Vice President Mike Pence – Page 7 – immigrationcourtside.com

FRESH CLAIMS OF CHILD ABUSE BY DHS IN YOUR “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” – Ever Wonder Why YOUR Tax Dollars Are Being Used To Fund What Medical Professionals Say Is An Inherently Abusive & Potentially Permanently Damaging “Kiddie Gulag?” – And, In Cases Like This, The Alleged Abuse Is Actually Individualized & Beyond the “Regular Damage” Intentionally Inflicted By The Trump DHS, Abetted By Complicit Courts!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/25/texas-immigration-detention-guard-assault-child-claims?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

A private prison guard physically assaulted a five-year-old boy at an immigration detention center in Texas, according to a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

She raised her niece like a daughter. Then the US government separated them at the border

Read more

Advocates for the boy and his mother expect the family to be deported on Friday and asked the US government to halt the deportation to investigate the alleged assault. The advocates also said the family, who are anonymous for safety reasons, face imminent harm or death in their home country of Honduras.

The alleged assault occurred in late September, when the boy was playing with a guard employed by the private prison company CoreCivic who had played with the boy before.

The five-year-old tried to give the guard a high-five, but accidentally hit him instead, angering the guard, according to a complaint seen by the Guardian. The guard then allegedly grabbed the boy’s wrist “very hard” and would not let go.

“The boy’s mother told the guard to let go and tried to pull her son’s hand away, but the guard kept holding on,” according to the complaint. “He finally released the boy and threatened to punish him if he hit him again.”

The complaint said the boy’s hand was swollen and bruised and he was treated with pain medication and ice at the South Texas family residential center in Dilley, in a remote part of the state about 100 miles from the US-Mexico border.

The Dilley detention center has been controversial since it opened in 2014. Dilley can hold 2,400 people, the most of any family detention center in the country, and in March 2019 held at least 15 babies under one year old.

“Since the assault, the boy is afraid of male officials at the jail, goes to the bathroom in his pants, bites his nails until they bleed, and does not want to play, sleep, eat, or bathe,” the complaint said.

The Guardian contacted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the homeland security agency which oversees immigration detention, and CoreCivic for comment, but they had not provided a response at the time of publication.

Katy Murdza, advocacy manager for the Dilley Pro Bono Project, which sends volunteers into the Dilley detention center to help families, met with the mother on Wednesday.

Murdza said the mother is fearful of her imminent deportation and is upset about what happened to her son because she had little power to protect him.

“She was unable to prevent someone from hurting her child and while she has tried to report it, she hasn’t received any information on what the results are, so she still does not have control of whether the detention center let that staff member back in,” Murdza said.

“When people are detained and it’s hidden from the public, these sorts of things happen and there are probably many other cases that we have never learned about that could be similar to this,” Murdza added.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said in March 2017 that no migrant child in the custody of their parent should ever be detained because the conditions could harm or retraumatize them.

The US government can release asylum-seeking families in the US while they wait for their cases to be heard in court, but Donald Trump’s administration favors expanding detention and has tried to extend how long children can be held in detention centers.

Katie Shepherd, national advocacy counsel with the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Justice Campaign, filed the complaint on Thursday with the DHS watchdog, the office of the inspector general, and with its office for civil rights and civil liberties.

“The government has a long history demonstrating it’s not capable of holding people in their custody responsibly and certainly not children who require special protections and safeguards,” Shepherd said. “They require a different environment, not one where guards are going to be physically abusing them.”

*********************************************

Ever wonder how things might be different if Article III Judges’ children and grandchildren were being treated this way?

Please think about situations like this the next time you hear sleazy folks like Kelly, Nielsen, or “Big Mac With Lies,”and other former “Trump toadies” tout their “high-level executive experience” and how “proud” they were of their law enforcement initiatives at DHS and other parts of the Trump kakistocracy! What’s the relationship between abusing children and real law enforcement or protecting our national security? None!

Outrageously, these former Trump human rights abusers not only have escaped legal and moral accountability for their knowing and intentional human rights abuses, but they have the audacity to publicly attempt to “leverage” their experience as abusers into “big bucks gigs” in the private sector. How disgusting can it get.

Here’s Professor (and ImmigrationProf Blog guru) Bill O. Hing’s “spot on” description of the “despicable John Kelly:”

Despicable John Kelly – Profits from Detention of Children

By Immigration Prof

Share

I was recently reminded of how John Kelly, former DHS Secretary and former White House Chief of Staff, is now on the board of Caliburn International: the conglomerate that runs detention facilities for migrant children. He is despicable. This was reported in May:

Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly can now count on a second line of income.

In addition to his attempt at scoring paid speaking gigs, Kelly has now joined the board of Caliburn International, the company has confirmed to CBS News. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates four massive for-profit shelters that have government contracts to house unaccompanied migrant children.

Kelly’s new job first became apparent when protesters gathered outside Comprehensive Health Services’ Homestead, Florida facility last month — it’s the biggest unaccompanied migrant child detention center in the country. They, along with a local TV station, spotted Kelly enter the facility, and CBS News later confirmed his affiliation. Read more..

When Kelly was DHS secretary, he began the implementation of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda in the early stages of the administration. Julianne Hing reported on Kelly’s record at DHS on the eve of becoming chief of staff for Trump.

Read here…

bh

October 20, 2019

Apparently, Kelly’s USG pension as a retired 4-star General wasn’t enough to support him in the style to which he aspired (perhaps after rubbing shoulders with the Trump family and its circle of grifters). So, he found it necessary to supplement his income off the misery of families and children in the “New American Gulag” he helped establish.

I had accurately predicted that Kelly wouldn’t leave his “service” to Trump with his reputation intact. Nobody does, except those with no reputation to start with.

Trump runs a kakistocracy. The private sector should treat the steady stream of spineless senior officials fleeing the Trump Circus accordingly.

Or compare the “achievements” of horrible frauds like these guys, who abused their time in the service of Trump by betraying our country’s most fundamental values, with that of a real American hero like the late Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) who was eulogized today. As President Obama said, “he was ‘honorable’ long before he was elected!”

PWS

10-25-19

“BIG MAC” SAYS EL SALVADOR IS A “SAFE” COUNTRY – HE LIES! — Mounting “Disappearances” & Government Acquiescence Show Why “Big Mac,” Pompeo, Pence, Trump & Other Corrupt Architects Of Unlawful Policies Designed To Kill Asylum Seekers (For “Deterrence”) Should Be Charged With “Crimes Against Humanity!” – “The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/disappeared-in-el-salvador-amid-a-cold-war-nightmares-return-a-tale-of-one-body-and-three-grieving-families/2019/10/19/d806d19a-e09d-11e9-be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html

Anna-Catherine Brigida
Freelance Reporter

Mary Beth Sheridan and

report for the WashPost:

By

Mary Beth Sheridan and

Anna-Catherine Brigida

Oct. 19, 2019 at 2:58 p.m. EDT

LAS ANIMAS, El Salvador — For Daisy Flores, Day 135 began like so many others. She soaked corn in a bucket on the dirt floor for tortillas. She washed the kids’ clothes in a blue plastic bin. And she thought, again, about that afternoon in May when her 18-year-old son Edwin rode off on his brother’s motorcycle.He still hasn’t come home.

Twenty miles away, in a working-class neighborhood in San Salvador, Karen was plodding through Day 297. She coped by writing notes to her absent husband and taping them to the bedroom wall.

“I send you a little kiss,” she’d scrawled to the man who had disappeared last year while delivering electricity bills. And: “I can’t take it anymore.”

Not far from her, a third family endured another Monday without their loved one. The middle-aged man had gone missing on his way home from his plumbing job. Was it already Day 192? They’d searched everywhere. Nothing.

AD

Three decades after a brutal civil war characterized by never-explained, never-resolved disappearances, Salvadorans are again vanishing.

The phenomenon is resurrecting one of the most chilling elements of Cold War Latin America. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people disappeared as right-wing governments — many supported by the United States — fought to extinguish leftist insurgencies.

These days, countries such as Mexico, Brazil and El Salvador are battered by criminal wars. The governments aren’t fighting Marxist guerrillas, but gangs and drug cartels instead.

In Mexico, more than 3,000 clandestine gravesites have been unearthed as families search for the 40,000 missing. In El Salvador, few of the burial sites have been found.

Which is why, when the government discovered one outside the capital last month, TV reporters rushed to the scene — and dozens of families began to wonder if their mystery would finally end.

AD

“I know he’s here,” said the mother of a 14-year-old.

“I am always hoping,” Karen said.

“They haven’t told me anything,” Flores said.

But for one family, things were about to change.

Mexican government says more than 3,000 hidden graves found in the search for the disappeared

A soldier guards a farm in El Limon, where investigators found a clandestine grave with human remains. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

No one knows exactly how many people in El Salvador have gone missing. National police say at least 2,457 people were reported disappeared in 2018, the most in a dozen years. The attorney general’s office puts the figure at 3,437 — more than the total of homicides. Both numbers are widely seen as undercounts.

For Flores, her son’s disappearance was a new version of an old nightmare. Her two uncles were among the at least 8,000 people who vanished during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

That was another era — of death squads, the Reagan Doctrine against communism, guerrillas wielding red banners and AK-47s. El Salvador today is a democracy, with free elections and onetime Marxists in congress.

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So why are disappearances back?

One reason is they make it easier for killers to avoid investigation. That goes both for gang members killing their rivals and for cops secretly executing suspects.

“If there is no body, there’s no evidence,” said Marvin Reyes, who spent 20 years in the national police.

But the disappearances also reflect a political strategy. That became evident when El Salvador’s top two gangs reached a government-backed truce in 2012. The homicide rate — among the highest in the hemisphere — plunged. But disappearances rose.

“If violence needed to be carried out [by gangs], it needed to be invisible, to avoid attention from state authorities,” said Angélica Durán Martínez, who studies Latin American violence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Analysts suspect the gangs and the government hide corpses to keep the homicide rate down.

AD

It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country

Karen looks through the window of her bedroom. Her husband went missing in San Salvador last November. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Trump administration reaches deal to send asylum seekers to El Salvador in an effort to deter migrants from entering the United States

For victims’ families, the uncertainty is cruel: There’s no resolution, no body to bury, no hope of closure. “We have so much stress,” said Karen, a 39-year-old mother of three.

She and her kids try to keep their minds on work and school, but their bodies betray them: Karen’s insomnia, her son’s overeating, her daughter’s wildly oscillating periods.

She believes her husband was abducted because he refused to hide a gang’s weapons in the family’s home. She is so frightened of retaliation that she spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.

Daisy Flores, 47, also suspects her son was hauled away by gang members.

Edwin was perhaps the most affectionate of her seven kids. The kind of boy who would sneak up behind her at the stove and grab her in a bear hug. Who wasn’t embarrassed to accompany his mama to the market.

AD

She doesn’t think he was a gang member. But: “I can’t tell you what kind of friends he had.” Everyone knew that MS-13 dominated their hamlet, a woodsy patch of small, concrete homes surrounded by fields where campesinos grew corn and raised cows and chickens. Nearby villages were ruled by the rival gang Barrio 18 .

Edwin’s absence is a constant torment. One of his brothers was so terrified that he considered migrating to the United States, like tens of thousands of Salvadorans in recent years.

Whenever Daisy thought of her missing son, she’d lose her appetite.

“I can’t live like this, learning nothing,” she said.

But in recent months, there was a new reason for hope.

Nayib Bukele, the charismatic young mayor of San Salvador, was elected president in February on promises of change.

“They say the president, now, he’s helping people,” Daisy said. “And that if you go to the attorney general, he’s helping to find the disappeared.”

A crusading attorney general promises answers

El Salvador Attorney General Raúl Melara and investigators arrive at the clandestine gravesite, under heavy guard, in Barrio 18 territory. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

U.S. officials said aid to El Salvador helped slow migration. Now Trump is canceling it.

Attorney General Raúl Melara hopped out of an SUV and strode toward the yellow police tape.

