group that contained many slaveholders, smart enough to know that slavery was wrong but too corrupted by it to do the right thing).
But, Trump is more than a “garden variety” racist/White Nationalist (that’s Jeff Sessions, Tom Cotton, Stephen Miller, etc.). He is a dangerous, lawless, “populist” authoritarian in the Mussolini mold. Although many of Trump’s supporters don’t recognize it, they and their rights will be “expendable” at his pleasure.
That leaves it to the rest of us (who actually are the majority of Americans) to save folks from Trump and, in far too many cases, from themselves and their short-sighted prejudices and selfishness. It’s a tall order; but the alternative is the end of our republic and a descent into the worst type of authoritarian dystopia.
My former colleague Judge Bruce J. Einhorn writes in the Washington Post:
Bruce J. Einhorn, an adjunct professor of immigration, asylum and refugee law at Pepperdine University, served as a U.S. immigration judge from 1990 to 2007.
It’s a principle that has been a hallmark of our legal culture: The president shouldn’t be able to tell judges what to do.
No longer. The Trump administration is intent on imposing a quota system on federal immigration judges, tying their evaluations to the number of cases they decide in a year. This is an affront to judicial independence and the due process of law.
I served as a U.S. immigration judge in Los Angeles for 17 years, presiding over cases brought against foreign-born noncitizens who Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers believed were in this country illegally and should thus be removed. My responsibility included hearing both ICE’s claims and the claims from respondents for relief from removal, which sometimes included asylum from persecution and torture.
Read These Comments newsletter
The best conversations on The Washington Post
As a judge, I swore to follow the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that “no person” (not “no citizen”) is deprived of due process of law. Accordingly, I was obliged to conduct hearings that guaranteed respondents a full and reasonable opportunity on all issues raised against them.
My decisions and the manner in which I conducted hearings were subject to review before the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals and U.S. courts of appeals. At no time was my judicial behavior subject to evaluation based on how quickly I completed hearings and decided cases. Although my colleagues on the bench and I valued efficiency, the most critical considerations were fairness, thoroughness and adherence to the Fifth Amendment. If our nativist president and his lapdog of an attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have their way, those most critical considerations will become a relic of justice.
Under the Trump-Sessions plan, each immigration judge, regardless of the nature and scope of proceedings assigned to him or her, will be required to complete 700 cases in a year to qualify for a “satisfactory” performance rating. It follows that only judges who complete more, perhaps many more, than 700 cases per year will qualify for a higher performance rating and, with it, a possible raise in pay.
Essentially, the administration’s plan is to bribe judges to hear and complete more cases regardless of their substance and complexity, with the corollary that judges who defy the quota imposed on them will be regarded as substandard and subject to penalties. The plan should be seen for what it is: an attempt to undermine judicial independence and compel immigration judges to look over their shoulders to make sure that the administration is smiling at them.
This is a genuine threat to the independence of the immigration bench. While Article III of the Constitution guarantees the complete independence of the federal district courts and courts of appeal, immigration judges are part of the executive branch. Notwithstanding the right of immigration judges to hear and decide cases as they believe they should under immigration law, they are unprotected from financial extortion and not-so-veiled political intimidation under the U.S. Administrative Procedure Actor any regulations.
Moreover, federal laws do not guarantee respondents in removal hearings a right to counsel, and a majority of those in such hearings are compelled to represent themselves before immigration judges, regardless of the complexity of their cases. Those who lack representation in removal hearings typically cannot afford it,and the funds to help legal aid organizations fill in for private attorneys are nowhere to be found.
Hearings in which respondents proceed pro se, or unrepresented, are often the most challenging and time-consuming for immigration judges, who must take care to assure that the procedural rights of those facing possible removal are protected and to guarantee that inarticulate relief claims are fully considered.
The Trump administration’s intention is clear: to intimidate supposedly independent judges to expedite cases, even if it undermines fairness — as will certainly be the case for pro se respondents. Every immigration judge knows that in general, it takes longer to consider and rule in favor of relief for a respondent than it does to agree with ICE and order deportation. The administration wants to use quotas to make immigration judges more an arm of ICE than independent adjudicators.
In my many years on the immigration bench, I learned that repressive nations had one thing in common: a lack of an independent judiciary. Due process requires judges free of political influence. Assembly-line justice is no justice at all.
************************************
Thanks, Bruce for speaking out so forcefully, articulately, and truthfully!
Jeff Sessions is a grotesque affront to the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, American values, and human decency. Every day that he remains in office is a threat to our democracy. There could be no better evidence of why we need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court!
Due Process Forever! Jeff Sessions Never! Join the New Due Process Army Now! The fight must go on until Sessions and his toxic “21st Century Jim Crows” are defeated, and the U.S. Immigration Courts finally are forced to deliver on the betrayed promise of “guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!
How Trump’s policies could worsen the migration issue he says he wants to solve
By Tal Kopan, CNN
President Donald Trump in recent days has decried “weak” US border laws that he says leave the US vulnerable to unfettered immigration — but some of his policies could have the effect of worsening a Central American migrant crisis.
Even as the Department of Homeland Security says the southern border “is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before,” Trump has stepped up his hardline immigration rhetoric, calling on the US military to guard the US-Mexico border until his long-promised wall is complete. He’s hammered Mexico and other countries for policies that he says are disadvantageous to the US and that send unsavory individuals into the country.
But experts say the President has been pursuing other policies that could substantially harm Central America — and in doing so, he risks creating conditions that generate the exact kind of mass exodus north that he talks about wanting to solve.
Immigration is driven by what are called push and pull factors. The US has been seeking aggressive immigration powers to cut down on what they say are pull factors — the perception that immigrants can live illegally with impunity in the US. But those very policies could affect push factors — the conditions of poverty and violence that drive immigrants elsewhere out of desperation.
“The US sort of talks out of both sides of its mouth,” said Eric Olson, a Latin America expert at the nonpartisan Wilson Center.
“If you’re investing in the region to address the drivers of migration and at the same time pursuing a policy of large-scale deportation, or at least potentially large-scale deportation, and you’re creating more obstacles for people leaving the region for reasons like violence and so on, you’re really creating more instability, not less instability.”
As Tal says, there’s much, much more to her report on the total stupidity and counter-productivity (not to mention inhumanity) of the Trump Administration’s “Gonzo” enforcement policy. Go on over to CNN at the link to get the full picture.
I’ve been saying for some time now that Trump is pursuing facially “hard-line” policies that are proven failures. Indeed, that forced migration from Central America is a phenomenon that spans four decades and six different Administrations with varying degrees of “same old, same old” would suggest to rational leadership that a different approach is required.
Contrary to Trump’s oft-made bogus claim, his is not the first Administration to try a “close the border, detain and deter” policy. Beginning with Reagan, every Administration has tried largely the same thing (although perhaps without some of the inflammatory and outright racist rhetoric favored by the Trumpsters) and all have failed. I know because I’ve been involved in some aspect of trying to implement those failed policies in at least four of those Administrations, two GOP and two Democrat.
That’s why the trend of migration from the Northern Triangle continues and will continue and fester until we get some enlightened leadership that 1) correctly applies our refugee and protection laws in the generous humanitarian spirit they were intended; and 2) recognizes and starts to deal effectively with the “push” issues in the sending countries.
Contrary to the false narrative spread by current Administration, most Central American refugees that I encountered personally during my career would have preferred to remain in their home countries, if political and country conditions had permitted it. Indeed, many were forced by targeted violence to give up promising careers, studies, or businesses to flee for their lives to the U.S. Here, they often had to perform “entry-level” work to support themselves unless and until they achieved some type of legal status (often TPS , asylum, withholding of removal, CAT relief, Special Immigrant Juvenile (“SIJ”) status, or a green card under NACARA).
