"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.
Inside an Immigrant Caravan: Women and Children, Fleeing Violence
Photo
Central American migrants, members of a group making its way through Mexico, waited in line on Wednesday to review their visa status at a temporary camp in Matías Romero. CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
MATÍAS ROMERO, Mexico — With a sarcastic half-smile, Nikolle Contreras, 27, surveyed her fellow members of the Central American caravan, which President Trump has called dangerous and has used as a justification to send troops to the border.
More than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, waited patiently on Wednesday in the shade of trees and makeshift shelters in a rundown sports complex in this Mexican town, about 600 miles south of the border. They were tired, having slept and eaten poorly for more than a week. All were facing an uncertain future.
“Imagine that!” said Ms. Contreras, a Honduran factory worker hoping to apply for asylum in the United States. “So many problems he has to solve and he gets involved with this caravan!”
The migrants, most of them Hondurans, left the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula on March 25 and for days traveled north en masse — by foot, hitchhiking and on the tops of trains — as they fled violence and poverty in their homelands and sought a better life elsewhere.
This sort of collective migration has become something of an annual event around Easter week, and a way for advocates to draw more attention to the plight of migrants.
But this particular caravan caught the attention of Mr. Trump, apparently after he heard about it on Fox News. In a Twitter tirade that began Sunday, he conjured up hordes of dangerous migrants surging toward the border. He demanded that Mexican officials halt the group, suggesting that otherwise he would make them pay dearly in trade negotiations or aid cuts.
Mr. Trump even boasted that his threat had forced Mexico’s government to halt and disperse the caravan participants. But there was no evidence of that on Wednesday.
. . . .
Irineo Mujica, Mexico director of People Without Borders, an advocacy group that is coordinating the caravan, called Mr. Trump’s Twitter attacks and promise of a militarized border “campaign craziness.”
“There are 300 kids and 400 women,” he said. “Babies with bibs and milk bottles, not armaments. How much of a threat can they be?”
. . . .
The group, organizers and advocates said, represented a regional humanitarian problem, not a security crisis for the United States, as Mr. Trump has suggested.
“What he’s attacking is a supremely vulnerable population,” said Gina Garibo, projects coordinator in Mexico for People Without Borders.
In response to Mr. Trump’s tweets and his plans to militarize the border, the Mexican Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding statement on Wednesday urging President Enrique Peña Nieto to suspend cooperation with the United States on immigration and security matters — “as long as President Donald Trump does not conduct himself with the civility and respect that the Mexican people deserve.”
Caravan organizers also said their intent was never to storm the border, especially not with a caravan of this size. While the original plan included the possibility of escorting the caravan to the northern border of Mexico, organizers had expected the group to mostly dissolve by the time it had reached Mexico City.
. . . .
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Read the complete article along with more pictures of ordinary folks forced to make an extraordinary journey at the link.
There has never been any doubt that folks like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen have nothing but contempt for the truth, laws, and human life. But, they also think that the American people are pretty stupid to fall for the “fantasyland claptrap” that they throw out to drum up support for their racist restrictionist ambitions.
Although you’ll never hear it from the disingenuous Trumpsters, individuals arriving at our borders have a legal right to apply for asylum guaranteed by both U.S. and international law. Most of the “law-breaking” involves the actions of the Trump DHS. By refusing to properly process asylum applicants at legal ports of entry, the Administration actually encourages illegal entry and the use of smugglers.
The only real “crisis” at the Southern border is a humanitarian one that this and past Administrations have had key roles in creating through failed immigration and foreign policies. Without better, smarter government, we’re bound to deep repeating the same mistakes.
Trump admin sending National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border
By Tal Kopan, CNN
President Donald Trump will sign a proclamation directing agencies deploy the National Guard to the southwest border, Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced Wednesday.
“The President has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy the National Guard to our southwest border,” Nielsen said at the White House.
The formal move follows days of public fuming by Trump about immigration policy, during which he has tweeted about immigration legislation in Congress, a caravan of migrants making its way through Mexico and what he calls weak border laws.
Since the passage of the government spending package for the year — which included $1.6 billion for border security but only a few dozen miles of new border barrier construction and a nearly equal amount of replacement fencing — Trump has been critical of Congress for denying him more money. Trump privately floated the idea of funding construction of a southern border wall through the US military budget in conversations with advisers, two sources confirmed to CNN last week — a plan that faces likely insurmountable obstacles in Congress.
Sending National Guard troops to the border is not unprecedented. Both of Trump’s predecessors also did so, though the moves were criticized for being costly and of limited effectiveness.
US law limits what the troops can actually do. Federal law prohibits the military from being used to enforce laws, meaning troops cannot actually participate in immigration enforcement. In the past, they’ve served support roles like training, construction and intelligence gathering.
From 2006-2008, President George W. Bush deployed 6,000 guardsmen to Southern border states, costing $1.2 billion and assisting with 11.7% of total apprehensions at the border and 9.4% of marijuana seized in that time.
From 2010-2012, President Barack Obama sent 1,200 guardsmen to the border to the tune of more than $110 million, and they assisted with 5.9% of the total apprehensions and 2.6% of the marijuana seizures on the border.
CNN’s Catherine Shoichet, Dan Merica and Betsy Klein contributed to this report
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Read Tal’s complete report at the link.
Here’s what you really need to know:
There’s no “border crisis” facing us except for that created in the minds of Trump and his White Nationalist restrictionist cronies;
The real threat to our “National Security” is Trump and his White Nationalist cabal;
According to all reliable reports, the few hundred “caravan” members who actually get to the border (the majority are “dropping out,” remaining in Mexico, or already have been removed by Mexican authorities) merely intend to apply for asylum, after consulting with lawyers, which they have every right to do under both U.S. and international law;
The more serious issue is that many observers have reported that the Trump DHS is violating U.S. and international laws by refusing to allow individuals who properly present themselves at a port of entry to apply for asylum (there is a law suit currently pending on this issue);
Trump is wasting time, money, personnel, and attention on a false “self-created” crisis that presents no realistic threat to the U.S.;
The Obama and Bush II Administrations did largely the same thing with disastrous results (actually helping to generate the “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” culminating in today’s near-700,000 Immigration Court case backlog).
