"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Late Monday afternoon, President Trump emerged from the White House and strode in the cool spring daylight to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square. It was supposed to be an act of defiance: Mr. Trump has bristled at the observation that during the protests roiling the capital he has burrowed into a fortified bunker rather than addressing the nation.
Like most performances arranged by Mr. Trump and associates, it made only a disjointed sort of sense. Yes, the president’s decision to march through the heart of the city’s unrest caused police and National Guard units to blast a peaceful crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets, carving a punishing path to the steps of St. John’s. But the show of force seemed to emphasize only that his legitimacy has shrunk to the point that he feels moved to dominate his own people with military power.
As he took up his post before the church, which was partially boarded up after a minor fire that broke out during a recent protest, Mr. Trump set his face in a stony scowl and held up a black Bible, tightly closed. “Is it your Bible?” a reporter shouted. “It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump said neutrally. The entire routine was vulgar, blunt: There Mr. Trump was, holding aloft this mute book — neither opened, cited, nor read from — in the shadow of a vandalized church, claiming the mantle of righteousness.
After all, that was what he had come to do. A ruler maintaining order strictly by brute force has a problem. Such regimes are volatile and fragile, subject to eruptive dissolution. Mr. Trump may lack the experience or interest to even pantomime genuine Christian practice, but he has acute instincts when it comes to the symbolism of leadership. He seemed to know, as he positioned himself as the defender of the Christian faith, that he needed to imbue his presidency with some renewed moral purpose; Christianity was simply a convenient vein to tap.
“I think that’s a standard trope in American political frames of reference,” Luke Bretherton told me on a Monday night phone call. Mr. Bretherton, who is a professor of moral and political theology at Duke University’s Divinity School, cited Cold War efforts to demonize socialism as viciously atheistic and amoral. It was work undertaken with anxious eagerness precisely because socialist criticisms of American life were substantial and compelling.
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Read the rest of Liz’s op-ed at the link.
Christ’s humanity, forgiveness, and empathy for the outcasts of the world is completely lost on the totally immoral and willfully ignorant Trump. The Bible is just another prop. If Jesus came back to earth today, he certainly would be found with the protestors seeking social justice rather than the current inhabitant of the White House and his equally corrupt and immoral cronies like Billy Barr.
PWS
06-03-20
UPDATE:
Check out Tom Toles’s cartoon “Sermon From the Pit” (“Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lowered”) from today’s WashPost here:
On a Friday afternoon in mid-April, Gladys Vega received a disturbing message: A woman hospitalized with COVID-19 needed food for the 11-year-old daughter she’d left at home. Worried that the girl would go hungry, Vega rushed out of her office and into the tangle of downtown Chelsea, Massachusetts, a 1.8-square-mile city across the Mystic River from Boston. The 52-year-old Vega, wearing a black tracksuit, a highlighter-yellow T-shirt, and a little bit of matching eye glitter, jumped out of the car so quickly, I could barely keep up. She approached a narrow brick apartment building and asked the people on the stoop to open the front door. “You don’t have to worry; I’m not immigration,” Vega said in Spanish. “Let me in.”
Vega was accustomed to convincing fearful Chelsea residents to trust her. More and more restrictive federal immigration measures had motivated some locals—day laborers, food-factory workers, janitors, and other employees now deemed“essential”—to leave as few traces of their presence as possible: using P.O. boxes instead of their own mailboxes at home, and steering clear of public buildings where Immigration and Customs Enforcement had made arrests.
In late February, new Trump-administration regulations took effect that radically expand whom immigration officials judge to be a “public charge”—permanently dependent on government aid—and thus ineligible for a green card. The rules allow officials to deny green-card applicants if they have used food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, or other safety-net programs that were previously exempt from consideration.
Vega, the executive director of a social-justice organization called the Chelsea Collaborative, believes that these measures have made it more difficult for immigrants to get the care and support they need to stop the spread of COVID-19. Out of fear of triggering the new public-charge rule, immigrants in Chelsea have been disenrolling from public services, worsening the overcrowding, food insecurity, and poor access to health care that make the area so vulnerable to the coronavirus.
By mid-April, the infection rate in Chelsea was six times higher than the state average, comparable to the rate in the hardest-hit boroughs of New York City. With the support of local officials, Vega is trying to use the credibility she’s earned over decades of fighting slumlords, predatory bosses, and scammers to persuade the hardest-hit families to use a makeshift social safety net—and to go to the hospital despite their fear that doing so will be weaponized against them later.
“Because they’re afraid of their status,” Vega said, “they will not speak up.”
The message about the girl in need of food, Vega learned, was outdated: Her mother had returned home earlier that day, after spending a week in the hospital. Still wheezing, the woman stood in the doorway wearing pajama pants, a gray overcoat, and a surgical mask. She told me she had deferred care for two weeks, and went to the hospital only when she could no longer breathe. Vega had prepared a box of bread, corn flour, beans, cookies, cooking oil, and milk. “God bless you,” the woman said. One floor below, several families who appeared sick were crammed into a handful of rooms. Vega gave them a box too.
Forty-two years ago, in the midst of the blizzard of 1978, Vega’s parents moved her from a farm in Puerto Rico to their own cramped apartment in Chelsea. The city, the climate, the language—it was “a nightmare,” she told me.
Her cousins in town spoke only English, so she became close with the other Spanish-speaking kids in school—mostly children who had fled the Central American civil wars of the 1980s with their families. Vega came to understand that her classmates didn’t see parents or relatives left behind for years at a time, because of immigration restrictions. “My passion for organizing came from those classrooms,” she said. By seventh grade, Vega was protesting cuts to bilingual education with a 700-student walkout she’d organized.
The newly formed Chelsea Collaborative hired her as a receptionist in 1990, when she was 21. From the beginning, she was a troublemaker. “I liked to challenge the status quo,” she told me. She set about trying to “manage up,” and to persuade her boss, the executive director, to put Latinos on the board. Her playbook: She’d gently inquire about a retirement party for a current board member. Then she’d line up a replacement, drop hints about all the funding her new pick could bring in, and order a plaque for the presumptive retiree. She tried to make it effortless for her boss to take her advice. “That’s how I moved out all of these older white men,” she said with a laugh.
Vega witnessed the first major wave of immigrant disenrollment from safety-net programs when Congress passed the Clinton administration’s welfare-reform law in 1996. The legislation, along with an immigration bill passed the following month, restricted green-card holders from using some federal benefits during their first five years in the country. Vega was working as a community organizer for the Chelsea Collaborative by then, holding large meetings at the Saint Rose of Lima Catholic church, where she was connecting immigrants with employment and educational opportunities. After the new laws passed, Vega recalled, immigrants felt that “to take any public assistance, you needed to bleed for [the government] to trust you. It was similar to what is happening now in terms of public charge.”
Around the same time that Vega was organizing at Saint Rose, Michael Fix, who is now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, received a sheaf of data from public-health officials in Los Angeles County that showed just how many noncitizens used public benefits before and after the laws took effect. The impact was apparent immediately, he recalled when we spoke. “I thought, Holy hell, what’s going on here?” Immigrant participation in health services had dropped sharply even among those who technically still qualified. Refugees, for instance, were unaffected by the new rules, but their participation in Medicaid fell 39 percent.
Fix and other researchers began to study these spillover consequences, concluding that they represented a chilling effect. Even immigration authorities were worried, especially about what the chilling effect would mean for public health. “Growing confusion is creating significant, negative public health consequences across the country,” the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which granted green cards at the time, wrote in 1999. “This situation is becoming particularly acute with respect to … the treatment of communicable diseases.”
Last summer, as the Trump administration’s beefed-up version of the public-charge rule sped toward approval, doctors and social workers at Massachusetts General Hospital’s clinic in Chelsea contacted Vega because they were concerned that immigrants were avoiding health care. The chilling effect was at work again. She brought clinic representatives to a street fair at Saint Rose full of food stalls and kids playing games on a warm evening. They walked around greeting attendees. “Please come back to MGH Chelsea,” Vega recalled the providers saying. “We miss you as patients.”
The expansion of the public-charge rule, Fix told me, is best understood as a way to favor affluent immigrants without having to go through Congress—a major victory for immigration hard-liners. According to an estimate by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the new standards are so restrictive that if they were applied to everyone in the United States, up to half of all Americans could be deemed a public charge and thus not qualify to settle in the country.
The current chilling effect has not been measured. But Tiffany Joseph, a sociologist at Northeastern University who studies health access in Boston’s immigrant neighborhoods, told me, “You should not underestimate how much the fear of ICE raids and the public-charge rule worsened the pandemic in Chelsea.”
Jessica Zeidman, a primary-care doctor at MGH Chelsea, told me that she saw disenrollment continue to intensify in the months before the pandemic hit. In December, for instance, a newly pregnant patient ended a checkup with a goodbye: She told Zeidman that she wouldn’t be seeing her anymore, for fear of triggering the rule, which would go into effect two months later. Zeidman tried to persuade her not to withdraw from WIC, the federal nutrition program for women, infants, and children, because the new restrictions wouldn’t apply to pregnant women.
“Most of the patients I have that have talked about disenrolling are not even actually affected by the rule; they just think they are,” Zeidman told me. “Part of its power is [that] it affects many, many more people than it’s actually written to affect.”
