🤯 UK CONSERVATIVES’ ABSURDIST ASYLUM PLAN CRASHES💥 & BURNS!🔥 — “This grubby, cash-for-people deal was always cruel and immoral but, most importantly, it is unlawful.“

Victims of Rwanda’s Genocide
Public Realm
Three decades ago, Rwanda was the scene of a horrible genocide. Now, UK right wing pols think it’s an ideal place to “orbit” refugees, in violation of international laws!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/15/supreme-court-rejects-rishi-sunak-plan-to-deport-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda

Supreme court rejects Rishi Sunak’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda

Judges uphold appeal court ruling over risk to deported refugees and deals blow to PM’s ‘stop the boats’ strategy

By Rajeev Syal and Diane Taylor

The Guardian 15 November 2023

UK politics live – latest updates

Rishi Sunak’s key immigration policy has been dealt a blow after the UK’s highest court rejected the government’s plans to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda.

Five judges at the supreme court unanimously upheld an appeal court ruling that found there was a real risk of deported refugees having their claims in the east African country wrongly assessed or being returned to their country of origin to face persecution.

The ruling undermines one of the prime minister’s key pledges: to “stop the boats”. The government claimed that the £140m Rwanda scheme would be a key deterrent for growing numbers of asylum seekers reaching the UK via small boats travelling across the Channel, a claim that refugee charities have rejected.

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Reading out the judgment, Lord Reed, the president of the supreme court, said the judges agreed unanimously with the court of appeal ruling that there was a real risk of claims being wrongly determined in Rwanda, resulting in asylum seekers being wrongly returned to their country of origin.

He pointed to crucial evidence from the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR, which highlighted the failure of a similar deportation agreement between Israel and Rwanda.

The ruling came the day after the sacked home secretary, Suella Braverman, released an incendiary letter accusing the prime minister of breaking an agreement to insert clauses into UK law that would have “blocked off” legal challenges under the European convention on human rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act.

Braverman said Sunak had no “credible plan B” and added: “If we lose in the supreme court, an outcome that I have consistently argued we must be prepared for, you will have wasted a year and an act of parliament, only to arrive back at square one.”

. . . .

Reed said the legal test in the case was whether there were substantial grounds for believing that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda would be at real risk of being sent back to the countries they came from, where they could face ill treatment.

“In the light of the evidence which I have summarised, the court of appeal concluded that there were such grounds. We are unanimously of the view that they were entitled to reach that conclusion. Indeed, having been taken through the evidence ourselves, we agree with their conclusion,” he said.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said it was a victory for men, women and children who simply wanted to be safe.

He said: “The plan goes against who we are as a country that stands up for those less fortunate than us and for the values of compassion, fairness and humanity. The government should be focusing on creating a functioning asylum system that allows people who seek safety in the UK a fair hearing on our soil and provides safe routes so they don’t have to take dangerous journeys.”

Toufique Hossain of Duncan Lewis solicitors, one of the lawyers representing asylum seekers who brought the legal challenge, said: “This is a victory for our brave clients who stood up to an inhumane policy. It is also a victory for the rule of law itself and the separation of powers, despite the noise. It is a timely reminder that governments must operate within the law. We hope that now our clients are able to dream of a better, safer future.”

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Sonya Sceats, the chief executive of Freedom from Torture, said: “This is a victory for reason and compassion. We are delighted that the supreme court has affirmed what caring people already knew: the UK government’s ‘cash for humans’ deal with Rwanda is not only deeply immoral, but it also flies in the face of the laws of this country.

“The stakes of this case could not have been higher. Every day in our therapy rooms we see the terror that this scheme has inflicted on survivors of torture who have come to the UK seeking sanctuary.”

Steve Smith, the chief executive of the refugee charity Care4Calais, a claimant in the initial legal challenge, said the judgment was “a victory for humanity”.

He added: “This grubby, cash-for-people deal was always cruel and immoral but, most importantly, it is unlawful. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on this cruel policy, and the only receipts the government has are the pain and torment inflicted on the thousands of survivors of war, torture and modern slavery they have targeted with it.

“Today’s judgment should bring this shameful mark on the UK’s history to a close. Never again should our government seek to shirk our country’s responsibility to offer sanctuary to those caught up in horrors around the world.”

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

Read the full article at the above link.

Here’s what the most recent USDOS Country Report says about human rights in Rwanda:

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings by the government; forced disappearance by the government; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary detention; political prisoners or detainees; politically motivated reprisals against individuals located outside the country, including killings, kidnappings, and violence; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; and serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations.

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_RWANDA-2021-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf

Sound like a “safe third country” to you? Gimmie a break! The genocide may be in the (not that distant) past, but it’s still a horrible place from a human rights standpoint! Not to mention, that as a tiny, poor country it has virtually no ability to absorb large numbers of refugees, particularly compared with the UK!

Sunak and the other cowardly UK Tory pols who cooked up and continue to defend this ludicrous scheme should go down in history as guilty of “crimes against humanity” — not to mention grotesque violations of common sense and human dignity.

Wanton cruelty, immorality, lies, intellectual dishonesty, scofflaw behavior from right wing politicos! Sound familiar? Always interesting how those who pontificate about “law and order” can’t abide by their own laws!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-15-23

⚖️🗽CHAMPIONS OF JUSTICE, MAKING A DIFFERENCE: 🛡⚔️ Round Table’s Fight For Better Policies, Best Practices, Earns Acclaim!

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

From “Sir Jeffrey” Chase:

Our statement yesterday on MPP was referenced and quoted by CNN at the end of this article by Priscilla Alvarez and Geneva Sands on the MPP restart:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/06/politics/biden-remain-in-mexico/index.html

CNN Digital Expansion 2019, Priscilla Alvarez
Politics Reporter, CNN

CNN Digital Expansion 2019, Geneva Sands

This morning, Democracy Now referenced our letter in a segment covering the issue, saying:

A group of former immigration judges released a statement condemning the return of the program as the “antithesis of fairness.”

Here is the link:

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/7/biden_trump_era_remain_in_mexico

Furthermore, in oral arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday in Patel v. Garland, our amicus brief received a brief mention:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: — questions, how
10 could an appellate court — and this question
11 cuts both ways, so — but how can an appellate
12 court look at a cold record and determine a
13 factual error when it relates to credibility,
14 for example, or something like that? Just give
15 me some examples where this will matter, I
16 guess.
17 MR. FLEMING: Well, there — as the
18 amici, the American Immigration Lawyers
19 Association and the EOIR judges, point out, it
20 — it’s not uncommon.Best, Jeff

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

And, here’s more coverage from Human Rights First:

Courtesy Paul Ratje — AFP via Getty Images

A man sits in a migrant camp near Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

The new version of MPP expands its focus to asylum seekers from across the hemisphere, stranding even more people seeking safety in dangerous conditions at the border.

Kennji Kizuka, Associate Director for Research and Analysis, Refugee Protection, appeared on Democracy Now! and detailed the many human rights violations faced by asylum seekers processed under the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

“It’s extraordinarily concerning that the Biden administration is not only restarting this policy but expanding it,” said Kizuka.

Human Rights First also announced the resumption of our research documenting the human rights abuses suffered by people turned away to wait in danger under MPP.

Human Rights First’s Associate Attorney, Refugee Protection Julia Neusner and Advocacy Strategist for Refugee Protection Ana Ortega Villegas are on the ground in Ciudad Juárez to monitor the first days of MPP’s reinstatement. Please follow their live updates and other reports through Human Rights First’s twitter account.

Our team’s view of the Mexican government’s

staging area in Cuidad Juárez for Remain in Mexico 2.0

Our position is gaining widespread support from those who understand the issue. The Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges condemned

MPP as the “antithesis of fairness,” concluding that there has been “no greater affront to due process, fairness and transparency,” and called for administration to “permanently end the program.”

The union for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum officers tasked with MPP screenings call it “irredeemably flawed.” They said that restarting MPP “makes our members complicit in violations of U.S. federal law and binding international treaty obligations of non-refoulement that they have sworn to uphold.”

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

So proud to be a part of this group and so grateful for the leadership of colleagues like Judges Jeffrey Chase, Ilyce Shugall, Lory Rosenberg, Carol King, Joan Churchill, Denise Slavin, Sue Roy, John Gossart, Charles Honeyman, Charlie Pazar, Sarah Burr, Cecelia Espenoza, Bruce Einhorn, Tue Phan-Quang, Bob Weisel, Paul Grussendorf, Jennie Giambastini, and many, many, many others!

As an “appreciative fellow NDPA member” told me yesterday, “it’s a true team effort!“ This type of teamwork for the public good was once encouraged at EOIR and even incorporated into the “leadership vision,” but now, sadly, it has “fallen by the wayside” in what has basically become a “haste makes waste race to the bottom.”

Fortunately, the Round Table and other members of the NDPA still share a “vision of what American justice should look like” and are willing to speak up for what’s legal and right rather than just “expedient!”

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-09-21

POPE FRANCIS SPEAKS OUT FOR MIGRANTS! — “Let us stop ignoring reality, stop constantly shifting responsibility, stop passing off the issue of migration to others, as if it mattered to no one and was only a pointless burden to be shouldered by somebody else!”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pope-comforts-lesbos-migrants-urges-refugee-aid_n_61accddbe4b044a1cc2482b3

AP reports on HuffPost:

LESBOS, Greece (AP) — Pope Francis returned Sunday to the Greek island of Lesbos to offer comfort to migrants at a refugee camp and blast what he said was the indifference and self-interest shown by Europe “that condemns to death those on the fringes.”