“Is it up here?” he asked.

At 47, Melara was part of El Salvador’s tiny business elite, with a doctorate in law and years of leading the National Association of Private Enterprise. He had swept-back dark hair and wire-framed glasses and favored starched white shirts. But on this afternoon, he had donned jeans, a gray polo shirt and a windbreaker to visit the village outside San Salvador known as El Limon — notorious territory of Barrio 18.

Melara scrambled up a nearly vertical dirt path alongside a dying cornfield, trampling vines and brushing through shoulder-high grass. A quarter-mile up lay a clearing, with mounds of freshly dug dirt and a body.

It had been a man in jeans and work boots.

More bodies would probably be dug up in the coming weeks, Melara told journalists. The new government, he said, was committed to finding the disappeared and punishing the culprits.

AD

“This is a phenomenon that, in past years, was hidden. They didn’t want it to be visible,” he told the TV cameras. “But we’re all seeing it.”

In just a few months, Melara had made some aggressive moves. He’d formed a team of prosecutors to focus on the disappeared. He’d promoted tougher penalties for those involved in the crime. He was working with the police to produce more accurate numbers.

Reform and revival: Gang members find Christianity in El Salvador prisons

Some were skeptical. It wasn’t until 2017 — a quarter-century after the civil war’s end — that the government finally created a commission to search for the disappeared from that conflict. And locating the more recent victims could be politically unpalatable in a country obsessed with the murder rate.

“Finding and identifying these bodies will inevitably imply a rise in the homicide index,” said Celia Medrano of the human-rights group Cristosal .

AD

Arnau Baulenas, legal coordinator of the Human Rights Institute at the José Simeón Cañas University of Central America, said Melara’s initiatives were positive but insufficient.

“The attorney general has a very small team,” he noted. There are so few forensic criminologists that one of them — Israel Ticas — has become a celebrity for helping mothers find the remains of their children.

Melara knows he lacks money, equipment and expertise. It sometimes seems the only thing that’s not in short supply is fear.

“In Mexico, the families of the victims are visible,” he told The Washington Post. “They’ve generated social pressure.”

El Salvador is different. Indeed, at El Limon, as the investigators shoveled dirt, a mother in blue flip-flops approached. Her son vanished a year ago, at age 14.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, weeping, in a TV interview. “Even if he’s not alive, and it’s just to bury him.”

But she begged the cameraman not to identify her. He filmed her feet.

There was no sign of her son. On Day 2 of the dig, though, investigators discovered a tantalizing clue near the body.

It was a wallet. Inside was an ID card.

During Pompeo’s visit, El Salvador’s new president says migrant problem ‘starts with us’

The site where investigators found the remains of a man. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)This pick belongs to Israel Ticas, El Salvador’s most prominent forensic criminologist. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)As does this shovel. Ticas uses both implements to dig up clandestine graves. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

A discovery brings new hope, and fear

The call came that day. It had been six months since the middle-aged plumbing worker vanished. Now his family was being summoned to the Justice Ministry.

Maybe, at last, they’d have an answer. But they couldn’t even grieve in peace. They begged reporters not to release his identity.

“We don’t want to make a lot of noise,” said one of the man’s relatives. “The neighborhood is really dangerous.”

Another relative was more blunt: “Saying the wrong thing could get you killed.”

The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.

“There’s silence — exactly like during the armed conflict,” said Eduardo García, who heads Pro-Búsqueda, a group searching for war victims.

Ten days after the discovery at El Limon, investigators still were trying to match the corpse with the DNA submitted by the plumbing worker’s relatives.

The families waited.

For Karen, the news had generated a brief flicker of possibility. Then authorities told her the corpse wasn’t her husband. “I am not going to stop calling the attorney general’s office,” she said. Maybe they’d discover some sign of him, somewhere.

Daisy hasn’t given up, either. In her son’s bedroom, she unlatched a suitcase stuffed with neatly folded shirts and slacks.

“Here are his clothes,” she said. “I’m keeping them here so they don’t get all dusty.”

She has vivid dreams of her son. In one, he was trapped in a room. “I couldn’t get him out,” she said. One day she heard her 3-year-old grandson shouting outside the house. “Edwin is coming,” he yelled, pointing at the dirt path. No one was there.

By Day 145, Daisy was thinking of paying another visit to the attorney general’s office.

“God willing, they’ll have some news soon.”

Daisy Flores touches a favorite shirt of her son, Edwin, at her home. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Fred Ramos in San Salvador and Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

********************************************************

Through their lies about conditions in the Northern Triangle and extralegal programs directed against legitimate asylum seekers, folks like “Big Mac with Lies,” “Cooch Cooch,” Pompeo, Miller, and Trump are literally “getting away with murder.” Why?

It’s critically important not to let guys like “Big Mac” attempt to “rehabilitate” their images in the private sector by touting their “management experience” and claiming the “Nazi defense” of “just carrying out my duties” or the totally disingenuous “just carrying out the law.” No other Administration, GOP or Democrat, has even hinted that the dangerous and corrupt countries of the Northern Triangle without functioning asylum systems would be considered “Safe Third Countries” or that our overseas refugee program would essentially be ended at the time of the world’s greatest need (even as we are complicit in genocide and creating more refugees in Syria).

In this respect, it is heartening to see the “pushback” against the disingenuous attempt of former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to “repackage” herself as a “leading female executive.” No, she was a Trump sycophant and a major human rights violator who is lucky not to be in jail. And, the same goes for many of the other current and former “Senior Executives” at DHS.

PWS

10-20-19

MAX BOOT @ WASHPOST: Trump’s Not the Only Grossly Corrupt Public Official – The “Sleazy Three,” Pence, Pompeo, & Barr, Have Also Betrayed Our Nation & Should Go Down!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/09/pence-pompeo-barr-deserve-be-impeached-too/

President Trump has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he is on the verge of being impeached. He recognizes no legal or moral limits on his “absolute right” to do whatever he pleases — including pressuring a foreign country to intervene in U.S. politics on his behalf. But his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.

Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.

Pence has been Trump’s most prominent proxy in his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cough up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election. Trump told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May so as to turn the screws on the Ukrainian president. When they finally met in Warsaw on Sept. 1, Pence again pressured Zelensky to take action on “corruption,” a code word for investigating Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter.

Pence has adopted the Sergeant Schultz defense: I know nothing! His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, given that the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, publicly proclaimed his desire to get dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine. Moreover, Pence’s national security adviser listened in on the now-infamous July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky that another participant described as “crazy” and “frightening.” Pence himself was given a readout of the call, yet he claims to have seen nothing wrong and is still sticking to the discredited cover story that Trump was pursuing a legitimate investigation of corruption. Pence will be saved from being remembered as the worst vice president in history only because Spiro Agnew had to resign after being charged with tax evasion and bribery.

Pompeo is now officially the worst secretary of state in history — wresting that uncoveted title from his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. As former secretary of state Colin Powell notes, “Our foreign policy is a shambles right now,” and Pompeo bears part of the blame for failing to stand up to Trump. He did not offer his resignation when the president proclaimed himself “in love” with the dictator of North Korea or when he abandoned the United States’ Kurdish allies. Pompeo subordinates the United States’ national interest to his own political interests; he is said to be interested in succeeding Trump.

Pompeo was fully aware of how unlawful Trump was acting — he was also on the July 25 call, though he pretended during interviews that he had no idea what had transpired. There is no evidence he did anything to stop Trump. Instead, he has endorsed the crazy conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election. Pompeo is now leading Trump’s coverup: He has refused to allow State Department employees to testify to Congress, denouncing Congress’s request as “an attempt to intimidate” and “bully” the career professionals. If anyone is bullying Foreign Service officers, it is Trump; witness the president’s firing of a respected ambassador in Ukraine because she wouldn’t help Giuliani frame Biden. Pompeo stood by as this happened.

No wonder State Department employees are so disgusted and demoralized. “The mood is low and getting lower,” Thomas Pickering, a distinguished former ambassador, told the New York Times.

But wait. If you think that’s bad, Barr says “hold my beer.” The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.

By waging war on the dedicated professionals in his own department at the behest of a law-breaking president, Barr is ensuring that he will be remembered as the worst attorney general ever. He has even eclipsed in awfulness his immediate predecessor, acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, a political hack who was previously a hawker of toilets for “well-endowed” men.

Impeaching Pence, Pompeo and Barr would be an unneeded distraction from the necessary impeachment of their boss but, on the merits, all three richly deserve to join Trump in the dock. They have betrayed the country and their oaths of office. They have even failed Trump by not acting to save the worst person ever to occupy the White House from his worst instincts.

************************************************

Yup. Public service doesn’t get any worse than this, although “Big Mac” could easily be included (and Stephen Miller, but he’d be part of the “Trump package.”) Unlikely to happen, of course. But, it should!

PWS

10-09-19

“DUH” OF THE DAY — THREE ARTICLES EXPLAIN HOW SLEAZY SYCOPHANT BILLY BARR PUT HIMSELF AT THE CENTER OF TRUMP’S CORRUPTION — It’s No Surprise To Those Of Us Who Have Watched Barr’s “Ethics Free Zone” @ DOJ — Why Are Article IIIs Allowing This Biased “Political Hack” To Trash Justice In The U.S. Immigration Courts?

https://apple.news/AbSuy-8PHRYa0vX1p8I-F5Q

Sonam Sheth writes at Business Insider:

‘Pure insanity’: Intelligence veterans are floored by Barr’s ‘off the books’ overtures to foreign officials about the Russia probe

Intelligence veterans were puzzled by reports that Attorney General William Barr personally urged foreign officials to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. “This is unheard of,” one former senior Justice Department official who worked closely with the former special counsel Robert Mueller when he was FBI director, told Insider. The Washington Post reported that Barr had already made overtures to British intelligence officials about the

Read in Business Insider: https://apple.news/AbSuy-8PHRYa0vX1p8I-F5Q

**********************************

Harry Litman in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/01/did-william-barr-break-any-rules-only-most-important-one/

Did William Barr break any rules? Only the most important one.

Add to list

By Harry Litman

Contributing columnist

October 1 at 11:35 AM

Multiple news agencies reported Monday that Attorney General William P. Barr has had extensive personal involvement in the Justice Department’s investigations into the origins of the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

That involvement — including trips abroad for personal meetings with foreign officials — is certainly “fairly unorthodox,” in the words of a former Justice Department official. Is it also inappropriate?

After all, part of an attorney general’s job is to liaise with foreign counterparts. It’s not unusual to have in-person meetings, especially at the beginning of an attorney general’s tenure, both to meet and greet and to discuss mutual priorities.

Moreover, Barr is the head of the Justice Department. No department business is beyond his concern. Unlike, say, the barriers that are supposed to stand between the White House and the Justice Department, there is no out-of-bounds area for the department’s political appointees, much less the attorney general.

Thus, during Barr’s first tenure as attorney general, he personally argued a case in the Supreme Court, a task normally reserved to the solicitor general and his or her assistants. No one took him to task for weeding in the solicitor general’s garden.

So what, if anything, might be worrisome about Barr’s conduct now?

Well, plenty. For starters, while attorneys general do meet with foreign officials to cement working relationships and even communicate shared general priorities, transatlantic trips to ask for help on an individual investigation are beyond rare. It would even be unusual for an attorney general to pick up the phone to call a counterpart about an individual case.

Barr’s personal globe-trotting mission necessarily communicates that this one matter — of all the ongoing business of the Justice Department — is an unsurpassed priority of the department.

Second and relatedly, Barr already has appointed a respected U.S. attorney, John Durham, to undertake the investigation. Many Justice Department investigations require cooperation with our most important foreign friends, and there are established channels of communication for Durham to work through if he needs help from intelligence agencies of other countries.

Third, the attorney general’s personal involvement compromises the whole idea of Durham’s independence. How is Durham supposed to ignore the bear riding piggyback on his shoulders?