Around the same time, another one of her patients, a man in his 50s, opted to remove his name from a public-housing waiting list, even though he was eligible for the benefit, because he was afraid of somehow triggering the rule and preventing other family members from obtaining green cards. As the pandemic spread, Zeidman wondered whether he was still stuck in overcrowded housing, risking infection By early April, immigrant patients showed signs of serious illness, after waiting as long as possible to seek care, Zeidman said. Almost all of them had labored breathing and a high fever.
“We’re reaping what we’ve sown,” she said.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
This isn’t rocket science! The irrationality, invidious motives, and danger to the public health of the Administration’s White Nationalist attack on vulnerable immigrants was obvious “from the git go.” Lower Federal Courts figured it out quickly and properly enjoined the illegal regulations change.
That’s hardly surprising given that the overwhelming majority of the 210,000 comments on the proposed change opposed it on public health and rational governance grounds, many coming from public health experts. The vile racism of Stephen Miller is also a matter of public record.
Nor is it surprising that the various “exemptions” are largely meaningless, given DHS’s and this regime’s complete and totally deserved lack of credibility in the immigrant community. It’s a commonly known fact of which any immigration practitioner or community worker would be aware, but of which members of our highest Court feign ignorance.
So, when we wonder “how we got to this point,” we can’t ignore the lack of practical understanding of human problems, absence of empathy, and the abandonment of fundamental principles of due process and equal justice for all represented by a Supremes’ majority that unleashed an illegal, ill-advised, invidiously discriminatory travesty like the “Stephen Miller’s public charge regulations” on our nation and some of our most vulnerable members of society – many of whom are actually suffering and even dying to bring us the essential goods and services that have kept us afloat during the pandemic.
A group of younger people that I work with raised these regulations with me recently. They appeared to have a very clear understanding of the adverse legal, ethical, practical, moral, and historical consequences of allowing one misguided group to inflict this type of invidious harm on another group in our society, thereby diminishing the general welfare. Pity that a majority of those serving on our highest Court lacked those same clear insights and values.
Actions and inactions have consequences. And, as we are now seeing, they can be quite ugly. A better Executive and a better Senate are keys to better Federal Courts, from the Supremes down to the Immigraton Courts. If nothing else, Trump has shown us how broken and feckless our current institutions are in the face of tyranny and “malicious incompetence.” We need regime change at all levels.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
(CNN)President Donald Trump‘s made-for-TV embrace of authoritarianism’s imagery and tools at a brittle national moment risks unleashing toxic political forces that threaten America’s democratic traditions.
Trump on Monday turned security forces on peaceful protesters in front of the White House, as tear gas and rubber bullets flew, before declaring himself the “law and order” President. Then, in one of the most bizarre moments in modern presidential history, he strode across the park to stand in front of an iconic church holding a Bible aloft in a striking photo op.
It was a moment of vanity and bravado — orchestrated for the cameras and transparently political — as Trump struggles to cope with protests sweeping the country after the killing of George Floyd and tries to cover up his botched leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, the White House’s official Twitter account released a triumphant video of the moment set to music but omitting any signs of the mayhem unleashed on the protesters.
Trump appeared to be trying to project strength at a moment when his presidency seems feckless and as the nation spins out of control. If it occurred abroad and not in the White House, Americans might perceive a ridiculous self-deluding act of a wanna-be strongman.
“I thought I was watching a scene from something in Turkey, and not in the United States,” retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who commanded National Guard troops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
And after using St. John’s Church, the “church of the presidents,” which had experienced a basement fire during Sunday’s demonstrations, Trump drew immediate criticism from faith leaders, including Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
“The President just used the Bible, our sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” Budde said on “AC360.”
Trump’s showmanship was motivated in part by anger at media coverage saying he had sheltered in a bunker below the White House on Friday night amid protests in Washington, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak reported. It shows how far Trump will go to protect his own thin skin and how his power plays are often motivated by assaults on his dignity.
But his behavior is also alarming, considering the vast power at his command, uses of demagogic tropes and capacity to buckle the traditions and structures of civilian, democratic government. So while Trump’s turn to the rhetoric of the despotic leaders he so admires had elements of farce, it opened a sinister new chapter in his presidency and a challenge to American norms.
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Read the rest of Stephen’s report at the link.
America’s national nightmare can’t end until Trump and his GOP enablers are removed from office at the ballot box. Just because he’s an incompetent, cowardly, bully doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. He is!
This November, vote like your life and our nation’s future existence depend on it! Because they do!
The Supreme Court will soon release an opinion on the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s choice to end DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Former President Barack Obama rolled out DACA in June 2012 and the Department of Homeland Security implemented it two months later through a memorandum signed by then-Secretary Janet Napolitano.
DACA, based on a conventional concept of prosecutorial discretion, provided limited relief from removal – and work authorization — to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants through a discretionary tool called “deferred action.” All legal challenges to DACA, including one by campus immigration hawk former Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, failed. How will the story of DACA be remembered?
Much more than the sum of its parts, DACA will be remembered as an intriguing political story. For years, Congress introduced legislation known as the DREAM Act to provide legal status and a pathway to permanent residency for young undocumented college students. Congress has debated some kind of comprehensive immigration reform over two decades. All of these efforts failed. Said President Obama in announcing DACA “In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places.” DACA helped jump start the forceful movement across the nation calling for the vindication of the rights of immigrants.
Politics led to DACA’s demise. Donald J. Trump ran for President on a strident immigration enforcement ticket and promised to end the “unconstitutional” DACA policy. After the inauguration of President Trump and lobbying by some Republican leaders to keep DACA, the administration tried to terminate DACA and announced this “wind-down” in a press conference on September 5, 2017. Ultimately, political slogans, not reasoned analysis, were offered for the decision to end DACA.
The Trump administration’s arguments to the Supreme Court defending the end of DACA were also mired in politics. In a convoluted fashion that wended its way to federal appellate courts from coast to coast, the administration—through a series of Interim leaders—simply ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and in an arbitrary and capricious way simply declared that DACA was “illegal,” and that they were required to end it.
The claim that DACA was somehow “illegal” was simply not true. No court found it to be, and for good reason. Deferred action is an instrument of discretion used to shield “low priority” immigrants from deportation. Deferred action enjoys a long history and legal foundation across both Republican and Democratic administrations. The administration could decide to end the policy it, but not by undertaking the judicial role of declaring their own exercise of discretion to be unconstitutional. As it did in the Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) in manufacturing a civil rights rationale for a U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 Census that would have chilled the participation of many Latina/os and immigrants, the administration simply misrepresented facts. The Supreme Court should require the Department of Homeland Security to undertake the searching analysis of facts and policy impacts, and honestly proceed, playing by the rules. Those with DACA have upheld their part of this bargain, and the administration must abide by open and fair procedures required by the law.
DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope. Said one DACA recipient one author spoke to described September 5, 2017, the day the end of DACA was announced as “just an awful day … Eventually you just get over the pain, get over the fear… and you continue to organize and protect your community in whatever way you can.” Throughout the time DACA has been tossed around in the courts, thousands continue to build families of their own, work in the frontlines of healthcare. and revitalize classrooms in colleges and universities across the country, a phenomenon we have seen first-hand as educators and administrators. DACAmented recipients are now our doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, repaying the investment this country has made in them.
If the Supreme Court fails to require the Trump administration to abide by the law, as we urge the Court to insist upon, those with DACA must live under a cruel Sword of Damocles, with no clear pathway to legal permanent residency. They deserve an honest policy determination, and the Supreme Court should insist on no less. Ultimately, it will take Congressional action to enact a DREAM Act, and comprehensive immigration reform to enable these young members a means to their rightful place in our society.
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Kevin R. Johnson is Dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law and Mabie/Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicanx Studies.
The Administration’s legal arguments for ending DACA have always been bogus and totally disingenuous. Indeed, they do not even remain the same from case to case as they essentially make it up as they go along. It’s all transparently about White Nationalist racism and political pandering to a right-wing minority.
The lower Federal Courts were nearly unanimous in rejecting the DOJ’s various bad faith positions. Yet, instead of unanimously blasting the Administration’s frivolous request for intervention out of hand and sending a clear message reaffirming the lower courts, the Supremes granted an audience to Francisco and the scofflaws.
By failing to send a clear message that political pandering at the expense of human lives won’t be tolerated, the Supremes have encouraged further lawless, insidiously-motivated acts by Trump and have become part of the problem. They have also unconscionably undermined lower Federal Court judges who stood up for the rule of law and removal of racism and dehumanization from government decision-making.
Among other things, the Supremes have helped Trump: eradicate 40 years of asylum protections without legislation; weaponize the public charge provisions without legislation to endanger the health an safety of immigrants and our nation; allowed invidious discrimination against Muslims and refugees; and forced individuals who have established reasonable fear of persecution to be sent to live in life-threatening squalor and danger in Mexico.
The Supremes’ majority has knowingly and intentionally furthered the “Dred-Scottification” of “the other” in society: African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, asylum seekers, the poor, women, prisoners, workers, etc. Our nation is paying the price.
The solution eventually will require a re-examination of the type of individuals to whom we give the high privilege of serving on the Supremes: their humanity, courage, practical experience, empathy, moral leadership, problem-solving ability, expertise in furthering human rights, and commitment to equal justice for all, rather than narrow “out of the mainstream” political ideologies. The current outrage and unrest over the lack of social justice in the United States can be tied directly to the Supremes’ lack of leadership, courage, humanity, and an overriding commitment to equal justice under law. This version of the Supremes has failed America. Badly!We must do better in the future!