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!
Leaving aside Trump’s rather Germanic approach to capitalization, that tweet is an occasion to paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman: Virtually every word is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Democrats repeatedly offered to deal on DACA, as did Trump. No newcomers could possibly “get onto the DACA bandwagon,” because only immigrants who were brought here before 2007 were eligible. And immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.
Why such a frenzy of untruth? Because Trump apparently sees anger building among his most fervent supporters over his utter failure to deliver on what they understood as his central campaign promise: to halt or reverse the flow of Latino immigration and the “browning” of America.
That’s what this is really about. On the emotional level, Trump appealed to white Anglo chauvinism. He skillfully stoked the anger and resentment of those who are annoyed when they phone the electric company to straighten out a bill and are told to press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish. When he writes things like “our country is being stolen,” it’s crystal-clear who’s supposed to be stealing it.
What I didn’t realize during the campaign was that Trump’s base realized he could never fulfill his absurd pledge to deport all of the estimated 11 million people who are here without papers. But his supporters did expect him to do something to stem what they see as an invasion — something concrete and unambiguous. Like the promised wall.
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Read Robinson’s complete article at the link.
White nationalism, racism, voter suppression, environmental destruction, rewarding fat cats, punishing ordinary folks and “enemies,” unnecessary trade wars, loss of international standing and leverage, destruction of honest government, war on public education, lies, immorality, greed, unethical behavior, those are what Trump and today’s sick GOP stand for. And that’s what the folks who continue to support this parody of a President and mockery of humane American values are aligning themselves with.
This is a time when the lines between human decency — the right side of history — and all the “worst things about America” — the wrong side of history — have clearly been drawn. I wonder what Dr. King would think if he were still living?
In a three-tweet salvo Sunday morning, Trump decried recent struggles with congressional Democrats to reach a deal that would legalize the status of millions of “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children.
“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,” Trump said in his first tweet. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
DACA refers to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump ended in the fall. The program had allowed dreamers to live in the country without fear of deportation.
Trump, a self-proclaimed “Fox & Friends” fan, appears to have fired off the tweets in response to a segment on the program in the morning (at least the National Border Patrol Council sees a connection, it claimed in a post afterward).
Why are they moving in a caravan?
The Fox News opinion segment was in response to a BuzzFeed report on Friday that more than a thousand Central Americans, primarily from Honduras, were winding their way up through Mexico to the U.S. border on a nearly month-long trip that began March 25. These migrants are looking to seek asylum from criminal elements back home or slip into the United States undetected.
Moving in a large group is expected to blunt the efforts of criminal gangs and cartels known to isolate and later rob immigrants, many of whom bring large sums of money to make the long journey north through Mexico. The caravan organizers, Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, appeared to have concluded that it is safer for these people to travel together.
That trip can be deadly as people find their way along various routes that go directly north to Texas, northwest to Arizona or along the coast to California.
Just about every route is more than a thousand miles long and is canvassed by robbers and corrupt police who shake down the immigrants, who have little access to legal recourse. A network of commercial locomotives is veined throughout Mexico in a 1,450-mile cannonball run. Migrants ride on top of the trains, occasionally falling off and breaking bones or suffering severe dehydration.
Central American immigrants get on the “La Bestia” cargo train in Arriaga, Mexico, on July 16, 2014, in an attempt to reach the Mexico-U.S. border. (Elizabeth Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images)
Members of the caravan said they would attempt to ride the trains, but in 2014, more guards and trains moving faster through stations made it more difficult for migrants to catch rides.
Migrants have many names for the trains, such as “El tren de los desconocidos” (the train of the unknowns) and “El tren de la muerte” (the train of death).
But its most common name is “La Bestia”: the Beast.
What is Mexico doing about the flow of migrants?
“Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!” Trump said in his second tweet.
Mexico is doing something — with the help of the United States. Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid flow to Mexico every year, including funds for strengthening its border with Guatemala, where migrants generally cross.
Billions in additional spending authorized by President Barack Obama in 2014 was prompted by thousands of unaccompanied minors arriving on the U.S.-Mexico border, mostly Central Americans fleeing horrific crime waves and economic crises in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. About 300,000 migrants were detained by Mexican authorities in the next two years.
The caravan began in Tapachula, BuzzFeed reported, nestled just on the other side of the border, and no authorities in Mexico appear to have stopped it as of Friday.
What is Trump doing about it?
Trump’s proposals to reduce aid to Mexico would raise the possibility that the country would be less able to stem flows of migrants and drugs coming across its border.
The president has been caught in a contradiction of policy on the border before.
The budget for the U.S. Coast Guard stayed flat in 2018 despite spending increases across the Pentagon (the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security). But the service seizes three times as much cocaine moving by sea as what U.S. agencies intercept at border checkpoints, putting a dent into Trump’s argument that a border wall would dry up the supply of hard drugs in the United States.
Trump has been more focused on DACA and the border wall lately. He has suggested that the program may be the reason the caravan has massed.
“These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!” Trump said in a tweet.
He later said outside a church before Easter services Sunday: “A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA. They had a great chance. The Democrats blew it.”
But that description of DACA appears to misrepresent the program’s intent, which was to provide protection for immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children. The adults in the caravan wouldn’t qualify for DACA. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.
“I asked some of the migrants on the caravan what they thought about Trump saying they were going to the US for DACA,” BuzzFeed reporter Adolfo Flores tweeted Sunday. “Some laughed and others said they thought (correctly) they wouldn’t qualify.”
Flores reported Friday afternoon that the caravan had gone more than 200 miles northwest in less than a week, crossing into the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
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Trump, Sessions, Miller, Homan, Nielsen and the rest of the White Nationalist cabal live in their own parallel universe where bias, hate, racism, xenophobia, lies, fears, cowardice, and political manipulation block out any rays of truth or reason. It’s certainly bad for our country to have such distorted, divisive, dishonest, and incompetent leadership. But, it’s a fact of life that the rest of us just have to deal with if we want to live in the present moment and try to prevent future disasters.