“Please, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!” Francis said at the Mavrovouni camp, a cluster of white U.N. containers on the edge of the sea lined by barbed wire fencing and draped with laundry hanging from lines.

Arriving at the camp, a maskless Francis took his time walking along the barricades, patting children and babies on the head and posing for selfies. He gave a “thumbs up” after he was serenaded by African women singing a song of welcome.

. . . .

“The arrival of the pope here makes us feel blessed because we hope the pope will take us with him because here we suffer,” Kiaku said as she waited in a tent for the pope to arrive.

But no papal transfers were announced this time around, though during the first leg of Francis’ trip in Cyprus, the Vatican announced that 12 migrants who had crossed over from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north would be relocated to Italy in the coming weeks. Cypriot officials said a total of 50 would eventually be sent.

Francis’ five-day trip to Cyprus and Greece has been dominated by the migrant issue and Francis’ call for European countries to stop building walls, stoking fears and shutting out “those in greater need who knock at our door.”

“I ask every man and woman, all of us, to overcome the paralysis of fear, the indifference that kills, the cynical disregard that nonchalantly condemns to death those on the fringes!” he said. “Let us stop ignoring reality, stop constantly shifting responsibility, stop passing off the issue of migration to others, as if it mattered to no one and was only a pointless burden to be shouldered by somebody else!”

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

Read the complete report at the link.

Xenophobia, cruelty, racism, and nativist nationalism won’t stop human migration. But, it will cause more unnecessary pain, suffering, death, and wasted lives.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-05-21

🌎ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES ARE ENTITLED TO PROTECTION — BIDEN ADMINISTRATION RECOGNIZES PROBLEM, BUT FAILS TO ACT ACCORDINGLY — Bannon & Far Right Neo Fascists 🏴‍☠️ Plan To Leverage Lies, Hate, Fear, & Loathing To Destroy Civilization! ☹️ — Round Table’s 🛡⚔️ Jeffrey Chase & The Guardian’s 🖋 Zoe Williams Sound The Alarm!⏰

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2021/11/22/white-house-issues-report-on-climate-change-and-migration\

JEFFREY S. CHASE | OPINIONS/ANALYSIS ON IMMIGRATION LAW

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White House Issues Report on Climate Change and Migration

On October 21, the White House issued a Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration which contains a few noteworthy passages relating to the law of asylum.

On page 17, the White House report acknowledges that existing legal instruments for addressing displacement caused by climate change are limited. Encouragingly, the report advises that “the United States should endeavor to maximize their application, as appropriate” to such displaced individuals.

The report next cites both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol and their application to climate-induced displacement, referencing recent UNHCR guidance on the topic. The report then offers three examples in which climate change issues might arise in the asylum context.

First, the report recognizes that where “a government withholds or denies relief from the impacts of climate change to specific individuals who share a protected characteristic in a manner and to a degree amounting to persecution, such individuals may be eligible for refugee status.”

Secondly, the report acknowledges that “adverse impacts of climate change may affect whether an individual has a viable relocation alternative within their country or territory.” This language relates to the regulatory requirement that in order to have a well-founded fear of persecution, an asylum applicant could not avoid persecution by relocating within their country of nationality “if under all the circumstances it would be reasonable to expect the applicant to do so.”1

The applicable regulations instruct that:

adjudicators should consider, but are not limited to considering, whether the applicant would face other serious harm in the place of suggested relocation; any ongoing civil strife within the country; administrative, economic, or judicial infrastructure; geographical limitations; and social and cultural constraints, such as age, gender, health, and social and familial ties. Those factors may, or may not, be relevant, depending on all the circumstances of the case, and are not necessarily determinative of whether it would be reasonable for the applicant to relocate.2

While the regulatory language is broad and non-exhaustive, the specific mention of climate change factors in the White House report is most welcome, as such circumstances might not otherwise jump out at immigration judges and asylum officers as being relevant to the relocation inquiry.

Thirdly, the White House report states that “[c]limate activists, or environmental defenders, persecuted for speaking out against government inaction on climate change may also have a plausible claim to refugee status.”

Although not specifically cited in the White House report, UNHCR issued guidance on the topic in October 2020.3 Practitioners should file both the White House report and the UNHCR guidance with EOIR and DHS in appropriate cases, as the latter clearly served as an influence for the former, and provides greater detail in its guidance.4 For instance, in discussing how climate change factors can influence internal relocation options, the UNHCR document at paragraph 12 makes clear that the “slow-onset effects of climate change, for example environmental degradation, desertification or sea level rise, initially affecting only parts of a country, may progressively affect other parts, making relocation neither relevant nor reasonable.” This detail not included in the White House report is important; it clarifies that the test for whether relocation is reasonable requires a long view, as opposed to limiting the inquiry to existing conditions, and specifically flags forms of climate change that might otherwise escape an adjudicator’s notice.

Also, in paragraph 10, the UNHCR document’s take on the White House report’s third example is somewhat broader, stating that “[a] well-founded fear of being persecuted may also arise for environmental defenders, activists or journalists, who are targeted for defending, conserving and reporting on ecosystems and resources.”5 UNHCR’s inclusion of journalists as potential targets, and its listing of “defending, conserving, and reporting” as activities which a state might lump into the category of “speaking out” and use as a basis for persecution, should be brought to the attention of adjudicators.

Given how early we are in the process of considering climate change issues in the asylum context, the above-cited language in the White House report is important, as it provides legitimacy to theories still unfamiliar to the ears of those adjudicating, reviewing, and litigating asylum claims. It is hoped that EOIR and DHS will immediately familiarize its employees who are involved in asylum adjudication with the report. And as EOIR and DHS consider next steps in developing guidance and training, it is hoped that they will consider a collaborative approach, including in the discussion those outside of government who have already given the topic a great deal of thought.6

Copyright 2021 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

Notes:

8 CFR 208.13(b)(2)(ii).

Id.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Legal considerations regarding claims for international protection made in the context of the adverse effects of climate change and disasters, 1 October 2020, https://www.refworld.org/docid/5f75f2734.html, at para. 12.

Although UNHCR’s views on interpreting the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol are not binding on the U.S. Immigration Courts, they have been found by the BIA to be “useful tools in construing our obligations under the Protocol.” Matter of Acosta, 19 I&N Dec. 211 (BIA 1985). See also INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 438-39 (1987).

Id. at para. 10.

See, e.g. “Shelter From the Storm: Policy Options to Address Climate Induced Displacement From the Northern Triangle,” https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/climate-change-and-displaced-persons.

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

NEXT

The Need For Full-Fledged Asylum Hearings

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Jeffrey S. Chase is an immigration lawyer in New York City. Jeffrey is a former Immigration Judge and Senior Legal Advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals.He is the founder of the Round Table of Former Immigration Judges, which was awarded AILA’s 2019 Advocacy Award.Jeffrey is also a past recipient of AILA’s Pro Bono Award.He sits on the Board of Directors of the Association of Deportation Defense Attorneys, and Central American Legal Assistance.

Audio by websitevoice.com

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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/climate-refugees-far-right-crisis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Failing to plan for climate refugees hands a cheap victory to the far right

Zoe Williams

The climate crisis could cause mass displacement as land is left uninhabitable – nations have to work together to plan for this

Thu 11 Nov 2021 03.00 EST

Last modified on Thu 11 Nov 2021 03.02 EST

As scientists wrestle to predict the true impact and legacy of Cop26, one speech, given at a rally organised by Global Justice Now, insisted upon a perspective not data-driven but moral. Lumumba Di-Aping, a South Sudanese diplomat and former chief negotiator for the G77, said: “The first resolution that should be agreed in Glasgow is for annex I polluters to grant the citizens of small island developing states the right to immigration.”

It was a tactful way of putting it: annex I nations are those with special financial responsibilities in tackling the climate crisis. They have these special responsibilities because their early industrialisation created so much of the carbon burden. A more pugilistic diplomat might have said “the people who created this disaster have to offer sanctuary to those displaced by it”, but then, he wouldn’t be a diplomat.

Di-Aping went on to note article 3 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” “Small island states,” he concluded, “should not be drowned alive like Zealandia.”

. . . .

As old debates around the climate crisis and whether or not it is anthropogenic give way to consensus, new ambiguities and uncertainties are constructed around refugees: can they really be called the victims of environmental degradation? We will grapple with any other explanation – they’re actually economic migrants, or they’re the victims of civil strife, or they fell foul of a dictatorship, the one-bad-man theory of geopolitics – rather than trace these proximal causes back to their roots. Most political efforts, currently, are geared towards building a positive picture of a sustainable future; the alternative is despair or denial, neither of which are generative forces for change. A coherent, practical plan detailing the probable scale of displacement and figuring out a just distribution of the climate diaspora will look radical and unsettling.

One group is extremely comfortable on that territory, however: the far right. Steve Bannon sent a chill down the spine in 2015 when he talked about a “Camp of the Saints-type invasion into … Europe”. He made the reference again and again, until finally onlookers were forced to read the source: Jean Raspail’s racist novel of 1973, which one contemporary reviewer called “a major event … in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event”. The title comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation about the coming apocalypse – civilisation collapses when the hordes arrive from the four corners of the Earth to “surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city” – and Raspail took up the idea; it was inevitable, he said, that “numberless disinherited people of the south would set sail one day for this opulent shore”.