As cities burn, Trump’s bullhorn drowns out the voices of our better angels
AS BUILDINGS and businesses burn in many cities across America, state and local officials and community leaders are desperately and at times bravely saluting the justifiable moral outrage of peaceful protesters while seeking to ensure that looters and hooligans whose only agenda is mayhem do not irreparably sully the cause. Meanwhile, President Trump, whose words could matter most, plays his customary role as human flamethrower: exactly the wrong leader for the times.
No magic elixir could extinguish the rage overnight, nor ensure that the fury over George Floyd’s brutal killing in Minneapolis is channeled in a constructive direction. But this much is certain: Words matter, and a commitment to reform matters. Some leaders are trying to deliver both. They recognize the challenges of systemic injustice; the pattern of brutality suffered by African Americans at the hands of white officers; the racism manifested in so many ways, including unequal rates of imprisonment and, now, unequal suffering from the novel coronavirus, both medically and economically.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump, the divider in chief, fulminates as the nation burns. He does not counsel restraint; nor issue appeals for unity, nor acknowledge the roots and reasons for the fury of black Americans who see white men in uniform as threats to their lives. To his administration, there is no systemic challenge, only “a few bad apples” among police, as Robert C. O’Brien, national security adviser, said Sunday. Even as police train their weapons on journalists doing their jobs by covering the unrest, Mr. Trump attacks the media. As the president vents — warning that “the most ominous weapons” and “the most vicious dogs” would be unleashed on protesters; threatening to deploy the active-duty military; attacking Democrats; relishing the Secret Service’s readiness for “action”; suggesting he may summon his MAGA supporters to the streets — the country’s more emollient voices are muffled.
Wanton destruction, looting and firebombing are unacceptable and unjustified no matter what the provocation, as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said on Saturday. Responsible leaders are trying to send that message. But against the president’s bullhorn, it becomes harder to hear leaders like Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose anger at destructive rioters in her city was tempered by a heartfelt appeal. “We are better than this as a city, we are better than this as a country,” she said. “Go home. Go home!” It becomes more difficult to focus on the message of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who tweeted, “Minnesota consistently ranks highly for our public schools, innovation and opportunity, and happiness – if you’re white. If you’re not, the opposite is true. Systemic racism must be addressed if we are to secure justice, peace, and order for all Minnesotans.”
So much depends right now on moral authority, yet so little of it can break through the chaos of events and the venomous soundtrack from Washington. The right message would combine an insistence on keeping protest peaceful with assurances that justice will be done in Mr. Floyd’s death and a recognition that righting deeper wrongs is an urgent priority. That message will not come from a White House that has used racial hatred as a wedge and repeatedly made clear its contempt for urban America. It is left to other leaders to try to break through the mayhem of the moment, and give voice to our better angels.
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Trump, already the worst President in U.S. history, has been a clear and present danger to the welfare, security, and continued existence of our nation since he took office.
His malicious incompetence, corruption, ignorance, racism, meanness, and lack of humanity are now on full display. Trump and his band of grifters, White Nationalists, toadies, and incompetents are a big part of the problem, not the solution!
Indeed, we can’t even get a constructive start on solving the problems of institutional racism, inequality, and failure to take equal justice for all as a serious goal with Trump in office. For example, Trump and the GOP have it very clear that they have the intent and a variety of schemes to suppress African-American and Hispanic-American voting and voting power this November — so far, with no meaningful pushback from the Supremes.
Still, we “are where we are” today because those institutions with a responsibility and the authority to curb his abuses, hold him accountable for his racism and dishonesty, and enforce our Constitution, namely, the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and the GOP have failed to do so. Beyond that, on many occasions they have actually encouraged and joined in his misdeeds.
This November, vote like your life depends on it.Because it does!
The most powerful people and institutions in the South spread paranoia and fear to protect slavery. Their beliefs led the country to war—and continue to haunt our politics to this day.
Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.May 29, 2020
Photo-illustration by Damon Davis
In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country”and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.” Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts and then allow the South to burn, rather than stepping in to quell resistance. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending “emissaries” to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.” Georgia’s insisted that the “avowed purpose” of Republican leaders was to “subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.”
These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.
The lies might not have spread so far or engendered so much violence if not for the real threat, and the real fear, that they tapped into. There was no great sectional war planned to root out slavery in the South, no plot among Lincoln’s allies to execute a mass murder of slaveholders and their families. But there were slave revolts. And those slave revolts could become deadly. In the Caribbean, a series of mass rebellions broke out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most successful of these, the Haitian Revolution, forged a new free state out of a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands of Europeans and white colonists, along with more than 100,000 slaves and freedmen. In the United States, where slaves remained a minority of southern state populations, violent uprisings were more limited, but still occurred: Individual slaves lashed out; groups of fugitives fought off slave catchers; and, every so often, an organized rebellion was planned.
These uprisings contradicted the narratives that southern slaveholders had constructed. In their telling, slaves were well cared for and content, provided with a better life than they could ever build for themselves in freedom—a life that would give them no good reason to turn on their owners.
To square this defense of slavery with the threat of resistance, southern slaveowners “over time shifted toward a more conspiratorial view,” Matthew J. Clavin, an American- and Atlantic-history professor at the University of Houston, told me. “Slaveowners blamed outsiders. Or they blamed free black people. Or they blamed foreign emissaries from London [for] trying to incite their slaves to rebel.”
Writing in The Atlantic in 1861 about the free black man Denmark Vesey’s thwarted plans to lead an uprising in Charleston, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the first official report on the revolt considered a range of possible motivations for the rebels—including “Congressional eloquence,” “a Church squabble,” and “mistaken indulgences”—but not that slavery itself might be to blame. “It never seems to occur to any of these spectators,” Higginson observed, “that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.”
Abolitionists were a favorite boogeyman in slaveholders’ stories. Antislavery pamphlets and speeches were also cited in reports about Vesey’s plans as a “means for inflaming the minds of the colored population” and instigating rebellion.
Such accusations were common in the first half of the 19th century, Clavin noted. “There would be episodes of a slave burning a slave owner’s house to the ground or slitting an overseer’s throat,” he said. “And there would be a wealthy abolitionist from New York City who would give a speech, and the speech didn’t incite violence, didn’t encourage anyone to run away, but six months later, southerners would be blaming that northern orator for causing the slave disturbance. It really [was] just an unbelievable ignorance of the facts used to create a community-wide response that was anti-abolitionist.”
John Brown’s attempt to start a mass slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859 seemed to confirm these sentiments. Brown was like a character straight out of a conspiracy theory: a white abolitionist who intended to arm slaves and turn them against their owners with the backing of a secretive network of antislavery supporters in New England (one of whom laid out the conspiracy in detail in The Atlantic years later).
For southerners, the John Brown rebellion “lent credence to that conspiratorial thinking that The abolitionists are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts,” Clavin said. But Brown’s raid was, in reality, “an absolute anomaly. Very few, if any, abolitionists, black or white, were literally willing to start a slave insurrection themselves.”
And slaveholders knew it. “They overstated the threat from abolitionists,” Clavin said. “They did that on purpose, because it served their intellectual needs”—allowing them to unite the South against a common enemy and to defend the narrative that slaves were docile and content.
At the same time, slaveholders worked to further unite the white South in fear of rebellion by circulating the “diametrically opposed image” of enslaved people as innately violent and dangerous, Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. The revolutionaries in Haiti, for example, were portrayed not as “freedom fighters, but as barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake,” she said.
The abolitionist John Weiss detailed how the revolution was transformed into a scary story for southerners—commonly called “the Horrors of San Domingo”—in an 1862 article for The Atlantic. “The Haytian bugbear” had been wielded by pro-slavery forces “to render anti-slavery sentiment odious” and “to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity” of emancipation, he wrote.
The specter of mass uprising spread “both in public and private narratives,” Sinha said. Southerners grew to fear that “at the moment of emancipation” slaves “were going to wage a huge Haitian Revolution–like rebellion that would kill all whites and establish ‘black supremacy,’” or that they “were just going to rise up, rape all white women, and that would be the end of whiteness.”
These conspiracy theories made an existential threat out of emancipation, and insidious enemies out of northern antislavery forces. Eventually, they became so powerful that southern leaders decided to break from the Union and launch the Civil War. Their racist defenses of slavery could not admit the possibility of a peaceable emancipation such as the one that Lincoln and northern abolitionists actually sought. So after decades of preaching that abolition would mean sweeping violence, southern leaders brought that violence on themselves—and hastened the end of slavery in the process.
Slavery was, however, survived by the racist fears intended to protect it. Sinha traced their legacy through generations of murder, incarceration, and exclusion, from the “regime of racial terror” in the postwar South to the restrictive immigration laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the way up to the “authoritarian mindsets, conspiratorial ways of thinking, and demonization of the other” that continue to pervade American politics in the present day. The belief in abolitionist terror and black violence that southern slaveholders had constructed, she explained, made the prospect of “a republic of equal citizens” feel like an existential threat not only to the culture of white supremacy but to all the white people who lived in it. The groups of people embodying the threat have changed and expanded over time: from slaves to Asian immigrants to civil-rights activists to Muslim Americans. But the fear has never entirely gone away. Through the lens of that fear, racist violence, such as that practiced by the Ku Klux Klan, and laws, such as voting restrictions or Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” have been reframed as protective measures. Conspiratorial vigilance and authoritarianism become shields against an imagined revolution.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Annika’s article at the link.