Undoubtedly, the Trump Administration’s inhumane and short-sighted policies will inflict some unnecessary pain and hardship on individuals who otherwise would be our friends and become loyal and productive members of our society. But, it’s unlikely that any of Trump’s blustering or the Administration’s “Gonzo” immigration enforcement policies and “Alice in Wonderland” pronouncements will have much lasting effect on migration patterns except, perhaps, to increase the number of people living in the United States without documents by artificially shutting down some of the existing paths that encourage individuals to come forward and obtain documentation or to enter the U.S. through the legal system in the first place. As with so much that this Administration is doing, it will be left for future generations to clean up the mess.
Wow, if these pathetic Dudes who supposedly govern us are this afraid of a few ragtag scared refugees moving north, what would they do in the face of a real army, a real invasion, and a real danger to our country? There wouldn’t be enough desks in Washington for them all to hide under!
Philip Rucker and David Weigel report for the Washington Post:
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump spent his Easter morning here on an anti-immigrant tirade, declaring Sunday that there would be no deal to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” and threatening to exit the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico increases border security.
Trump thrust the future of millions of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children into peril by promising “NO MORE DACA DEAL,” and he directed congressional Republicans to pass tough anti-immigration legislation.
An hour after he wished Americans a “HAPPY EASTER,” Trump fired off three tweets in which he vented, sometimes in all caps, about immigration laws he derided as “ridiculous” and “dumb” and about border enforcement he deemed dangerously lax.
In his first of the immigration-related tweets, Trump wrote, “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
It was Trump who last fall canceled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was begun in the Obama administration to provide temporary protection to dreamers.
“A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA,” Trump told the traveling press pool. “They had a great chance. The Democrats blew it.”
The president added, “Mexico has got to help us at the border. . . . They flow right through Mexico; they send them into the United States. It can’t happen that way anymore.”
President Trump’s position on DACA has taken several twists and turns over the years.(Meg Kelly, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)
Trump in the past has promised to show “great heart” in dealing with DACA. In his comments Sunday, he appeared to be confused about the rules of the program. To qualify, immigrants must have lived in the United States since 2007, have arrived in the country before age 16 and have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012. No one arriving in the country after that date is eligible.
After canceling DACA, Trump said he would like to reach a deal with Congress to protect dreamers from deportation in exchange for funding to build his long-promised wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The president, however, went on to reject immigration proposals from congressional Democrats in recent months.
“Catch and release” is not a law, but shorthand for immigration officials freeing up detention center space by allowing immigrants to remain at large if they are not seen as security risks. The Trump administration has frequently claimed that the policy ended when the new president took office.
But detention centers have continued releasing low-risk immigrants, as the backlog of immigration court cases reaches the hundreds of thousands. On March 5, Attorney General Jeff Sessions informed immigration court judges that they could rule against asylum seekers without full hearings, which conservatives see as a way, in the long term, to open more space in detention centers.
Trump — who has spent his time in Palm Beach hanging out with family, playing golf with friends and watching television — may have tweeted in response to commentary on Fox News Channel, which he is known to view regularly.
“Fox & Friends” aired a segment earlier on Sunday morning about Central American migrants traveling through Mexico en route to the United States. It carried the headline: “CARAVAN OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS HEADED TO U.S.”
Trump’s Sunday comments may have been mere musings by an impassioned “Fox & Friends” viewer and may not signal a substantive shift in administration policies. Still, White House officials have long said Trump’s tweets are official presidential statements, and he has been known to use Twitter to preview formal policy pronouncements.
Trump sent his tweets on the fourth and final day of his vacation in Palm Beach, Fla., where he has been staying at his private Mar-a-Lago Club with a small coterie of aides. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly did not travel with him, but senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a proponent of hard-line immigration policies, has been with Trump.
The president also has been spotted spending time — both over dinner Friday at Mar-a-Lago and on Saturday at the nearby Trump International Golf Club — with Fox host Sean Hannity. An outspoken immigration hard-liner, Hannity is a Trump booster and informal presidential adviser, in addition to hosting a radio show and prime-time Fox show.
Trump’s tweets baffled some Democrats, who had seen the president distinguish between DACA recipients and other immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“Time and time again, the president has walked away from bipartisan proposals that are exactly what he asked for,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “When an agreement to protect the Dreamers is reached, it will be despite this president rather than with his leadership.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said on Twitter that Trump had once again revealed a racial animus behind his immigration policy. “The mask of deceptions and lies with which Trump has tried to gaslight the country for months just fell away: ‘no more DACA deal.’ ” Beyer tweeted. “His true position was always anti-immigrant.”
Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), a leading advocate for a DACA deal in the House, tweeted that Trump had “demonstrated his complete ignorance” on immigration policy.
“Everyone who qualifies for DACA must show they lived in US almost 11 years ago,” he wrote. “Apparently every day is April Fool’s Day at White House.”
Conservative reaction to the tweets was relatively muted, and no Republican member of Congress had a comment or statement Sunday afternoon. At Breitbart, the tweets were reported as Trump refusing to “negotiate a deal between the GOP establishment and Democrats,” in “a return to his ‘America First’ immigration agenda.”
On Facebook, the conservative author Ann Coulter, who had condemned Trump for not securing border wall funding so far this year, urged the president to show and not tell.
“Try to get a message to the commander in chief for that wall,” she wrote.
But some Republicans joined the chorus of criticism. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a GOP primary opponent of Trump in 2016 and possibly again in 2020, tweeted in response: “A true leader preserves & offers hope, doesn’t take hope from innocent children who call America home. Remember, today is Easter Sunday. #DACA #Hope”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a supporter of immigration reform who represents Miami and is retiring this year, took a sarcastic approach: “Such a strong message of love and new beginnings from @realDonaldTrump on Easter Sunday.”