Of course, many were denied protection despite having very credible, well-documented fears of harm because they didn’t fit the intentionally restrictive asylum criteria engineered by the BIA over several Administrations largely as a result of political pressure on the system to be “unwelcoming” to Central American migrants. Some of those who returned were killed or disappeared; others were tortured or attacked again and forced to flee second or third times, now bearing the scars or injuries to prove their cases — only as “prior deportees” they were no longer eligible for asylum but had to accept withholding of removal or CAT deferral.
Nobody in this Administration, and sadly relatively few in Congress and among the public, are willing to deal honestly with the phenomenon of Central American migration and the “push factors” that will never, ever be controlled by more restrictive laws, more violations of statutory, Constitutional, and international rights, inhumane and life-threatening detention , and racist rhetoric. Nor will it be stopped by any bogus “Wall.”
As I’ve said before, “We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration!” If only someone would listen!
Where Fear and Hope Collide: Images From Mexican Border, and Beyond
Photo
A man killed in a suspected drug-related execution in 2012 in Acapulco, Mexico. Violence has surged in Acapulco, once Mexico’s top tourist destination, spurring the flight of many Mexicans.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images
For nearly a decade, the photographer John Moore has traversed the Mexico-United States border, covering the story of immigration from all sides — American, Mexican, immigrant and border agent.
His depiction of the border is both literal and figurative.
Families at a memorial service for two boys who were kidnapped and killed in February 2017 in San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images
. . . .
A boy from Honduras watched a movie in 2014 at a detention facility for unaccompanied minors in McAllen, Tex.
. . . .
But wherever the numbers go, Mr. Moore’s images reflect an American truth: The fury and debate over immigration to the United States appears to be going nowhere.”
*****************************************
Go to the above link to the NYT for the full article and all of Moore’s pictures.
What do you suppose the “boy from Honduras” is thinking about America? Are these the images by which we want to be remembered as a country? If not, join the New Due Process Army and work for constructive change!
“HOUSTON— They had come so far together, almost 3,000 miles across three countries and three borders: a mother with three children, fleeing a gang in El Salvador that had tried to kill her teenage son.
But now, in a frigid Border Patrol facility in Arizona where they were seeking asylum, Silvana Bermudez was told she had to say goodbye.
Her kids were being taken from her.
She handed her sleeping preschooler to her oldest, a 16-year-old with a whisper of a mustache whose life had been baseball and anime until a gun was pointed at his head.
“My love, take care of your little brother,” she told him on Dec. 17.
“Bye, Mommy,” said her 11-year-old daughter, sobbing.
And then her children were gone.
Once a rarity, family separations at the border have soared under President Trump, according to advocacy groups and immigration lawyers.
The administration first put forth the idea a year ago, when John F. Kelly, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he was considering separating parents from their children as a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Kelly, now the White House chief of staff, quickly walked back his comments after they triggered public outrage, and the controversy ebbed as illegal immigration plunged to historic lows.
But when border apprehensions began to rise again late last year, so, too, did reports of children being stripped from their parents by Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Separating children from their parents is unconscionable and contradicts the most basic of American family values,” 71 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to DHS in February.
The separation of a Congolese mother from her 7-year-old daughter generated headlines and spurred a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union this month.
“We are hearing about hundreds of families,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
“DHS does not currently have a policy of separating women and children,” according to an agency statement released this month, but retains the authority to do so in certain circumstances, “particularly to protect a child from potential smuggling and trafficking activities.”
“The truth is that whether they call it a policy or not, they are doing it,” Gelernt said.
For Silvana’s children, the separation was bewildering and frightening.
They had no idea where their mother was. Did their father, who had fled to the United States months earlier, know where they were?They were told they’d join their family in a few days, but days turned into weeks.
Surrounded by strangers in a strange place, they wondered: Would they ever see their parents again?
‘My soul left me’
The family’s crisisbegan a year ago, when Silvana’s husband, Yulio Bermudez, refused to help MS-13 members in San Salvador escape from police in his taxi. The gang beat him and threatened to kill him.
Silvana Bermudez weeps on March 16 as she watches a video of her children during their separation. (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)
Yulio fled north and crossed illegally into Texas, where the 34-year-old claimed asylum and eventually joined relatives.
Then one night in November, Silvana sent her oldest son — Yulio’s stepson — to a pupuseria down the block. As he was walking, the teenager saw a car pull up. A member of MS-13’s rival, the 18th Street gang, peppered the restaurant with gunfire.
The gang member then turned his gun on the teen, who was frozen with fear. But when he pulled the trigger, there was only the click of an empty chamber.
“Must be your lucky day,” the gangster said and sped off.
Silvana, 33, and her son reported the incident to police, also describing Yulio’s run-in with MS-13. Within days, MS-13 members showed up to their door to tell Silvana she’d pay for snitching, she would later tell U.S. immigration officials. And when the 18th Street member saw her in the street, he pointed his finger at her like a gun.
“It was a clear sign that he was on to us and he wanted to hurt me and my child,” she said in immigration court filings.
Relatives drove Silvana and her kids to the border with Guatemala, where they caught the first of many buses on their way to America.
When they arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border several days later, Silvana and her children followed a group of migrants through the night to a tall brick wall.
“When I saw they were jumping a wall, I said, ‘Oh my God, where do I go from here?’ ” Silvana recalled in an interview. But it was too late to turn back, so she ushered her daughter forward and watched as the 11-year-old disappeared over the wall. Then she handed up her 3-year-old.
“My soul left me, because the wall was very high,” she recalled. Out of sight on the other side of the wall, migrants caught the boy using a blanket.
They had been walking through the desert for a few minutes when they were caught and taken to a “hielera,” or ice box, the nickname for the cold, barren Border Patrol facilities along the frontier where detained migrants sleep dozens to a room.
There, Silvana was told she was being separated from her kids because she had tried to enter the country illegally a decade earlier. Border Patrol agents said she would be charged with “illegal reentry” — a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison — and that her children could not join her in court, she recalled later. (The Washington Post is not naming the children because of the family’s fears about their safety.)
Instead, the kids were loaded onto a van and driven for four hours. As his baby brother slept in his arms, the 16-year-old could hear his sister crying out for their mom. He tried to comfort her, but a metal divider stood between them.
The desert gave way to neighborhoods, and the 11-year-old said she began to believe they were being taken to their dad’s house. When the van finally stopped in front of a large building on the outskirts of Phoenix, she thought: My dad lives in a hotel?
But the building wasn’t a hotel. It was La Hacienda del Sol, one of dozens of shelters around the country for unaccompanied minors. And it was surrounded by a six-foot fence.
Silvana’s sons were given bunk beds in a room with several other boys. The windows were equipped with alarms, which often went off during the night. Each evening, the 16-year-old would lie awake worrying abouttheir fate.
And each morning, the 3-year-old would wake up and ask the same question.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“She had to go to work,” his older brother would say. “She had to go shopping.”
Silvana’s Bermudez’s 3-year-old son kept asking, “Where’s Mommy?” during their long separation. (Michael E Miller/The Washington Post)
The boys had each other, but their sister was by herself in a wing for girls. They only saw her at meals and for a few hours in the evening, when they would play Battleship or Connect 4.
Silvana had given her oldest sona scrap of paper with his stepdad’s phone number on it. But he’d lost it. There was no Internet at the shelter, and when the teen asked to access Facebook to contact Yulio, he said he was told he’d have to make an official request.
Days passed as the children waited for Yulio or Silvana to find them. They took classes, spoke to therapists and received vaccinations. All the while, there was a constant churn of children around them. They would make new friends, only to lose them a few days later, writing their names in notebooks in the hopes of one day re-connecting.
At one point, the 11-year-old’s only roommate was a 4-year-old. Shelter employees asked her to help care for the girl by warming up her bottle and putting her to sleep.