Clearly, Donald Trump did not originate the concept of “fake news,” nor did he invent internet conspiracy theories. But, he, his cronies, and his enablers have become experts in exploiting it for their own selfish purposes: From the absurdist, yet dangerous and divisive, “birtherism” to today’s disingenuous attempts to shift blame for the racism that has spawned disorder throughout our nation.
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
“At Some Point the Country Is Going to Have to Wake Up”: James Clyburn on the Floyd Killing and The Role of Race In The Coming Election
Chris SmithMay 29, 2020
Clyburn, who helped hand Biden his presumptive nomination, talks about Biden’s “you ain’t black” and V.P. possibilities, and why this moment is defined by “raw politics and meanness.”
by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images.
James Clyburn grew up in a segregated South Carolina. He is now the longest-serving member of the state’s congressional delegation and the highest-ranking black Democrat in the House. In February, Clyburn basically saved Joe Biden’s presidential bid, endorsing Biden three days before South Carolina’s pivotal primary and helping deliver the decisive black vote. On Thursday evening, just after landing in his home state for a weekend visit, the 79-year-old Clyburn talked about holding on to his optimism in the wake of yet another brutal killing of a black man by police.
Vanity Fair: What was your reaction when you saw the video of a Minneapolis cop kneeling on the neck of George Floyd?
James Clyburn: I don’t know that I would describe my emotion as anger. I guess I should be angry. Maybe at my age, and as many of these kinds of things as I’ve experienced, you get to the point where you say, but for the video, I would not have seen it; other people would not have seen it; and the official word would be all anyone knew. I do feel, though, that at some point the country is going to have to wake up to this reality.
What do you tell black Americans, particularly young black male Americans, who say the country is long past the point when it should have awakened, and that the reality is just racism and hatred?
Going back to the student movement and the civil rights movement, I’ve really questioned many times whether or not what we were doing made any real sense. Whether there was any possibility of success. But along with people like John Lewis, who I met in October 1960, he’s held on to his faith in the country, and I’ve held on to mine. I went to jail several times. I ran for office three times before I got elected. You don’t give up. You aren’t going to win by giving up.
by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
The four Minneapolis police officers have been fired. Should they be tried for murder?
They certainly should stand trial. The hand of one is the hand of all, so four people need to be on trial.
In a conference call with House leaders two days after Floyd’s death, you talked about it being a symptom of larger problems that plague minority communities, and that it showed the need for systemic change. What did you mean?
I have been saying for a long time now that so much in this country needs to be restructured. Health care, education, the judicial system. Every time these issues are raised, folks on the Republican side find a way to parse the words and turn it to their agenda, and they get accommodated by too many people in the media. When we first started discussing the CARES Act, I said to my caucus, in a Zoom call, that this was a tremendous opportunity for us to restructure things in our vision. My vision comes from the pledge of allegiance: liberty and justice for all. That remains a vision—but we’re not doing much to make that vision a reality. Mitch McConnell goes on the floor of the Senate and calls me out, as if there’s something nasty about my vision. He never asked me what my vision was. I’ve got it on billboards all over Charleston: “Making America’s Greatness Accessible and Affordable for All.” What’s wrong with that? And that’s been weaponized by the other side as something untoward. It’s ideology, it’s raw politics, and meanness. That’s why we can’t fix these things.
Do you think the Floyd killing will end Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s chances of being picked as Joe Biden’s running mate?
It certainly won’t help. But it’s not just this. Her history with similar situations when she was a prosecutor came up time and again during the campaign. I suspect this incident plays into that.
You said you cringed when Biden told a radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”
I compare Joe Biden to the alternative, not the Almighty. One of the things I learned early in this business is that one of the worst things you can do in politics is to make a joke out of any serious matter. He would have been better off not doing that.
Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who happens to be black, said that Biden’s remark showed him to be “condescending and arrogant.”
I’ve known Joe Biden for a long, long time. I don’t perceive anything about him to be arrogant. Tim Scott supports [Donald] Trump, and I don’t. If he can reconcile his blackness with Trump, that’s fine. I can’t reconcile mine with Trump. I’ll never ever accept the president of the United States looking into a camera and calling a black woman a dog. I will never get over that. Nothing else he says will matter to me. And he said that not about one of his opponents—that was about one of his staffers! Who supported him! I have three daughters, and I know how I’d feel about any man calling one of them a dog.
With his attacks on former president Barack Obama, among other things, it’s clear that Trump is going to play the race card in his reelection campaign. Do you worry about the tensions becoming dangerous, or is it better to have the issue out in the open?
I think we’re in much better shape for it to be out in the open than for it to be hidden under a bushel. That’s what happened in 2016. The whole thing about African American males responding to Trump saying, “What do you have to lose?” I know from my visits to barber shops that it resonated. But if you fool me once, that’s on you. If you fool me twice, that’s on me. If black men allow themselves to be fooled twice, it’s on them. Four years later, if it ain’t clear what they have to lose, if they can’t count up their losses with Trump, ask them to ask me.
You have said that it isn’t “a must” for Biden to pick a black woman as the vice presidential nominee. Why not?
I remember Sarah Palin. She was fine until it turned out the vetting hadn’t been thoroughly done. I remember Geraldine Ferraro. She was fine. It was her husband that got exposed during the campaign. So if I say it’s a must and something turns up in the vetting, what does that make me? I’m never going to say it’s a must for him to choose a black woman. It would be a plus.
Are you confident that black turnout will be high enough to win no matter whom Biden chooses?
I don’t know about that. Black voters are incentivized already. You can always stimulate the vote. There are picks that could energize the vote.
If Biden said, “Jim, I’ll choose whomever you want,” what would say?
I’m not gonna tell you! But I would tell him.
There’s a tremendous amount of outrage right now about the George Floyd and the Ahmaud Arbery killings. But unfortunately, we’ve seen this cycle many times before, where attention fades after a few weeks.
I think something’s going to be different about this. After the Minneapolis killing, I saw the Minnesota attorney general on TV. For the first time in the state’s history, that attorney general is African American. Also Muslim. That, to me, helps set this whole issue on a different plane. Minneapolis had issues with the former mayor and the police. This mayor says he’s calling for these men to be indicted. To me, that’s progress in something all of us need to work on. You can’t take these things in silos. I’m a history guy. I’ve been studying this country’s history pretty much all my life. It’s pretty sordid in some areas. But that history ought to inform us. Everybody’s not going to learn the lessons. The ones who learn, you hope they change the world.
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Our country can’t get to the better future we need with horrible, unqualified, bigoted leaders like Trump, Pence, Mitch, et al.
One of the most unhelpful of our failed institutions: A Supreme Court that has abandoned the courageous heritage of Brown v. Board of Education and instead encouraged, embraced, aided, and abetted the “Dred Scottification of the other” by a corrupt, bigoted, racist, overtly White Nationalist Executive and his equally corrupt cronies and toadies.
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
That’s because the pretense was nonsense from the start. Trump’s regulatory agenda was never about helping the economy; it was always about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. White House officials have weaponized the “administrative state” they claim to hate and have repeatedly tried to strangle disfavored groups with regulations and red tape.
Not just Twitter, either.
Arbitrary delays in processing visa applications, for example, have been used to punish immigrants and the companies that employ them. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has rejected visa applications because applicants lack a middle name. It has also waited to mail approved visas until (oops!) after the visas had already expired.
The additional costs and uncertainty these processing changes create for workers and their employers are a feature, not a bug.
Elsewhere, both federal and state officials have ratcheted up bureaucratic hurdles for the poor, as Georgetown University professors Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan have documented.
Right now, for example, states can decide a poor family is automatically eligible for food assistance if the family is enrolled in other means-tested safety-net programs. The Trump administration is trying to block states from doing this, and require more paperwork to prove eligibility. By the administration’s own calculations, this would cause 1 million children to lose their automatic eligibility for free school lunches.
The administration, of course, argues that its regulatory decisions are determined not by Trump’s political whims but by meticulous analysis of what’s best for the economy.Helpfully, a method exists to check their work: the cost-benefits analysis that agencies must produce ahead of major rule changes.
These records show, however, that the administration has repeatedly struggled to prove that its regulatory actions actually increase economic and social welfare.
To get the numbers to work out in its favor, the administration has had to cook the books.
. . . .
The only upside to this slapdash math is that it makes the administration’s most damaging and punitive regulatory changes less likely to hold up in court. Already, the Trump administration has lost more than 90 percent of the legal challenges to its regulatory policies, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. By comparison, previous administrations lost only about 30 percent of the time.
“A lot of these losses have been because of the poor quality of the analysis — who’s harmed, who’s helped, by how much,” said Richard Revesz, a law professor who directs the institute.
The only thing that may save us from the administration’s regulatory vindictiveness is its incompetence.
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Read the rest of Catherine’s article at the link.
As usual, Catherine’s analysis is “spot on.” My problem is this.
If the same private litigant and his or her lawyers kept presenting Federal Courts with false, misleading, or just plain faked evidence and statistics, the private lawyers likely would be facing discipline or disbarment for failure to provide “candor to a tribunal.” The client would be facing large penalties and likely contempt for continuing to institute or cause frivolous litigation.