Through Bannon and others, this idea has replicated, mutated and engulfed others, to become the “great replacement theory” of white supremacists, which Paul Mason describes in his recent book How to Stop Fascism as the toxic political view that “immigration constitutes a ‘genocide’ of the white race”. Feminists help it along by depressing the birth-rate, and cultural Marxists bring the mood music, by supporting both migrants and feminists.

Other far-right movements are sucked into the vortex of this wild but coherent theory, and yet more are spawned or shaped by it: the cosmic right (embodied in Jake Angeli, the QAnon figure in the animal-skin cap who stormed the Capitol in January, then went on hunger strike in prison because the food wasn’t organic), or the eco-minded white supremacists who make this explicit – you can be a humanitarian or an environmentalist. Choose one.

As fanciful and irrational as many far-right arguments are, they have a rat-like cunning. They find these spaces that are untenanted by mainstream debate – there will be climate refugees and they must be accommodated – and they run riot in them. Nations who ignore Lumumba Di-Aping aren’t doing anything to avert the consequences he describes: their silence merely creates an open goal for the professed enemies of a peaceful and prosperous future.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

*********

Read Zoe’s complete article at the link.

Usually White House Reports and other quasi-academic “White Papers” produced at public expense are accompanied by major press releases and momentary hoopla. Then, they are rapidly consigned to the “Dustbin of History.”

They are widely ignored by politicos and bureaucrats who all too often are pursuing policies with little or no empirical basis, but designed to appease or “fire up” some voting block or to further the institutional self-preservation upon which bureaucracies thrive, expand, and prosper, even at the expense of the well-being of the governed!

This report, however, is one that deserves to be the basis for policy action! Too bad it isn’t!

Obviously, an Administration that failed to restore existing refugee and asylum systems, continues to subject migrants to due process denying “star chambers,” thinks “die in place” is an acceptable and effective refugee policy, and wrongly views asylum as a “policy option” rather than a well-established legal and human right, is playing right into the hands of Bannon, Miller, and their 21st Century nihilist movement! It’s also an Administration that didn’t learn much from World War II and the Cold War.

And, on future inevitable and predictable forced migrations, the world isn’t going to get much leadership from a rich nation that can’t even deal fairly, generously, and efficiently with today’s largely predictable, potentially very manageable, refugee situations. Many are situations that our nation either created or played a significant role in creating. See, e.g., environmental migration.

There is actually “room at the inn” for everyone and creative ways for nations to work together to resettle refugees of all types while prospering and working together for the benefit of humanity. Sure, they contradict the nationalist myths upon which many past and current refugee and migration restrictions are based.

Clearly, the realistic, constructive, humane solutions necessary for survival aren’t going come from the racist far right! And, currently the Biden Administration’s failure to stand up for the legal, moral, and human rights of asylum seekers and other referees isn’t doing the job either! Constructive, democratic, moral leadership and courage, oh where, oh where, have you gone?

We can’t deport, imprison, prosecute, wall, threaten, mythologize, abuse, and hate our way out of forced migration situations. It’s going to take dynamic, courageous folks who can get beyond past failures and lead the way to a better future for humanity!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-24-21

⚖️🗽👩‍⚖️ U.S. CIRCUIT JUDGE BEVERLY MARTIN 🌟 “OUTS” TRUMPY COLLEAGUES’ INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY, BIA’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE IN STINGING DISSENT FROM BOGUS ASYLUM DENIAL! — Garland’s Failure To “Pull Plug” On “Miller-Lite BIA” Continues To Cost Innocent Lives,☠️⚰️ Undermine American Justice, 🏴‍☠️ Outrage Human Rights Experts!🤮

https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201913715.pdf

Murugan v. U.S. Atty Gen., 08-24-21, published

PANEL: MARTIN (Obama), NEWSOM (Trump), and BRANCH (Trump), Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Branch

DISSENT: Judge Martin

KEY QUOTES FROM DISSENT:

The majority opinion gives no more consideration to Mr. Murugan’s claims

and individualized evidence than did the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Immigration Judge. That is to say not much consideration at all.

Mr. Murugan produced evidence that in October 2018, the Sri Lankan government changed drastically when the former president, who had been accused of authorizing war crimes and other human rights abuses against Tamils “blindsided” political observers and “sudden[ly]” returned as prime minister. Because Mr. Murugan is a member of the Tamil ethnic group, his attorney brought up these facts at the hearing before the IJ. But the IJ took no notice of this evidence, finding that Mr. Murugan’s country conditions evidence was outdated because it included materials related to the former president’s rule from 2014 to 2016. Mr. Murugan argued to the BIA that the IJ improperly disregarded these new facts, because they were relevant to what treatment the Tamils could expect from the newly returned prime minister. Even so, the BIA mechanically adopted the IJ’s decision that Mr. Murugan’s evidence was outdated. Mr. Murugan has now tried a third time, pointing out the significance of this evidence in his brief before this Court.

The majority opinion, like the IJ and the BIA, fails to engage with this

evidence. But I see it as substantial and highly probative evidence of a pattern or 19

USCA11 Case: 19-13715 Date Filed: 08/24/2021 Page: 20 of 34

practice of government persecution of Tamils. Because I believe Mr. Murugan met his burden of showing he had a well-founded fear of future persecution based on the Sri Lankan government’s practice of persecuting Tamils, I would grant him relief on this claim.

. . . .

When this Court is tasked with reviewing a decision of the BIA, we must

actually review it, albeit with deference. This majority opinion may condemn Mr. Murugan to extreme persecution in Sri Lanka because it failed to actually examine the evidence of recent political changes in that country. When a dictator with a well-documented history of persecuting an ethnic group returns to power, surely

33

USCA11 Case: 19-13715 Date Filed: 08/24/2021 Page: 34 of 34

our law does not require a member of that group wait to again experience persecution before he can claim asylum. Mr. Murugan has met his burden here. I respectfully dissent.

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

I encourage everyone to read Judge Martin’s complete dissent. By contrast, Judge Elizabeth Branch’s majority opinion is a vapid, disingenuous, piece of right-wing legal sophistry. As my colleague, Hon. “Sir Jeffrey” Chase observed, Branch was “Associate General Counsel for Rules and Legislation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in 2004-2005,” during the Bush II Administration.

Judge Martin will retire from the bench on September 30, 2021, thus giving President Biden a chance to appoint her replacement. So, this might be her last immigration opinion.

Judge Martin calls out her intellectually dishonest Trumpy colleagues and accurately characterizes BIA review as no review at all. (Actually, it’s worse than no review, because the BIA sometimes reverses correct IJ asylum grants and rewrites decisions to make it easier for OIL to defend bad denials.)

No matter how poorly they perform their judicial duties (the majority decision in this case certainly stands out as one of many low points in recent American jurisprudence) Trump’s and McConnell’s far righty Article IIIs enjoy lifetime sinecures.

But, EOIR “judges,” particularly after the last two decades of political interference with any semblance of “judicial independence,” enjoy no such exalted lifetime protection. As DOJ keeps pointing out, they are “mere Government attorneys” who can be reassigned to a wide range of attorney positions at the discretion of the Attorney General.

Thus Garland could, and should, remove and reassign poorly qualified judges and replace them with real, well-qualified expert progressive judges who understand asylum law, will fairly apply it, will issue some positive asylum precedents, and will control the “Asylum Deniers Club” operating in Immigration Courts throughout America. The dysfunction, institutionalized unfairness, and “worst practices,” are particularly acute after four years of poor judicial selections, a BIA packed with anti-asylum zealots, and defective training by biased, anti-asylum AGs under fatally flawed and discriminatory selection procedures

Judge Martin “gets it.” How come nobody on Team Garland does?

As we can see, from the Supremes to the “retail level” at the Immigration Courts, the consequences of poor right-wing judging fall most heavily on migrants, women, children, and people of color. Progressives could change that around at EOIR. But, Judge Garland doesn’t seem up to the job, as the opportunity for long overdue, systemic, life saving changes at EOIR continues to slip through his fingers!

But, I repeat myself, obviously to no avail.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-24-21

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, “PERPS” ON THE LOOSE! — DOJ Internal Report Shows How “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton Conspired To Separate Migrant Kids In Violation Of 5th Amendment — When Will These Criminals Be Charged & Prosecuted Under 18 USC 242? — NY Times Reports!

Sessions in a cage — Jeff Sessions’ Cage by J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group/AL.com
Republished under license

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separation-border-immigration-jeff-sessions-rod-rosenstein.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20201007&instance_id=22889&nl=the-morning&regi_id=119096355&section_index=2&section_name=the_latest_news&segment_id=40077&te=1&user_id=70724c8ee3c2ebb50a6ef32ab050a46b

‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said

Top department officials were “a driving force” behind President Trump’s child separation policy, a draft investigation report said.

By Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt

Oct. 6, 2020

505

WASHINGTON — The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Bash had declined the cases, but Mr. Rosenstein “instructed that, per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”

The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.

The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration. But the fierce backlash when the administration struggled to reunite the children turned it into one of the biggest policy debacles of the president’s term.

Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote.

The draft report, citing more than 45 interviews with key officials, emails and other documents, provides the most complete look at the discussions inside the Justice Department as the family separation policy was developed, pushed and ultimately carried out with little concern for children.