“She was alone,” Silvana’s daughter said. “Without her mom. Without anyone.”
Christmas arrived without word from their parents. Instead of dinner with family and fireworks in the streets of San Salvador, there was pizza and a shelter employee dressed as Santa Claus dispensing winter hats and plastic yo-yos. When Silvana’s daughter began shimmying to Latin music like she had in her dance troupe in El Salvador, she was told to tone it down. And a no-touching rule meant she wasn’t allowed to hug her older brother, even when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The 11-year-old began to despair.
“At first I thought it’d only be a few days before I saw my dad,” she recalled. “But after a month there, I was going crazy, thinking, When? When? When?”
***************************************
Go to the link to read the rest of the article.
This story should be appalling to every American on two levels. First, the unnecessarily cruel policy of separating families, which has frequently been in the news lately.
But, additionally, these folks are refugees who should be granted protection under U.S laws. However, because of unrealistically restrictive politically influenced decisions by the “captive” Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) in the U.S. Department of Justice, and undue deference given to BIA by the Federal Courts under the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” individuals like this basically face a “crap shoot” as to whether protection will in fact be granted.
With a good lawyer, time to prepare and document their case, the right U.S. Immigration Judge, the right BIA “appellate panel,” and the right Court of Appeals panel, protection can be granted under the law in these cases. But, because there are no appointed counsel in Immigration Court cases, most families like this don’t get the top flight legal help that they need to understand the unduly and intentionally overcomplicated law and prepare a winning case. Moreover, too many Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate levels are biased against or unreceptive to asylum cases from the so-called “Northern Triangle” involving gang violence. Some Circuit Court of Appeals panels care and take the time to carefully review BIA findings; others view their “Ivory Tower Sinecures” as an excuse to merely “rubber stamp” the BIA result without giving it much, if any, apparent thought. And this was happening before the Trump Administration took over.
Now, with the biased, White Nationalist, anti-asylum, restrictionist Jeff Sessions actually in charge of our Immigration Courts it’s basically “open season” on the most vulnerable asylum seekers. Sessions rapidly is moving to make the entire U.S. asylum process basically a “Death Train” with the Immigration Courts and the BIA as mere “whistle stops on the deportation railway.”
Outrageously and shamelessly, Sessions has moved to make it difficult or impossible for individuals to obtain counsel by detaining them in out-of-the-way locations specifically selected for lack of availability of legal services and harsh conditions; separated families to demoralize, punish, and terrorize applicants; cranked up the pressure on already overburdened U.S. Immigration Judges in a system already collapsing under 670,000 pending cases to turn out more mindless removal orders; limited the rights of asylum applicants to full hearings — for all practical purposes a “death sentence” for the majority of those who are unrepresented; and indicated an intention to strip particularly vulnerable women, children, gays, and other asylum applicants similar to this family of the bulk of the already merger substantive legal protections they now possess.
Yes, Sessions’s evil and idiotic plan — which reverses decades of settled administrative precedents — is likely to tie up the Federal Courts for years if not generations. But, not everyone in the position of these families has the time, resources, and know how to navigate the Courts of Appeals to obtain justice. That’s particularly true when folks are held in detention in deliberately substandard conditions.
Because Congressional Republicans have long since abandoned any pretensions to human decency or to care about the Constitutional and statutory rights of migrants, Sessions is running roughshod over the laws, the Constitution, and human rights, and wasting taxpayer money by grossly mismanaging the Immigration Courts, without any meaningful oversight whatsoever.
No, folks like the Bermudez family aren’t “fraudsters,” “terrorists,” “frivolous filers,” “economic refugees,” “job stealers,” “system abusers,” “dangerous criminals,” “gangsters” or any of the other litany of false and derogatory terms that Sessions and his ilk intentionally and disingenuously use to describe refugees and asylum seekers. They are frightened, yet courageous, human beings fighting for their legal rights and their very lives in a system already intentionally and unfairly stacked against them.
Through articles like this and court cases, we are making a record of the human rights abuses of Sessions and the rest of the Trump Administration. The “New Due Process Army” will continue to fight injustice throughout our country! For those supporting, enabling, or consciously ignoring this Administration’s human rights atrocities, history will be the judge. Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!
Donald Trump is not subtle. While normal political language functions through implication and indirection, Mr. Trump luxuriates in saying the quiet part loud. But in doing so, Mr. Trump exposes what drives the politics of the movement he commands. That is most evident in the way he talks about crime and punishment.
No president since Richard Nixon has embraced the weaponized rhetoric of “law and order” as avidly as Mr. Trump. “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country,” he said during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016. “I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate.”
Time and again, the president denounces “illegals” and “criminals” and the “American carnage” they wreak on law-abiding Americans. He even advised an audience of police officers to rough up suspects they were arresting.
Yet this tough-guy stance disappears when the accused are in the president’s inner circle. In defending Rob Porter, the White House senior aide accused of abuse by both of his ex-wives, the president wondered whatever happened to due process while praising a man accused of giving his wife a black eye. (Mr. Porter denies the abuse.)
It’s no surprise that Mr. Trump’s critics pounced. Where was this concern for due process, they asked, when the president and his supporters chanted “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t even been formally accused of a crime? Where was his devotion to due process when he called for the Central Park Five to be executed, and then, after their exoneration, still maintained that they were guilty?
As tempting as it is to hammer Mr. Trump for his epic hypocrisy, it is a mistake. The president’s boundless benefit of the doubt for the Rob Porters and Roy Moores of the world, combined with off-with-their-heads capriciousness for immigrants accused of even minor crimes, is not a contradiction. It is the expression of a consistent worldview that he campaigned on and has pursued in office.
In this view, crime is not defined by a specific offense. Crime is defined by who commits it. If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.
This view is also expressed by many of the president’s staff members, supporters and prominent allies. During the same week that the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, repeatedly vouched for Rob Porter’s integrity, Mr. Kelly also mused that hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who did not fill out the paperwork for DACA protections had refused to “get off their asses.”
A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations.
This is the opposite of what we like to tell ourselves is the traditional American civic creed: one symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice who applies the law without fear or favor to whoever may come before her. It is one of Mr. Trump’s most insidious victories that he has given his supporters permission to drop any pretense of insisting that their actions and views should conform to this principle.
If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.
And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law. It shouldn’t have taken this long to see what has always been staring us in the face. After all, the last president to focus so intensely on law and order, Richard Nixon, the man who helped usher in mass incarceration, was also the most infamous criminal to occupy the Oval Office. The history of the United States is the story of a struggle between the desire to establish certain universal rights and the countervailing desire to preserve a particular social order.
We are now witnessing a president who wholly embraces the latter. America can have that kind of social order, or it can have justice for all. But it can’t have both.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) is host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC and the author of “A Colony in a Nation.”
*************************************
Yup. Probably the most lawless Administration in history, certainly in my lifetime, disingenuously throws around the term “Rule of Law” all the time.
“The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.”
But, the good news is that those of us who actually believe in the “REAL Rule of Law” can unite and stand up to Trump, Sessions, Miller and the racist, White Nationalist movement. When we succeed, the “REAL Rule of Law” will actually be available to Trump and his followers on an equal basis with everyone else. And, for many of them, the fair application of the law to everyone in America, as required by the Due Process clause of our Constitution, could be bad news! Let the chips fall where they may.