That would be so even if the attorney general had no particular prejudice or bias with respect to the investigation. But the next problem, larger still, is that this attorney general brings strongly held preconceptions into an investigation that is supposed to be free of them.

Barr has repeatedly expressed suspicions of impropriety in the initiation of the Russia probe, including his inflammatory suggestion that the probe constituted “spying” on the Trump campaign.

It is hard not to conclude that Barr’s driving motivation is to turn up some nefarious aspect to the probe’s origins, backed by the imprimatur of a foreign government. And of course, nothing would please President Trump more.

Which brings us to the next big problem with Barr’s unusual campaign. Its animating idea, in fact obsession, is simply wacky. No one has ever shown any satisfactory basis for the various conspiracy theories that Trump defenders have trotted out to argue that the investigation into Russian meddling was rotten at the core.

Indeed, the whole enterprise of trying to discredit the probe is half-cocked. The revelations in the Mueller report of extensive efforts by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election are beyond dispute and extraordinarily grave. It is fortunate that the FBI undertook the probe with the seriousness it merited.

Finally, the attorney general has not simply inserted himself into Durham’s probe. He has entered into a working partnership with Trump. Thus, we learned that the president’s recent call to the Australian prime minister to urge him to assist Barr apparently came at Barr’s urging. And again, that Barr asked Trump to contact other countries to ask them to introduce the attorney general and Durham to appropriate officials.

The president should not be within a million miles of this probe. Barr’s improper tag-team approach links the attorney general to Trump’s goal of smearing anyone involved in investigating him and can only further undermine public confidence in the department’s evenhandedness.

The overall rule that Barr has broken isn’t found in so many words in the Code of Federal Regulations or the Department of Justice Manual. But it’s the first rule for any attorney general: the rule of sound judgment and impartial apolitical administration of justice.

****************************************

Barr’s enabling of Trump’s corruption just got more dangerous

Add to list

By Greg Sargent

Opinion writer

October 1 at 10:42 AM

We are now learning extraordinary new details about the lengths to which William P. Barr is going in service of President Trump’s corrupt and all-consuming goal of making core truths about his 2016 election victory disappear.

But this isn’t a story that only looks backward. It also looks forward. And we need to ask whether these new efforts by Trump’s attorney general are aimed at the 2020 election as well.

Barr appears determined to discredit the special counsel investigation’s finding that Russia engaged in “sweeping and systematic” interference in our election on Trump’s behalf.

Which raises the question: What if Barr’s activities — whether by coincidence or design — end up chilling how intelligence officials respond to the next foreign effort to sabotage a U.S. presidential election on Trump’s behalf?

The Post has some major new reporting that documents Barr’s efforts to enlist foreign governments in his campaign to discredit the origins of Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Barr has made overtures to British and Italian officials, and Trump himself pressed the Australian president to assist in undermining the investigation’s genesis.

[Harry Litman: Did William Barr break any rules? Only the most important one.]

Barr has already claimed “spying” on Trump’s campaign occurred, feeding Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory of a “deep state” plot to block him from getting elected. The goal now appears to be to use the government’s investigative machinery to create the impression that the real crime was not Russian interference, for which a whole bunch of Russians were indicted, but rather the investigation itself — perpetrated by U.S. law enforcement.Current and former officials are alarmed by Barr’s direct involvement in the investigation into the probe’s origins currently being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. As one former official tells The Post, this is “fairly unorthodox” and undercuts any hopes that Durham will be permitted to settle this in a “professional, nonpartisan manner.”

Another worry about Barr’s involvement

In an interview with me, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), raised another worrisome prospect.

“This is designed to validate a conspiracy theory — that Russia didn’t interfere, and that the whole Mueller probe was a ‘witch hunt,’” Malinowski, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me. The goal, he said, is to paint the intelligence community and FBI as the “villains in that conspiracy theory.”

Malinowski argued that intelligence officials eyeing how to respond to foreign interference in 2020 might take cues from the aggressiveness of Barr’s ongoing investigation of the investigators.

“There’s a message to our intelligence community, which is, ‘Don’t go there,’” Malinowski told me. “They’re being investigated for doing their jobs the last time.”

What’s more, Malinowski pointed out, foreign intelligence officials and governments might take a similar message from Barr’s efforts to enlist them in his current internal review.

“Are you going to share intelligence with this administration next year if you pick up evidence of Russian interference?” Malinowski noted, referring to foreign officials, who will ask themselves: “How will such information be received by the Trump administration? Do you pass along something that is clearly unwanted?”

Making that point more salient, The Post reports that Barr has taken a “sustained interest” in a conspiracy theory holding that the European academic who originally alerted Trump adviser George Papadopoulos to dirt Russia gathered on Hillary Clinton — which led to the FBI probe — was actually a plant hoping to falsely entrap the Trump campaign.

And one source tells The Post that in his conversations with British officials, Barr “expressed a belief” that the investigation of Russian interference “stemmed from some corrupt origin.”

A second source denies that characterization. But it simply cannot be dismissed as a very real possibility.

No end to Barr’s enabling of Trump

After all, we already saw Barr publicly legitimize Trump’s corrupt attacks on law enforcement by validating the “spying” and “witch hunt” language. Barr has even appealed to us to take into account how victimized Trump felt by Mueller’s witch-hunting in evaluating Trump’s corrupt efforts to obstruct it.

What’s more, Barr’s initial summary of the Mueller report misled the country by dishonestly downplaying what it actually determined about Trump officials’ efforts to conspire and benefit from Russian interference, and by minimizing the findings on obstruction of justice.

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All this feeds into the ballooning Ukraine scandal as well. One key thing that Trump demanded of the Ukrainian president in the July 25 call is help validating a whackjob conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 email hacks. This, too, would magically make the truth about 2016 disappear — and in the call, Trump directed the Ukrainian president to work with Barr to make it true.

The Justice Department has denied any such Barr involvement. But here again, we already know that Barr’s Justice Department helped direct efforts to keep Congress from learning of the whistleblower complaint detailing that corrupt pressure on a foreign leader to interfere in the next U.S. election. Barr didn’t recuse himself from that, despite being personally named in the complaint.

Barr’s efforts in that regard are now being scrutinized by House Democrats as part of their impeachment inquiry. Which raises the question of whether these latest activities abroad will also come under House Democratic scrutiny.

Such efforts by Democrats, Malinowski suggested to me, would show that Democrats have the “back” of the intelligence community, so it isn’t dissuaded from investigating the next foreign attacks on our political system. After all, as Malinowski bluntly put it, this dissuasion appears in part to be Barr’s “goal.”

******************

Barr’s political bias and his gross failure to provide asylum applicants and other migrants with the “fair and impartial” quasi-judicial hearings guaranteed by our Constitution has become painfully obvious, just as it was under unqualified White Nationalist AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. The conflicts of interest, bogus legal rulings, ethical violations, and anti-immigrant bias simply scream out.

Yet, complicit Article IIIs continue to mindlessly accept the skewed and systemically unfair results of this corrupt and politicized “court” system largely without critical examination. Why aren’t life tenured Federal Judges performing their Constitutional duty to protect our individual Due Process?

PWS

10-01-19

BELOW THE RADAR SCREEN: Trump Uses UN Speech To Urge Return To Unbridled, Racist, Xenophobic Nationalism That Caused Two World Wars, The Holocaust, & Fueled The Rise Of Communism, While Killing 80-100 Million People! — He’s An Existential Threat To Civilization!

https://apple.news/AiFomr1e1Tni878bxZd4OKw

Letters to the Editor [LA Times]: Trump’s U.N. speech extolling nationalism was frightening

President Trump’s speech at the U.N. dismissing globalism and praising nationalism endorsed the very ideologies the U.N. was formed to combat.

To the editor: In his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump called for rejecting everything the United Nations stands for and a return to nationalism. Great.

This is what comes from someone who is ignorant of history — and fairly recent history at that. It was nationalism that brought us the two most catastrophic wars in human history. It is nationalism that has been at the root of many conflicts since then.

The U.N. was created to combat this most destructive of ideologies. For the most part, it has been succeeding, but in small, incremental, not often seen ways.

Now, the man in the White House wants to throw it all away. And for what? Self-aggrandizement? Profit for defense companies? Or just to give fodder to his followers?

Stephen McCarthy, Monrovia

********************

Stephen McCarthy “gets” it. Unfortunately, Trump, the GOP, and their enablers don’t!

Will the electorate “wake up” in time. Or, will we repeat the worst mistakes in history with America as the main culprit?

PWS

09-26-19

BILL McKIBBEN @ TIME: Imagine A World Not Led By Trump & His Fellow GOP Climate Change Deniers! — Humanity Would Have At Least A “Fighting Chance” For Survival!

https://time.com/5669022/climate-change-2050/

BY BILL MCKIBBEN SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

IDEAS

McKibben is the author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and a co-founder of 350.org

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an underappreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the change we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

. . . .

*************************************

Read the rest of McKibben’s essay at the link.

The 2020 election might be America’s and the world’s last, best chance for salvation from Trump and his anti-science, climate denying GOP cabal that is bent on destroying our air, water, resources, and health.

PWS

09-13-19

RETIRED MILITARY LEADERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST TRUMP’S WANTON DESTRUCTION OF U.S. RFUGEE PROGRAM — “When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.”

Admiral Robert J. Natter — United States Navy Official photo of ADM (Line) [Now Retired] Robert J. Natter, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations N3/N5. As of August 1999.

Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling — Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling
U.S. Army

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/08/cutting-refugee-admissions-will-have-severe-consequences-us-military/

Admiral (Ret.) Robert J. Natter & Lt. General (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling write in WashPost:

Robert J. Natter is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces from 2000 to 2003. Mark P. Hertling is a retired lieutenant general who served as commanding general of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012.

America was founded as a safe haven to persecuted people and a beacon of hope, liberty and freedom to people around the world. Those themes reflect our values, and the welcoming of refugees to our shores is one of our proudest legacies and a fundamental part of who we are as a nation.

As military leaders, we spent nearly four decades defending these values. But today, a core American legacy is at risk, as the Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing severe, unprecedented cuts — potentially even zeroing out — the bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the established legal means of entry for these deserving people.

This week, we joined a group of 27 retired generals and admirals — all of whom have been operational leaders in military conflicts and exhibited courage in defending our values on the battlefield — in writing to President Trump expressing grave concerns about the direction of this vital program.

That’s because for many of us, welcoming refugees is not just a matter of smart policy and a reflection of our national values; it is also personal. Many of us know these refugees: They worked for and with us in our fight against terrorists and insurgents. The tangible and significant improvements we were able to make in the lives of millions as well as efforts to protect our own soldiers, sailors and Marines would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, logisticians, engineers and others.

Many of those individuals were targeted because of their assistance to us. They and their families have often been threatened for working with coalition forces, yet they bravely continued in their service at every level from translating conversations at the infantry squad level to contributing to task-force-level diplomatic missions. They may claim different cultures and speak different languages, but they have all put their lives on the line along with our citizens as part of our team.

Many of our partners continue to live in fear, given the continued hazardous situations in various parts of the world. In Iraq alone, more than 100,000 await entry to the United States. We promised our Iraqi partners support and safety when they were shoulder to shoulder with us fighting a despicable enemy. If today we turn these people away, or reduce the numbers who are allowed entry, it will be extremely difficult to ask others to assist us in the future.

Providing safety to people who assist American troops is a core function of our refugee program, but it does not stop there. We are living in a moment of unprecedented global displacement. Of the nearly 26 million refugees across the globe, most are hosted by low- and middle-income countries bordering the unstable areas that people are fleeing. A small proportion of the most vulnerable — less than 5 percent — are selected for resettlement. In addition to humanitarian assistance, resettling refugees is a concrete way that the United States offers support to these countries, while also strengthening regional stability and reducing the risk that people will be forced to return to conflict zones.

We know firsthand that both the humanitarian and strategic consequences of conflicts in Iraq, Syria, the Balkans and East and West Africa would be much worse had neighboring countries closed their borders. We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.