This article is based on a review of the 86-page draft report and interviews with three government officials who read it in recent months and described its conclusions and many of the details in it. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it publicly, cautioned that the final report could change.

Before publishing the findings of its investigations, the inspector general’s office typically provides draft copies to Justice Department leaders and others mentioned in the reports to ensure that they are accurate.

Mr. Horowitz had been preparing to release his report since late summer, according to a person familiar with the investigation, though the process allowing for responses from current and former department officials whose conduct is under scrutiny is likely to delay its release until after the presidential election.

Mr. Sessions refused to be interviewed, the report noted. Mr. Rosenstein, who is now a lawyer in private practice, defended himself in his interview with investigators in response to questioning about his role, according to two of the officials. Mr. Rosenstein’s former office submitted a 64-page response to the report.

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw concluded that intentional separation of families was unconstitutional — a clear violation of Fifth Amendment due process. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/us/politics/family-separations-congress-states.html

The Government did not seriously question the correctness of this finding!

Intentionally violating Constitutional rights (not to mention lying and attempting to cover it up) is clearly a violation of 18 USC 242.

Here’s the text of that section from the DOJ’s own website:

TITLE 18, U.S.C., SECTION 242

Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-law

Sure looks like an”open and shut” case for prosecution.

The irony: Families and their kids have been traumatized for life, perhaps even killed or disabled by the actions of these criminal conspirators; however, the “perps” remain at large.

Hamilton is on the public dole continuing to wreak-havoc on the Constitution, the rule of law, the Immigration Courts, and human decency at the corrupt Barr DOJ; Rosenstein works for a “fat cat” law firm hauling down a six figure salary while he avoids justice and accountability for his misdeeds; “Gonzo” had the absolute audacity to try to reinsert himself onto the public dole by running for the Senate from Alabama (thankfully, unsuccessfully, even though he previously held the seat for years and misused it as a public forum to spread his racist ideas, xenophobic venom, lies, false narratives, and unrelenting cruelty).

Where’s the “justice” in a system that punishes victims while letting “perps” prosper and go free?

Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-07-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻KAKISTOCRACY HAS CONSEQUENCES: CLIMATE MIGRATION IS ONE OF THEM! — Trump’s Stupidity & Cruelty On Immigration Climate Science, & Disease Control Promises Horrible Global Human Disaster For Future Generations — Empowering & Enabling A Moron Is Always A Very Bad Idea! — No Idiotic Wall Or “Drill Baby Drill” Insanity Is Going To Prevent This Human Catastrophe We Are Inflicting On Those Who Follow!

🏴‍☠️

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.

From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

. . . .

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.

Reporting and translation were contributed by Pedro Pablo Solares in Guatemala and El Salvador, and Louisa Reynolds and Juan de Dios García Davish in Mexico.

Data for opening globe graphic from “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” by Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Marten Scheffer, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic by Bryan Christie Design/Joe Lertola.

Maps in Central America graphics sequence show total population shift under the SSP5 / RCP 8.5 and SSP3 / RCP 8.5 scenarios used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it is calculated on a 15-kilometer grid. A cube-root scale was used to compress the largest peaks.

Projections based on research by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Model graphics and additional data analysis by Matthew Conlen.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint and Shannon Lin.

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

Read the full article, with pictures and neat graphics, at the link!

“Safe Third Countries” indeed! It’s total fraud-enhanced immorality by the Trump regime, with our failed and failing “governing institutions” and the rest of the world fecklessly watching us be driven by the irrational hate and stupidity filled agenda of a madman and his toadies!

No wall will be high enough, no “American Gulag” cruel enough, no rhetoric racist enough, no laws hateful enough, no Supreme Court dehumanizing enough, no immorality and stupidity gross enough to stop mass human migration driven by climate change. “Desperate people do desperate things!”

This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

07-26-20

FORCED ENVIRONMENTAL MIGRATION: The Next Global Crisis Is Coming – Walls, Gulags, Weaponized Courts, & Institutionalized Cruelty Won’t Stop It! – “The benefits of accepting more migrants goes far beyond economics. Studies show that increasing immigration quotas improves both economic innovation and community resilience, proving that diversity and inclusion make the United States stronger.”

https://apple.news/AEhIK_rMuTuussVUz0LMm9w

Rosemary Dent writes for International Policy Digest:

“Pacific Island states do not need to be underwater before triggering human rights obligations to protect the right to life.” – Kate Schuetze, Pacific Researcher with Amnesty International

This is a quote in reference to a landmark human rights case brought to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) in February 2016. Ioane Teitiota of the island nation of Kiribati was originally refused asylum as a ‘climate refugee’ by New Zealand’s authorities and was subsequently deported. While the HRC did not rule this action unlawful, the committee did set a global precedent in recognizing the serious threat to the right to life that climate change poses on many communities globally. Furthermore, the HRC urged governments to consider the broader effects of climate change in future cases, essentially validating the concept of a ‘climate refugee’ outside the context of a natural disaster.

As the impacts of climate change become more severe and widespread, the United States must prepare for the resulting surge of human migration. Climate scientists are currently predicting that both primary and secondary impacts of climate change will collectively produce 140–200 million climate refugees by 2050. This sharp increase, if mismanaged, would likely overwhelm refugee processing systems, flood points of entry to the United States and strain both society and the economy. In order to protect the United States from these potential shocks, the government must begin to prepare the appropriate infrastructure, processes, and funding for integrating climate refugees into the population. As the coronavirus ravages the country, it is highlighting many of the systemic failures that occur when the government is not adequately prepared or pro-active.

In 1990, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognized human migration as the biggest impact of climate change. The IPCC predicted that primary impacts like shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruptions would create massive disruptions to the livelihoods of millions. The resulting secondary impacts relate to the effects on society globally; such as political unrest, food insecurity, and mass migrations. As four out of five refugees flee on foot to nations bordering their home country, most human migration is localized to areas affected by conflict. However, as climate change affects communities globally, the flows of refugees will no longer be concentrated to conflict zones and their surrounding nations, bringing the issue to U.S. borders. The sheer scale of migration that the IPCC is predicting renders any previous methods of dealing with refugees unsuitable for this impending crisis.

In terms of physical processing capacity, the United States is currently severely unprepared. Presently, it takes between eighteen to twenty-four months for a refugee to be screened and vetted before being approved to be resettled. This process involves in-person interviews, ongoing vetting by various intelligence agencies, health screening, and application reviews. These are all important and necessary steps to take in order to safeguard domestic security and safety of American citizens. However, expanding the capacity of these processes is necessary to prevent overwhelmed systems and employees, as it can result in errors or oversights. The administration must begin to work with sector experts and employees to determine the most efficient and effective way to expand these services.

These initial consultations are a necessary first step to creating a cohesive plan of action for the imminent refugee crisis. It would be irresponsible to simply increase the refugee intake limit without first establishing an effective process, as this would generate fragmented and disjointed state-level responses. A unified federal approach to intake climate refugees will standardize the procedure for smooth resettlement and promote economic growth.

Ensuring a legal framework is in place, with clear and inclusive classifications and resettlement plans will allow migrants to fully participate and enrich society. Unpreparedness will strain the U.S. economy, systems and society. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), admitting migrants is beneficial for a domestic economy because they add human capital and boost the working-age population. The United States has an aging population, as people over the age of sixty-five are projected to outnumber children in the United States population by 2030. If this gap continues to grow, it will cause the number of dependent individuals to be greater than those contributing to the economy. Accepting more migrants into the United States can alleviate this problem, provided that sufficient processing and resettlement programs exist to direct migrants into the workforce effectively.

The benefits of accepting more migrants goes far beyond economics. Studies show that increasing immigration quotas improves both economic innovation and community resilience, proving that diversity and inclusion make the United States stronger. In view of the abundant challenges ahead for the United States, as highlighted by the current pandemic, uniting communities and reinforcing the economy to maintain employment levels will be key to survival. As a global leader in developing methods for climate change adaptation, the United States must be prepared to take these first steps.

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

Needless to say, we’re not going to get the necessary enlightened humanitarian leadership and careful expert planning necessary to deal with such a global crisis from the Trump kakistocracy. That’s why regime change in November is essential for both the future of our nation and the future of our world.

Due Process Forever! Kakistocracy Never!

PWS

04-20-20

LETTER FROM 21 DEMOCRATIC SENATORS HIGHLIGHTS FRAUD, “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN TRUMP REGIME’S BOGUS “SAFE THIRD COUNTRY AGREEMENTS” WITH SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS AND INHOSPTABLE COUNTRIES FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS!

Trump Refugee Policy

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.02.05%20Letter%20to%20State,%20DOJ,%20DHS%20about%20Northern%20Triangle%20Asylum%20Cooperative%20Agreements.pdf

The Honorable Michael R. Pompeo Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20037

The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001

The Honorable Chad F. Wolf
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security U.S. Department of Homeland Security 3801 Nebraska Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20528

tinitrd ~tatrs ~rnatr WASHINGTON. DC 20510

February 5, 2020

Dear Secretary Pompeo, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Secretary Wolf:

We write regarding the “asylum cooperative agreements”1 (ACAs) that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has signed in recent months with Guatemala? El Salvador,3 and Honduras,4 countries collectively referred to as the “Northern Triangle.” These agreements outline a framework that could enable the United States to expel asylum seekers to each ofthese countries, regardless of where the migrants are from or which countries they have transited en

1 Sometimes referred to as “safe third country agreements.” U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-20 19-11-19/pdf/20 19-25137.pdf.