Ruth Ellen Wasem The University of Texas at Austin
6 Journal on Migration and Human Security 97 (2018)
KEY QUOTE:
Even with fragmented governance and strained resources, the US immigration system has enjoyed successes. Each year, approximately one million foreign nationals legally become permanent residents in the United States. In FY 2015 and FY 2016, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued over 10 million visas each year to foreign nationals coming to the United States as nonimmigrants (i.e., for a temporary purpose and a temporary period of time) and over half a million visas to LPRs (Bureau of Consular Affairs 2017). CBP admitted almost 77 million foreign nationals as nonimmigrant admissions to the United States in FY 2015 (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). That year, DOL processed 711,820 employer applications for 1,580,778 positions for temporary and permanent labor certifications Immigration Governance for the Twenty-First Century 117 (Office of Foreign Labor Certification 2016). In FY 2015, there were 730,259 LPRs who became US citizens. That same year, the United States admitted 69,920 refugees, and USCIS approved 26,124 asylees. DHS apprehended 462,388 foreign nationals and deported 444,431 foreign nationals in FY 2015. Another 253,509 foreign nationals were denied entry, and 129,122 foreign nationals returned home without a formal order of removal (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). In FY 2016, EOIR judges received 328,122 cases and completed 273,390, including those of 8,726 foreign nationals who were granted asylum (EOIR 2017). Considerable credit is due to the people carrying out immigration-related responsibilities across the federal government.
Immigration is not a program to be administered; rather, it is a phenomenon to be managed. While there are limits to how much one government can control migration, the building blocks in Figure 3 offer a reasonable set of priorities. Effective immigration governance, coupled with laws and policies that incorporate the national interests, is key to maintaining a robust sovereign nation.
Get the entire article, which I highly recommend, at this link:
Words of wisdom, to be sure. If only our policy makers had the same degree of understanding.
Today, we operate on an illusion that a few folks sitting in Washington, D.C. can “pull all the strings” to seal borders, override market forces, ignore international conditions and agreements, change behavior in foreign countries, and dominate forces of human migration that have been at work since before all of us were born and will continue long after we’re all gone. It’s a toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance that will leave immigration and refugee policy in tatters for years to come.
I can only hope that there are those out there in the upcoming generations who will bring to the immigration phenomenon practical scholarship, reason, humanity, fairness, and better ideas on management of our laws for the benefit of our country and humanity as a whole.
Professors Linda R. Tropp and Dina G. Okamoto write in The Guardian:
“For more than a century, the identity of the United States has been grounded in the notion that we are a “nation of immigrants.” Immigrants have made innumerable contributions to our economy, infrastructure, and culture – building our railroads and bridges, bringing innovation and new ideas, and settling in communities that thrive throughout our country today. But now, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a federal agency charged with immigrant affairs, has turned its back on this rich legacy.
As of last week, the mission statement of the USCIS has changed. No longer does its mission speak to “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” that promotes “an awareness and understanding of citizenship” along with “ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.” Now, the new version focuses on “adjudicating requests for immigrant benefits” while “protecting Americans” and “securing the homeland”.
Why do changes to the USCIS’s mission statement matter? It may seem like just a few words, but this new language is happening within the context of other alarming changes to our national immigration policies and practices.
Refugee admissions have been curbed to a historic low, and people with “temporary protected status” who fled their homelands due to natural disasters or civil wars are being sent back.
Several crucial programs are at risk of being terminated, including programs that allow 50,000 people from countries underrepresented in current immigration streams to come to the US, pathways for those who arrived in the US as children without legal documents to remain in the US to work and attend school, and the family-based system of immigration – a cornerstone of US immigration policy – which allows US citizens to reunite with family members by sponsoring their migration to the US.
All of these changes have been presented under the guise of protecting against threats to our national security. But these policies stand in stark contrast to the will of the American people. Despite increased attention on anti-immigrant sentiments, Americans across the country largely embrace immigrants of all faiths and cultures and want our government to do the same.
Most Americans believe the numbers of immigrants coming to the United States should be kept at its present level or increased. And 60% percent of Americans oppose building a wall on our border with Mexico. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now supportgranting legal status to immigrants originally brought to the US without papers as children, driven by the same moral imperative that has guided family reunification efforts over the last 50 years.
These levels of endorsement in national polls are bolstered by the actions of US citizens from many walks of life who have taken to the streets in protest, boldly stating that “immigrants are welcome here”.
Indeed, across the country, people and communities have been sending the clear message that immigrants are not only welcomed, but valued. Hundreds of local governments have advocated for their cities and towns to be recognized as “welcoming cities” for immigrants.
Spanning from the industrial rust-belt of the midwest to our nation’s borders, civic leaders have gone to great lengths to welcome immigrants, because they open up new businesses, populate local schools, revitalize housing markets, and infuse new life into local communities. And while the majority of immigrants in the US are here legally, nearly 500 US cities have chosen to become “sanctuary cities” to protect immigrants without legal status from deportation, even at the risk of losing federal funding.
These actions by everyday Americans uphold our nation’s values and reflect the best of who we are as a country, while our federal immigration policies are seeking to close doors and build walls. One of the best ways to honor our values as a nation is not to close opportunities to immigrants, but to successfully integrate them into the fabric of our society. As researchers who have been studying immigration and race relations for 20 years, our research shows that one of the best ways to integrate immigrants into the fabric of society is to interact with and welcome them.
Such encouraging effects of contact between US citizens and immigrants are not limited to big cities or liberal-leaning areas. Recent immigrants have established themselves both in diverse urban areas and new destinations across the United States.
According to recent poll data, more than 75% of US adults report that there are immigrants living in their community, with about a quarter (27%) reporting many recent immigrants in the community where they live. Our surveys of US citizens, including both white and black Americans, show that the more they encounter and interact with immigrants, the more inclined they are to welcome them into their communities.
This significance of welcoming does not simply serve to express our national values or concern about immigrants and their wellbeing. Welcoming immigrants is also important for creating a shared sense of identity and community within our nation. Parallel surveys we have conducted with immigrants show that the more they feel welcome by Americans, the more they come to identify as American themselves and to seek to become US citizens – factors that can fuel greater civic participation and contributions to our society.
The recent barrage of exclusionary immigration policy proposals are attempts to sow the seeds of fear, anxiety, and distrust. Rather than pursue policies that set immigrants apart, we should seek to integrate immigrants and highlight the assets they bring to communities across our nation.
Linda R Tropp is a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dina G Okamoto is the director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University. They are both visiting scholars at the Russell Sage Foundation.”
*******************************************
Trump and the GOP restrictionists are trying to “whitewash” American history by denying and downplaying the achievements of immigrants, particularly those of color, without which American could never have survived and prospered. Don’t let them get away with their disingenuous and anti-historical efforts. Don’t let this (unjustifiably) disgruntled minority of (largely White, badly misinformed) Americans hijack our country and its future.
By 7 p.m., the sun had set and groups of young men had begun to gather inside a small, nameless restaurant on a narrow street in Tapachula, Mexico. Anywhere else in the city, a hub of transit and commerce about ten miles north of the Guatemalan border, there would be no mistaking that you were in Latin America: The open colonial plaza, with its splaying palms and marimba players, men with megaphones announcing Jesus, and women hawking woven trinkets and small bags of cut fruit suggested as much. But inside the restaurant, the atmosphere was markedly different. The patrons hailed not from Mexico or points due south but from other far-flung and unexpected corners of the globe—India, Pakistan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Congo. Men, and all of the diners were men, gathered around tables, eating not Mexican or Central American fare but steaming plates of beef curry, yellow lentils, and blistered rounds of chapati. The restaurant’s proprietor, a stern, stocky Bangladeshi man in his thirties named Sadek, circulated among the diners. He stopped at one table of South Asian men and spoke to them in Hindi about how much they owed him for the items he’d collected on their tab. The waitress, patiently taking orders and maneuvering among the crowds of men, was the only Spanish speaker in the room.