Yet, except for occasional “harsh but toothless” language in judicial opinions or a couple of minor fines, Trump, his sycophantic toadies, and his battery of unethical Government lawyers get off scot-free for abusing the Article III Judiciary and our legal and judicial processes. Meanwhile, the private litigants are forced to file the same challenges over and over again in different jurisdictions across the country. In the area of immigration, asylum, and human rights, most of the lawyers are donating their time pro bono, while the unethical Government attorneys and their corrupt clients are on the taxpayer’s dime.
The occasional Equal Access to Justice Act award against the Government seldom comes close to compensating private lawyers for their actual lost time and lost opportunities. Nor does it deter the Trump regime, because it comes out of “you of the taxpayers’” pocket.
A Federal Judge demands accurate statistics from DHS after private litigants show the last batch was bogus; the DHS merely submits another set of bogus or misleading data, forcing the private litigants to once again have to demonstrate their unreliability. Government officials and their attorneys claim, contrary to fact, that there is no “child separation” policy, but suffer no consequences other than to be told to stop violating the Constitution. Instead of doing that, they “repackage” unconstitutional child separation as a bogus “parental choice.” So, now the private litigants, who have already won once, have to show that the latest iteration of a clearly illegal and contemptuous policy is what it is: unlawful.
A Federal Judge orders they DHS to make individualized release determinations for detainees held in overcrowded substandard conditions that violate the Government’s own health guidance. Instead of doing that, the DHS merely moves them to another, slightly less crowded facility with equally bad conditions and falsely claims they have “fixed” the problem. Again, the private litigants have to gather new evidence that the move has not materially reduced the health risks to the clients. And so on.
Essentially, the Trump regime and their lawyers are playing a big game of “hide the ball;” every time the private advocates show the Federal Judge where the ball actually is hidden, the Government simply moves it again. And, unfortunately, most Federal Judges give the regime and its ethics-challenged lawyers unlimited “plays” at the expense of the other side. Even when relief is ordered, it just solves the “problem of the moment” rather than halting the pattern of ethical abuses, contemptuous attitudes, and unlawful conduct by the regime and its complicit lawyers.
In effect, the regime has “weaponized” the Federal Courts and the Article III Judiciary in a way not dissimilar from how Sessions and Barr have “weaponized” the Immigration Courts. Turning the Article III Courts into a feckless “runaround” where the individuals and their lawyers “lose even when they win” makes the process punitive and serves as a deterrent to those seeking to challenge the regime’s overtly lawless agenda.
The November election is the chance to throw a scofflaw regime out of office. But, the deep-seated institutional and integrity problems of an Article III Judiciary, beginning with the dangerously complicit and spineless in the face of tyranny “Roberts Court,” that has allowed itself to be “weaponized” and used by the army of authoritarian scofflaws to punish those seeking to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law won’t be solved so quickly. The Article III Judiciary requires an institutional re-examination and a philosophical and ethical overhaul so that it serves the Constitution, due process of law, and equal justice for all, rather than protecting the interests of an insular right-wing minority that seeks nothing less than the disintegration of our nation and our cherished democratic institutions.
A.G. Sessions To Citizens Who Suffered Police Brutality: Go Pound Sand! — Busting Criminals, Deporting Migrants, Policing Tech Employers Takes Precedence Over Civil Rights Protections For African Americans — Baltimore Police Reformers Forced To “Stand Alone” After DOJ Pulls The Rug Out From Underneath Them!
Lynh Bui and Peter Hermann report in the Washington Post:
“BALTIMORE — After the federal government released a searing 163-page report in August condemning police practices in Baltimore, the police commissioner and mayor stood with Justice Department leaders to promise sweeping reform.
Change was necessary, they all said, not only to prevent riots like those that flared after the fatal injury of Freddie Gray in police custody, but also to repair the long-standing, deep rift between the city’s crime-weary residents and its police.
Nine months later, Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner again appeared before television cameras committing to overhaul the department.
But this time they stood by themselves.
“I’m asking the citizens of Baltimore to have faith that we will continue this work,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (D) said Tuesday. “It’s hard to deny that these kinds of reforms don’t need to take place in the city of Baltimore.”
On January 12, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Justice Dept. reached a deal for sweeping reforms to the Baltimore Police Dept. after a federal review found officers routinely violated residents’ civil rights. (Reuters)
The pledge to move ahead came hours after the Justice Department had asked a federal judge Monday night to postpone the department’s tentative police reform agreement with the city — part of a wider review of pacts nationwide ordered by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The Baltimore consent agreement was announced days before President Trump took office and awaits a federal judge’s approval.
The request for a delay, which a judge has yet to rule on, left some Baltimore leaders and residents worried that momentum will wane and leave the city stuck in a familiar loop of unfulfilled promises.
Interim city solicitor David Ralph would not comment Tuesday on whether the city would file a response to the requested delay.
“It seemed clear that Justice was going ahead with these reforms, and now all of a sudden they don’t want to do it,” said Rebecca Nagle, co-director of the No Boundaries Coalition, a resident-led advocacy group.
The coalition helped organize residents to relay their experiences with city police to the Justice Department team that produced the August report, which concluded that the police department engaged in unconstitutional policing that discriminated against black residents in poor communities through illegal searches, arrests and stops for minor offenses.
“Residents invested two years doing this, and not going forward will destroy the trust that has built up,” Nagle said.
In Sessions’s two-page memo ordering the review of open and pending consent decrees, he said the department wants to guarantee the pacts are in line with Trump administration goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.
“The Federal government alone cannot successfully address rising crime rates, secure public safety, protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public, or implement best practices in policing,” the memo stated. “These are, first and foremost, tasks for state, local and tribal law enforcement.”
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Now, I might only be a retired Immigration Judge, not a civil rights expert. But, even I can tell that if “state and local law enforcement” could solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.
In fact, until former Attorney General Lynch and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division intervened, state and local authorities had done their best to cover up the problems and avoid solving them. (And, I’m by no means a fan of Lynch. She was appropriately very interested in vindicating the civil rights of African Americans. But, she wasn’t interested in the human rights of mostly Hispanic women and children fleeing Central America. She aided and abetted a system of detention of such asylum applicants under deplorable conditions and hustling their cases through the U.S. Immigration Courts, in too many cases without full due process or even an opportunity for a fair hearing.)
No, what Sessions really means is that he has no interest whatsoever in helping the African American community vindicate their civil rights if it means clamping down on police abuses. After all, look at the “bang up” job that Session’s home state, Alabama, did on protecting its African American citizens from police abuses for most of the 20th Century. Who could ask for more? Or, perhaps we should get a “second opinion” from Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) who had his head split open by one of Sessions’s “police heroes,” an Alabama State Trooper.
That’s what often happens when the Feds rely on states and localities to vindicate citizen’s constitutional rights against the state’s own abuses. Classic “fox guarding the chicken coop.” Sort of like having Jeff Sessions protecting the rights of minorities and migrants. Yeah, the Birmingham Bridge incident was in 1965. But, Sessions and his gang have every intention of turning the clock back to those “glory days” of state’s rights.
Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was “silenced” on the Senate floor for “disparaging” a colleague, Senator Sessions, by putting the truth about his tone-deaf record on civil and human rights “in the record.” But, silenced or not, Warren spoke truth about Session’s unsuitability to serve as Attorney General. Sadly, African Americans, Hispanics, members of the LGBT community, and migrants are likely to find out first hand that “he’s still the same ol’ Jeff.”
PWS
04-04-17
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The George Floyd tragedy became largely inevitable the day a GOP-controlled Senate approved the stunningly unqualified 21st Century Jim Crow Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions to be Attorney General. The results have been disastrous for America and particularly cruel and tragic for people of color.
Also, as a nation, we need to come to grips with the failure of our Supreme Court. The Supremes’ GOP majority has enabled, encouraged, and embraced the Trump regime’s “Dred Scottification” of “the other.”
They have disgracefully and improperly failed to set a legal and moral tone condemning racist abuses, kids in cages, gross mistreatment of legal asylum seekers, and blatantly biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Courts” that parody and mock justice every day. The Supremes have enabled GOP schemes to erode minority voting and political power and have shown a willingness bordering on enthusiasm to accept bogus security-related “pretexts” for racism, religious intolerance, and abuse of authority by Trump and his cronies!
Unwarranted favoritism toward unethical Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco is also a glaring, inexcusable problem. America’s future depends on a more diverse, courageous, humane, and “connected with reality” Supreme Court; a Court that rejects bogus right-wing legal nonsense; a Court that solves problems, upholds individual legal rights, insists on “equal justice for all,” and holds the Executive fully accountable for intentional abuses of authority.
This November, vote like you life and the survival of our democratic republic depend on it! Because they do!
DOJ memo offered to buy out immigration board members
The buyouts were only offered to Board of Immigration Appeals members hired before Trump took office
The Justice Department memo came from the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, a Justice Department agency. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
The Justice Department offered buyouts to pre-Trump administration career members on its influential immigration appeals board as part of an ongoing effort to restructure the immigration court system with new hires who may be likely to render decisions restricting asylum.
An internal memo viewed by CQ Roll Call shows that James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, offered financial incentives to longtime members of the Board of Immigration Appeals to encourage them to retire or resign. The buyouts and “voluntary separation incentive payments” were offered to “individuals whose positions will help us strategically restructure EOIR in order to accommodate skills, technology, and labor markets,” according to the April 17 memo.