By calling for Republicans to use the “Nuclear Option” to pass tough immigration measures, Trump seemed to urge a parliamentary procedure by which Senate Republicans could pass legislation with a simple majority of 51 votes as opposed to the 60-vote majority required to end debate and bring a vote to the floor.
But in mid-February, just 36 of the Senate’s 51 Republicans backed an immigration bill that mirrored White House demands. Congressional negotiations on DACA stalled just weeks later, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision that prevented the Trump administration from denying new program renewals.
The court’s move effectively nixed a March 6 deadline that the administration had set for ending DACA. Before leaving for Easter recess, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill with no DACA fix, even though advocates saw that as the best must-pass vehicle for one.
Trump lashed out at Mexico in his second of the three tweets Sunday. He threatened to “stop” NAFTA unless Mexican authorities do more to secure the border with the United States.
Trump wrote: “Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!”
And in the third tweet, the president wrote, “These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!”
Trump’s tweets come amid tense negotiations over NAFTA between his administration and that of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. A call between the two men in February became testy after Trump refused to publicly affirm Peña Nieto’s position that Mexico will not pay for the wall’s construction, leading the Mexican leader to cancel a planned visit to Washington.
Philip Rucker is the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.
David Weigel is a national political correspondent covering Congress and grass-roots political movements. He is the author of “The Show That Never Ends,” a history of progressive rock music.
DACA obviously has nothing to do with any “exodus” now on the way. Rather, those arriving appear to be mostly refugees from the Northern Triangle — primarily scared women and children. And, they are being driven north not by DACA, but by unrelenting persecution and violence by gangs fueled by the Trump Administration’s own wrongheaded and tone-deaf policies. Sometimes, folks reap what they sow!
Most of the new arrivals probably can establish a legal right to refuge under the law. That’s why Sessions is so anxious to manipulate and “game” the existing asylum system against them. But, that move is likely to be tied up in the Federal Courts, perhaps for decades and with a good chance of grinding the entire immigration enforcement system to a halt.
The “Con-Man-In -Chief” seems to have forgotten that his “enforcement overload legislative proposal” failed miserably in the Senate — garnering only 40 votes. Even if the Senate were to change the “60 vote rule” — something which neither party seems inclined to do — it’s virtually impossible that Trump would be able to round up the necessary 11 additional votes for his “mega enforcement only” program. His problem is that his proposals have offended enough members of the GOP that they are basically DOA in the Senate.
While “The Wall” likely would have little impact on either immigration or drugs, fact is that Trump could have gotten “His Wall” in exchange for relief for the Dreamers. He just was too biased or inept (or both) to close the deal.
Trump has already claimed to have eliminated the inaptly named “catch and release” program. If there is a problem now, it’s with his own policies. Moreover, to the extent that releasing aliens on bond is a function of their being determined to be neither dangers to the community nor flight risks, that appears to be constitutionally required. Trump and the GOP can fume all they want, but they can’t eliminate the US Constitution.
Trump now appears to be backing away of his premature claim that his “get tough rhetoric and policies on immigration enforcement” had single-handedly closed down exgtra-legal migration. Human migration is driven by forces far more powerful than Donald Trump.
Mexico has been known to use some methods that violate human rights to enforce migration restrictions. Encouraging them to do that puts Trump and his buddies squarely on the side of human rights violators. On a more practical note, even assuming that there were legal measures that Mexico could take to stem the flow of northward bound migrants, Trump’s disparaging and inflammatory rhetoric has done little to encourage such action on the part of the Mexican Government. And using NAFTA to threaten Mexico is hardly likely to increase Mexico’s inclination to help.
As a country that imports more than it exports, we need NAFTA more than Mexico does. If the US wants to “dis” one of its primary trading partners, I have little doubt that countries like China, the EU, Canada, and even India will be happy to step in and fill the void. I imagine that the Chinese would love to stick some factories just south of the Mexico-US border, for all sorts of reasons.
Trump’s mean-spirited and idiotic approach to immigration, as well as his inappropriate and unhinged tweets, are a continuing embarrassment to our country and create real questions as to both his intelligence and his mental stability.
Of the untold number of stupid things that have come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, making a strong case for the stupidest was his claim, as he announced his candidacy for president, that he would build a wall on the southern border of the country and make the “criminals” and “rapists” in Mexico pay for it. So dumb was this declaration that even Trump eventually realized he would have to tweak it, probably around the time that Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said there was no way in hell he would fund the project. From there, Mr. Art of the Deal changed his story to taxpayers will put up the money initially, but Mexico will pay us back;which later became Mexico will pay for the wall through import tariffs; which quickly changed to Mexico will pay for the wall indirectly through NAFTA,” which morphed, earlier this month, into the wall will pay for itself. And now, the president has landed on a new idea: make the military pay for it.
Trump has privately been making the case that the Pentagon should use some of the $700 billion it received as part of last week’s spending bill to fund his vanity project, The Washington Postreported Tuesday. After mentioning it to several advisers last week, Trump reportedly floated the idea by House Speaker Paul Ryan in a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, to which Ryan “offered little reaction.” During another meeting, this one with senior aides, Trump apparently whined about how much money the Department of Defense was getting, noting that surely the Pentagon could afford to part with a few (or, say, 67) billion dollars. According to reporters Josh Dawsey and Mike DeBonis, President Temper Tantrum has had a hard time watching TV lately—heretofore his only solace in this cruel world—due to criticism of the spending deal he signed last week, and the fear that his base could sour on him without any wall progress. (The fact that he allegedly had an affair with a porn star, whom he subsequently paid off to stay quiet, is obviously a plus for them.) Currently, just $641 million is earmarked for new fencing, and it can only be used on “operationally effective designs that were already deployed last May,” meaning that unless something changes, the prototypes Trump recently visited in California will be just for show.