Outside, dozens of other such men, travelers from around the world, mingled on the avenue. They reclined against the walls of restaurants and smoked cigarettes on the street-side balconies of cheap hotels. They’d all recently crossed into the country from Guatemala, and most had, until recently, been held in Tapachula’s migrant detention center, Siglo XXI. Just released, they had congregated in this packed migrants’ quarter as they prepared to continue their journeys out of Mexico and into the United States. They had traveled a great distance already: a transatlantic journey by airplane or ship to Brazil; by car, bus, or on foot to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia; through Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua; on to Honduras, Guatemala, and into Mexico. Again and again, I heard their itinerary repeated in an almost metronomic cadence, each country a link in a daunting, dangerous chain. They’d crossed oceans and continents; slogged through jungles and city slums; braved detention centers and robberies; and they were now, after many months, or even longer, tantalizingly close to their final goal of the United States and refugee status.
Police in Tapachula, a Mexican city used as a waypoint for migrants known as extra-continentales, patrol past a Cameroonian traveler (in a striped shirt).
They are the extreme outliers of a global migration crisis of enormous scale. Today, more than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes—a higher number than ever recorded, as people flee war, political upheaval, extreme poverty, natural disasters, and the impacts of climate change. Since 2014, nearly 2 million migrants have crossed into Europe by sea, typically landing in Italy or Greece. They hail from dozens of countries, but most are from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria—countries struggling with war, political repression, climate change, and endemic poverty.
Their passage to supposed safety, which takes them across Libya and the Sinai, as well as the Mediterranean, has become increasingly perilous. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 150,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2017. More than 3,000 are believed to have drowned. Stories of detention in Libya, as well as physical and sexual abuse, are commonplace among those who manage to make it to Europe. A recent CNN report depicted a Libyan slave auction, where people were being sold for as little as $400. Even the lucky ones who wash up on Europe’s shores may end up stuck for years in transit camps and detention centers in the south of the continent, in some cases only in the end to be deported. In 2013, in an effort to curb migration and ease the burden of migrants within its borders, the European Union began ramping up deportations. In 2016, nearly 500,000 people were deported from Europe.
While the global drivers of migration have not subsided—devastation in Syria and Afghanistan, political repression in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—200,000 fewer migrants attempted to cross into Europe in 2017 than the year before. In response to the migrant crisis, European countries have sent strong messages that newcomers are no longer welcome; they’ve built fences to stop refugees from crossing their borders and elected far-right politicians with staunchly anti-immigrant messages. Meanwhile, most asylum cases are stalled in overburdened court systems, with slim prospects for any near-term resolution, which leaves many migrants stuck in the wicked limbo of a squalid, under-resourced refugee camp or austere detention facility. Today, European authorities have stiffened their resistance not only to new arrivals, but to the hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers who arrived years before and remain in an eerie liminal zone: forbidden to live or work freely in Europe and unwilling, or often unable, to go home.
Because of the high risks of crossing and the low odds of being permitted to stay, more and more would-be asylum-seekers are now forgoing Europe, choosing instead to chance the journey through the Americas that brings them to Sadek’s restaurant in Tapachula. Each year, thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make their way to South America and then move northward, bound for the United States—and their numbers have been increasing steadily. It’s impossible to know how many migrants from outside the Americas begin the journey and do not make it to the United States, or how many make it to the country and slip through undetected. But the number of “irregular migrants”—they’re called extra-continentales in Tapachula—apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has tripled since 2010.
They remain a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans crossing into the United States. But it is a hastening trickle that may well become a flood. “These ‘extra-continental’ migrants will probably increase,” said Roeland De Wilde, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migrationin Costa Rica, “given the increased difficulties in entering Europe, relative ease of entry in some South American countries, and smugglers’ increased organization across continents.”
A migrant from Bangladesh, Sadek (in a red shirt) is part restaurateur, part migratory middleman. He can help a traveler with a good meal—or a good travel agent or immigration attorney.
One tragic lesson of the extra-continentales is that no set of governments, however callous, can solve the migration crisis by closing its doors to refugees seeking shelter. All Europe has done is redirect the flow of vulnerable humanity, fostering the development of a global superhighway to move people over this great distance. The doors will not hold, and neither will the fences. You can build a wall, but it will not work. Desperate people find a way.
“Cette route,” a French-speaking man from Cameroon told me, one sweltering afternoon in Tapachula on the breezeless balcony of a hotel frequented by irregular migrants, “n’existe pas sur le map.” This route doesn’t exist on the map.”
****************************************
Read Lauren’s much longer complete article at the above link. It’s one of the most incisive treatments of the worldwide migration phenomenon that I have seen recently. I highly recommend it.
Thanks to dedicated “Courtsider” Roxanne Lea Fantl of Richmond, VA for sending this item my way!
Shortly after I arrived at the Arlington Immigration Court, one of my wonderful colleagues told me “Paul, desperate people do desperate things. Don’t take it personally, and don’t blame them. We just do our jobs, as best we can under the circumstances.” Good advice, to be sure!
We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration!
“A wise person once said, of working in the White House: “It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns . . . I am in a constant state of shock and horror.” Whether or not that description can be attributed to Gary Cohn or is simply “representative” of his views, we may never know, but it’s obviously a good summation of what life is like inside the capsizing Carnival cruise ship that is the West Wing, particularly over the last 24 hours.
To recap, on Wednesday night, The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump was expected to announce major tariffs on aluminum and steel on Thursday, a development that apparently caught administration officials completely off guard. Though Trump has been itching to start a trade war since he announced his candidacy for president, virtually all of his advisers, outside the truly batshit insane ones, strongly advised against such punitive measures, as they could ultimately hurt many U.S. allies and provoke retaliation by U.S. trading partners, among other terrible consequences. During a June meeting with his Cabinet to discuss the issue, a whopping 22 people were said to be against Trump’s wishes, to the three who weren’t: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, then-senior adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump himself. Unhappy that more people weren’t on his side, Trump reportedly screamed, “I want tariffs. And I want someone to bring me some tariffs!”
With Bannon’s departure, there was a thought that sheer numbers, if not sanity, would prevail. In addition to Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have all strenuously argued against the tariffs, warning that they could hurt the global economy, damage key relationships, and threaten national security. That was obviously wishful thinking, though, given that 1) when Trump gets an idea in his head, no matter how dumb it is, he doesn’t let it go, and 2) the president has recently been taking the advice of Peter Navarro, a hard-line trade adviser who makes Bannon look like a “globalist cuck.” (For reference, Navarro wrote a book called Death by China, has encouraged Trump to go after freaking Canada, and thinks the North American Free Trade Agreement is responsible for an increase in spousal abuse, divorce, and infertility.) Considering Navarro’s growing influence in the White House, in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have come as a shock that this afternoon, this happened:
President Trump said on Thursday that he will impose stiff and sweeping tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum as he moved to fulfill a key campaign promise to get tough on foreign competitors.Mr. Trump said he would formally sign the trade measures next week and promised they would be in effect “for a long period of time.” The trade measures would impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. It is unclear whether those would apply to all imports or be targeted toward specific countries, like China, which have been flooding the United States with cheap metals.
The announcement capped a frenetic and chaotic morning inside the White House as Mr. Trump summoned more than a dozen executives from the steel and aluminum industry to the White House, raising expectations that he would announce his long-promised tariffs. However, the legal review of the trade measure was not yet complete and, as of Thursday morning, White House advisers were still discussing various scenarios for tariff levels and which countries could be included, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
It’s hard to overstate how bad of an idea this is. In addition to going against the advice of nearly all of his advisers and most people on Capitol Hill, essentially flipping off the World Trade Organization, and likely alienating important allies, the “JOBS JOBS JOBS” president is putting countless “JOBS” at risk in sectors like the automotive industry that obviously rely on aluminum and steel to manufacture their products. (According Axios’s Jonathan Swan, a report put out by Wilbur “wake me when the meeting is over” Ross that recommended imposing tariffs enraged Cohn because it didn’t factor in such collateral damage. Cohn and other staffers were also reportedly irked by the fact that the report suggested Trump’s fantasy of a manufacturing Renaissance could come true, when everyone knows it’s never gonna happen.)