2 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Republic of Guatemala on Cooperation Regarding the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed July 26,2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6232982-Signed-Agreement- English.html#document/p 1.

3 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative- Agreement.html.

4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic of Honduras for Cooperation in the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed September 25, 2019, https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/47/a5/85ea59444cb89bb2f3eca15880f3/us-honduras- asylum-cooperative-agreement.pdf.

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route to the United States.5 The Trump Administration’s approach to asylum seekers is not only inhumane and potentially illegal; it could also overwhelm the asylum systems ofGuatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and further destabilize those countries. As such, these agreements could have serious and detrimental implications for U.S. national security.

There is significant evidence that the Northern Triangle countries are unlikely to provide safety or adequate protection for asylum seekers, both because ofthe pervasive violent crime and targeted persecution there as well as their governments’ weak or practically non-existent asylum capacities. We are also concerned that expelling asylum seekers under this framework raises serious legal and procedural questions, including the degree to which the Administration complied with relevant law in producing and signing these agreements.

As you know, the Northern Triangle countries have some ofthe highest homicide rates in the world and are experiencing massive forced displacement both internally and across borders.6•7•8 The Department of State’s own human rights reports for these countries describe the dangers of rape, femicide, forced child labor, and threats against the LGBTQ community.9 Gang violence is pervasive and often transcends borders; some ofthese criminal organizations are so dangerous that even some police forces trained to combat gang violence are themselves fleeing to the United States.10 Despite these troubling facts, on November 21,2019, the Administration expelled a Honduran man to Guatemala in the first transfer under these agreements.11 ·

The Administration has since expelled more than 250 migrants from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala.12 At first, the Administration said it would transfer only single adults.13 However,

5 The agreements do not allow for returning an asylum seeker to the country oftheir own nationality. But they allow, for example, for a Honduran or a Cameroonian asylum seeker to be deported to Guatemala. U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19,2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019-25137.pdf.

6 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide 2019,” July 2019, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html.
7 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018,” June 20, 2019, p. 48, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/5d08d7ee7/unhcr-global-trends-2018.html. (In 2018, over 282,000 people from the Northern Triangle countries had asylum applications pending adjudication worldwide)
8 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Painting the Full Picture: Persistent data gaps on internal displacement associated with violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” November 2019, pp. 10-15, http://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/painting-the-full-picture-displacement-data-gaps-in-the-ntca.
9 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustoin/420abb692c/.
10 Washington Post, “It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country,” Kevin Sieff, March 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the americas/its-so-dangerous-to-police-ms-13-in-el- salvador-that-officers-are-fleeing-the-countrv/2019/03/03/e897dbaa-2287-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084 stmy.html

11 Reuters, “Shifting asylum ‘burden’: U.S. sends Guatemala first Honduran migrant,” Sofia Menchu, November 21, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-guatemala/shifting-asylum-burden-us-sends-guatemala- frrst-honduran-migrant-idUSKBN1XV1 WM.
12 The Intercept, “One year into ‘Remain in Mexico,’ the U.S. is enlisting Central America in its crackdown on asylum,” Sandra Cuffe, January 29, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/remain-in-mexico-year-anniversary- central-america/.

13 LA Times, “In a first, U.S. starts pushing Central American families seeking asylum to Guatemala,” Molly O’Toole, December 10, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-10/u-s-starts-pushing-asylum- seeking-families-back-to-guatemala-for-first-time.

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the Administration has begun to transfer children and families, including a Honduran mother with two children who had been hospitalized.14 Reportedly, many ofthese migrants are not even aware in advance ofthe country to which they are being transferred. Upon arrival, they are told that they have 72 hours to either apply for asylum or leave, but are reportedly given practically no information about the process.15

Because ofthe lack ofprotection offered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, these agreements raise serious legal questions. On November 18,2019, the Department ofJustice and DHS released an interim fmal rule (“Rule”) amending departmental regulations in order to implement the ACAs.16 The Rule, effective November 19, 2019, characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides that asylum seekers may be removed under the following conditiop.s:

“[I]fthe Attorney General determines that the alien may be removed, pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement, to a country (other than the country ofthe alien’s nationality or, in the case ofan alien having no nationality, the country of the alien’s last habitual residence) in which the alien’s life or freedom would not be threatened on account ofrace, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and where the alien would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection, uilless the Attorney General fmds that it is in the public interest for the alien to receive asylum in the United States.”17

The Rule provides that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security will make “categorical” determinations as to whether the Northern Triangle countries offer access to a “full and fair procedure” for determining asylum claims. Written information provided to our offices by the Administration indicates that “[t]he Attorney General and Secretary ofHomeland Security determined that Guatemala’s asylum system provides full and fair access to individuals seeking protection, as required by U.S. law, prior to the ACA entering into force on November 15.”18

The notion that Guatemala or the other two Northern Triangle countries offers such a procedure strains credulity-their systems for determining asylum claims are, at best, deeply flawed and under-resourced, and at worst, practically non-existent. According to the State Department’s human rights reports, in Guatemala, “identification and referral mechanisms for potential asylum seekers were inadequate… [and] migration and police authorities lacked adequate training

14 Associated Press, “Advocates: Honduran mother, children deported to Guatemala,” Nomaan Merchant, January 21, 2020, https://apnews.com/583a7dl0644f407e8035e5b6eddlc8f7.
15 Washington Post, “The U.S. is putting asylum seekers on planes to Guatemala- often without telling them where they’re going,” Kevin Sieff, January 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/worldlthe americas/the-us- is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre- going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-llea-alff-c48cld59a4a1 story.html.

16 U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019- 25137.pdf.

17 8 USC§ 1158(a)(2)(A). Emphasis added.
18 U.S. Department of State, Answer to Question for the Record to Deputy Secretary of State Nominee Stephen Biegun by Senator Bob Menendez (#235), Submitted November 20, 2019.

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concerning the rules for establishing refu,gee status.”19 Guatemala does not have a dedicated office for resolving asylum cases; instead, a commission offour officials from several ministries and the immigration department.meet a few times a year to decide cases.20 Reportedly, these officials did not resolve a single case in the first seven months of2019.21 Honduras and El Salvador do not have a single full-time asylum officer. By contrast, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has about 500 asylum officers who are currently tasked with adjudicating over 300,000 pending asylum cases.22 Thus, the Northern Triangle countries are not remotely equipped to fully and fairly handle even a small fraction ofthese cases.

The lack of asylum capacity poses a grave risk that these Northern Triangle governments w ill- whether inadvertently or willfully-return asylum seekers to their country ofpersecution, constituting the serious human rights violation of refoulement that is prohibited under Section 208(a)(2)(A) ofthe U.S Immigration and Nationality Act.

This provision ofU.S.law codifies U.S. obligations prohibiting the return ofrefugees to a territory where his or her life or freedom would be threatened as a state party to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The ACAs may also violate U.S. obligations as a party to the 1984 Convention against Torture.23 Indeed, in response to the publication ofthe Rule, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released a statement, saying it “has serious concerns about the new U.S. policy on asylum,” calling it “an approach at variance with international law that could result in the transfer ofhighly vulnerable individuals to countries where they may face life-threatening dangers.”24 A recently filed lawsuit details additional legal violations posed by the implementation ofthe ACAs.25

The ACAs recently signed by DHS appear to have been drafted in haste, with multiple typographical errors introduced into the agreements.26 There is little sign that they were

19 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustom/420abb692c/.
20 Wall Street Journal, “Asylum Seekers at U.S. Southern Border Can Now Be Sent to Guatemala Instead,” Michelle Hackman and Juan Montes, November 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/asy1um-seekers-at-u-s-southern- border-can-now-be-sent-to-guatemala-instead-11574187109.
21 Univision News, “Guatemala’s ’embryonic’ asylum system lacks capacity to serve as safe U.S. partner, experts say,” David C. Adams, August 2, 2019, https://www.univision.com/univision-news/immigration/guatemalas- embcyonic-asylum-system-lacks-capacity-to-serve-as-safe-u-s-partner-experts-say.
22 Government Executive, “Homeland Security Says It Will Dramatically Increase Asylum Workforce by Year’s End,” Eric Katz, October 23, 2019, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2019/10/homeland-security-says-it-will- dramatically-increase-asylum-workforce-years-end/160828/.
23 Protocol Relating to the Status ofRefugees, January 31, 1967; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 12, 1984; “Benchbook on International Law,” Diane Marie Amann (ed.), pp. ill.E-51, 2014, https://www.asil.org/sites/defau1t/files/benchbook/humanrights4.pdf.
24 UNHCR, “Statement on new U.S. asylum policy,” press release, November 19, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en- us/news/press/2019/11/5dd426824/statement-on-new-us-asylum-policy.html.
25 U.T. v. Barr, “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” United States District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.ac1u.org/sites/default/files/field document/complaint – u.t. v. barr 1 15 2020.pdf.
26 For example, the agreement with El Salvador refers to “El Salvadornian [sic] migration law, although this language is incorrect. A Google search for “El Salvadornian” produces zero results.:_the most common English- language demonym is “Salvadoran,” though “Salvadorian” and “Salvadorean” are also used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadorans. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the

4

negotiated in a meaningful way individually with each country. Furthermore, the President’s actions leading up to the agreements’ signing-including social media statements threatening to withhold, and subsequent withholding of, Congressionally-appropriated aid to the region- indicate that Central American officials may have accepted the terms under duress.27

~ Additionally, one news report indicated that, in a private meeting with President Trump, Secretary Pompeo criticized the agreement with Guatemala, “ca:lled the agreement flawed and a mistake,” and told the President that ”the Guatemalan government did not have the ability to carry out its terms.”28 This raises questions about the degree to which the State Department was involved in policy deliberations and decisions underlying these agreements.