Of course, as everyone but the president seems to understand, it’s highly unlikely that the Pentagon would divert funds from the military to finance the wall, which experts say won’t actually stop the flow of illegal immigration at all, and which would require Congressional votes that Trump obviously doesn’t have. Not only will Democrats take a hard pass military spending paying for his fence, but Pentagon officials, per White House advisers, “may also blanch at the possibility.” In a statement to the Post,Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made his feelings pretty clear. “First Mexico was supposed to pay for it, then U.S. taxpayers, and now our men and women in uniform? This would be a blatant misuse of military funds and tied up in court for years. Secretary [James] Mattis ought not bother and instead use the money to help our troops, rather than advance the president’s political fantasies,” he said.
That virtually no one is going for the idea hasn’t stopped Trump from floating it in his preferred venue of choice. Over the weekend he suggested on Twitter that the military should scrounge up the money for national security reasons:
The national security argument might hold a bit more water if the Trump administration hadn’t targeted traditional border security measures for for cuts or delays in funding that experts say “[pose] a serious threat to border security.” (Those experts also say that the The Wall will largely useless “unless it’s 35,000 feet high.”) Meanwhile, at the White House, good soldier Sarah Sanders on Tuesday told reporters that the administration “still has plans to look for potential ways” for Mexico to pay for the wall.
Anyway, stay tuned for next week when Trump privately presses for the Department of Veterans Affairs to quit being so stingy and pony up the dough. How much money do they really need to treat PTSD?
Team Trump has a special treat in store for the bank industry
It’s the appointment of Jelena McWilliams at the F.D.I.C., which will result in a trifecta of deregulation-happy officials atop the nation’s banking regulators, per The Wall Street Journal:
When that happens, the F.D.I.C., the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will be able to move ahead on a number of the Trump administration’s policy priorities, such as adjusting capital and liquidity requirements, easing restrictions on short-term consumer loans and relaxing the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law’s proprietary trading ban, the Volcker rule.
Ms. McWilliam’s arrival likely will coincide with the completion of a bill in Congress aimed at easing crisis-era banking regulations, another catalyst for changes to the financial rule book.
Isaac Boltansky, the policy research director at Compass Point Research & Trading LLC, told W.S.J.that, “With Congress likely to pass the only financial deregulatory bill for the near future, it will be the alphabet soup of new regulators who decide the tone and tenor of the new deregulatory agenda.” #MAGA!
Wilbur Ross does the G.O.P. a solid
Overriding the advice of career officials who warned that adding a question to the 2020 census about citizenship will lead to fewer responses from people worried about deportation, Ross decided on Monday to just go for it, writing in a memo he had “determined that reinstatement of a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census questionnaire is necessary to provide complete and accurate census block level data” (the last time the citizenship question was on the census was in 1950). That’s an interesting argument, given that the very reason census officials didn’t want to reinstate the question is a fear that it will lead to lower response rates. Which may be all part of the plan:
Critics of the change and experts in the Census Bureau itself have said that, amid a fiery immigration debate, the inclusion of a citizenship question could prompt immigrants who are in the country illegally not to respond. That would result in a severe undercount of the population—and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.
Others argued that an undercount in regions with high immigrant populations would lead not only to unreliable data but also to unfair redistricting, to the benefit of Republicans.
More threatening essentially to break or evade the law from our “Con-Man-In-Chief.” “Normalizing” this erratic, “Third World Dictator” conduct doesn’t make it “normal” or “acceptable.” It reflects on the folks willing to enable and apologize for Trump (although apology is something he never does, no matter how egregious his lies or misconduct.)
Ironically, Trump likely could have had “His Wall” funded if he had been willing to support a bipartisan “Dreamer Compromise” just a few weeks ago.
It might be more productive at this point to put negotiations about DACA and DREAM Acts aside and try a different approach. My suggestion is to work on creating a place in the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program for the DACA participants.
This little-known humanitarian program makes lawful permanent resident (LPR) status available to undocumented alien children in the United States who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected by one or both parents and who should not be returned to their own countries.
. . . .
DACA
Undocumented aliens were considered for the DACA program if they:
Were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012;
Came to the U.S. before reaching their 16th birthday;
Have continuously resided in the U.S. since June 15, 2007;
Were physically present in the U.S. on June 15, 2012, when they filed their DACA applications; and
Had no lawful status on June 15, 2012.
The aliens in both programs came to the United States as children and humanitarian relief is warranted in both situations to prevent them from having to return to their own countries. The SIJ aliens would be returning to abuse, neglect, or abandonment; and the DACA aliens spent their childhoods here and know no home other than America.
The need for the new category would end when all of the DACA participants have been taken care of, but this should not be a problem. Section 1059 of the FY2006 National Defense Authorization Actestablished Special Immigrant status for Iraqi and Afghan nationals who had served as translators for the U.S. Armed Forces, and the need for that program will end when the translators are no longer needed.
Trump’s Framework
The first pillar of Trump’s framework is the legalization program.
Putting the DACA participants in the SIJ program would facilitate a compromise on Trump’s pillar requiring an end to chain migration.
The SIJ provisions take away a participant’s right to confer immigration benefits on his parents when he becomes an LPR. INA §101(a)(27)(J)(iii)(II)states that, “no natural parent or prior adoptive parent of any alien provided special immigrant status under this subparagraph shall thereafter, by virtue of such parentage, be accorded any right, privilege, or status under this Act.”
This restriction continues even if they naturalize.
It might be necessary to amend this provision to include the rest of the family-based classifications that Trump wants to eliminate, but that would be a much smaller concession than terminating chain migration for everyone.
Trump has made it very clear that he will reject any deal that does not include funding for his wall.
Lastly, terminating the DVP should not be a problem. The Democrats have shown a willingness to end that program. Section 2303 of Senator Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) Gang of Eight bill would have repealed the DVP if it had been enacted.
In any case, the parties have nothing to lose from trying this approach.”
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Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article.
This seems like an interesting idea that could work if, and it’s a big “if,” the parties can get over their respective “all or nothing” approaches.
For the Dems, it gives the Dreamers closure, permanent status, and a path to eventual citizenship. A very big deal!