EOIR is the Justice Department agency that oversees the Board of Immigration Appeals, a 23-member body that reviews appealed decisions by immigration judges and sets precedent.
According to two knowledgeable sources at EOIR who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, the memo was sent to the nine board members appointed under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, before Trump took office. No one accepted the buyout offers, according to both sources.
CQ Roll Call reached out for comment on the memo to McHenry, EOIR and the Justice Department and received a statement Wednesday saying that “the Department does not comment on personnel matters.”
“Any insinuation that politicized hiring has become ramped up is inconsistent with the facts,” the statement said.
The memo sheds light on an ongoing debate over BIA hiring. Immigration judges, lawyers and former EOIR employees say the Trump administration has used the board to help meet its goal of reducing immigration, while government officials say they have simply streamlined a lengthy hiring process that was always subject to political judgments.
In October, CQ Roll Call reported on documents showing the Justice Department had tweaked the hiring process to fill six new vacancies on the board with immigration judges with high asylum denial rates and a track record of complaints. Additional memos that CQ Roll Call wrote about earlier this month shed further light on these rule changes that enabled fast-tracking of those and more recent hires.
The three most recent hires to the board include an immigration judge who denied 96 percent of the asylum requests before him and had a history of formal complaints about “bias and prejudice.” The vacancies were created after a flurry of career board members left the BIA.
“EOIR does not select board members based on prohibited criteria such as race or politics, and it does not discriminate against applicants based on any prohibited characteristics,” the Justice Department said in its statement. “All board members are selected through an open, competitive, merit-based process that begins with a public advertisement on the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) federal employment website.”
Recent changes to EOIR hiring procedures “have made the selection process of board members more formalized and neutral,” the department said.
While buyouts are typically offered to soften the blow of workforce reductions, the two sources at EOIR said the agency’s offers were made so that the BIA could be reconfigured entirely, with the positions of “board members” replaced by those of “appellate immigration judges.” The differences go beyond title, extending to pay ranges and leave policy. Appellate immigration judges also hear cases at both the trial and appellate levels, creating potential conflicts of interests.
“Many board members have viewed themselves as appellate immigration judges for years, and EOIR first proposed such a designation in 2000,” according to the Justice Department statement. “Elevating trial-level judges to appellate-level courts is common in every judicial system in the United States.”
The American Immigration Lawyers Association and other critics said the buyout offer is the latest example in a series of moves that have undermined the neutrality of the immigration court system. They point out that BIA is already housed under a law enforcement agency, the Justice Department, whose leadership may have a stake in the outcome of the court process.
“The administration is trying to further politicize the immigration court system by packing the appellate bench and is seeking to make room for more handpicked judges with this buyout,” Benjamin Johnson, AILA’s executive director, told CQ Roll Call.
“These latest actions reveal the severe impact of our nation’s immigration system being housed under the Attorney General and only underscore the real need to create an independent immigration court,” he said.
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The refusal of the “holdovers” to take the “buyout” just forced the DOJ politicos to use a different “strategy:” creating additional “appellate judgeships” and “packing” them with appointees with established records of hostility to asylum seekers and the due process rights of respondents.
This presents an interesting historical comparison with an earlier GOP Administration’s program for promoting an anti-immigrant agenda at the BIA. Under Bush II, Ashcroft arbitrarily “cut” the size of the BIA to get rid of the vocal minority of judges who dared to speak up (usually in dissent) for the rights of asylum seekers and other migrants to due process, fundamental fairness, and humane treatment. I was one of those judges “exiled” from the BIA during the “Ashcroft Purge of ‘03.”
Fortunately, I got a “soft landing” just down the hill from the “EOIR Tower” at the Arlington Immigration Court where I remained on the bench and (mostly) “below the radar screen” for the following 13 years. And, yes, I was offered a “buyout” in the form of “early retirement,” which would have been a rather bad financial deal for me at the time.So, I rejected it, and eventually got a much better “deal.”
The DOJ’s claim that the current farce is a “merit selection system” is beyond preposterous. But, as long as Congress and the Article IIIs won’t stand up to Trump’s blatant abuses of due process, the “de-professionalization” of the career Civil Service, and the dehumanization of the “other” before the law (“Dred Scottificfation”), the charade will continue.
Of course the problem isn’t, as EOIR would lead you to believe, that some “trial judges” are elevated to the appellate bench. It’s which “trial judges” are being “rewarded” for their records of hostility to asylum seekers, respondents, and their attorneys.
Also, in what has become essentially a “closed system” of Immigration Judges, staffed almost exclusively by government attorneys overwhelmingly with prosecutorial backgrounds, the “elevation” of existing trial judges, basically tilts the system heavily in favor of DHS and against respondents. Indeed, some fine Immigration Judges with broader experience including private practice, who would have made superior Appellate Immigration Judges in a true merit-based system, were instead forced off the bench by the demeaning, biased, restrictionist policies implemented at EOIR.
Also, having served as both a trial and appellate judge, I know that the “skill sets” are related, but by no means identical. Not all good trial judges make good appellate judges and vice versa. While it’s certainly to be expected that some trial judges will be elevated to the appellate bench, that should not be the sole source of appellate judges.
Appellate judging requires scholarship, collegiality, creativity, writing, and a broad perspective that many talented private advocates, academics, and NGO lawyers possess in abundance. The same holds true of the Article III Appellate Bench. From the Supremes on down, it’s basically in various degrees of failure to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution against the attacks by the Trump regime.
It’s a case of far too many former District Court Judges, former prosecutors, and right-wing “think tankers,” and far too few individuals who have litigation, legal, and life experience gained from representing those who actually come before the courts. The Supremes in particular are badly in need of folks with a broader, more practical, more humane perspective on the law.
The institutional failure of today’s Supremes in the face of concerted Executive tyranny threatens to collapse our entire justice system and take our democratic republic down with it. The whole Article III judicial selection system needs careful reexamination and reforms lest it fall into the same type of institutional dysfunction and disrepute as today’s Immigration “Courts” (which aren’t “courts” at all in any normal sense of the word).
Of course, Trump, Barr, and the rest of their anti-democracy gang would love to make the captive, biased, Executive-controlled Immigration “Courts” the “model” for the Article III Judiciary. And, John Roberts and the rest of the “JR Five” seem all too eager to accommodate them. The perception already is out here that Roberts & Co. “work for” Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco in somewhat the same way as Immigration “Judges” work for Billy Barr. Until Roberts and his gang show the courage to stand up to Trump and enforce the legal, constitutional, and human rights of “the other” in our society, that perception will only deepen.
As generations of African-Americans discovered following the end of Reconstruction, Constitutional and legal rights are meaningless in the face of biased and cowardly legislators, judges, and other public officials who simply look the other way, join the abuses, or “go along to get along” with treating “the other” unfairly under the law.
Due Process Forever, Captive & Complicit Courts, Never!
Washington, DC – According to the Roll Call story published May 27, 2020, Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) Director McHenry sent the remaining members of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) a buy-out memo offering them financial compensation in exchange for early retirement or resignation. This memo was sent on April 17, 2020, during the global public health crisis, and highlights the continuing push by this administration to manipulate the functions of the BIA, the appeals court located within EOIR.
AILA Executive Director Benjamin Johnson stated, “This administration has taken numerous steps to alter the composition and role of the BIA, all in an effort to gain more control over the immigration courts and influence court decisions. In recent months, it came to light that the EOIR Director was attempting to pack the immigration bench with more appointees who have among the lowest asylum grant rates in the country. Now, he is attempting to winnow existing members from the BIA and replace them with a roster of Appellate Immigration Judges, despite congressional and stakeholder concerns about politicization of the BIA. Last year, these new appellate judge positions were created out of thin air. They appear to have nearly identical job functions as the BIA members but the Appellate Immigration Judges can adjudicate both trial and appellate level cases at the same time and can be reassigned away from the BIA at the whim of the EOIR Director.”
“This effort shows a complete disregard, or at the very least a failure to appreciate how our judicial system is supposed to work to provide a fair day in court. In 2003, Attorney General Ashcroft purged several members of the BIA, a political move that was severely criticized and ultimately undermined the credibility of our court system. These recent efforts by this administration make it even clearer that our nation urgently needs an immigration court system that is independent, fair and impartial.”
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The American Immigration Lawyers Association is the national association of immigration lawyers established to promote justice, advocate for fair and reasonable immigration law and policy, advance the quality of immigration and nationality law and practice, and enhance the professional development of its members.
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The BIA is a travesty, to be sure. But, an even bigger travesty is the continued “deference” given to a biased, unqualified, non-expert tribunal and its political handlers by the Article III Courts! Under Marbury v. Madison, it’s the job of the Article III Courts to say what the law is. To “defer” to the BIA, a body that currently functions not like a independent, expert tribunal, but has become a “shill” for DHS Enforcement and an adjunct of White Nationalist White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, is a disgraceful case of judicial task avoidance and dereliction of duty.
If nothing else, the ongoing disaster at the BIA points to an “inconvenient truth” in America’s justice system: We need better, more informed (particularly in the areas of immigrants’ rights and human rights), more courageous judges at all levels of the Federal Judiciary if we are to survive as a democratic republic where the rule of law and equal justice under law have meaning!
Migrant children are still confined and vulnerable. It’s a gratuitous act of cruelty.