Accordingly, please provide answers to the following questions by February 18, 2020:

Did any officials within the State Department raise concerns abol)t the feasibility of implementing these ACAs due to the lack of capacity of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum systems, or for any other reason? Please provide any such memoranda or communications in which any such concerns were articulated.

What specific concerns about the agreement with Guatemala were raised by Secretary Pompeo in the reported Oval Office meeting with the President? Have these concerns been addressed?

Were any assessments of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum adjudication procedures made prior to the negotiation or conclusion ofthe ACAs? Please provide any documents related to any such assessments.

The ACAs indicate that the parties shall develop standard operating procedures and plans regarding the implementation ofthese agreements. What is the status ofthese plans in each Northern Triangle coll.ntry?

4.. The ACAs indicate that they shall enter into force upon “exchange ofnotes” indicating that both countries have compl~ted the n~cessary domestic legal procedures for bringing the agreement into force. Which ofthe ACAs are in force? Please include copies ofany and all records related to this required exchange of notes.

Reportedly, Honduran officials wanted to delay transfers until both countries “provided notification that they have complied with the legal and institutional conditions necessary for proper implementation of this agreement” but DHS officials wrote that this request read to them as an “escape-hatch not to implement the ACA.”29 Should this be taken as an indication that DHS considers the ACAs to be in force even in the absence of such “notification” by both countries?

Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, p. 2, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative-Agreement.html.
27 Politico, “Trump warns ofretaliation against Guatemala after immigration deal falls through,” Rishika Dugyala and Sabrina Rodrigues, July 23, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/23/trump-guatemala-retaliation- immigration-deal-1426722; NPR, “Trump Froze Aid To Guatemala. Now Programs Are Shutting Down,” Tim McDonnell, September 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/17/761266169/trump-froze- aid-to-guatemala-now-programs-are-shutting-down.
28 New York Times, “Trump Officials Argued Over Asylum Deal With Guatemala. Now Both Countries Must Make It Work,” Michael D. Shear and.Zolan Kanno-Youngs, August 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/safe-third-guatemala.html.
29 BuzzFeed News, “Trump Wants To Start Deporting Asylum-Seekers To Honduras By January,” Hamed Aleaziz, November 25, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/asylum-seekers-deportation-honduras- trump.

5

The Rule indicates that the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security will make a categorical determination that each ofthe Northern Triangle countries offers a “full and fair procedure” for adjudicating asylum claims.

Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland

Security determined do have a “full and fair procedure”? Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security determined do not have a “full and fair procedure”? For each country, when were any such determinations reached?

How are the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security reaching these determinations? Please provide copies of any determinations made by DOJ and DHS and any related documentation ofdiscussions ofthis issue.

The Rule characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Besides the ACAs, the only “safe third country” agreements signed in the 50 years since the enactment ofthe Immigration and Nationality Act was the agreement with Canada. Over two years elapsed between December 5, 2002, when that agreement was signed, and December 29, 2004, when it came into force.30 In contrast, less than four months elapsed between July 26, 2019, when the ACA with Guatemala was signed, and November 15,2019, when it came into force.

In the ACA signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Guatemala’s Minister of Interior and Home Affairs said that “Guatemala is definitely clear on the responsibility that it has. We are clear that we have to make changes.”31 What changes, if any, did Guatemala make to strengthen their asylum procedures in these four months? Please provide any communications between the government of Guatemala.and the Administration related to improvements made to Guatemala’s asylum system since the agreement was signed in July.

In order to ensure that the United States fulfills its obligations to refrain from sending a person to a place where such person will face harm, what procedures will the Administration follow if asylum seekers face torture, ill treatment, or persecution after being transferred to the Northern Triangle? ·

Is DHS transferring asylum seekers under the ACAs to Northern Triangle countries on the same flights as deportees? How is DHS ensuring that asylum seekers are not transferred in the company of individuals who may threaten their life or freedom after their arrival in country?

What, ifanything, was promised or offered by U.S. officials to the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras in exchange for their signing onto these agreements?

30 “AgreementbetweentheGovernmentofCanadaandtheGovernmentoftheUnitedStatesofAmericaFor cooperation in the examination ofrefugee status claims from nationals ofthird countries,” signed December 5, 2002, https://www.canada.ca/enlimmigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions- agreements/agreements/safe-third-country-agreementlfmal-text.html.
31 White House, “Remarks by President Trump at Signing ofSafe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala,” July 26, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-signing-safe-third-country- agreement-guatemala/.

