"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.
Adolfo Flores, Hamed Aleaziz, & Karla Zabludovsky for BuzzFeed News:
TIJUANA, Mexico — For Trump administration officials, an unprecedented confrontation at the US-Mexico border on Sunday invited an assessment that their policies have only exacerbated the problems of an overwhelmed immigration system whose court backlog has grown larger since Trump’s inauguration 22 months ago.
León Rodriguez, who headed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency from 2014 to 2016, didn’t want to comment on the events on the ground, but said what happened at the border seemed to be “a foreseeable result of the US policy of placing every conceivable obstacle in the way of orderly legal migration and of not having a policy that [recognizes] the desperate circumstances driving migration.”
Mexican officials shared that negative assessment. Héctor Gandini, who will take over as spokesperson for Mexico’s Interior Ministry when Mexico swears in a new president on Saturday, said that the US use of tear gas on migrants attempting to cross illegally into the country was “not correct. We don’t want them to hound migrants.”
“You have to respect migrants’ human rights,” Gandini added.
For Josué Rosales, one of the migrants who took part in the ill-fated march to the border, what began as a journey of hope had turned into one of despair, one that promised weeks of more nights inside the tent he’s now sharing with his girlfriend on the grounds of the Benito Juarez stadium, where the caravan has been camped for days. He said he’s not ready to give up.
“I’m waiting to see if Trump comes to some type of agreement that allows us to cross,” Rosales said. “If he says no we’ll figure out another way to cross.”
The Trump administration faces a situation its best efforts have failed to control.
Administration officials have imposed a number of policies to discourage migrants from seeking to enter the United States. Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions personally rewrote key immigration court decisions to eliminate domestic violence and fear of gang violence as reasons for asylum to be granted. The administration imposed a controversial family separation policy that was intended to discourage parents from crossing the border with their children. Trump dispatched 5,800 US active-duty soldiers to the border in a show of force that many critics also claim was a blatant political ploy ahead of the midterm elections earlier this month.
Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuter
And yet border apprehensions are at the highest level yet of the Trump administration (though still at historically low levels), family detentions are at record levels, and the number of people granted asylum actually rose in the fiscal year that just ended, to the highest level in two decades.
In Tijuana, where the number of would-be asylum seekers is growing by the day, immigration attorneys and advocates describe a bottleneck system that makes asylum seekers wait weeks before they can seek to enter the US for refuge. That’s created an enormous backlog.
And the situation promises only to get worse as more people seeking to reach the US arrive in Baja California, the Mexican state that abuts California. Mexico’s interior ministry said there are 8,247 people now in Mexico who are traveling as part of so-called caravans from Central America. The vast majority of migrants — 7,417 — are in the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana. The other 424 are in a Mexico City shelter, 253 are in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and another 153 are making their way north on their own. It’s unclear how many of them will ask for asylum.
Caring for the migrants is costing about $27,000 daily — money Tijuana’s mayor says the city does not have.
Sunday’s march to the border was intended to be peaceful, but it devolved into a frantic rush toward the border fence after the group, which numbered about 500, according to the Mexican interior ministry, was blocked from reaching the San Ysidro port of entry by a line of Mexican federal police.
The crowd skirted the police line and rushed across the Tijuana River’s small stream that runs next to the walkway leading to the port of entry.
Then after being blocked on the street in front of the Chaparral border crossing by metal barriers and another line of federal police with shields, a group walked to a train border crossing a few minutes away.
Several members of the group told BuzzFeed News they wanted to negotiate some type of agreement with the Trump administration that would let them enter the United States. Others said they hoped to be able to cross into the US as a group.
Instead, US border officers met them with tear gas and pepper balls, according to a statement from Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for border law enforcement.
CBP said its officers deployed the tear gas and pepper balls after some members of the group threw objects, including rocks, at agents while others tried to enter the United States illegally, some through a gap in the metal barrier along the railroad tracks.
Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters
But not all immigration officers were willing to defend the US actions. One US asylum officer, who could not talk about policy publicly, said the confrontation likely was the result of the US’s inability or unwillingness to process asylum claims at the border daily. The officer said USCIS recently had told staff to be on standby to be sent to San Diego to help hear asylum claims.
“I’m just glad nothing worse happened,” the officer said. “I think it’s illegal that they closed the border. We cannot decide when we can close the border if there’s no state of emergency. For a couple dozen asylum seekers? That was not an emergency that should justify closing the border. I’m just relieved it wasn’t worse.”