By Editorial Board
May 25 at 2:09 PM ET
As the pandemic gathered speed In March, a federal judge called the government’s immigrant detention centers “hotbeds of contagion” and ordered that migrant children be released from them without delay. Some have been. But the Trump administration has dragged its feet in freeing many migrant children detained with their families, offering parents the formal “option” of letting their children go — to be separated from their mothers and fathers.
That Hobson’s choice was presented in mid-May to several hundred asylum-seeking parents at the three migrant family detention centers, in Texas and Pennsylvania, run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many Americans may have assumed that the administration, scalded by its last experiment with separating migrant children from their families, would not again broach that subject. But it did.
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On May 13 and 14, parents at those facilities, mainly mothers, were herded into sudden encounters with ICE officials, who presented them with forms to sign. The detainees’ lawyers were neither notified nor aware of what was going on. The forms presented parents with the option of allowing government agents to place their children with relatives or other sponsors elsewhere in the United States, while the parents would stay behind in detention. Very few of the parents assented, though plenty were shaken by the experience; some agreed without realizing the repercussions, according to a subsequent court filing.
Judge Dolly M. Gee, of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, has jurisdiction over detained migrant children under the 1997 Flores settlement, which prohibits the long-term detention of migrant minors. In March, as covid-19 cases were spreading rapidly in migrant detention facilities, she ordered the administration to speed up the release of minors; hundreds were placed with sponsors. However, the Flores agreement grants the judge no jurisdiction over parents detained with their children.
That apparently prompted ICE to undertake its proceedings in the family detention centers, in which agents asked asylum-seeking parents if they were willing to part with their children, some of them babies and toddlers. In fact, ICE has the authority to release families pending their next appearance in immigration court, and has done so routinely in the past. The Trump administration has taken a different tack, raising the bar on asylum as it subjects migrant families to months-long confinements even if children suffer in the process — which they do.
According to advocates and attorneys for the migrant parents, the parents summoned by ICE officials were confused and intimidated. Some thought they risked being deported if they refused to let their children be taken away. In at least one instance, according to a court filing, a mother who signed the form asked an ICE officer if she could change her mind; she was told no.
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The administration closed the U.S. southern border to asylum seekers this spring, citing the risk of the pandemic. Most detained migrants had entered the country months earlier, and more than 1,000 covid-19 cases have been reported in detention facilities nationwide, including among detainees and staff members. None have been confirmed in the three family detention centers, perhaps because there has been little testing. Still, hundreds of migrant minors detained with their families remain at risk of contracting the virus. At this point, their continuing confinement seems a gratuitous act of cruelty.
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A regime of scofflaws, child abusers, and human rights violators. How will we explain that to future generations?
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
A 34-year-old Guatemalan man who tested positive for COVID-19 died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at a Georgia hospital on Sunday, according to an internal government report obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, 34, had been in ICE custody at Stewart Detention Center, in Lumpkin, since early March and was granted a voluntary departure to Guatemala, ICE later confirmed in a press release.
Baten-Oxlaj was arrested on March 2 at a probation office in Marietta, Georgia “pursuant to his conviction for driving under the influence,” ICE said. On March 26, an immigration judge granted him voluntary departure. “At the time of his death, Baten was awaiting departure from the United States,” ICE added.
On April 17, he was admitted to a local hospital for treatment of decreased oxygen saturation levels, hospital officials tested the man for COVID-19 and the result was positive.
On Sunday, he died at the hospital, according to the report, which listed his preliminary cause of death as COVID-19.
ICE said it “is undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review of this incident, as it does in all such cases.”
His death comes weeks after a 57-year-old man in ICE custody in San Diego died after testing positive for COVID-19. The San Diego County medical examiner’s office said the man, Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, died of acute respiratory failure due to pneumonia resulting from COVID-19. He was the first immigrant in ICE custody to die of the disease.
As of May 16, 1,201 immigrant detainees have tested positive for the disease in ICE custody out of 2,394 who had been tested.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Hamed’s article at the above link.
Unfortunately, this won’t be the last victim. According to the article, over 50% of those detainees tested for COVID-19 were positive.
With the BIA basically taking a “pass/dive” on requiring health and safety considerations to be serious factors in custody decisions, custody cases will continue to be litigated in U.S. District Courts throughout the country. Why have a BIA incapable of functioning as an independent tribunal consistent with due process?
This op-ed argues that the terms we use to discuss immigration rely on a lot of anti-immigrant assumptions.
The United States has a long history of hostility toward immigrants, from barring “undesirables” (a shifting category that has targeted the nonwhite, the disabled, and women) to turning away desperate asylum seekers who went on to gruesome deaths. Even after these cruel laws have been rolled back (and some haven’t), they’ve fundamentally shaped the way we as a nation think of immigration. A lot of the modern policy we consider “common sense” was directly molded by this history. It means that often the terms of the immigration debate rely on a lot of anti-immigrant assumptions. Even the best-intentioned progressives can fall into these traps, which is why examining how we talk about these issues is so important.
THE NOTION THAT THERE ARE “GOOD” AND “BAD” IMMIGRANTS
One common talking point holds that we should welcome the “good” immigrants while getting rid of the “bad” or “criminal” ones. This framing obscures the realities of the U.S. justice system, which disproportionately arrests, convicts, and incarcerates people of color. Black immigrants make up just 7.2% of the noncitizen population, yet they make up over 20% of people facing deportation on criminal grounds. The “good” vs. “bad” framework also obscures how laws are an expression of class power: Financial crimes committed by wealthy individuals and corporations often go unpunished, while everyday people are often punished for their poverty. And even people convicted of crimes shouldn’t lose their humanity, especially in a system that is incentivized to incarcerate.
Anti-immigration advocates often invoke misleading language and statistics suggesting that immigrants commit more crime, while ignoring a vast legal framework set out to criminalize immigrants for minor infractions. Many studies have found that undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, but our very definition of what constitutes a crime has grown dramatically over the past few decades. A set of 1996 laws expanded deportable offenses by reclassifying more minor crimes as “aggravated felonies” in the context of immigration. As a result, immigrants can be considered felons for acts like drug possession or failing to appear in court.
DISTINGUISHING “REAL” REFUGEES FROM ECONOMIC MIGRANTS
Another dangerous misconception is the differentiation between “real” refugees (people whose search for safety we consider valid) and “economic migrants,” who are perceived as “gaming the system” to obtain a higher standard of living in America. This is a fundamentally false dichotomy: People, and the systems we live in, are far too complex to fit in these binaries. Who gets to be considered a “real” refugee is significantly informed by America’s ideological attitudes; for decades, the system was based more on Cold War politics than any real concern for the safety of asylum seekers. Those fleeing political or religious persecution are seen as legitimate, while those fleeing violent crime or a lack of economic opportunity — causes that also have political roots — are, too often, not. It’s a pattern that continues today: People coming to the U.S. from countries where America has vested geopolitical interests have historically had a harder time gaining asylum than those from countries the U.S. ideologically opposes, even if they have strong claims of persecution.
This hierarchy has stark consequences. As the bar becomes ever higher for who is a “true” refugee, many who flee certain death are turned away. Meanwhile, those who flee “less serious” violence, like poverty and starvation, often have no avenue for help. Their experiences expose the glaring gaps in our asylum policy. Why should certain types of violence be taken more seriously than others? Who is to say that the fear of gang violence is worse than that of not being able to feed your children?
. . . .
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Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
Whether you accept Uhlmann’s conclusions or not, her point that immigrants’ advocates often accept the terms and framework set forth by nativists and restrictionists is basically valid. One false concept that appears to govern much of the debate is that immigration is fundamentally “negative” and therefore 1) must be limited to those who can provide immediate economic benefits to us (leaving aside the range of human interests of the immigrants themselves), and 2) that any increases in “desirable” immigration must be offset by cuts, restrictions, and/or removals of “undesirables.”
In many ways, this explains the sad failure of the Obama Administration to adopt more humane and effective immigration policies. They apparently never could get over the idea that they had to “prove their toughness” by deporting record numbers of folks and inflicting some gratuitous cruelty on migrants, particularly helpless asylum seekers, to “establish their creds” and get the GOP to the table to discuss serious immigration reform. No chance!
With restrictionists, even record levels of removals and historically low levels of border apprehensions are “never enough.” That’s because they are coming from a place of ideological nativism which is neither fact nor reality driven. It’s driven by inherent biases and nativist myths.
Overall, immigration is both a human reality — one that actually predated the establishment of “nation-states” — and a plus for both the immigrants and the receiving countries.
That being said, I personally think that immigration should be robust, legal, humane, and orderly. But, I doubt that “immigration without limits” is politically realistic, particularly in today’s climate.
Generally, global “market forces” affect immigration much more than nativists are willing to admit. When the legal system is too far out of line with the realities of “supply and demand” the excess is simply forced into the “extralegal market.”
That’s why we have approximately 11 million so-called “undocumented immigrants” residing in the U.S. today. Most are law abiding, gainfully employed, and have helped fuel our recent economic success. Many have formed the backbone of the unheralded “essential workforce” that has gotten us through the pandemic to this point. Many pay taxes now and all could be brought into the tax system by wiser government policies.
That’s why the mass removals touted by Trump and his White Nationalists are both impractical and counterproductive, as well as being incredibly cruel, inhumane, and cost ineffective.