6

Sincerely,

un· ed States Senator

k4-/a…~ Richard Blumenthal
United States Senator

~~~~

Kirsten E. Gillibrand Benjamin L. Cardin

United States Senator

United States Senator

‘0…=.>–·-topher S. Murphy United States Senator

United States Senator

~%Markey ·~ United States Senator

Edward J.

Bernard Sanders United States Senator

Thomas R. Carper United States Senator

~~

United States Senator

—

7

Tim Kaine
United States Senator

Christopher A. Coons United States Senator

8

Cory A. Booker United States Senator

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

All good points. But, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a reply from the regime.

Obviously, in the process of selling out America, the GOP just authorized the regime to “give a big middle finger” to any type of Congressional oversight.

Once you get beyond the fraud, lawlessness, and intentional cruelty of the regime’s agreements, here’s the reality of what’s awaits those illegally “orbited” to dangerous failed states in the Northern triangle: death, torture, rape, extortion, etc.:

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations!

This isn’t “normal.” It’s politically and judicially enabled neo-fascism unfolding right in front of us.

PWS

02-10-20

4th CIR. NABS BIA VIOLATING DUE PROCESS, AGAIN: Yes, Guys, Believe It Or Not You Should Allow the Respondent To Actually TESTIFY Before Sustaining An “Adverse Credibility” Finding! — Atemnkeng v. Barr – Plus, Bonus Mini-Essay: “When Will Life-Tenured Judges Stop Enabling The Arrogant Trashing Of Due Process By Our Authoritarian Regime?”

4^th CIR. NABS BIA VIOLATING DUE PROCESS, AGAIN: Yes, Guys, Believe It Or Not You Should Allow the Respondent To Actually TESTIFY Before Sustaining An “Adverse Credibility” Finding! — Atemnkeng v. Barr – Plus, Bonus Mini-Essay: “When Will Life-Tenured Judges Stop Enabling The Arrogant Trashing Of Due Process By Our Authoritarian Regime?”

http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/181886.P.pdf

Atemnkeng v. Barr, 4^th Cir. Jan. 24, 2020, published

PANEL: GREGORY, Chief Judge, WYNN, and THACKER, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Chief Judge Gregory

KEY QUOTE:

Ngawung Atemnkeng, a citizen of Cameroon, fled her country after participating in

anti-government meetings and protests, getting arrested and was detained without trial several times, being tortured and beaten by government officers, and receiving numerous death threats. An immigration judge (“IJ”) initially noted some inconsistencies in Atemnkeng’s application, but nevertheless found her credible and her explanations plausible, and granted her asylum application. On appeal, the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) reversed the IJ’s determination and instructed the IJ, in reviewing the asylum application a second time, to afford Atemnkeng an opportunity to explain any inconsistencies.

On remand, Atemnkeng has now relocated to Baltimore and the new IJ (“Baltimore IJ”) permitted her to submit additional documents in support of her asylum application and scheduled a master calendar hearing. Approximately one month prior to the hearing, however, the Baltimore IJ issued a written ruling denying Atemnkeng’s applications for asylum and other reliefs. The Baltimore IJ concluded, without Atemnkeng’s new testimony, that she was not credible in light of inconsistencies in her story. On a second appeal to the BIA, the Baltimore IJ’s ruling was affirmed without an opinion. Atemnkeng now petitions for review of the BIA’s summary affirmance of the Baltimore IJ’s rulings.

In her petition for review, she raises several claims, most notably, that her due process rights were violated when the Baltimore IJ deprived her of an opportunity to testify on remand. Concluding that Atemnkeng’s claim related to her ability to testify is

meritorious, we grant the petition for review, vacate the BIA’s affirmance, and remand for 2

further proceedings. In light of our conclusion that the Baltimore IJ failed to give Atemnkeng an opportunity to testify and weigh the relevance of that testimony in conjunction with the entire record, we decline to address whether the adverse credibility determination and denials of Atemnkeng’s applications for withholding of removal and relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) were erroneous.

*******************************“

When Will Life-Tenured Judges Stop Enabling The Arrogant Trashing Of Due Process By Our Authoritarian Regime?”

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

“Courtside” Exclusive

Jan. 1, 2020

Giving someone a chance to testify in person and explain apparent discrepancies, particularly when the case was for remanded for just that reason, seems like “Law 101.” It’s so elementary, I wouldn’t even include it on a final exam!

After all, simple logic, unclouded by a philosophy of treating migrants as a subclass whose legal rights judges often parrot but seldom enforce, would say that “Due Process is at its zenith” when human lives are at stake, as was the case here. It’s also required not only by the Constitution, but by BIA precedents like Matter of A-S-. So, how does this “go south” at EOIR?

Following precedents where it might help a respondent, be it a BIA or a Circuit precedent, seems to have become largely “optional” in the Immigration Courts these days, as I have previously observed. Instead, with constant encouragement from a White Nationalist, xenophobic regime, and lots of complicit judges at all levels, Due Process has largely been wiped out in Immigration Court.

Thank goodness this respondent, represented by long-time practitioner Ronald Richey (an Arlington Immigration Court regular” during my tenure), had the wherewithal to get to the Fourth Circuit and to draw a panel of judges interested in setting things right.

Think about what might have happened if she had landed in a complicit, largely “Decency Free Zone” like the Fifth or Eleventh Circuits, known for “going along to get along” with almost any abuse of migrants’ rights by the Government.

When are all Article III Judges going to start “connecting the dots” and asking why a supposedly “expert tribunal” whose one and only job should be to painstakingly insure that nobody is denied relief and removed from the United States, particularly to potential torture or death, without full Due Process and fundamental fairness is making fundamental mistakes in churning out removal orders.

Once upon a time, EOIR, the “home” of the Immigration Courts set out to use “teamwork and innovation to become the world’s best administrative tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”Not only has that “noble vision” been totally trashed, but the exact opposite has become institutionalized at EOIR: “Worst practices,” badly skewed pro-prosecutor hiring, inadequate professional training, lack of expertise, speed and expediency elevated over quality and care, intentional institutionalization of anti-immigrant, anti-asylum, pro-DHS bias, demeaning treatment of respondents and their lawyers, and the extermination of judicial independence and public accountability.

Today’s EOIR is truly a grim place, particularly for those whose lives are being destroyed by its substandard performance and also for the attorneys trying desperately to save them. Obviously, most Article IIIs have insulated themselves from the practical humanitarian disasters unfolding in Immigration Courts every day under their auspices.

What do they think happens to folks who can’t afford to be represented by Ronald Richey or one of his colleagues and whose access to pro bono counsel is intentionally hampered or impeded by EOIR? Think they have any chance whatsoever of a “fundamentally fair hearing” that complies with Due Process? Hearings for unrepresented individuals in detention are so grotesquely ridiculous that EOIR and DHS have gone to extreme lengths to impede public access so their abuses will take place in secret. Just ask my friendLaura Lynch over at AILA or my colleague Judge Ilyce Shugall of our Round Table what it’s like simply trying to get EOIR and DHS to comply with their own rules.

Listen folks, I helped formulate and implement the Refugee Act of 1980 as a Senior Executive in the “Legacy INS” during the Carter and Reagan Administrations. I even represented a few asylum applicants in private practice, something most Article III Judges and even many Immigraton Judges have never done. In 21 years on the “Immigration Bench” at both the trial and appellate levels, I personally listened to, read, or reviewed on appeal more asylum cases than any sitting Article III Judge of whom I’m aware.

The various parodies and travesties of justice in today’s Immigration Courts are eerily similar to, or in some cases the same, as I used to hear and read about in some of the third-world dictatorships, banana republics, and authoritarian tyrannies I dealt with on a regular basis. It’s simply infuriating, and beyond my understanding, that privileged, life-tenured, Article III Judges in our country, sworn to uphold our laws and Constitution, can continue to permit and so “glibly gloss over” these violations of law and gross perversions of human decency.

And, that goes right up to the Supremes’ intentional, disingenuous “tone deaf” approach to ignoring the real unconstitutional, invidious motives and fabrications behind the Administration’s original “Travel Ban.” All of the fatal legal defects were carefully documented and explained by various lower court judges trying conscientiously to uphold their oaths of office and “do the right thing.” Instead they were “dissed” by the Supremes and their hard work was ignored and denigrated. Fake, exaggerated, or “trumped up” “national security” pretexts for abusive treatment of “others” and political or religious opponents is a staple of persecuting regimes everywhere, as it now has become a judicially-enable staple of our current regime.

It’s long past time for the Article IIIs to wake up and put an end to the systemic nonsense that is literally killing people in our dysfunctional Immigration Court system. Is this the type of system to which you would entrust YOUR life, judges? If not, and I severely doubt that it is, why does it pass for “Due Process” for some of the most vulnerable among us? Think about it?

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

01-31-20

MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: Conscientious Immigration Judges Continue To Jump Ship As Regime Turns Immigration “Courts” Into DHS Deportation Offices, Where Due Process & Humanity Die Under A White Nationalist Agenda

Hon. Charles Honeyman — Honorable Charles Honeyman
Retired U.S. Immigration Judge
Member, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=b5c81c57-52fe-4cd7-a092-fc7c8da23f05&v=sdk

HOUSTON — Immigration Judge Charles Honeyman was nearing retirement, but he vowed not to leave while Donald Trump was president and risk being replaced by an ideologue with an anti-immigration agenda.

He pushed back against the administration the best he could. He continued to grant asylum to victims of domestic violence even after the Justice Department said that was not a valid reason to. And he tried to ignore demands to speed through cases without giving them the consideration he believed the law required.

But as the pressure from Washington increased, Honeyman started having stomach pains and thinking, “There are a lot of cases I’m going to have to deny that I’ll feel sick over.”

This month, after 24 years on the bench, the 70-year-old judge called it quits.

Dozens of other judges concerned about their independence have done the same, according to the union that represents them and interviews with several who left.

“We’ve seen stuff which is unprecedented — people leaving the bench soon after they were appointed,” said A. Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges union.

“Judges are going to other federal agencies and retiring as soon as possible. They just don’t want to deal with it. It’s become unbearable.”

Especially worrying to many is a quota system that the Trump administration imposed in 2018 requiring each judge to close at least 700 cases annually, monitoring their progress with a dashboard display installed on their computers.

Tabaddor called the system “a factory model” that puts “pressures on the judges to push the cases through.”

Jeffrey Chase, who served as an immigration judge in New York City until 2007, founded a group of former immigration judges in 2017 that has grown to 40 members.

“They say they would have gladly worked another five or 10 years, but they just reached a point under this administration where they can’t,” he said. “It used to be there were pressures, but you were an independent judge left to decide the cases.”

The precise number of judges who have quit under duress is unclear. Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the courts, said a total of 45 left their positions in the fiscal year that ended last September, but she declined to provide a breakdown of how many of those were deaths, planned retirements or promotions to the immigration appeals board.

More information may become available Wednesday, when a House judiciary subcommittee is scheduled to hear testimony on the state of judicial independence and due process in the country’s 68 immigration courts.

The Trump administration has been adding new judges faster than old ones are leaving. Between 2016 and last year, the total number of judges climbed from 289 to 442.

That increase as well as the quota system and other measures are part of a broad effort by the Trump administration to reduce a massive backlog that tripled during the Obama presidency and then grew worse as large numbers of Central Americans arrived at the U.S. border.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security filed 443,000 cases seeking deportations and immigrants made a record 200,000 asylum applications — both records. More than a million cases remain unresolved.

Still, James McHenry, director of the immigration courts, told the Senate Homeland Security committee in November that the new rules have started to turn around a court system that had been hobbled by neglect and inefficiency.

On average, immigration judges met the quota last year while the number of complaints against judges decreased for the second year in a row, he said.

“These results unequivocally prove that immigration judges have the integrity and competence required to resolve cases in the timely and impartial manner that is required by law,” McHenry testified.

But many judges came to see the new guidelines as a way for the Trump administration to carry out its agenda of increasing deportations and denying asylum claims, which the president has asserted are largely fraudulent.

Those judges say it is impossible to work under the new system and still guarantee migrants their due process rights.

“There are many of us who just feel we can’t be part of a system that’s just so fundamentally unfair,” said Ilyce Shugall, who quit her job as an immigration judge in San Francisco last March and now directs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

The Trump administration was “using the court as a weapon against immigrants,” she said.