When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has welcomed about 3 million refugees from around the world who have gone on to contribute to and strengthen this country in immeasurable ways. The average refugee admission level across both Republican and Democratic administrations is 95,000 annually. Yet in the last two years, admissions have plummeted 75 percent.

In the next two weeks, the president will decide how many refugees we will admit in 2020. That decision will determine whether we uphold America’s legacy as a haven for the persecuted, and it will send a powerful message to the world about who we are as a people. We strongly recommend that this lifesaving humanitarian program be restored to historic bipartisan-supported levels.

***************************************

“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

So much for the Trump Administration’s “solution” of returning refugees and other forced migrants to danger zones in their own countries or to countries that are equally or more dangerous. Killing and abusing forced migrants through improper returns and “deterrents” intended to make them “die in place” is reminiscent of other types of “final solutions” that were disastrous for humanity. Only, this time, the U.S. is the “leader of the pack” downward rather than one of those fighting to save humanity.

A thoroughly cowardly performance by Trump and his White Nationalist gang.

Also, for the more than four decades I have been involved in immigration and refugee issues, overseas refugee admissions have received overwhelming bipartisan support. What has happened to the GOP which suddenly has “swallowed the whistle” in the face of Trump’s cowardly White Nationalism?

It appears that retired military leaders, like former U.S. Immigration Judges, can make a “full time job” out of speaking out against the stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane policies of the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-10-19

THE U.S. REFUGEE PROGRAM IS A SMASHING SUCCESS THAT SAVES LIVES WHILE PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST IN MANY WAYS — NOW, TRUMP & HIS STUPID & CRUEL WHITE NATIONALIST GANG WANT TO COMPLETELY SHUT OUT REFUGEES AT A TIME OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEED AND WHEN AMERICA NEEDS MORE IMMIGRANTS!

Julie Hirshfeld Davis
Congressional Reporter
NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/us/politics/trump-refugees-united-states.html

Julie Hirshfeld Davis & Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear

Sept. 6, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a plan that would keep most refugees who are fleeing war, persecution and famine out of the United States, significantly cutting back a decades-old program, according to current and former administration officials.

One option that top officials are weighing would cut refugee admissions by half or more, to 10,000 to 15,000 people, but reserve most of those spots for people from a few countries or from groups with special status, such as Iraqis and Afghans who work alongside American troops, diplomats and intelligence operatives abroad. Another option, proposed by a top administration official, would reduce refugee admissions to zero, while leaving the president with the ability to admit some in an emergency.

Both options would all but end the United States’ status as a leader in accepting refugees from around the world.

The issue is expected to come to a head on Tuesday, when White House officials plan to convene a high-level meeting to discuss the annual number of refugee admissions for the coming year, as determined by President Trump.

“At a time when the number of refugees is at the highest level in recorded history, the United States has abandoned world leadership in resettling vulnerable people in need of protection,” said Eric Schwartz, the president of Refugees International. “The result is a world that is less compassionate and less able to deal with future humanitarian challenges.”

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, has used his considerable influence in the West Wing to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history, capping the program at 30,000 this year. That is a more than 70 percent cut from its level when President Barack Obama left office.

The move has been part of Mr. Trump’s broader effort to reduce the number of documented and undocumented immigrants entering the United States, including numerous restrictions on asylum seekers, who, like refugees, are fleeing persecution but cross into the United States over the border with Mexico or Canada.

Now, Mr. Miller and allies from the White House whom he placed at the Departments of State and Homeland Security are pushing aggressively to shrink the program even further, according to one senior official involved in the discussions and several former officials briefed on them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the private deliberations.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

John Zadrozny, a top official at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, made the argument for simply lowering the ceiling to zero, a stance that was first reported by Politico. Others have suggested providing “carveouts” for certain countries or populations, such as the Iraqis and Afghans, whose work on behalf of the American government put both them and their families at risk, making them eligible for special status to come to the United States through the refugee program.

Advocates of the nearly 40-year-old refugee program inside and outside the administration fear that approach would effectively starve the operation out of existence, making it impossible to resettle even those narrow populations.

“Pulling the rug out from under refugees and the resettlement program, as is reported, is unfair, inhumane and strategically flawed for the United States,” said Nazanin Ash, the vice president for global policy and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. “This is a program that is reserved for, and vital to, the most vulnerable refugees.”

Now, officials at the advocacy groups say the fate of the program increasingly hinges on an unlikely figure: Mark T. Esper, the secretary of defense, who they are hoping will save the program by protesting the cut and recommending that Mr. Trump set a higher refugee ceiling.

Barely two months into his job as Pentagon chief, Mr. Esper, a former lobbyist and defense contracting executive, is the newest voice at the table in the annual debate over how many refugees to admit. But while Mr. Esper’s predecessor, Jim Mattis, had taken up the refugee cause with an almost missionary zeal, repeatedly declining to embrace large cuts because of the potential effect he said they would have on American military interests around the world, Mr. Esper’s position on the issue is unknown.

The senior military leadership at the Defense Department has been urgently pressing Mr. Esper to follow his predecessor’s example and be an advocate for the refugee program, according to people familiar with the conversations in the Pentagon.

But current and former senior military officials said the defense secretary had not disclosed to them whether he would fight for higher refugee admissions at the White House meeting next week. One former general described Mr. Esper as in a “foxhole defilade” position, a military term for the infantry’s effort to remain shielded or concealed from enemy fire.

Image

For two years, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration advisor, has used his influence to reduce the refugee ceiling to its lowest levels in history.

Credit

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A senior Defense Department official said that Mr. Esper had not decided what his recommendation would be for the refugee program this year. As a result, an intense effort is underway by a powerful group of retired generals and humanitarian aid groups to persuade Mr. Esper to pick up where Mr. Mattis left off.

In a letter to Mr. Trump on Wednesday, some of the nation’s most distinguished retired military officers implored the president to reconsider the cuts, taking up the national security argument that Mr. Mattis made when he was at the Pentagon. They called the refugee program a “critical lifeline” to people who help American troops, diplomats and intelligence officials abroad, and warned that cutting it off risked greater instability and conflict.

“We urge you to protect this vital program and ensure that the refugee admissions goal is robust, in line with decades-long precedent, and commensurate with today’s urgent global needs,” wrote the military brass, including Admiral William H. McRaven, the former commander of United States Special Operations; General Martin E. Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Lt. General Mark P. Hertling, the former commanding general of Army forces in Europe.

They said that even the current ceiling of 30,000 was “leaving thousands in harm’s way.”

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who retired this year after overseeing the American military’s command that runs operations in the Middle East, also signed the letter. In an interview, he noted that the flows of refugees leaving war-torn countries like Syria was one of the driving forces of instability in the region.

“We don’t do anything alone,” General Votel said of American military operations overseas, which are regularly helped by Iraqi citizens who become persecuted refugees. “This is not just the price we pay but an obligation.”

Mr. Mattis privately made the same arguments in 2018 and 2019 as he tried to fight back efforts by Mr. Miller to cut the refugee cap, which had already been reduced to 50,000 by Mr. Trump’s travel ban executive order.

Joined by Rex W. Tillerson, who was then the secretary of state, and Nikki R. Haley, the United Nations ambassador at the time, Mr. Mattis succeeded in keeping the cap at 45,000 for 2018. The next year, Mr. Miller tried to persuade Mr. Mattis to support a lower number by promising to ensure the program for the Iraqi and Afghans would not be affected. But Mr. Mattis refused, pushing for the program to remain at 45,000 refugees. But with Mr. Tillerson gone, Mr. Miller succeeded in persuading the president to drop the ceiling to 30,000.

In his announcement last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued that because of a recent surge of asylum seekers at the southwestern border, there was less of a need for the United States to accept refugees from abroad.

“This year’s refugee ceiling reflects the substantial increase in the number of individuals seeking asylum in our country, leading to a massive backlog of outstanding asylum cases and greater public expense,” Mr. Pompeo said at the time.

Now, a year later, Mr. Miller and his allies have repeatedly made that same argument in urging that the number go even lower.

Barbara Strack, who retired last year as chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the United States used to be a model for other countries by accepting refugees from all over the globe. After America began accepting Bhutanese refugees from Nepal, she said, other countries followed suit.

“Very often, that leadership matters,” she said. “That is something that is just lost in terms of who the United States is in the world and how other governments see us.”

The State Department was once the main steward and champion of the refugee resettlement program, but under Mr. Trump, that has changed, as the president and Mr. Miller have made clear that they view it with disdain. The top State Department official now in charge of refugees is Andrew Veprek, a former aide of Mr. Miller’s at the White House Domestic Policy Council who — with Mr. Zadrozny — was a central player in 2017 in efforts to scale back refugee resettlement as much as possible.

That has left the Defense Department as the last agency that could potentially preserve the refugee program. Its proponents inside the administration say they feel a sense of desperation waiting to see whether Mr. Esper will become its advocate.

“The strength of D.O.D.’s argument would really make a difference,” Ms. Strack said. “There just needs to be an acknowledgment that this administration would be walking away from a longstanding, bipartisan tradition of offering refuge to the most vulnerable people around the world.”

That sense of foreboding has intensified in recent weeks, as Mr. Miller has locked down the process for determining the refugee ceiling, to guard against leaks and cut down on opportunities for officials to intervene to save it. Normally, cabinet-level officials would be informed in advance of the options to be discussed at a meeting like the one scheduled on Tuesday.

This time, officials have been informed that their bosses will learn what numbers the White House is proposing only when they sit down at the table and are asked to weigh in.

Correction: September 6, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of a refugee program. It is 40 years old, not 50 years old.

Helene Cooper and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

**************************************

Here’s a recent post featuring Don Kerwin of Center for Migration Studies (“CMS”) highlighting the many successes of our national refugee program and how it serves the national need.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/07/21/don-kerwin-cms-refugees-helped-make-america-great-now-unpatriotic-trump-administration-plans-to-completely-abandon-worlds-refugees-at-their-time-of-greatest-need-rich/

As someone who worked on the enactment and initial implementation of the Refugee Act of 1980, I find Trump’s actions to be shockingly un-American and short sighted. The Refugee Program is there for very good reasons — to implement our obligations under the U.N. Convention & Protocol Relating To The Status of Refugees in an orderly and transparent manner with needed participation from both Congress and the Executive.

While no program is “perfect,” the Refugee Admissions Program under the Refugee Act of 1980 is about as close to a perfect program as you can get. It has fostered nearly unprecedented cooperation among the U.S., other signatory countries, and NGOs who do much of the “footwork” at minimal costs to the Government in relation to the program’s long-term contributions to saving lives and promoting the national interest. Terminating it is nothing short of insane — the action of diseased and twisted minds overcome by fear, cowardice, and White Nationalist-stoked racism.

Undoubtedly, a future Administration will attempt to restore the program to its important place in the American foreign and domestic policy arenas. But, it won’t be so easy. The success of today’s overseas program is based on years of shared expertise among our government institutions, the NGO community, and the international community. Once that apparatus is “disassembled” and the expertise lost or diverted elsewhere, it will not be easily or quickly restored.

Indeed a much more rational program, recommended by many, would be to substantially increase our refugee admissions, even above Obama Administration levels, and to include a realistically generous and robust program for identifying and accepting for resettlement refugees from the Northern Triangle without forcing them to make the difficult journey to the U.S. border to seek our protection.

Incidentally, since there is an irreducible requirement of “non refoulment,” or “non-return” under Article 33 of the U.N. Convention & Protocol, refugees will continue to seek protection from the U.S. no matter what lengths to which the Trump Administration goes to harass and punish therm. Eliminating existing legal refugee and asylum programs will just make their quest more dangerous and uncertain. It also will force those who succeed in establishing their cases for protection to “remain in limbo” in the U.S. rather than being welcomed and integrated into our society so that they can achieve their full human potential. Talk about a “lose-lose!” But, ultimately, making everybody a loser is about the only real skill that Trump, American’s greatest con-man, possesses.