To give you an idea of how unpopular today’s announcement was, even the Brothers Koch have come out against it, calling the tariffs, via their Americans for Prosperity mouthpiece, “a misguided approach that will hurt American businesses and families by increasing costs and undermining the tax relief just delivered by Congress and President Trump.” Larry Kudlow, whose name as been floated as a possible replacement for Cohn, and who is a huge fan of Trump’s, slammed the move, too, saying “All that will happen with steel tariffs is you will raise prices for all import users and that includes businesses and of course consumers. You will wind up hurting millions of people to help 140,000 people in the steel industry.” But don’t take their word for it. Here’s how Trump’s favorite metric responded:
(For those of you who are not visual learners, what we’re saying is: the Dow plunged 550 points on the news, closing the day down more than 400 points. For a stock-market obsessed president, that’s gotta hurt.)
Scott Pruitt, risking his life, will fly coach
Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruittcame under fire for routinely flying first or business class when coach would have sufficed. His excuse? That “we live in a very toxic environment politically, particularly around issues of the environment,” and one time someone went up to him in the airport and uttered completely factual statements to his face. From there on out, his security detail decided that flying at the back of the plane was too much of a risk, and that Pruitt’s safety could only be ensured in the part of the aircraft where the booze is on the house. Today, however, this hugely brave American announced that those days are over.
During an interview with CBS News, Pruitt said that he has told his security detail “to accommodate those security threats in alternate ways . . . up to and including, flying coach going forward.”
Perhaps showing why we have the Trump “Clownocracy” in the first place, some Dems actually enthusiastically endorsed Trump’s idiotic move. As the late great Casey Stengel might have said, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Guys, we need steel and aluminum, and we import one heck of a lot more than we make. Even an “economic dummy” like me knows that. So, a trade war that hurts American consumers and manufacturers who use steel and aluminum is going to be a big loser for us. Countries like ours that are, and almost certainly always will be, net importers rather than exporters can’t afford trade wars (particularly with our, perhaps soon to be former, “friends” like Canada & the EU)!
Finally, a “too bizarre not to be true rumor” sweeping the “world of inside the Beltway punditry” is that “Don the Con Man” will fire “Mr. Magoo” (a/k/a “Gonzo Apolyptco,” a/k/a “Jeff Sessions”) and temporarily replace him with the ethically challenged Scott “First Class” Pruitt for long enough to completely dismantle the Justice Department and our system of justice just as he did with our environment and the EPA. Talk about the “GOP Wrecking Crew” and the not-so-smart minority of folks who voted them into power. Vladi must be laughing his tail off!
“The most difficult decision a lawyer has to make is whether to allow his client to speak to the prosecutor—or in this case, the special counsel,” Robert Bennett told me, referring to the unfolding chess match between Donald Trump and Robert Mueller. Bennett, the Brooklyn-born Washington superlawyer, would know, having represented President Bill Clinton in the Kenneth Starr investigation. For a fabulist like Trump, however, the danger is tenfold: Mueller has already charged four former members of the Trump campaign with making false or misleading statements to the F.B.I. “I think there are tremendous risks in this case, because the easiest case for the government to prove would be a false statement given to the F.B.I. or the independent counsel,” Bennett added. “That’s a very easy one to prove.”
While the president initially said he is “100 percent” willing to meet with Mueller under oath, his legal team has cautioned that any interview could be a perjury trap. “He’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer on the Russia inquiry, told The New York Times. For months, Trump’s lawyers have been engaged in discussions with Mueller’s team, weighing options that could mitigate the president’s legal risk. Though the format of the potential interview remains an open question, Mueller, wielding the power of subpoena, has the upper hand in shaping the negotiations. “What matters is how much leverage you have on either side,” said Renato Mariotti, a former Chicago prosecutor. “Mueller has most of the leverage . . . in the end, Mueller is going to get most, if not the vast majority, of what he wants.”
The challenge for Trump’s legal team, led by Cobb and John Dowd, is to protect the president from himself under conditions acceptable to Mueller. “It’s a very bad sign for the president that his own lawyers are so worried about whether he’s going to tell the truth that they’re trying to negotiate all of these conditions ahead of time,” Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, told me. “Ordinarily, when you’re representing a high-ranking government official, you’re not worried about your client being forthcoming because that goes with the nature of government service. But here, I think the lawyers are wise to worry, just given Donald Trump’s track record of him confabulating in any number of ways.”
*********************************
Read the rest of Tracy’s article at the above link.
I don’t have much doubt that Trump will perjure himself. I don’t think he could tell the truth if his life depended on it. And, it’s likely that Mueller will be able to build a convincing case for obstruction against the Liar-In-Chief.
But, Trump relies heavily on the complicity of the sleazy GOP he has come to dominate and the indifference of his voters to moral values or honest government. Trump is used to at least figuratively “getting away with murder” (remember his all too true boast that he could shoot someone in broad daylight in Times Square and his voters wouldn’t care). So, the chances of Trump being held accountable are probably minimal until 2024.
“In the decade or so before Donald Trump became president, America’s approach to criminal justice was changing fast — reckoning with decades of destructive and ineffective policies that had ballooned the prison population and destroyed countless lives. Red and blue states were putting in place smart, sensible reforms like reducing harsh sentencing laws, slashing prison populations and crime rates, and providing more resources for the thousands of people who are released every week.
President Obama’s record on the issue was far from perfect, but he and his first attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., took several key steps: weakening racially discriminatory sentencing laws, shortening thousands of absurdly long drug sentences, and pulling back on the prosecution of low-level drug offenders and of federal marijuana offenses in states that have legalized it. This approach reflected state-level efforts and sent a message of encouragement to those still leery of reform.
Within minutes of taking office, Mr. Trump turned back the dial, warning darkly in his Inaugural Address of “American carnage,” of cities and towns gutted by crime — even though crime rates are at their lowest in decades. Things only got worse with the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, along with Mr. Trump, appears to be stuck in the 1980s, when politicians exploited the public’s fear of rising crime to sell absurdly harsh laws and win themselves re-election. Perhaps that’s why both men seem happy to distort, if not outright lie about, crime statistics that no longer support their narrative.
Last February, Mr. Trump claimed that “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” Wrong: The national rate remains at an all-time low. It’s true that the 10.8 percent increase in murders between 2014 and 2015 was the largest one-year rise in more than four decades, but the total number of murders is still far below what it was in the early 1990s.
For his part, Mr. Sessions has repeatedly hawked a nationwide crime wave that doesn’t exist, and he has called crime spikes in certain areas a “dangerous, permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk” — despite the lack of any evidence that recent upticks will last. To the contrary, in 2017 the crime rate in the nation’s 30 biggest cities actually went down.
As bad as the dishonesty is the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions have managed to engineer their backward worldview largely under the public’s radar, as a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice documents. Last May, Mr. Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to charge as aggressively as possible in every case — reversing a policy of Mr. Holder’s that had eased up on nonviolent drug offenders and others who fill the nation’s federal prisons. In January, Mr. Sessions rescinded another Obama-era policy that discouraged federal marijuana prosecutions in states where its sale and use are legal. (Mr. Sessions has long insisted, contrary to all available evidence, that marijuana is “a dangerous drug” and “only slightly less awful” than heroin.)
These sorts of moves don’t get much attention, but as the report notes, they could end up increasing the federal prison population, which began to fall for the first time in decades under Mr. Obama.