Another government official, who works on the issue but does not make policy, blamed the Trump administration for the tensions at the border.
“Trump has broken the law by not having people at the border processed for months and months and creating a bottleneck there,” the official said. “Tear gassing children because maybe they’ll get into the US? Heaven forbid.”
Mexican authorities late Sunday were contemplating what to do next. In a press release, the interior ministry said Mexican police had retaken control of the area leading to the San Ysidro port of entry and that Mexican troops would not be deployed “despite the magnitude of the situation.”
A government official who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to reporters told BuzzFeed News that 30 migrants had breached the border and were promptly detained by CBP. The National Migration Institute said that it planned to deport as many as 500 others who attempted to cross into the US illegally but were unsuccessful. Since the first caravan entered Mexico on October 19, 11,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have been deported.
The escalation at the border comes at a complicated time — the country’s embattled president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will conclude his mandate in less than a week.
BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that the Trump administration was attempting to broker a deal that would force people to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were processed. The Washington Post reported that incoming Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s transition team had agreed to this plan, but that report was disputed by the same officials it cited; they pointed out that López Obrador’s government would not take office for several more days. “There is no agreement of any sort between the future government of Mexico and the US government,” said a press release from López Obrador’s transition team.
Immigration promises to be a major challenge for López Obrador, who has pledged to give work permits and offer jobs to Central American migrants in Mexico. Detentions and deportations of migrants have increased steadily since 2014, when the government launched the Southern Border Program, shortly after a large wave of unaccompanied minors surged across the US-Mexico border.
Lucy Nicholson / Reuters
Sunday’s events were much different from the results of a spring caravan that arrived in Tijuana in late April with hundreds of asylum seekers. The group camped out on the grounds of the Chaparral border crossing for days after being turned away by CBP agents because the port of entry was at capacity. Over several days, small groups of asylum seekers were allowed into the US to make their claim, 93% of whom passed what’s known as a credible fear interview, a crucial first step in the asylum application process.
But that caravan was much smaller, at most 1,500 at its start in southern Mexico, than the thousands now waiting in Tijuana, and its members had been vetted by the NGO that led it, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, to weed out those whose asylum claims were likely to be found without merit by the time it reached the border. In the end, only 228 people sought asylum in a process that took just five days. Separately, other members of the caravan asked for asylum before and after those five days, putting the total number of asylum seekers at 401.
This time around, asylum seekers have been told they would likely have to wait weeks in Tijuana before they could ask the US for refuge because of a backlog at the border. The current expected wait to begin the process is now up to six weeks.
Delay at the border for requesting asylum is nothing new, but it’s been getting worse under Trump. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found recently that US immigration authorities’ inability to handle the number of people seeking asylum at ports of entry had forced migrants to cross illegally. But there’s little sign that US officials are planning to take steps to improve the wait times.
And the likelihood is great that those who must wait in Tijuana will find only that their frustration will grow in the coming months.
“It’s difficult because we came as one peaceful caravan and now we’re just waiting here without any results,” Rosales, the march participant, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re sitting in the sun, thirsty, hungry, with no resolution to our situation.”
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The Trump Administration created this artificial mess. The solution is hardly “rocket science:”
More USCIS Asylum Officers;
More pro bono private attorneys;
More U.S. Immigration Judges and staff;
Restoring authority to Immigration Judges to work with both parties before their courts to close and remove hundreds of thousands of “low priority” cases from the courts’ dockets, thus freeing up judicial time to work on asylum cases of more recent arrivals;
Restoring precedents that would allow refugees with documented cases of persecution on the basis for domestic violence and family relationships to be expeditiously granted, thus freeing up docket space for other types of cases.
No chance that the Trump Administration will do this voluntarily. But, there might be an opening for House Democrats to condition further immigration enforcement funding on improvements in the foregoing areas and an end to the Trump-created “border backups.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned on Wednesday at the request of Donald Trump. He served a little less than two years as the head of the Department of Justice. During that time, Sessions used his immense power to make America a crueler, more brutal place. He was one of the most sadistic and unscrupulous attorneys general in American history.