Every day, the vile characters in the Trump Administration lead our country downward — toward the darkest recesses of failure and despair. We need national leaders who can show us the way upward again, before it’s too late for all of us.

PWS

09-08-19

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!

Catherine writes in the Washington Post:

You’ve heard of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, Poverty, even Women. Well, welcome to the War on Children.

It’s being waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing public officials, regardless of any claimed “family values.”

For evidence, look no further than the report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’s own inspector general. It details the trauma suffered by immigrant children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s evil “zero tolerance” policy.

Thousands of children were placed in overcrowded centers ill-equipped to provide care for them physically or psychologically. Visits to 45 centers around the country resulted in accounts of children who cried inconsolably; who were drugged; who were promised family reunifications that never came; whose severe emotional distress manifested in phantom chest pains, with complaints that “every heartbeat hurts”; who thought their parents had abandoned them or had been murdered.

Such state-sanctioned child abuse was designed to serve as a “deterrent” for asylum-seeking families, as then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other administration officials made clear.

Of course, they failed to recognize just how horrific are the conditions these asylum-seeking children are fleeing — conditions that further decreased HHS’s ability to adequately care for them.

“Staff in multiple facilities reported cases of children who had been kidnapped or raped” back in their home countries, the IG report states. Other children witnessed family members raped or murdered.

But hey, Trump believes these kiddos must be punished further for the crime of seeking refuge — a.k.a., the “invasion” of America.

Despite this and other abundant evidence that government facilities are not able to care for children for extended periods, last month, the administration also announced a new policy that would allow it to keep children (along with their families) in jail-like conditions for longer periods of time.

This is hardly the only way the administration has knowingly enacted policies that harm children.

In August, it finalized a rule that would make it more difficult for immigrants to receive green cards if they have used certain safety-net services they’re legally entitled to — or if government officials suspect they might ever use such services. Confusion and fear about the policy and whom it affects abound. This has already created a “chilling effect” for usage of social services, with immigrant parents disenrolling even their U.S.-citizen children just to be safe.

Last fall, for instance, I interviewed a green-card-holding mother who decided not to enroll her underweight newborn in a program that would have provided free formula (even though the program in question was not mentioned in the rule, and the baby is a U.S. citizen). Huge recent declines in children’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment are also believed to be at least partly a result of fears about this policy change.

If Your Dog Does This, It Could Be Them Signaling A Warning

And lest you think only immigrant or brown children are being targeted in this war: U.S. servicemembers’ children, of all sorts of backgrounds, are being hurt, too.

The Trump administration is siphoning billions from various defense projects to fund border wall construction, despite promises that Mexico would pay for it. This might sound unlikely to affect kids, but somehow the Trump administration found a way. Among the projects losing funds are schools for the children of U.S. servicemembers based in Kentucky, Germany and Japan, and a child-care center at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Trump’s proposed federal budgets have likewise axed funding for other programs that serve children, such as subsidized school meals and Medicaid. Indeed, both federal and state GOP officials more broadly are still working to kill the Medicaid expansion, as well as other Affordable Care Act provisions that benefit kids.

The GOP has likewise ignored the pleas of children who want their lives protected from gun violence, or who want their futures protected from a warming planet.

A year ago, I offered a suggestion : that Democrats make children the theme of their midterm campaign. They mostly ignored me and still did okay. Nonetheless, I’m re-upping it.

Because even without Trump’s baby jails and proposed Medicaid cuts, our country’s emphasis on children’s well- being is seriously deficient.

Last year, for the first time on record, we spent a greater share of the federal budget servicing the national debt than we did on children, according to an analysis out next week from First Focus on Children. Spending on children as a share of the federal budget is also expected to shrink over the coming decade, crowded out by both debt service and spending on the elderly.

This is despite the fact that spending on children (especially low-income children) has among the highest returns on investment of any form of government spending.

Whatever the opposite of Trump’s War on Children is, that’s what Democrats should be running on.

*************************************

Thanks, Catherine, for speaking out so clearly and articulately about what has become our #1 National Disgrace: Trump’s War On Human Decency & Future Generations and its sleazy cast of supporting characters like Pence, Kelly, Miller, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” Homan, Albence, Morgan, “Cooch Cooch,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, Cotton, Graham, and others with their glib immorality and disregard for truth, our Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human values.

Who thought the U.S. would ever stoop so low — to use our government’s power and might to abuse defenseless, already traumatized, and highly vulnerable children. (Catherine’s article does’t even get into how, with the help of scofflaw Attorneys General Sessions and Barr and some complacent Article III Judges, the Administration has manipulated asylum law and Immigration “Court” procedures to deny children and other asylum seekers the legal protection to which they are entitled under U.S. and international laws.)

There are many groups out there in the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day against this kind of outrageous behavior by our elected leaders, their corrupt cronies, and their many “go along to get along” enablers in the bureaucracy. Join or donate to one today!

The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

PWS

09-06-19

JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”

New from JMHS | An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era

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A publication of the Center for Migration Studies

Donald Kerwin, Executive Editor
John Hoeffner and Michele Pistone, Associate Editors

An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era

By Paul Wickham Schmidt (Georgetown Law)

This paper critiques US immigration and asylum policies from perspective of the author’s 46 years as a public servant. It also offers a taxonomy of the US immigration system by positing different categories of membership: full members of the “club” (US citizens); “associate members” (lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees); “friends” (non-immigrants and holders of temporary status); and, persons outside the club (the undocumented). It describes the legal framework that applies to these distinct populations, as well as recent developments in federal law and policy that relate to them. It also identifies a series of cross-cutting issues that affect these populations, including immigrant detention, immigration court backlogs, state and local immigration policies, and Constitutional rights that extend to non-citizens. It makes the following asylum reform proposals, relying (mostly) on existing laws designed to address situations of larger-scale migration:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, in particular, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should send far more Asylum Officers to conduct credible fear interviews at the border.
Law firms, pro bono attorneys, and charitable legal agencies should attempt to represent all arriving migrants before both the Asylum Office and the Immigration Courts.
USCIS Asylum Officers should be permitted to grant temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) to applicants likely to face torture if returned to their countries of origin.
Immigration Judges should put the asylum claims of those granted CAT withholding on the “back burner” — thus keeping these cases from clogging the Immigration Courts — while working with the UNHCR and other counties in the Hemisphere on more durable solutions for those fleeing the Northern Triangle states of Central America.
Individuals found to have a “credible fear” should be released on minimal bonds and be allowed to move to locations where they will be represented by pro bono lawyers.
Asylum Officers should be vested with the authority to grant asylum in the first instance, thus keeping more asylum cases out of Immigration Court.
If the Administration wants to prioritize the cases of recent arrivals, it should do so without creating more docket reshuffling, inefficiencies, and longer backlogs

Download the PDF of the article

Read more JMHS articles at http://cmsny.org/jmhs/

Want to learn more about access to asylum on the US-Mexico border? Join the Center for Migration Studies for our annual Academic and Policy Symposium on October 17.

****************************************

My long-time friend Don Kerwin, Executive Director of CMS, has been a “Lt. General of the New Due Process Army” since long before there even was a “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”). Talk about someone who has spent his entire career increasing human understanding and making the world a better place! Don is a great role model and example for newer members of the NDPA, proving that one can make a difference, as well as a living, in our world by doing great things and good works! Not surprisingly, Don’s career achievements and contributions bear great resemblance to those of our mutual friend, the late Juan Osuna.

So, when Don asked me to consider turning some of my past speeches about our immigration system and how it should work into an article to honor Juan, I couldn’t say no. But, I never would have gotten it “across the finish line” without Don’s inspiration, encouragement, editing, and significant substantive suggestions for improvement, as well as that of the talented peer reviewers and editorial staff of JMHS. Like most achievements in life, it truly was a “team effort” for which I thank all involved.

Those of you who might have attended my Boynton Society Lecture last Saturday, August 10, at the beautiful and inspiring Bjorklunden Campus of Lawrence University on the shores of Lake Michigan at Bailey’s Harbor, WI, will see that portions of this article were “reconverted” and incorporated into that speech.

Also, those who might have taken the class “American Immigration, a Cultural, Legal, and Anthropological Approach” at the Bjorklunden Seminar Series the previous week, co-taught by my friend Professor Jenn Esperanza of The Beloit College Anthropology Department, and me had the then-unpublished manuscript in their course materials, and will no doubt recognize many of the themes that Jenn and I stressed during that week.

Perhaps the only “comment that really mattered” was passed on to me by Don shortly after this article was released. It was from Juan’s wife, the also amazing and inspiring Wendy Young, President of Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”):“Juan would be truly honored.”

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Juan P. Osuna (1963-2017)
Judge, Executive, Scholar, Teacher, Defender of Due Process

Wendy Young
President, Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”)

PWS

08-19-19

HON. JEFFREY CHASE: Barr Intended To Attack The “Quintessential Particular Social Group In Society” — The Family — As Part Of His Restrictionist Deconstruction of Asylum Protections For Vulnerable Refugees — But, Can He Really Rewrite Reality? — Chase On Matter of L-E-A-!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/8/11/l-e-a-how-much-did-the-ag-change

Aug 11 L-E-A-: How Much Did the AG Change?

In June 2018, the Attorney General issued his precedent decision in Matter of A-B-. The AG intended his decision to lead to the denial of asylum claims based on domestic violence and gang violence by asylum officers, immigration judges, the BIA, and the circuit courts. The decision also aimed to compel asylum officers to find those arriving at the southern border to lack the credible fear necessary for entry into the court system, allowing for their immediate deportation.

However, the decision failed to achieve these goals. A U.S. District Court decision, Grace v. Whitaker, prohibited USCIS from applying A-B- in credible fear determinations. And Immigration Judges have continued to grant significant numbers of domestic violence claims, concluding that A-B- did not prevent them from doing so, but only required their decisions to contain an in-depth analysis of their reasoning. The case of A-B- herself presently remains pending before the BIA.

More recently, the Attorney General took the same approach to the question of whether family may constitute a particular social group. While once again, the administration’s goal is to prevent such claims from passing credible fear interviews and from being granted asylum, the effort also seems likely to fail.

* * *

“There can, in fact, be no plainer example of a social group based on common, identifiable and immutable characteristics than that of the nuclear family. Indeed, quoting the Ninth Circuit, we recently stated that ‘a prototypical example of a “particular social group” would consist of the immediate members of a certain family, the family being a focus of fundamental affiliational concerns and common interests for most people.'”

The above language is from a 1994 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Gebremichael v. INS, 10 F.3d 28 (1st Cir. 1994). It pretty much reflects the view of every circuit court over the past 25 years. Since Gebremichael, the BIA has added additional requirements of particularity and social distinction to the particular social group (“PSG”) requirements in a series of six precedent decisions issued between 2006 and 2014. But as a recent practice advisory of CLINIC points out, the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have all recognized that family can constitute a PSG, and all have reiterated that opinion in decisions issued in 2014 or later, meaning that those courts have not found the BIA’s subsequent requirements to alter their longstanding view on the matter.

For this reason, when L-E-A- was first decided by the BIA in 2017, the parties were not in disagreement on this point – the issue had acquired a “the sky is blue” certainty. The issue before the BIA was rather about nexus – i.e. what was required to show that one’s feared persecution was in fact “on account of” such family membership. The Board settled on a highly restrictive standard for establishing nexus, illustrated by the single example of the Romanov family in 1918 Russia.

Possibly fearing an influx of asylum-seeking Romanovs, Matthew Whitaker, during his very brief tenure as Acting Attorney General, felt the need to certify the decision to himself. And on July 29, his successor, WIlliam Barr, issued a decision very reminiscent of A-B-.