At the same time, the GOP and Trump basically get three of “Trump’s pillars” in some form or another.
Yes, the inclusion of the “parent bar” could be a sticking point for the Dems. But, it will be at least three to five years after the Dreamers get their “green cards” before any of them would be eligible to naturalize. By that time, both the thinking and the politics behind the issue of status for parents of naturalized U.S. citizens could well change. We would definitely have better data about the “real universe” in terms of numbers.
Even now, many Dreamers no longer have two living parents who would be able to or interested in immigrating. Estimates of “future impact” based on the assumption that each Dreamer would “immigrate” two parents always have appeared wildly exaggerated to me. A “special immigrant program” would provide better data.
Also, once Dreamers become Lawful Permanent Residents and U.S. citizens, they are likely to be in a position favorably to influence the dialogue about parental migration.
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.”
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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!
But other political strategists aren’t sure that many Latino voters will be able to get past the messages they have heard from Trump and some GOP leaders related to DACA, misleading stats about MS-13-related gang violence and other issues.
“A whole generation of minority voters is essentially hearing the GOP tell them, ‘We don’t like you,’ ” Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, previously told The Washington Post. “That might not have sunk the GOP against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, but the demographics are moving into a direction where this will be political suicide.”
Unless things change significantly — as in the president and Congress proposing policies that Latino voters consider important — the GOP could continue to push voters away.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
The Trump GOP’s program is doubly insulting. While the Dems undoubtedly have both under-appreciated Latino voters and grossly underperformed on their issues, there is a huge difference between ineffectiveness and race-based maliciousness which has become part of the “Trump/GOP Brand.” And, contrary to the Trumpsters’ blather, Latinos are more than smart enough to figure out the difference and where their real interests reside.
“Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump argued Friday that Democrats have stood in the way of DACA recipients gaining permanent legal status, while casting Republicans as would-be saviors.
“The Republicans are with you, they want to get your situation taken care of,” Trump said at the White House, as he complained about the $1.3 trillion spending bill program, speaking directly to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “The Democrats fought us, they just fought every single inch of the way. They did not want DACA in this bill.”
But as Congress left town increasingly unlikely to pass any major immigration legislation before November’s midterms, the White House has repeatedly rejected deals to fix DACA, the Obama-era policy he ended then implored Congress to save.
Here’s a timeline of DACA under Trump:
September 5, 2017: Trump announced an end to the DACA program, which protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. President Barack Obama instituted the work permits and protections in 2012.
September 13: Trump has dinner with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi at the White House, after which the two Democrats say they agreed in broad strokes to a DACA-border security deal that doesn’t include Trump’s wall. Trump initially seems on the same page, then the White House and Republicans walk it back. Trump tweets about how “good, educated and accomplished” DACA recipients are.
October 8: The White House unveils what it calls its priorities for a DACA deal, a laundry list of aggressive conservative immigration measures that Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected as rife with poison pills.
November 1: After a terrorist attack in New York City, Trump begins to emphasize ending the diversity visa lottery and family-based migration.
November 2: Republican lawmakers meet with Trump at the White House and rule out attaching any DACA deal to year-end funding bill before a possible shutdown.
December 21: Lawmakers pass government funding into the new year and leave town without a deal, despite Democrats’ previous pledges to not go home without one.
January 9: Trump holds bipartisan meeting at the White House that cameras televise for nearly an hour. He indicates multiple times he is willing to compromise on DACA, despite some contradictions within the meetings, and says “when this group comes back — hopefully with an agreement — this group and others from the Senate, from the House, comes back with an agreement, I’m signing it.” The so-called “four pillars” also come out of this meeting — that a deal shall include DACA, family-based migration, the diversity lottery and border security.
January 9: Federal court puts hold on Trump’s plan to end DACA, ordering renewals of permits to continue but no new applications.
January 11: After months of meetings, Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham go to the White House to propose to Trump a compromise worked out by their group of six bipartisan senators. The offer includes a path to citizenship for eligible young immigrants, the first year of Trump’s border wall funding, ending the diversity visa lottery and reallocating those visas, and restricting the ability of former DACA recipients to sponsor family.
Trump and the White House invite hardline Republicans to the meeting and he rejects the deal, making his now-infamous “shithole countries” comment in the process.
January 19: House before a government funding deadline, Schumer and Trump meet for lunch at the White House. Schumer offered Trump the upwards of $20 billion he wanted for his border wall in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for the eligible immigrant population. The deal is rejected, and government shuts down at midnight.
January 22: Government reopens after Republicans Graham and Jeff Flake secure a public commitment from Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell to hold a future immigration floor vote. Bipartisan negotiations resume.
January 25: White House releases its proposal for a DACA deal under the four pillars, which includes a generous path to citizenship for eligible immigrants, but also a number of impossible-to-swallow provisions for Democrats and some Republicans under the auspices of family-based migration and border security.
February 14: A bipartisan group of senators unveils a compromise plan, which includes $25 billion for the border, a pathway to citizenship for the immigrants, cuts to one slim category of family-based migration and prevents the parents who brought their children to the US illegally from ever being sponsored for citizenship by those children.
February 15: White House goes all out to stop the bipartisan compromise deal, which fails to get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate, with 54 votes.
February 26: Supreme Court declines to take up an immediate appeal of court decisions resuming DACA renewals, ensuring no deportations of DACA recipients for months and taking pressure of Congress.
March 14: With roughly a week to go before the major government spending package known as the omnibus must pass, White House suddenly signals a desire for a DACA-border deal. Publicly, the White House says they oppose a temporary fix.
March 22: Congress passes an omnibus without DACA, virtually ensuring it will not be addressed before midterms.
March 23: Trump signs the omnibus, rails on Democrats for, he says, not caring about DACA.
CNN’s Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report.”
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Thanks, Tal for your very succinct, accessible reporting “setting the record straight” on DACA.