Rebecca Jamil, who was also a judge in San Francisco before quitting in 2018, called it a “nearly impossible job.”

She said the judge appointed to replace her left after less than a year.

The judges union has taken up the cause, fighting to end the quota system and make immigration courts independent from the Justice Department.

In response, Justice officials petitioned the Federal Labor Relations Authority last August to decertify the union, arguing judges are managers and therefore not entitled to union protections. The board is expected to issue a decision later this year.

The conflict intensified after the union filed a formal complaint about a Justice Department newsletter that included a link to a white nationalist website that waged anti-Semitic attacks on judges.

Honeyman, who is Jewish, makes no secret of the empathy he felt for the asylum seekers who appeared in his courtroom in Philadelphia and during temporary assignments to courts in Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas.

His grandparents had come from Eastern Europe through New York’s Ellis Island. “I always thought, ‘But for some quirk of the immigration system, I would be on the other side’ ” of the bench, he said.

He granted asylum more often than many other judges. Between 2014 and 2019, immigration judges across the country denied about 60% of asylum claims, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Honeyman denied 35% of claims in his courtroom.

Reflecting on his career in a speech at his retirement party this month, Honeyman said he had been inspired by the cases he heard, including that of a Central American girl who wrote to thank him for granting her asylum. She had graduated from college and was applying to law school “so that she could give back to the America that had saved her life.”

Honeyman said he decided to leave the bench because of “the escalating attack over the past few years on the very notion that we are a court in any meaningful sense.”

“All of these factors and forces I regret tipped the balance for me,” he said. “It was time for Courtroom 1 at the Philadelphia immigration court to go dark.”

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

The idea that things are “turning around” in a positive way for the beleaguered and weaponized “courts” is, of course, pure regime propaganda. The system, is totally out of control.

The Administration eliminated sensible “prosecutorial discretion” guidelines for DHS that prioritized cases in the manner of all other law enforcement agencies in America. DOJ politicos also stripped Immigration Judges of their well-established authority to manage dockets thorough “administrative closure” and restricted their ability to grant reasonable continuances (likely unconstitutional).

At a time when the world is still producing record numbers of refugees, the regime has artificially suppressed the asylum grant rate by issuing unethical and legally wrong politically generated precedents, blocking access to counsel, using intentionally coercive detention, and pressuring judges to “produce or else” which roughly translates into “deny and deport.” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) is the order of the day. This toxic brand of ADR (not to be confused with “alternative disputes resolution”) is an insanely wasteful bureaucratic practice whereby “ready to try cases,” many pending for years, are shuffled off to the end of dockets that are many years out, often without advance notice to the parties, to accommodate Immigration Judge details, reassignments, and other “new priorities of the day.”

So totally out of control and mismanaged is today’s weaponized “court system” that the independent TRAC Immigration at Syracuse University recently estimated that it would take approximately another 400 Immigration Judges, in addition to the approximately 465 already on duty, just for the courts to “break even” on the unrestricted and irresponsible flow of incoming cases from DHS enforcement. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/591/

In other words, to stop creating more backlog. And that would be without further retirements or resignations – something that clearly is not going to happen. Even under those circumstances, the courts would merely be “breaking even.” Eliminating the “backlog” in a fair and legal manner would take additional judges and years, if not generations, if the courts continue to operate as a dysfunctional branch of DOJ dedicated to biased enforcement at the expense of due process, fundamental fairness, and responsible, professional management.

It’s likely that Wednesday‘s House hearings will further document the institutional unfairness and dysfunction of the current “courts” and the urgent, overwhelming need for an independent Article I Immigration court to be established by Congress. But, that reform might not come soon enough for the lives of many of the vulnerable individuals stuck in this “legal hellhole” and the sanity of many of the judges still on the bench.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-27-20

U.N. RECOGNIZES RIGHTS OF “ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES!” — No immediate impact expected

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/world/climate-refugees-unhrc-ruling-scli-intl/index.html

Rob Picheta reports for CNN:

Refugees fleeing the effects of the climate crisis cannot be forced to return home by their adoptive countries, a United Nations panel has ruled, in a landmark decision that could open the door to a flood of legal claims by displaced people around the world.

The UN’s Human Rights Committee was making a judgment on the case of Ioane Teitiota, who applied for protection from New Zealand after claiming his life was at risk in his home country of Kiribati. The Pacific island is at risk of becoming the first country to disappear under rising sea levels.

The committee ruled against Teitiota on the basis that his life was not at imminent risk — but it also outlined that countries could violate people’s international rights if they force them back to countries where climate change poses an immediate threat.

“Without robust national and international efforts, the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to a violation of their rights,” its ruling said.

It’s unlikely the ruling will have an immediate impact on citizens of other countries, given that even Kiribati’s dire situation did not meet the threshold for Teitiota’s claim to succeed. But the decision could have a significant impact on future claims, as the number of people forced from their homes from the intensifying climate emergency grows.

Droughts, crop failure and rising seas are expected to forcetens of millions to move to other areas in the coming years. A 2018 study by the World Bank found that 143 million people across South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are at risk of becoming climate migrants.

In its ruling, the committee cited articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which ensure an individual’s inherent right to life.

“Given that the risk of an entire country becoming submerged under water is such an extreme risk, the conditions of life in such a country may become incompatible with the right to life with dignity before the risk is realized,” its decision added.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified Teitiota’s home nation of Kiribati as one of the six Pacific Island countries most threatened by rising sea levels. The report claims that, due to coastal erosion and freshwater contamination, Kiribati could become uninhabitable as early as 2050.

It has been among a group of Pacific nations sounding the alarm over climate change in recent years but has run up against resistance from nearby Australia.

**********

Kind of reminds me of hypos in some academic articles and law school case books. Only, this problem is real! And, this might only be the beginning.

What’s going to happen when Bangladesh sinks below sea level? Seems like it would be prudent to have elected leaders who acknowledge the problem and at least think about solutions, rather than just pretending like it doesn’t exist.

PWS

01-23-20

NIKKI HALEY: How Ambitious Daughter Of Immigrants Became A Shill For White Nationalist, Xenophobic, Misogynistic Regime & Its Corrupt Leader — “All she had to do was to ignore her conscience, betray her colleagues and injure her country. A small price to pay for such a brilliant political future.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-officials-believe-trump-is-a-danger-to-the-country-they-have-a-duty-to-say-so/2019/11/11/0541dc64-04bf-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html

Michael Gerson writes in the WashPost:

Nikki Haley used to be known as the other member of President Trump’s Cabinet who left with an intact reputation (in addition to former defense secretary Jim Mattis). In an administration more influenced by Recep Tayyip Erdogan than Ronald Reagan, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations often provided a more traditional rhetorical take on American foreign policy. Haley seemed genuinely to care about human rights and democracy, and to somehow get away with displaying such caring in public. Her confidence in national principles marked her as such a freakish exception that some speculated she might be the rogue, anti-Trump Trump official who wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times.

But Trump’s corruption still pulls at a distance. Clearly convinced that Trumpism is here to stay, Haley has publicly turned against other officials in the administration who saw the president as a dangerous fool. She recounts an hour-long meeting with then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who “confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country.” The conspirators (in Haley’s telling) considered it a life-and-death matter. “This was how high the stakes were, he and Kelly told me. We are doing the best we can do to save the country, they said. We need you to work with us and help us do it.”

Haley, by her own account, refused to help. “Instead of saying that to me, they should’ve been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan,” she now explains. “It should’ve been, ‘Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don’t like what he’s doing.’ But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing.”

Here Haley is confusing two categories. If a Cabinet member has a policy objection of sufficient seriousness, he or she should take that concern to the president. If the president then chooses against their position — and if implementing the decision would amount to a violation of conscience — an official should resign. Staying in office to undermine, say, a law or war you disapprove of would be a disturbing arrogation of presidential authority.

But there is an equally important moral priority to consider: If you are a national security official working for a malignant, infantile, impulsive, authoritarian wannabe, you need to stay in your job as long as you can to mitigate whatever damage you can — before the mad king tires of your sanity and fires you.

This paradox is one tragic outcome of Trumpism. It is generally a bad and dangerous idea for appointed officials to put their judgment above an elected official’s. And yet it would have been irresponsible for Mattis, Kelly, Tillerson and others not to follow their own judgments in cases where an incompetent, delusional or corrupt president was threatening the national interest.

Consider the case of former White House counsel Donald McGahn. According to the Mueller report, McGahn complained to then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus that Trump was trying to get him to “do crazy s–t.” McGahn (thankfully) told investigators he ignored presidential orders he took to be illegal.

Or consider a negative illustration. When it came to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the only morally mature adults in the room (and on the phone) were quite junior in rank. They expressed their concerns upward. But those above them — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — had learned the lesson about officials fired for an excess of conscience. They apparently looked the other way as a friendly country was squeezed for political reasons.

On the whole, I’m glad that responsible officials such as Kelly and Mattis stayed as long as they did to prevent damage to the country. But I also think they have a moral obligation to come out before the 2020 election and say what they know about Trump’s unfitness. If Biden is the nominee, they might even get together and endorse him. But, in any case, if they believe Trump is a danger to the national interest, they eventually have a duty to say something. Saving the country requires no less.

As for Haley, she has now signaled to Trump Republicans that she was not a part of the “deep state,” thus clearing away a barrier to ambition. All she had to do was to ignore her conscience, betray her colleagues and injure her country. A small price to pay for such a brilliant political future.

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

Haley’s ridiculously disingenuous performance on Today when grilled by Savannah Guthrie about the facts was worthy of her new role model, “Don the Con.”

Although you wouldn’t know it from the sycophantic Haley, political appointees, including Cabinet Members, actually take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the U.S., not the President. They are also first and foremost public servants paid by the People, not personal retainers of Trump as Haley, Barr, Pompeo, and others have functioned. I’d actually put Kelly and Tillerson in that category too; they certainly made a mess out of things at DHS and State, respectively, by putting the President’s xenophobic political policies before the law and the public interest.

And, if they in fact thought the President was endangering the U.S., they have kept it a secret after leaving. Compare these tawdry performances with those of the career public servants who have spoken out about Trump’s misdeeds even at the likely cost of their careers. And, unlike the stream of political appointees who have left in various stages of disgrace, they probably don’t have lucrative private sector jobs and/or fat book contracts awaiting them.

Expect Haley to “repackage herself” as a “powerful woman” and eventually as a Presidential candidate. She should be met with the same contempt as Kirstjen Nielsen and the few other GOP women who penetrated the Trump GOP’s “White Men Only Club” only to choose pandering to its corrupt leader over the welfare of our nation and advancement of humanity.

PWS

11-12-19

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

https://apple.news/AiFomr1e1Tni878bxZd4OKw

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen McCarthy, Monrovia

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

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

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

PWS

09-26-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

09-10-19

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

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

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