As in A-B-, Barr justified vacating the Board’s decision because it relied on the parties’ stipulation to the issue in question. In Barr’s view, this caused the resulting decision to lack the rigorous analysis deserving of a precedent decision. While it remains unclear why rigorous legal analysis is required where everyone agrees to the correctness of the assertion (do we require rigorous mathematical analysis to the proposition that 2+2 = 4?), it should be noted that unlike Matter of A-R-C-G-, which was the single precedent decision holding that victims of domestic violence could be eligible for asylum, there is 25 years worth of circuit court case law on this point, plus the BIA’s own statement in Matter of Acosta that kinship could be a basis for a PSG, which dates to 1985, a point that the BIA reaffirmed over the next three decades, in Matter of C-A- (2006), and then, by reference to that case, in Matter of M-E-V-G- (2014). Barr’s excuse is that, in his view, multiple circuits “have relied upon outdated dicta from the Board’s early cases.”

As in A-B-, the AG’s decision affects no change in the applicable legal standard. The holding is quite narrow, simply overruling the part of the BIA’s decision discussing the cognizability of family as a PSG. The decision doesn’t preclude such findings, but rather requires adjudicators to spend more time on each case, providing a detailed, step-by-step analysis before granting relief. This is a critical point, as at least one IJ has said that L-E-A- has closed the door on family-based PSGs. IJs had a similar reaction in the immediate aftermath of A-B-, stating that they can no longer grant domestic violence claims, only to realize otherwise over time. Barr specifically states that his decision “does not bar all family-based social groups from qualifying for asylum,” adding “[t]o the contrary, in some societies, an applicant may present specific kinship groups or clans that, based on the evidence in the applicant’s case, are particular and socially distinct.” He also cautions adjudicators to “be skeptical of social groups that appear to be “defined principally, if not exclusively, for the purposes of [litigation] . . . without regard to the question of whether anyone in [a given country] perceives [those] group[s] to exist in any form whatsoever.” These are restatements of long-existing law. Of course, the concept of family was not artificially created for litigation purposes.

In L-E-A-, Barr specifically referenced the canon of ejusdem generis, which the BIA applied in Matter of Acosta to conclude that a particular social group should not be interpreted more broadly than the other four terms (race, religion, nationality, and political opinion) that surround it in the statute.1 As the canon was applied to counter the argument that the legislative intent of the PSG ground was to serve as a broad, catch-all “safety net” for those deserving of protection but unable to fit within the other four protected categories, the AG is happy to rely on the premise in his decision as well.

However, ejusdem generis is a two-edged sword. In the same way as it prevents the PSG category from being interpreted more broadly than its fellow protected grounds, it similarly prevents those other categories from being interpreted more broadly than PSG.

And therein lies the flaw in Barr’s argument that “as almost every [noncitizen] is a member of a family of some kind, categorically recognizing families as particular social groups would render virtually every [noncitizen] a member of a particular social group. There is no evidence that Congress intended the term “particular social group” to cast so wide a net.”

Every noncitizen is also a member of a race and a nationality. And most believe in a religion of some type. But no court has suggested that those categories are therefore too wide to form a protected ground for asylum purposes. Barr fails to explain that belonging to a protected ground does not make one a refugee; everyone in the world belongs to one or more such categories; many of us belong to all five. Asylum requires persecution (either suffered in the past, or a sufficient likelihood of suffering in the future), as well as a showing that such persecution was motivated more than tangentially in the persecutor’s view by the victim’s possessing one or more of the protected bases. When one also considers how extreme the harm must be to be constitute persecution; that such harm must either be by the government, or by a person or group that the government is unable or unwilling to control, and that the asylum seeker must not be able to avoid such harm through reasonable relocation to a safer place within their own country, it is not an easy standard to satisfy.

Barr then further errs in claiming that the test for social distinction is not whether the nuclear family carries societal importance (which in fact is the test), but rather, whether the applicant’s “specific nuclear family would be ‘recognizable by society at large.’” In that sentence, Barr supported his erroneous claim by misquoting Jeff Sessions in Matter of A-B-, by omitting the word “classes.” The actual quote, “social groups must be classes recognizable by society at large,” actually supports the argument that nuclear families would enjoy social distinction. By manipulating the language of case law, Barr attempts to equate “social distinction” with fame. Under his proposed interpretation, an asylum seeker must be a Kardashian to satisfy the PSG standard, and a Romanov to then prove nexus. (While such interpretation is clearly incorrect, I am nevertheless coining the term “Czardashian” here).

The true test for social distinction is whether the proposed group is consistent with how society divides itself. And families are the most basic way that society divides itself into groups. We are often identified in society as someone’s child, spouse, parent, or sibling. When we meet someone with a familiar last name, the first thing we ask is “are you related to so and so?” The reason we care to ask such question is precisely because families are socially distinct. By comparison, no one has ever asked me if I’m a member of the group of “tall, gray-haired, left-handed immigration lawyers with glasses,” because that is the type of artificially concocted group that in no way reflects how society divides itself.

Barr’s statement that “unless an immediate family carries greater societal import, it is unlikely that a proposed family-based group will be ‘distinct’ in the way required by the INA for purposes of asylum” is nonbinding dicta, expressing the likelihood of success in claims not before him.2 Nevertheless, his statement also overlooks an important aspect of PSG analysis: the impact of persecution on public perception. Social distinction is measured not in the eyes of the persecutors, but of society. But as UNHCR points out in its 2002 Particular Social Group Guidelines, at para. 14, even though left-handed people are not a particular social group, “if they were persecuted because they were left-handed, they would no doubt quickly become recognizable in their society as a particular social group.” So even if we were to accept Barr’s flawed premise that a regular, non-celebrity family lacks his misconstrued version of social distinction, as word spread of the targeting of its members, that family would gain social recognition pretty quickly.

And as CLINIC’s practice advisory astutely notes, societies accord social distinction to even non-famous families in its laws determining how property is inherited, or to whom guardianship of surviving children is determined.

Notes:

For a highly detailed analysis of the Chevron deference test as applied to Matter of A-B-, including the use of ejusdem generis as a canon of construction in step one of Chevron, see Kelley-Widmer, Jaclyn and Rich, Hillary, A Step Too Far: Matter of A-B-, ‘Particular Social Group,’ and Chevron (July 15, 2019). Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 19-30. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3410556 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3410556

See CLINIC’s Practice Advisory at 3. Much thanks to CLINIC attorneys Victoria Neilson, Bradley Jenkins, and Rebecca Scholtz for so quickly authoring this excellent guide.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

********************************************

There can be no doubt of Bill Barr’s anti-asylum bias, his poor lawyering skills, his lack of ethics, and his willingness to serve as a weapon of White Nationalist racist nonsense. If you serve the cause like a toady, whether or not you “truly believe” becomes irrelevant.

But, as Jeffrey points out, no matter how much the Barrs of the world would like to rewrite the law without going through the legislative or regulatory process, there is a long history of Article III Courts and the Immigration Courts themselves recognizing family-based asylum cases.

There is also an irreducible truth staring Barr and his fellow restrictionists in the face: folks have been identifying themselves based on kinship ties from the beginning of history and other folks have been protecting, rejecting, joining, or excluding themselves from those family-based kinship groups since humans first walked the earth. Sometimes these processes have been peaceful, other times violent, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes coercive.

But, the reality is that family-based persecution happens every day of the week, through out our world. In many many instances it’s “at least one central reason” for the persecution.

Ironically, folks like Trump and Barr are doing their best to divide our country into as many hostile and sometimes violent, ethnic, racial and social groups as it can. But, in the end, whether within my lifetime or not, the truth will “eat up” the lies and false ideologies that drive Barr and the rest of the Trumpists. Sadly, however, by the time they are rightfully dislodged from power, too many will have died or been irrevocably harmed by their false doctrines and conscious disregard for human life, human decency, and well-established truths of human history.

PWS

08-17-19

“DUH” ARTICLE OF THE DAY: Eugene Robinson @ WashPost: “Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration turns out to be a lie”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-claim-that-he-supports-legal-immigration-turns-out-to-be-a-lie/2019/08/12/66f09920-bd32-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

The erratic Trump administration has had just one consistent policy principle, one guiding North Star: punitive and often sadistic treatment of nonwhite immigrants.

President Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration, as opposed to the undocumented “invasion” he rails against, turns out to be — big surprise — a lie. On Monday, the administration proved its antagonism toward those who “stand in line” and “come in the right way” by issuing a new rule forcing many legal immigrants to make an impossible choice: accept needed government benefits to which they are fully entitled, or preserve their chances of obtaining permanent residence.

Say you’re an immigrant from Mexico who came here legally to join family members who are already permanent residents or citizens. Say you’re working a full-time minimum-wage job, plus odd jobs nights and weekends. You are a productive member of society. You are paying payroll taxes, sales taxes, vehicle registration fees and other government levies. Still, as hard as you work, you can’t make ends meet.

You may be legally entitled to health care through Medicaid. You may be entitled to food assistance through the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. You may be entitled to housing assistance. But according to the new Trump administration rule — set to take effect in two months — if you use any of these programs, you might forfeit the opportunity to ever obtain a green card making you a permanent resident. That means you also forfeit the chance of ever becoming a citizen.

Long advocated by White House adviser Stephen Miller, the Torquemada of the immigration inquisition, the new policy is a major step in Trump’s crusade to Make America White Again. If it survives court challenges, the new rule could dramatically reduce legal — I repeat, legal — immigration from low-income countries. Not just coincidentally, I am sure, this means fewer black and brown people would be granted resident status.

Trump’s message to the world: Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As he memorably and disgracefully put it: “Our Country is FULL!”

A Homeland Security Investigations officer guards detained workers Aug. 7 after immigration raids at seven work sites across Mississippi. (Handout/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AFP/Getty Images)

This is part of a well-established pattern. Trump often uses immigrants as scapegoats, encouraging his supporters to blame them for any and all problems they face. But beneath the cynical posturing there appears to be genuine animus.

Does the president hate all immigrants? He did once allegedly muse about wanting more newcomers from Norway. But those who are not white are treated, by this administration, as if they were not fully human.

How else to characterize a policy of cruelly separating children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border? Of keeping children in cages and denying them toothbrushes or soap? Of cramming adults into overcrowded lockups when their only crime was to lawfully seek refuge from violence and persecution?

Last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement staged what was apparently the biggest one-day immigration raid in modern American history. Approximately 680 men and women classified as “removable aliens” were arrested at seven work sites in Mississippi. Taken from their job sites, many left young children waiting in vain, and in anguish, for their parents to pick them up from school or day care.

ICE has limited resources — certainly nowhere near enough to go after all the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The only policy that makes sense is to prioritize the capture and removal of those who pose a genuine danger, such as MS-13 gang members. But that’s not who you find punching a clock for minimum wage at a chicken plant in Mississippi. Instead, you find hard-working people trying to put food on the table for their families.

The raid was a demonstration, a warning, a show of force. If the administration were serious, it would have gone after the employers, who were not immediately hit with charges or sanctions — and are already looking for replacement workers. The message to undocumented migrants was: You are weak. We can hurt you whenever we want.

Sensible immigration reform would provide the law-abiding undocumented with a pathway to legal status and citizenship. But the Republican Party blocks action because it is terrified that these immigrants would eventually become Democrats. I wonder why.

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

**************************************************

KEY QUOTE:

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

So, why is it OK to have mindless cruelty be the “official policy” of the US? If it isn’t “OK,” what is each of us doing to remove this cancer that is eating away the fabric of America under the incredibly bogus and insulting mantra of “Making America Great Again?”

Is cruelty great? Is stupidity great? Is dumping on our fellow man great? Is environmental degredation great? Is blatant racism great? Is misogyny great? Is beating up on children great? Is corruption great? Is lying great? Is cowardice great? Is selfishness great? Is White Nationalism great? Is encouraging gun violence great? Are out of control deficits great? Is turning our backs on vulnerable refugees great? Is bullying other countries great? Is insulting our allies great? Are useless “trade wars” great? Is sucking up to the world’s worst dictators great? Is nuclear proliferation great? Is wiping entire species from the earth great? Is less health care great? Is election minipultion by Putin great? Are collasing bridges and deteriorating roads great? Is using public office for private gain great? Is nepotism great? Is failing to pay taxes great? Just what part of Trumpism does the “MAGA Crowd” think is “great?”