Trump could, and should have engineered full DACA relief with no “tradeoffs.” since the DACA folks are a great benefit to America, why would we need any “tradeoffs?” And, I believe that a “straight DACA relief bill” could have passed both Houses and been signed into law if Trump had backed it, although it might not have had “majority GOP support.” All polls show that the vast majority of Americans favor status for DACA recipients.
Moreover, the Dems probably would have given Trump at least something he could have claimed as a “Wall victory” thrown in. In the end, Trump’s insistence that the DACA bill had to contain other unneeded and highly inappropriate restrictions on legal immigration and anti-Due Process measures directed at children at the border killed the effort.
“Congressman Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) immigration bill, the Securing America’s Future Act (SAFA) may be the last chance this election year to pass a bill that would help the Dreamers. It needs more support, but he should be able to get it from the Democrats.
First, however, he needs to overcome the negative impression some Democrats have of him and his bill, which is expressed in this commentthe ACLU made when SAFA was introduced:
“This bill should be viewed for what it is — an obvious attempt by longtime anti-Dreamer lawmaker Rep. Bob Goodlatte and his allies to derail a legislative solution for Dreamers.
“The policies in the new legislation are a collection of hardline provisions designed to sabotage, rather than advance, the possibility of a bipartisan breakthrough.”
The best approach may be to revise SAFA to include a statutory DACAprogram with a legalization program that would not become available until the bill’s enforcement measures are implemented. Also, Goodlatte should remove enforcement measures that are not needed to prevent a recurrence of what happened the last time the Republicans agreed to a legalization program.”
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Please go over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete, much more detailed, analysis of the opportunities for compromise.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.
Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top priority.
Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of a Washington-based think tank called the Center for Responsible Immigration, believes that most Americans favor the building of border walls over extravagant pet projects like structurally sound freeway overpasses.
“The estimated cost of a border wall with Mexico is five billion dollars,” he said. “We could easily blow the same amount of money on infrastructure repairs and have nothing to show for it but functioning highways.”
Congress has dragged its feet on infrastructure spending in recent years, but Dorrinson senses growing support in Washington for building a giant border wall. “Even if for some reason we don’t get the Mexicans to pay for it, five billion is a steal,” he said.
While some think that America’s declining infrastructure is a national-security threat, Dorrinson strongly disagrees. “If immigrants somehow get over the wall, the condition of our bridges and roads will keep them from getting very far,” he said.
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WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING, AND ALSO MORE FACTUAL ACCURACY THAN ANY REPORT PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF “AGENT DEVON!”
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Yup. It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen as a nation that some of us are reduced to thinking that wasting money on “The Wall” as part of a “deal” to take care of Dreamers (who should get green cards “no strings attached”) is an “OK deal” because unlike some of the other GOP proposals “nothing gets broken, nobody (except the US taxpayers) gets hurt.”
“The architecture of all this fear is not incidental. It’s the result of policy. The agents who pulled over Alejandro were acting within the bounds of U.S. law. So the question surrounding his arrest is not whether it was legitimate; it’s whether it was a good use of resources. Why choose him, a family man with no criminal record, over any of the 11 million other undocumented people in America?
Even operating full tilt, ICE has nowhere near the manpower or money to enforce U.S. immigration laws against everyone in the country illegally. Experts estimate that the agency has the capacity every year to deport roughly 4% of all undocumented immigrants. So the real challenge is to establish clear priorities about who should be at the top of the list. In theory, all DHS employees, from ICE officers on the street to prosecutors in immigration court, have the power— known as “prosecutorial discretion”—to determine when and whether to enforce immigration laws. But in reality, those decisions are shaped from the top. Presidents determine what immigration policy will look like.
Both the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations assumed this responsibility. They directed DHS employees to use their prosecutorial discretion to prioritize the deportation of certain criminal groups. They also outlined clear factors like old age, U.S. military service or a lack of criminal record that might mitigate enforcement.
Illustration by Michele Asselin for TIME
The Trump Administration has not issued similar prerogatives. In January 2017, Trump signed an Executive Order calling for the enforcement of immigration laws against “all removable aliens,” and in February 2017, DHS rescinded all previous Administrations’ priorities and restrictions. Then DHS Secretary John Kelly replaced them with new guidance so broad that employees were effectively instructed to “prioritize” the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. The only listed exception were those who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a now uncertain program shielding those who were brought to the U.S. as children.
“Prosecutorial discretion shall not be exercised in a manner that exempts or excludes a specified class or category of aliens from enforcement of the immigration laws,” wrote Kelly in a memo to staff. The Administration also eliminated Obama-era moratoriums on certain types of enforcement, including what’s known as “collateral arrests,” which is when ICE agents detain not only an intended target, but also anyone else “deportable” nearby.
Immigration hard-liners, like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have cheered the change. The new policy, they say, restores the enforcement of U.S. immigration law “as written.” But critics argue that this doesn’t track. Congress has not given DHS more money or enforcement officers, so there can’t simply be more enforcement. The difference is who is being enforced against. Despite the President’s frequent talk of “rapists and murderers,” the most influential shift in 2017 was that ICE agents arrested 146% more noncriminals, compared with the year before. In 2016, 14% of the people whom ICE arrested had no criminal record. In 2017, close to 26% were. “There’s the sense that they’re just going after low-hanging fruit,” says Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a constitutional and immigration law professor at Santa Clara University.
The effect is an implied war on all undocumented immigrants. It’s a move that unravels decades of state, federal and local policies designed to establish a level of relative security among immigrant communities, experts say. That security, in turn, encourages broad social benefits—like people reporting crimes to police, rather than avoiding all officers, or enrolling children in government health programs. Under Trump, that’s all up for grabs.
Take Amenul Hoque, for example. The Bangladeshi father of three, who overstayed a visa in 2005, had lived in Newark, N.J., with his wife and three kids for the past 14 years. In 2011, ICE officials granted Hoque a temporary stay of removal, requiring that he check in regularly with ICE, which he did. His next check-in was scheduled for March, according to local news. But on Jan. 17, ICE agents showed up at the fried-chicken restaurant where he works, detained him for nearly a month and then loaded him onto a flight to Bangladesh. Hoque’s wife Rojina Akter, who is also undocumented, is now in deportation proceedings as well.