There is a theory out there that although Trump’s uber-enforcement policies might be doomed to long-term failure, he is “succeeding” in another, much more damaging, way. By attacking the safety net, government, education, science, the environment, worker safety, and the rule of law while spreading racism, xenophobia, divisiveness, and maximizing income inequality, Trump has finally succeeded in making the U.S. a less desirable place for “immigrants with choices” to live.
As Bill Gelfeld wrote recently in International Policy Digest:
This pandemic has laid bare national weaknesses, and these weaknesses will have not gone unnoticed by potential and future migrants. Where they have a choice, and many skilled and even unskilled migrants do indeed have a choice, they will increasingly opt for those locales that have figured out universal health care, pandemic and crisis response, and unified national action, and these are the nations that now stand to gain from this migratory boon. https://apple.news/AiY6v3tN0SU6ES08RMUe29g
In the “post-pandemic world economy,” as our birthrate continues to go down and we need immigrants to fuel continued economic growth, the U.S. might well find itself losing the international competition for immigrants, particularly those we most want to attract.
The latter is likely if we give in to the restrictionist demand that we cut legal immigration. That simply forces more immigrants into the “extralegal market.” “Immigrants with choices” are more likely to choose destinations where they can live legally, integrate into society, and fully utilize their skills over a destination that forces them to live underground.
Over the last several years, America has been rocked by evidence of the mistreatment of migrants in detention centers. While the nation makes its political judgments about the future of immigration policy, Stephen Manning has assembled a team of lawyers, organizers, and tech innovators working to squeeze more humanity out of the current system while imagining its replacement. We talked to Stephen about how he pursues justice and reform.
How did you get involved in immigration law in the first place?
I was volunteer teaching at an elementary school, helping immigrant children from Central America with homework. I asked, “Why don’t you do your homework?” and I found their answer hard to believe: “We’re going to be deported.” No one deports second-graders, I thought. It must be an administrative matter. Naively, I took the whole family to Immigration, unprepared for the experience. I discovered a system based on the otherization and exclusion of human beings, as core principles. I could have gotten the whole family deported but luckily everyone was ok, and are still ok—I’ve since presided over two of their weddings.
What is so dehumanizing about immigration?
In fact, immigration could be a deeply humanizing experience—it could be the ultimate humanizing concept, actually. Instead, though, today it is the opposite. Its purpose is to categorize persons and judge their desirability. Racism and other biases have corrupted these functions. For example, on April 22nd, President Trump issued a proclamation to end family-based immigration. The next day his advisor explained that they want to “re-white” the country. The Remain in Mexico program does the same thing. Take a person seeking asylum: they are treated based not on their individual lives and circumstances, but on their assignment to a less desirable macro category—the asylum-seeker. They lose their individuality and simply become members of an undesired group. That classification has nothing to do with their hopes, fears, dreams or their contributions to our collective prosperity.
The same sense of power affects the whole system and shows up in myriad small ways. For example, I remember being at a detention center filled with families, working on a very compelling claim by a mother and her children. I’m working on my laptop surrounded by small children playing. We had sent a letter to the officer showing cause for their release. He showed up armed, in aviator glasses, ignored the children, and crumpled up and threw away the letter right in front of everyone. That’s dehumanization on a micro scale.
What surprises people when they learn about the realities of the U.S. immigration system?
People expect law to reflect some kind of morality. We expect the power of the law to be used justly. When law and power seem to align against common sense—that’s a tough lesson, even for lawyers. The immigration legal system is a world unto itself, and even for experienced lawyers, nothing prepares them for it.
You started and lead Innovation Law Lab, one of the largest pro bono projects in the country, to push for reforms. How do you recruit lawyers to volunteer?
Innovation Law Lab is equal parts lawyers, organizers, and coders. Our core team is about 20 people. For volunteers, actually, we don’t have any formal recruitment mechanisms. The work itself is demanding—you’re volunteering, giving up family time, spending your own money to participate. What we offer is a chance to use the law for justice and to join a team of like-minded people. And we’ve also structured it so that it can scale. We ask, Can you come for a day, a week, three weeks? Big law does not have to worry—there’s no mass exodus coming, but there is a small trend towards movement-based lawyering. The last time I looked, our numbers at Innovation Law Lab were in the tens of thousands of volunteers. And about 30% are repeat volunteers; they participate in multiple projects.
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Stephen Manning is an Ashoka Fellow. You can read more about him and his work here.
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You can read the rest of the profile at the link.
Innovation Law Lab is doing some spectacular work in defending the Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity against the Trump regime’s relentless onslaught.
David H. Wetmore, Esq. is a career appellate litigator in the United States Department of Justice, currently serving as Associate Deputy Attorney General. During his tenure at the Department of Justice, Mr. Wetmore has also served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General and as a Trial Attorney in the Civil Division. He has been the principal author of hundreds of appellate briefs and argued over twenty-five cases in federal courts of appeals. Prior to joining the Department of Justice, Mr. Wetmore was an associate attorney in Sidley Austin LLP’s District of Columbia office, and at Jenner & Block LLP’s Chicago office, where his practice focused on civil, criminal, and constitutional litigation. Mr. Wetmore has experience in all aspects of litigation, from initial investigation and discovery through trial and appeal, in both state and federal courts, including in the District of Columbia. He has also served as an Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University Law School.
Mr. Wetmore earned his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Miami University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated from the University Honors Program, and received Departmental Honors in Political Science and Philosophy. He earned his Juris Doctor, with High Honors, from The George Washington University Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of The George Washington Law Review, elected to Order of the Coif, and a member of the Moot Court Board. Following law school, Mr. Wetmore served as a law clerk to the Honorable Gordon J. Quist, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, and later to the Honorable Daniel A. Manion, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
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Normally reliable, totally unofficial anonymous sources say Wetmore’s “the one.”
There is further rank, unverified speculation that the current Acting Chair, Judge Garry Malphrus, eventually will get the just-advertised “Vice Chair/Deputy Chief Appellate Judge” position as a reward for reliably furthering the BIA’s anti-immigrant jurisprudence during his tenure. Malphrus replaced former Chair David Neal who resigned suddenly last Fall.
Wetmore currently is an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ. That’s roughly the DOJ equivalent of the “Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man*.” The Associate Deputy Attorney General, of course, should never be confused with the Deputy Associate Attorney General, an entirely different position. Actually, it’s about as far up the DOJ hierarchy that a “career” attorney can get. The higher level positions, in this case the Deputy Attorney General, are Presidentially-appointed politicos.
With this development, the connection between the BIA and the Office of Immigration Litigation (“OIL”) should become “seamless.” The BIA staff can just “cut and paste” OIL briefs into their decisions and vice versa. This eliminates the need to sometimes request time-consuming Circuit Court remands to get the BIA to adopt OIL’s preferred litigating position. In turn, this should totally eliminate the possibility of an individual ever “winning” a BIA appeal and will eradicate any remainingtraces of due process or fundamental fairness at the BIA.
These moves, combined with an outrageous proposed increase in the filing fee for a BIA appeal, will undoubtedly be a powerful tool for deterring, discouraging, and punishing individuals for exercising their legal rights. These are critical steps in insuring the smooth operation of the regime’s “Deportation Railroad.”
Any way you look at it, today’s BIA certainly presents an “interesting diversity profile,” particularly considering the community whose rights it once was supposed to protect, but now has unabashedly abandoned as it seeks to carry out the Trump/Miller/Barr White Nationalist mission of “Dred Scottifying the other.”
It also continues a two-decades long “DOJ tradition” of intentionally failing to attract better-qualified candidates from the private immigration sector, with actual experience representing and interacting with asylum seekers and other migrants, for BIA judgeships. The “outside, non-restrictionist world” has also been overwhelmingly excluded from appointments to Immigration Courts, with essentially de facto preference being given to government prosecutors.
Obviously, the reduction of Immigration Judges and Appellate Immigration Judges to something akin to “deportation clerks” straining to meet “production quotas” and pressured by regime politicos to aid DHS Enforcement by churning out deportation orders has been an important step in “dumbing down” EOIR. Today, EOIR is probably more subservient to DHS Enforcement, less impartial, and more of an administrative disaster than it was under the “Legacy INS.” Except, now there is more of everything — more overt political interference in the adjudication process, more bad law intentionally created, more and bigger backlogs, more intellectual dishonesty, more chaos, more disrespect for and demeaning of respondents and their attorneys, and more lives ruined.
Due Process Forever! Weaponized, Captive, “Courts” Never!
PWS
05-21-20
*Stones, The Rolling, “The Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man”
Well, I’m waiting at the bus stop in downtown L.A.
Well, I’m waiting at the bus stop in downtown L.A.
But I’d much rather be on a boardwalk on Broadway
Well, I’m sitting here thinkin’ just how sharp I am
Well, I’m sitting here thinkin’ just how sharp I am
I’m an under assistant west coast promo man
Well, I promo groups when they come into town
Well, I promo groups when they come into town
Well they laugh at my toupee, they’re sure to put me down
Well, I’m sitting here thinking just how sharp I am
Yeah, I’m sitting here thinking just how sharp I am
I’m a necessary talent behind every rock and roll band
Yeah, I’m sharp
I’m really, really sharp
I sure do earn my pay
Sitting on the beach every day, yeah
I’m real real sharp, yes I am
I got a Corvette and a seersucker suit
Yes, I have
Here comes the bus, uh oh
I though I had a dime
Where’s my dime
I know I have a dime somewhere
I’m pretty sure