It’s not rocket science. Trump, Miller, ”Cooch Cooch,” & company are the vilest racists since the supposed end of Jim Crow (as we’re now seeing, that was an illusion; it never ended for the GOP and the Trumps of the world). The DHS and disgraceful and disingenuous cowards like McAleenan, Morgan, Albence, and Provost are their “handmaidens.” Barr is their enforcer. And the GOP is the racist party of the “New Jim Crow.”

It’s not just immigrants, Eugene. Once Trump and his neo-Nazi gang are done “Dred Scottifying” migrants, they are going after you and every other person of color and minority in the U.S. who dares to stand up to up to them.

Ironically, it’s a small handful of truly bizarre African Americans and Hispanic Americans who continue to support Trump, wrongly thinking that they are now “De Facto White” and consequently the “railroad cars will never be coming for them,” along with those who don’t vote, who could give Trump the electoral college edge he needs to remain in office (while likely losing the popular vote by an even larger margin than in 2016) and seal their own eventual demise and that of their families.

Some German Jews had converted to Lutheranism or Catholicism before World War II thinking that it would save them from Hitler and the anti-Semites. How did that work out for them?

Trump and today’s GOP are unapologetic racists as well as congenital liars lacking in any type of fundamental values. Their lies are many, selfishness rampant, and their policies and pronouncements vile. But, they must be taken seriously for the existential threat they are to the rest of us. To treat them as anything else or to express surprise when they turn out to be “as advertised,” is to push America and the world ever closer to the abyss.

Treating Trump as “normal” or a “legitimate” U.S. President, as too may Federal Judges, legislators, and some members of the media do, is a potentially fatal mistake. He’s a 24-caret fraud, but every bit as much of a threat to our nation’s future as George III was when the Declaration of Independence was written; probably greater, because he’s here on our shore, in person –trying to satisfy his own insatiable ego while destroying our nation.

PWS

08-13-19

TRUMP SEES MASS MURDER AS OPPORTUNITY TO SPREAD LIES, HATE, RACISM, & DIVISION, WHILE TOUTING HIS “PERSONALITY CULT” — Hits On Leaders of Dayton, El Paso, While Upping Racial Tensions That Undoubtedly Will Lead To More White Supremacist Domestic Terror In The Near Future!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lashes-out-at-beto-orourke-and-the-media-ahead-of-visits-to-el-paso-and-dayton/2019/08/07/b0aa8afc-b8fb-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

Ashley Parker
White House Reporter
Washington Post

From the Washington Post:

By Ashley Parker ,

Philip Rucker ,

Jenna Johnson and

Felicia Sonmez

August 8 at 12:01 AM

EL PASO — On a day when President Trump vowed to tone down his rhetoric and help the country heal following two mass slayings, he did the opposite — lacing his visits Wednesday to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, with a flurry of attacks on local leaders and memorializing his trips with grinning thumbs-up photos.

A traditional role for presidents has been to offer comfort and solace to all Americans at times of national tragedy, but the day provided a fresh testament to Trump’s limitations in striking notes of unity and empathy.

When Trump swooped into the grieving border city of El Paso to offer condolences following the massacre of Latinos allegedly by a white supremacist, some of the city’s elected leaders and thousands of its citizens declared the president unwelcome.

In his only public remarks during the trip, Trump lashed out at Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, both Democrats, over their characterization of his visit with hospital patients in Dayton.

“We had an amazing day,” Trump said in El Paso as he concluded his visit. “As you know, we left Ohio. The love, the respect for the office of the presidency.”

Trump also praised El Paso police officers and other first responders and shook their hands, telling one female officer, “I saw you on television the other day and you were fantastic.”

None of the eight patients still being treated at University Medical Center in El Paso agreed to meet with Trump when he visited the hospital, UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke said. Two victims who already had been discharged returned to the hospital with family members to meet with the president.

“This is a very sensitive time in their lives,” Mielke said. “Some of them said they didn’t want to meet with the president. Some of them didn’t want any visitors.”

Before Trump’s visit Wednesday, however, some of the hospitalized victims accepted visits from a number of city and county elected officials, as well as Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) and Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.).

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president and first lady Melania Trump met with “victims of the tragedy while at the hospital” and were “received very warmly by not just victims and their families, but by the many members of medical staff who lined the hallways to meet them. It was a moving visit for all involved.”

El Paso and Dayton were not merely the latest in the multiplying series of American mass shootings. The carnage in El Paso is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, with parallels between a racist manifesto posted minutes before the shooting and the president’s own anti-immigration rhetoric.

President Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio on Wednesday. (Ty Greenlees/AP)

This has thrust Trump into the center of a roiling political and societal debate, with some Democratic leaders saying the president has emboldened white supremacy and is a threat to the nation.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who is running to unseat Trump in 2020, said in a speech Wednesday, “We have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”

When the Mayor of Dayton first saw @realDonaldTrump tweet about her pic.twitter.com/Z8YdyeebXp

— Scott Wartman (@ScottWartman) August 7, 2019

Both in Dayton and El Paso, Trump kept almost entirely out of public view, a marked break with tradition, as presidents visiting grieving communities typically offer public condolences.

Trump avoided the Oregon district where the shooting in Dayton took place, and just a short drive from Miami Valley Hospital, which he did visit. Whaley said he would not have been welcome in the Oregon District, where scores of demonstrators congregated, holding anti-Trump signs and chanting “Do something!” in a call for stricter gun laws.

Brown and Whaley described the visit by the president and first lady in favorable terms.

“They were hurting. He was comforting. He did the right things. Melania did the right things,” Brown told reporters. “And it’s his job in part to comfort people. I’m glad he did it in those hospital rooms.”

Whaley added: “I think the victims and the first responders were grateful that the president of the United States came to Dayton.”

Both Brown and Whaley, however, were also sharply critical of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and Republican resistance to gun-control legislation.

Whaley later responded to Trump’s comments about her and Brown by calling him “a bully and a coward.” She said on CNN, “It’s fine that he wants to bully me and Sen. Brown. We’re okay. We can take it.”

The traveling press corps was not allowed to observe Trump’s visit with three victims who remained hospitalized. It fell therefore to White House aide Dan Scavino to proclaim in a tweet that Trump “was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital.”

[‘Hispanic invasion’: A white nationalist version of Texas that never existed]

Trump and the first lady also met with police officers, fire officials, trauma surgeons and nurses at the facility, which treated 23 victims of the shooting. The hospital invited victims who had already been released to come back and meet with the president and the first lady.

“It was an authentic visit,” hospital president Mike Uhl said, praising Trump as “attentive, present and extremely accommodating.”

Trump offered his own affirmation on Twitter: “It was a warm & wonderful visit. Tremendous enthusiasm & even Love.”

Grisham said journalists were kept out of the hospital visit because staff did not want it to devolve into “a photo op” and overwhelm the victims with media.

The White House, however, distributed its own photos of Trump smiling for pictures with first responders, along with a slickly produced video, helping make the president the center of attention.

Trump’s reception in El Paso was less hospitable, and not only because so many local leaders have said they believe his rhetoric inspired Saturday’s slayings at a shopping center near the U.S.-Mexico border. Although he won the state of Texas in the 2016 election, Trump captured just 25.7 percent of the vote in El Paso County, the worst performance recorded here by a major-party presidential candidate in at least two decades.

An ever-growing makeshift memorial has sprouted near the shooting scene that features piles of colorful flowers, a row of white crosses, a line of prayer candles, as well as messages to the president. “Mr. T, Respect our sorrow and grief. Do not ‘invade’ our city,” reads one note, a reference to Trump’s repeated warnings of a migrant “invasion” at the border.

Just before Trump arrived in El Paso — where he and the first lady met with law enforcement personnel at an emergency operations center following their hospital visit — several hundred people gathered in opposition to his trip .

Congregating under the hot midday sun in a baseball field for an “El Paso Strong” event, some held homemade signs. “Go home! You are NOT welcome here!” read one. “This was Trump-inspired terrorism,” read another. “Trump repent,” read a third.

At one point, the crowd chanted, “Send him back!” — a nod to the incendiary “Send her back!” chant about Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at one of Trump’s campaign rallies last month.

“We feel like right now we should be in mourning, and we feel like we should be collecting our thoughts, we should be doing vigils and we should be gathering together as a community. We believe it is an insult that the president is coming here,” said one of the organizers, Jaime Candelaria, a 37-year-old singer and songwriter.

[‘Be quiet!’: Trump claims Beto O’Rourke uses a ‘phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage’]

Escobar said onstage, “In this moment, someone is visiting … I felt it was important that we come together and not focus on the visitor, but focus on El Paso.” She added, “We will not stop resisting the hate! Resisting the bigotry! Resisting the racism!”

In the crowd at the El Paso Strong event was Shawn Nixon, 20, a Walmart employee who was at work restocking the school supplies area when the gunman opened fire Saturday morning. At the sound of the shots, Nixon said he fell to the ground, pulling with him a young child who had been shopping with his mother.

“All I’m just asking for Donald Trump, for the president, to do is to say ‘sorry,’ ” Nixon said. “He created this crime. He created it because of his words. Every time that he’s on TV, that’s what he’s doing.”

During his flight home from El Paso, Trump attacked Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), the twin brother of presidential candidate Julián Castro, tweeting that he “makes a fool of himself every time he opens his mouth.” The congressman has come under scrutiny for publicizing a list of San Antonio donors who have contributed to Trump and accusing them of “fueling a campaign of hate.”

On Saturday in El Paso, authorities said, a man opened fire inside the Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring two dozen others. At 1:05 a.m. Sunday, a gunman killed nine people and injured 27 others outside a bar in Dayton, police said.

All week, Trump has zigzagged between two competing instincts: unite and divide.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, Trump remained cloistered at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., issuing only short statements on Twitter. Back at the White House on Monday, the president delivered a scripted speech in which he preached harmony.

“Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside — so destructive — and find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters.

The president did not heed his own advice, however. Late Tuesday night, he took to Twitter to attack Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman running for president who has said Trump bears some responsibility for the shooting there because of his demonization of Latino immigrants.

Trump tweeted: “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement — & be quiet!”

Then, as he departed the White House on Wednesday morning en route to Ohio, Trump told reporters he would refrain from attacking his adversaries during the trip.

“I would like to stay out of the political fray,” the president said. Asked about his rhetoric, he said he thinks it “brings people together” and added, “I think we have toned it down.”

[Gannett building in McLean evacuated after reports of man with weapon]

That detente lasted only a few minutes. Answering a reporter’s question about Biden, Trump pounced. “Joe is a pretty incompetent guy,” the president said. “Joe Biden has truly lost his fastball, that I can tell you.”

By the time the president had left Dayton, he was back on Twitter and sniping at Democrats, a tirade triggered by his consumption of cable television news aboard Air Force One.

“Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech. Sooo Boring! The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks with this guy,” the president wrote.

Then he lashed out at Brown and Whaley, falsely accusing them of “totally misrepresenting” the reception he received at Miami Valley Hospital. He alleged that their news conference immediately after the president’s visit “was a fraud.”

But neither Brown nor Whaley said Trump received a poor reception at the hospital.

When Whaley first saw Trump’s tweets criticizing her and Brown, she paused for a moment to read them on a cellphone and said, “I don’t — I mean, I’m really confused. We said he was treated, like, very well. So, I don’t know why they’re talking about ‘misrepresenting.’

“Oh, well, you know,” the mayor added with a shrug. “He lives in his world of Twitter.”

Parker and Johnson reported from El Paso, and Rucker and Sonmez reported from Washington. Arelis R. Hernández in Dayton, Robert Moore in El Paso, and Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.

*************************************

Totally lacking in human decency. Totally unqualified for any office, let alone the highest one in the land. Will enough folks ”wise up” and stand up to this cowardly bully before it’s too late for all of us?