The reversal of sensible criminal justice reform doesn’t stop there. Under Mr. Trump, the Justice Department has pulled back from his predecessor’s investigations of police abuse and misconduct; resumed the use of private, for-profit prisons; and stopped granting commutations to low-level drug offenders who have spent years or decades behind bars.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sessions, who as a senator was one of the most reliable roadblocks to long-overdue federal sentencing reform, is still throwing wrenches into the works as Congress inches toward a bipartisan deal. Mr. Sessions called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, a sweeping bill that would reduce some mandatory-minimum sentences, and that cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a “grave error.” That earned him a rebuke from the committee’s chairman, Senator Charles Grassley, who pointed out that the attorney general is tasked with enforcing the laws, not writing them. “If General Sessions wanted to be involved in marking up this legislation, maybe he should have quit his job and run for the Republican Senate seat in Alabama,” Mr. Grassley said.
Mr. Grassley is no one’s idea of a justice reformer, but he supports the bill because, he said, it “strikes the right balance of improving public safety and ensuring fairness in the criminal justice system.”
So what has this administration done right? The list is short and uninspiring. In October, Mr. Trump declared the epidemic of opioid abuse a national emergency, which could be a good step toward addressing it — but he’s since done almost nothing to combat a crisis that killed more than 64,000 Americans in 2016.
In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. Trump promised to “embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance.” It’s great if he really means that, but it’s hard to square his assurance with his own attorney general’s opposition to a bill that includes recidivism-reduction programs intended to achieve precisely this goal.
Perhaps the most insidious part of the Trump administration’s approach to criminal justice lies in its efforts to link crime to its broader crackdown on immigration. In a speech last month, Mr. Sessions said undocumented immigrants are far more likely than American citizens to commit crimes, a claim he found in a paper by John Lott, the disreputable economist best known for misusing statistics to suit his own ideological ends. In this case, it appears Mr. Lott misread his own data, which came from Arizona and in fact showed the opposite of what he claimed: Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens, as the vast majority of research on the topic has found.
But no matter; Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions don’t need facts to run their anti-immigrant agenda, which has already resulted in more than double the number of arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions as in 2016, as the Brennan Center report noted. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials. A federal judge blocked the order in November for violating the Constitution.
The rhetoric from the White House and the Justice Department has emboldened some state and local officials to talk tougher, even if just as ignorantly, about crime. The good news is that it’s not working as well anymore. In Virginia’s race for governor last fall, the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, attacked his opponent, Ralph Northam, with ads blaming him for violence by the MS-13 gang.
It was a despicable stunt, its fearmongering recalling the racist but effective Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush ran on in his successful 1988 presidential campaign. Thankfully, Virginia’s voters overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Gillespie, another sign that criminal justice reform is an issue with strong support across the political spectrum. In the era of Donald Trump, candidates of both parties should be proud to run as reformers — but particularly Democrats, who can cast the issue not only as a central component of a broader progressive agenda, but as yet another example of just how out of touch with the country Mr. Trump and his administration are.”
******************************************
I know it’s quoted above, but two paragraphs of this article deserve re-emphasis:
Perhaps the most insidious part of the Trump administration’s approach to criminal justice lies in its efforts to link crime to its broader crackdown on immigration. In a speech last month, Mr. Sessions said undocumented immigrants are far more likely than American citizens to commit crimes, a claim he found in a paper by John Lott, the disreputable economist best known for misusing statistics to suit his own ideological ends. In this case, it appears Mr. Lott misread his own data, which came from Arizona and in fact showed the opposite of what he claimed: Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens, as the vast majority of research on the topic has found.
But no matter; Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions don’t need facts to run their anti-immigrant agenda, which has already resulted in more than double the number of arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions as in 2016, as the Brennan Center report noted. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials. A federal judge blocked the order in November for violating the Constitution.
Gonzo consistently uses bogus statistics, fear-mongering, racial innuendo, and outright slurs of immigrants, including Dreamers, and their advocates to advance his White Nationalist agenda at Justice.
At the same time, he largely ignores or proposes laughably inadequate steps to address the real justice problems in America: Russian interference, the opioid crisis, uncontrolled gun violence (much of it involving mass shootings by disgruntled White Guys with assault-type weapons), overcrowded prisons, lack of an effective Federal community-based anti-gang effort in major cities, hate crimes committed by White Supremacists, grotesquely substandard conditions in civil immigration detention, and the uncontrolled backlogs and glaring denials of Due Process and fairness to migrants in our U.S. Immigration Court System.
How long can America go without a real Attorney General who acknowledges the rights of all people in America? How will we ever recover from the damage that Gonzo does every day he remains in the office for which he is so supremely unqualified?
A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He announced on Wednesday that he would legalize the “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall and ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.
There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio launched his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, declared in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney promised in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”
Trump has turned that distinction on its head. He’s willing to legalize the “dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than those who don’t.
What explains this? Trump’s great hidden advantage during the 2016 Republican presidential primary was his lack of support from the GOP political and donor class. This allowed him to jettison positions—in support of free trade, in support of the Iraq War, in support of cutting Medicare and Social Security—that enjoyed support among Republican elites but little support among Republican voters. He did the same on immigration, where the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction turned out to be much more popular among the party’s leaders than among its grassroots. Cribbing from Ann Coulter’s book, Adios America, Trump replaced the legal-illegal distinction with one that turned out to have more resonance on the activist right: The distinction between white Christian immigrants and non-white, and non-Christian ones.The words “illegal immigration” do not appear in Trump’s presidential announcement speech. Instead, Trump focused on immigrants’ country of origin. “When Mexico sends its people,” he declared, “they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists … It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.”
Trump, who often says bluntly what other Republicans say in code, probably realized that “illegal immigrant” was, for many voters, already a euphemism for Latino or Mexican-immigrants. In their book White Backlash, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal cite a poll showing that 61 percent of Americans believe that most Latino immigrants are undocumented even though only about a quarter are. “When Americans talk about undocumented immigrants, Latinos or immigrants in general,” they note, “the images in their heads are likely to be the same.”
What really drove Republican opinion about immigration, Trump realized, was not primarily the fear that the United States was becoming a country of law-breakers. (Republicans, after all, were not outraged about the lack of prosecution of tax cheats.) It was the fear that the United States—which was becoming less white and had just elected a president of Kenyan descent—was becoming a third world country.When the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution asked Americans in 2016 their views of immigration from different parts of the world, it found that Republicans were only three points more likely than Democrats to want to reduce immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” and only seven points more likely to want to reduce immigration from Europe. By contrast, they were 33 points more likely to support reducing immigration from Mexico and Central America and 41 points more likely to support reducing immigration from “predominantly Muslim countries.” What really drives Republican views about immigrants, in other words, is less their legal status than their nation of origin, their religion, and their race.
Trump grasped that during the campaign, and in coalition with a bevy of current and former Southern Senators—Jeff Sessions, David Perdue and Tom Cotton—he has used it to turn the GOP into a party devoted to slashing legal immigration. On Thursday, when presented with a bill that traded the legalization of dreamers for more border security but did not reduce legal immigration, only eight Republican Senators voted yes. However, 37 voted for a bill that legalized the “dreamers,” added more border security and substantially reduced legal immigration.
But there’s another reason Trump has succeeded in erasing the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction that for years governed GOP immigration debate. He’s made Republicans less concerned with legality in general. In 2012, the GOP—which was then-outraged by executive orders that supposedly displayed President Barack Obama’s contempt for the constitutional limits of his office—titled the immigration section of its platform, “The Rule of Law: Legal Immigration.” The seven paragraph-section used variations of the word “law” fourteen times.That emphasis is harder now. In his ongoing battles with the FBI, Justice Department, judiciary and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Trump has convinced many Republicans that the “rule of law” is often a cloak for the partisan biases of the “deep state.” As a result, Republicans are now 22 pointsless likely to hold a positive opinion of the FBI than they were in 2015.
What really matters for many Republicans in Trump’s standoff with Mueller and the FBI is not who has the law on their side, since the bureaucracy can twist the law to its own advantage. What really matters is who enjoys the backing of “the people,” the authentic America that resides outside the swamp, a construct that definitely does not include the imagined beneficiaries of “chain migration” and the “visa lottery.”