This decision to create “a culture where enforcement appears to happen randomly,” Gulasekaram says, is not an accident. It has the effect of discouraging new immigrants from coming to the U.S. and encouraging existing ones to leave. The Trump Administration deported fewer immigrants last year largely because fewer people were attempting to cross the border.
In a statement to TIME, Danielle Bennett, an agency spokeswoman, said that “national security threats, immigration fugitives and illegal re-entrants” remain priorities for deportation. The agency has also said that it does not “unnecessarily disrupt the parental rights of alien parents and legal guardians of minor children.” In its 2017 report, ICE also stated that 92% of its arrests in 2017 were criminals. Its definition of criminal includes those with civil offenses, like non-DUI traffic stops, and those whose only crimes are immigration-related.
Undocumented immigrants in communities across the country are struggling to gauge the threat. Maria, who is now caring for three U.S.-citizen children on her own, feels trapped. She can take her kids back to a country where she has citizenship rights but where they have none. Or she can stay in the U.S. and live in fear. Because she’s already here illegally, she has no easy path to legal status. Trump uses terms like anchor babies and chain migration to describe how families supposedly bring their relatives into the country, but it doesn’t actually work that way, says Laura St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. “It’s a myth.”
St. John says Maria’s American-born children can’t petition DHS to give her legal status until the eldest turns 21. That’s in 2036. Someone in Maria’s position would need to obtain a federal waiver, a process that often takes up to 10 years and could require that she return to Mexico to wait it out, St. John explains. Maria’s brother, a U.S. citizen, could also petition for her, but that too would likely require Maria to return to Mexico, for an even longer period of time. The State Department is so backlogged that it’s currently processing visa requests for Mexican siblings filed on Nov. 15, 1997. “To people who practice immigration law, ‘anchor babies’ and all that just sounds ridiculous,” says Erin Quinn, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco. “There’s really no legal mechanism for people like [Maria] to leave and come back legally. It just doesn’t exist.”
For now, Maria will stay in the U.S., pick grapes and care for her children in the country of their birth. But when she imagines raising her girls without their father, tears slide down her cheeks. “It’s the worst thing that you can do to a family,” she says. Every day, when Alejandro calls on FaceTime, Isabella, who’s 2½, lights up. “Papi?” she asks, reaching for Maria’s iPhone. A thousand miles south, in Sonora, Mexico, Alejandro holds his screen close to his face. “Papi!” Isabella squeals. “I love you!”
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Read Edwards’s much longer complete article at the above link.
What an ugly, cruel, inhumane, dishonest, and often just plain nasty group of individuals we now have in charge of our immigration policies! Random acts of cruelty never bode well for a nation’s future. And, there is a clear record being made of what’s happening that should put the “Trump Cabal” and all of those who have enabled them firmly in the company of history’s most notorious human rights abusers.
The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes. Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system, over-policing within schools, and law enforcement, all of which can be compounded by racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime. The confluence of these systems results in a trajectory that has been referred to as “the school to deportation pipeline.”
Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are an emerging practice in this trajectory. Using non-uniform and broad guidelines, law enforcement, school officials, and immigration agents may label immigrant youth as gang-affiliated based on youths’ clothes, friends, or even where they live. These allegations serve as the basis to detain, deny bond, deny immigration benefits, and deport youth in growing numbers. This Article posits that gang allegations are a natural outgrowth of the convergence of the criminal and immigration schemes, serving as a means to preserve racial inequality. This Article further suggests excluding the consideration of gang allegations from immigration adjudications because their use undermines fundamental fairness. Finally, this Article proposes a three-pronged approach to counter the use of gang allegations, including initiatives to interrupt bias, take youthfulness into account, and increase access to counsel in immigration proceedings.
Hlass, Laila, The School to Deportation Pipeline (2018). Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2018; Tulane Public Law Research Paper No. 18-1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3132754
HERE ARE SOME “KEY QUOTES:”
“To be sure, the problem of gang violence in this country is a serious one. It is a problem that requires sustained attention to the complex (and diverse) sociological and neurological reasons that young people decide to associate with gangs or, as the case may be, disengage from them.27 Those concerns, however important, are beyond the scope of this Article. Instead, the goal of this Article is to shed light on the practical realities faced by immigrant youth caught in the school to deportation pipeline, where entrenched biases and insufficient procedural safeguards virtually guarantee their removal based on gang affiliation, no matter how flimsy the evidence supporting that label.28”
. . . .
“Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are part of the immigration regime’s long and ignoble history of explicit and implicit racism. Immigrant children, particularly youth of color, increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system and subject to over-policing within schools and by law enforcement. These factors converge with existing racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime, creating a perfect storm. To address this problem, gang allegations and related evidence should be excluded from immigration adjudications due to their unreliability and prejudicial nature. Furthermore, safeguards must be implemented to address this phenomenon, particularly as gang allegations appear to be on the rise. The immigration agency should attempt to interrupt adjudicator bias through education, improved decision-making conditions, and data collection. Secondly, youth should explicitly be a positive factor in discretion and bond decisions. Finally, to stall the school to deportation pipeline, children should have access to representation in immigration adjudications.”
AND, HERE’S A LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW:
Laila was my colleague at Georgetown Law when she was a Fellow at the CALS Asylum Clinic. In fact, she was a “Guest Lecturer” in my Immigration Law & Policy class.
Although Laila takes the much more scholarly approach, I have been saying consistently that this Administration’s harsh rhetoric and strictly law enforcement approach to diminishing the power of gangs is not only likely to fail, but is almost guaranteed to make the problems worse. Indeed, it’s basically an “on rhetorical steroids” version of the gang enforcement policies that have consistently been failing since the Reagan Administration.
But, we now have folks in charge who glory in their ignorance and bias. Consequently, they refuse to learn from past mistakes and will not embrace more effective community-based strategies that over time would deal with the causes of gang membership and help reduce gang violence.