PWS

08-09-19

SHOCKER: Trump’s Shockingly Disingenuous & Inappropriate Speech About El Paso Is Perceived By Many El Pasoans As . . . Shockingly Disingenuous & Inappropriate! — Fails To Mention Or Reach Out To Majority Latino/Hispanic Community Targeted By His Consistent Message Of Hate & Dehumanization!

https://apple.news/AvS_y1RcRTB66pEMhqUbLPg

Suzanne Gamboa reports for NBC News:

Some El Paso residents outraged by Trump’s speech that ‘failed to mention Latinos’

EL PASO, Texas — President Donald Trump condemned white supremacy from the White House Monday, but left Hispanics and Latinos out of his speech.

It’s a significant omission and a stark difference from the written document that has been linked to the 21-year-old gunman who allegedly opened fire on weekend shoppers Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The shooter’s alleged document mentions a Hispanic invasion, the increasing Hispanic population and a decision by its writer to target Hispanics after reading a right-wing conspiracy theory asserting Europe’s white population is being replaced with non-Europeans.

The death toll in the El Paso attack, which is being investigated as domestic terrorism, rose to 22 on Monday.

“We’ve got dead bodies. The majority are Hispanic. Some are foreign nationals from Mexico and we got a manifesto describing what he intends to do and why,” said state Rep. Cesar Blanco, a Democrat who represents El Paso.

“I think it’s telling; he failed to mention Latinos,” Blanco said of the president. “He failed to mention that our community is majority Latino, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

The Mexican government confirmed that eight of the victims identified so far were Mexican citizens, not unexpected considering the city of El Paso and surrounding communities of El Paso County, Texas are about 83 percent Latino.

Add to that the number of shoppers and workers from Mexico who legally cross the international border each day to shop, dine, work and visit family. The Walmart is part of a complex of retail outlets, with a Sam’s Club and the Cielo Vista mall next door. There is also a theater close by along with many restaurants and hotels.

Trump did say in the speech that he had sent his condolences to Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because eight citizens from Mexico were among the dead. But he didn’t make specific mention of El Paso’s residents of Latino descent, who comprise the majority of the community.

Jeramey Maynard, 26, a local artist and restaurant manager, said Trump’s response has been largely political, exemplified by the president’s call to combine gun regulation reforms with immigration reform.

“He’s choosing his words without saying Hispanic or immigrant and making it about other things,” Maynard said. “He’s been having these racist comments. When it comes time to defend the community, of course we are not going to hear him say anything about the Hispanic community.”

Maynard added that he thought Trump “would paint it with the broadest brush he can. Why would he say something he thinks supports the Democratic Party?”

‘Target on our back’

Trump launched his 2016 election campaign with disparaging words, seen by many as racist, about people in the United States who have come from Mexico.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems,” Trump said to a largely white crowd at Trump Tower in New York. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people …”

Some defended the president saying he was referring only to immigrants who commit crimes and not speaking of Latinos in the United States as a whole.

But then Trump went on to question the ability of a U.S. district court judge to be impartial because he is of Mexican descent.

Trump’s political rallies have often been filled with chants of “Build the Wall” in reference to his pledge to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it.

He responded to the influx of Central Americans seeking asylum by separating children from their parents and allowing border officials to hold them in chain-link pens.

In the past several days, many Latinos have been vocal about what they see as a through line between the president’s rhetoric and the shooting in El Paso.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat whose district includes El Paso, said she had hoped Trump would have apologized for his rhetoric, which she said put a target on the city’s back.

“I would encourage him to do that,” she said.

The city has seen stark evidence of fear that exists among families because of the Trump hardline on immigration, according to several residents.

Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of the Hope Border Institute, said the organization fielded calls from families who were directly affected by the shootings and families who were looking for loved ones.

They were afraid to go to the hospital or to interact with police and border enforcement, who responded to the shooting.

“If you are undocumented or of a mixed status household, the last place you want to go is where there is a tremendous amount of police presence,” Limón Garza said. Immigrants often are part of families that may include a mix of citizens, legal residents and people without legal status.

Her organization has been working with families to help them get the help they need, but she said it is a daily occurrence for people without legal permission to be in the country to be afraid to go to the hospital.

“This is just another layer of psychological trauma that this community has to face when we have already been ground zero for so many other challenges,” she said.

‘The illness is racism and xenophobia’

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed Trump to commit to no longer using “invasion“ to describe Hispanic communities, immigrants or refugees to the country.

The caucus also asked the Trump administration to “acknowledge the threat of white supremacy and domestic terrorism” and to “combat this state of emergency head-on” with federal resources.

Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-Texas, twin brother of presidential candidate Julián Castro, said in a statement that the caucus is grateful Trump addressed the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, tragedies.

But he said, “this does not make up for the years of attacks by President Trump on Hispanic Americans and our immigrant communities.”

“During the president’s address, he blamed the Internet, news media , mental health and video games, among others … Unfortunately, he did not take responsibility for the xenophobic rhetoric that he has frequently used to demonize and dehumanize Hispanic Americans and immigrants over the past four years.”

But Limón Garza said the tragedy has not been confined to immigrants.

“Here in El Paso we are a community that is over 80 percent Latino and that means people that are immigrant themselves and then people who have been here for generations,” she said. “It’s clear it was not just a random attack. It’s clear that this cannot be called someone with a mental illness. This illness is racism and xenophobia.”

Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

****************************

Trump delivered a dishonest, divisive, and totally insincere condemnation of White Supremacy designed and delivered primarily to reassure his White Supremacist supporters that he’s really still on their side.

His ridiculously inappropriate upcoming visit to El Paso is a totally dishonest and divisive self-promotion stunt which all residents should either ignore or peacefully protest.

There is no human good, empathy, or redeeming quality in Donald Trump. Decent folks have to stop looking for that which doesn’t (and never did) exist and band together and use what remains of our Constitutional system to remove him from office before he destroys our country and everyone in it. It won’t be easy, but the lives of generations to come and the world’s future are at stake.

PWS

08-06-19

DON KERWIN OF CENTER FOR MIGRATION STUDIES (“CMS”) WITH A STATEMENT ON EL PASO SHOOTINGS: “Yesterday’s hate crime attacked this community, its perpetrator reportedly angered by the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and seeking to prevent “cultural and ethnic replacement” in a region settled by Spanish speaking persons in the mid-17th century and by native peoples in 40 AD.”

Statement of Donald Kerwin, Executive Director of the Center for Migration Studies, on the Shooting in El Paso

The violent attack yesterday in El Paso in which 22 people lost their lives and more than 24 others were injured evokes two starkly divergent views of El Paso, the first held by most of its residents and those who know it well, and the second championed by extremist politicians, media sources, and hate groups. The latter describe El Paso and other border communities as dangerous and crime-ridden places, victimized by “invaders” from undesirable countries.

Just five days ago, Beto O’Rourke outlined a different vision of this community, writing in The Hill that that El Paso might (instead) be considered the nation’s future Ellis Island; that is, a symbol of hope for the world. The Ellis Island language may have come from a 2012 gathering in El Paso of border residents (most from El Paso) from different sectors – public officials, law enforcement, faith communities, business people, the press, and others – who were offended by how their communities had been characterized in the national immigration debate and wanted to articulate a richer, more truthful narrative of their communities. “If nothing else,” they later wrote presciently, “we could all agree on this point. There is a prevailing narrative about the US border and it is false and it is dangerous to border communities.”

These border residents recognized the problems in their communities, some of which they attributed to ill-considered federal immigration enforcement policies and the vilification of immigrants. El Pasoans have generously welcomed newcomers throughout their history, particularly in recent months. In a report published by the Border Network for Human Rights titled “The New Ellis Island: Visions from the Border for the Future of America,” they described El Paso as a safe, family-oriented, creative and culturally rich community that benefitted from its diversity and bi-national identity, and that could serve as a model for other American communities in an increasingly inter-connected world.

As Professor Josiah Heyman of the University of Texas in El Paso later wrote in the Journal on Migration and Human Security:

These border residents viewed their region as a set of human communities with rights, capacities, and valuable insights and knowledge … They saw the border region as the key transportation and brokerage zone of the emerging, integrated North American economy. In their view, the bilingual, bicultural, and binational skills that characterize border residents form part of a wider border culture that embraces diversity and engenders creativity. Under this vision the border region is not an empty enforcement zone, but is part of the national community and its residents should enjoy the same constitutional and human rights as other US residents.

They also enunciated a prophetic view of their communities:

We imagine a border that is no longer characterized by walls, migrant deaths, illegality, human and drug trafficking, and violence in all of its forms. We see a place of opportunity and encounter. We see a place of pilgrimage where – like Ellis Island – residents and visitors can remember their family histories of crossing over, living as “strangers,” and struggling for a foothold in their new country. We imagine a region which, 50 years from today, serves as a symbol of hope for border communities throughout the world. We picture a border that crosses, but does not divide families and communities. We see a border of faith communities converted by their own core values and beliefs. We envision a gathering place for God’s scattered children, where residents and visitors in all their diversity can work together to build the human family. We hope, pray, and vow to work for such a border.

Yesterday’s hate crime attacked this community, its perpetrator reportedly angered by the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and seeking to prevent “cultural and ethnic replacement” in a region settled by Spanish speaking persons in the mid-17th century and by native peoples in 40 AD.In a statement on the shootings, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso wrote:

Once again in our nation we see the face of evil. We see the effects of a mind possessed by hatred. We see the effects of the sinful and insipid conviction that some of us are better than others of us because of race, religion, language or nationality.

Bishop Seitz also lauded the borderlands for demonstrating to “the world that generosity, compassion and human dignity are more powerful than the forces of division.”

In announcing a faith vigil last night in response to the shooting, an inter-faith alliancewrote:

Today we stand in horror and shock at the devastating loss of life and heartless attack on our border community. Tomorrow we will mourn, dry tears, offer our sacrifice of prayer and brace ourselves for the work ahead. Because even now the borderlands will stick together and the borderlands will stand together.

As many have remarked, El Paso is a resilient and special American community, but has too long been the victim of hateful and dangerous rhetoric. Its residents deserve the nation’s solidarity and respect, particularly at this sad time.

The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) is a New York-based educational institute devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. For more information, please visit www.cmsny.org or contact Emma Winters, CMS’s Communications Coordinator, at ewinters@cmsny.org.

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*************************************

Thanks, Don, for your powerful and timely statement!

Interesting to compare the statements of a real leader like Don Kerwin, who exercises moral authority, with the vapid and disingenuous statements of immoral White Nationalist hate purveyors like Trump and most of his GOP stooges (including, of course, “Super Stooge” Mike Pence).

Trump might have yielded to his campaign advisers’ suggestions that he “cool it” until the bodies are buried. Since “ego is everything, and winning is ego” in Trump-land, he apparently deemed it worth the supreme sacrifice of knocking off the hate tweets and lie streams for a few hours.

But, I guarantee that it won’t be long before Trump is once again throwing around knowingly false racist narratives and “hate bombs” directed at migrants, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, other minorities, and Democrats, with the GOP looking the other way, nodding approval, or, in too many cases, actually joining in or attempting to defend the indefensible. This is a party whose sorry and cowardly actions and policies are inconsistent with the continuation of America as a democratic republic. It deserves to be voted out of existence and consigned to the “dustbin of history.” Whether or not that actually happens, and when, is ultimately up to the American voters.

PWS

08-05-19

She raised her niece like a daughter. Then the US government separated them at the border

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“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

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The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

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KEY QUOTE:

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

So, why is it OK to have mindless cruelty be the “official policy” of the US? If it isn’t “OK,” what is each of us doing to remove this cancer that is eating away the fabric of America under the incredibly bogus and insulting mantra of “Making America Great Again?”

It’s not just immigrants, Eugene. Once Trump and his neo-Nazi gang are done “Dred Scottifying” migrants, they are going after you and every other person of color and minority in the U.S. who dares to stand up to up to them.

Some German Jews had converted to Lutheranism or Catholicism before World War II thinking that it would save them from Hitler and the anti-Semites. How did that work out for them?

PWS

08-13-19

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