In the Trump era, Republicans now justify their immigration views less by reference to law than by reference to tribe. Which, not coincidentally, is how they justify Trump’s presidency itself.”
*****************************************
Marco Rubio has already seen the downside of trying to become a national force in the GOP by advocating a moderate, pro-business, pro-immigrant, not overtly anti-Hispanic policy. I suspect if and when Ambassador Nikki Haley tries to make a bid for national office in the GOP she’ll find out that the Miller-Sessions-Cotton-Perdue-King group and Trump supporters will treat her with the same disrespect, bias, and disdain that they usually reserve for smart, capable Latinas, children fleeing for their lives from the Northern Triangle, and “Dreamers.”
And folks like Sen. Tim Scott will find that even consistent support for a right-wing GOP that regularly disses African-Americans and Hispanics won’t give him “White Guy” status in the larger GOP world. A useful vote in the Senate. That’s about it. Reportedly, Scott once talked to Trump about the latter’s “tone” on race. How did that work out, Tim? But, hey, as long as you vote for big tax breaks for the wealthy, cuts in health care, and are happy to threaten the benefits, remaining dignity, and lives of the poor, you can at least retain your status a “club member at the retail level.”
“Even among some of Donald Trump’s allies, there is a sense of astonishment at the White House’s handling of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “It’s like no one took down the Gambino family,” Steve BannontoldChris Whipple in a book adaptation the Hive published this week. “Mueller’s doing a roll-up just like he did with the Gambinos. [Paul] Manafort’s the caporegime, right? And [Rick] Gates is a made man!” Indeed, Mueller, who led the F.B.I. takedown of the infamous crime family in the early 1990s, famously cutting a deal with Sammy the Bull to flip on mob boss John Gotti, appears to be executing what some have called a “Gambino-style roll-up.” First, he flippedformer Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos; then, he turnedousted national security adviser Michael Flynn. Now, CNN reports, Mueller appears to be in the final stages of a plea deal with Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman and a longtime business associate of Manafort, who was indicted alongside him last fall.
The White House reportedly views Gates’s testimony as a threat to Manafort, and not to the president. “There’d be no anxiety here,” a White House official told CNN when asked about the possibility that Gates will cut a deal. The charges against the two, after all, had nothing do with Russian collusion; the 12 counts included failure to register as a foreign agent, false and misleading statements related to that registration, and seven counts of improper foreign financial reporting—all as part of a broader conspiracy to launder millions of dollars from their consulting work in Ukraine into the United States. Manafort has pleaded not guilty, and is fighting the charges. But Gates, who has also pleaded not guilty, has been grappling with financial troubles and difficulties with his legal team. According to CNN, he has been in plea negotiations with Mueller’s team of F.B.I. investigators for about a month, and has already given an interview in which he would have revealed any knowledge he might have of criminal activity that could be traded for leniency or immunity in sentencing.
What this means for the White House isn’t exactly clear. While Manafort’s reign as campaign chairman and Gates’s role as his deputy were short-lived, the duo oversaw a series of events and interactions that have come under intense scrutiny in the ongoing Justice Department probe. Manafort and Gates ran the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, during which Donald Trump Jr. held his infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. They were also on board during the Republican National Convention, where a number of Trump campaign officials and surrogates met with Russian officials and campaign officials altered the language of the official G.O.P. platform on Ukraine to be more sympathetic to Russian interests. While Manafort was replaced by Bannon after The New York Times alleged that handwritten ledgers showed millions in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort in Ukraine—a claim Manafort denies—Gates continued to work with the Trump campaign through the transition, and served as a senior official on Trump’s inaugural committee.”
For now, the most significant facts in the case remain under lock. Adam Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that the panel has discovered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the 2016 campaign, as well as evidence of subsequent obstruction. “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation,” Schiff toldreporters. Whether that information is actionable remains to be seen. According to the White House’s own budget request, the administration expects Mueller’s investigation to continue well into next year, despite repeated assurances from the president’s legal team that it was approaching a conclusion. If Gates has the goods, perhaps it will end sooner.
*****************************************
No, the “Don of Con” isn’t “in the clear” as he incredibly asserts. In fact, it appears that the noose is slowly tightening. Exactly the kind of “dangling in the wind” to which The Don likes to subject those subordinates whom he suspects of disloyalty.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” And, there’s so much smoke surrounding The Don, his family, and his current and former associates right now that it’s a miracle nobody in the White House has succumbed to smoke inhalation.
When Donald Trump was running for president, absent any actual relevant experience, he claimed he was qualified for the job thanks to his superior deal-making skills—an argument that many ended up buying, despite vast stores of evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately for the U.S., what Trump didn’t explain—though laid out pretty clearly in his book The Art of the Deal—was that as a businessman, making “a deal” to him meant the other side loses, rather than both parties walking away with a happy compromise. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition,” he wrote, because yes, he’s just that much of an asshole. But whereas his business-world competition could simply get up from the negotiating table and leave, sadly for America, that asshole is our president. And this week, we all got a taste of his singular deal-making style. Only instead of jockeying over some crappy Atlantic City casino or Versailles-inspired condo, this deal had to do with the fate of hundreds of thousands of people who might be sent back to a country they’ve never known because the president is a fraud.
Despite claiming over and over that he has a “big heart” where DACA recipients are concerned, that he wants to come up with a solution before the March 5 deadline he set, and that if lawmakers came to him with an agreement, “I will be signing it,” Trump this week chose to torpedo Congress’s best stab at a bipartisan deal. With four proposed Senate bills to protect the Dreamers from deportation, the White House chose to “work vigorously to oppose” a centrist bill that had the best chances of passing, with the Department of Homeland Security claiming it amounted to “mass amnesty for over 10 million illegal aliens.” While the Common Sense Coalition measure, sponsored by eight Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent, would have provided $25 billion for border security, including Trump‘s precious wall, it would have done so over a period of 10 years and not immediately, as the man-child in the Oval Office has demanded. “I don’t think the president helped very much,” Senator Lindsey Graham, told The New York Times, adding, “As long as the president allows Steve Miller and others to run the show down there, we’re never going to get anywhere.” Thanks to Congress’s paralysis, experts estimate that more than 100 DACA recipients are losing their status daily. And Trump’s the business world is pissed.
“I’ve been very worried for quite a while that I was watching a train wreck in slow motion, and yesterday we had that train wreck,” Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an alliance of small businesses, told the Financial Times. Echoing the sentiment was Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who noted: “We have people who are working here contributing to our society. Many of them are in the manufacturing sector. We don’t want to lose those folks. And frankly our country shouldn’t want to lose those folks—especially in manufacturing where we have 364,000 open jobs.” Earlier in the week, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein said in interview, “I couldn’t bear the idea of sending outside the country someone who grew up here his or her entire life,” adding that “over time, immigrants add to the economy because they bring in skills,” a data point the administration would rather not hear. To that end, the Cato Institute estimates that if the employers lost all of their DACA employees, it would set businesses back $6.3 billion in worker-turnover costs.
You might think a guy who just delivered a billion-dollar tax break to corporations would remain invested in keeping those corporations happy. But of course, Trump doesn’t deal in facts, so such negotiating points are lost on him. Art of the Deal, indeed.
*************************************************
“Putin’s Idiot” Donald Trump specializes in taking potential “win-win” situations and turning them into “lose-lose.” That’s certainly what he has done with the Dreamers. And, we all share in their loss.
Nevertheless, if our country survives, the Dreamers will end up better than Trump and his apologists. The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere, for the most part. But, I’m betting that we will see a number of the super slimy folks who served Trump in the White House or his campaign headed for jail (or at least a few years of “supervised release.”).