At the Department of Justice, Sessions enforced the law in a manner that harmed racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. He rolled backObama-era drug sentencing reforms in an effort to keep nonviolent offenders locked away for longer. He reversed a policy that limited the DOJ’s use of private prisons. He undermined consent decrees with law enforcement agencies that had a history of misconduct and killed a program that helped local agencies bring their policing in line with constitutional requirements. And he lobbied against bipartisan sentencing reform, falsely claiming that such legislation would benefit “a highly dangerous cohort of criminals.”
Meanwhile, Sessions mobilized the DOJ’s attorneys to torture immigrant minors in other ways. He fought in court to keep undocumented teenagers pregnant against their will, defending the Trump administration’s decision to block their access to abortion. His Justice Department made the astonishing claim that the federal government could decide that forced birth was in the “best interest” of children. It also revealed these minors’ pregnancies to family members who threatened to abuse them. And when the American Civil Liberties Union defeated this position in court, his DOJ launched a failed legal assault on individual ACLU lawyers for daring to defend their clients.
As he oversaw family separation, forced birth, and mass incarceration, Sessions found time to degrade LGBTQ Americans and their families. He issued a memo alleging that federal civil rights laws do not protect transgender employees, a position the Justice Department recently reiterated to the Supreme Court. He also argued that these civil rights laws do not protect gay people. His DOJ defended Trump’s ban on open transgender military service by claiming that trans people are disordered deviants. Under his leadership, the DOJ also asked the Supreme Court to rule that many businesses have a First Amendment right to turn away same-sex couples. (Sessions gave a speech to the anti-LGBTQ group that brought that case to SCOTUS, thanking them for their “important work” on behalf of religious liberty.)
The guiding principle of Sessions’ career is animus toward people who are unlike him. While serving in the Senate, he voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it expressly protected LGBTQ women. He opposed immigration reform, including relief for young people brought to America by their parents as children. He voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He voted against a federal hate crime bill protecting gay people. Before that, as Alabama attorney general, he tried to prevent LGBTQ students from meeting at a public university. But as U.S. attorney general, he positioned himself as an impassioned defender of campus free speech.
While Sessions doesn’t identify as a white nationalist, his agenda as attorney general abetted the cause of white nationalism. His policies were designed to make the country more white by keeping out Hispanics and locking up blacks. His tenure will remain a permanent stain on the Department of Justice. Thousands of people were brutalized by his bigotry, and our country will not soon recover from the malice he unleashed.
His successor could be even worse.
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Can’t overstate the intentional damage that this immoral, intellectually dishonest, and bigoted man has done to millions of human lives and the moral and legal fabric of our country. “The Father of the New American Gulag,” America’s most notorious unpunished child abuser, and the destroyer of Due Process in our U.S. Immigration Courts are among a few of his many unsavory legacies!
The scary thing: Stern is right — “His successor could be even worse.” If so, the survival of our Constitution and our nation will be at risk!
President Donald Trump delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he touted nationalism, got laughed at by world leaders, and told migrants to stop coming to the United States.
Trump began his address to world leaders by boasting of his supposed accomplishments.
“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country … So true,” Trump said. Laughter could be heard from those in attendance.
“Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK,” Trump said.
Later in the speech, the president launched into his anti-immigration views, saying illegal immigration “has produced a vicious cycle of crime, violence and poverty.” He added that the United States will not participate in the U.N.’s new global compact on migration, which the world body said would “develop a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.”
“Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens,” Trump said. “Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home counties. Make their countries great again.”
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Compare Trump’s dishonest, selfish, and downright cowardly views on immigration with those of President Ronald Reagan as quoted by Philip Klein in an article in the Washington Examiner:
Saying that the setting was fitting, Reagan spoke of the families that came through Ellis Island right by the Statue of Liberty. “These families came here to work,” he said. “They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions, but this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered.”
He went on to say that, “They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. They came from different lands but they shared the same values, the same dream.”
Selfish nationalism, ignoring international institutions, racism, and “I can do what I want because I’m bigger and have more guns” attitudes are what caused World War I and World War II. Yet, here is America’s so-called “leader” diminishing us in the world’s eyes and spouting exactly the same type of ignorant, discredited garbage that led to two disastrous World Wars.
No wonder we are losing respect and becoming a laughingstock among nations.
No we’re not “MAGA;’ we’re “MARA” — and we are appearing ridiculous and cowardly to boot. What kind of country elects an “Evil Clown” like Trump to represent them on the world stage.
Get out the vote in November. Decent Americans need to take our country back from Trump and his non-majority “base” before it’s too late — for us and for the world! America is better than this!
