CHARLES M. BLOW @ NYT: TIME TO START CALLING IT WHAT IT IS: “It is time for us to simply call a thing a thing: White supremacy is the biggest racial problem this country faces, and has faced. It is almost always the cause of unrest around race. It has been used to slaughter and destroy, to oppress and imprison. It manifests in every segment of American life.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/opinion/racism-united-states.html

Blow writes in The NY Times:

Now that we are deep into protests over racism, inequality and police brutality — protests that I’ve come to see as a revisiting of Freedom Summer — it is clear that Donald Trump sees the activation of white nationalism and anti-otherness as his path to re-election. We are engaged in yet another national conversation about race and racism, privilege and oppression.

But, as is usually the case, the language we used to describe the moment is lacking. We — the public and the media, including this newspaper, including, in the past, this very column — often use, consciously or not, language that shields anti-Black white supremacy, rather than to expose it and hold it accountable.

We use all manner of euphemisms and terms of art to keep from directly addressing the racial reality in America. This may be some holdover from a bygone time, but it is now time for it to come to an end.

Take for instance the term “race relations.” Polling organizations like Gallup and the Pew Research Center often ask respondents how they feel about the state of race relations in the country.

I have never fully understood what this meant. It suggests a relationship that swings from harmony to disharmony. But that is not the way race is structured or animated in this country. From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof.

Protests, and even violence, have erupted when white people felt their hold on those things was threatened or when Black people — or Indigenous people, or Hispanics — rebelled against those things being denied.

So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

White Supremacy is at the core of Donald Trump and today’s GOP. It is willfully enabled by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Supreme Court Justices who refuse to acknowledge the obvious anti-Hispanic and anti-people of color motivations behind unconstitutional and inhuman immigration and asylum restrictions designed by notoriously outspoken neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller.

Likewise, the intellectually corrupt Supremes’ majority fails to prevent the GOP’s racist strategy of suppressing voting rights of African Americans and Latinos. The unconstitutionality of these schemes to deny the vote and dilute the political power of people of color has been crystal clear under our Constitution since the enactment of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

You don’t need a Harvard law degree to figure this out. Just honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity — things that I once took for granted among Supreme Court Justices, but now see are sorely missing on today’s Court where extreme rightist ideology identified with white supremacy has replaced judicial qualifications as selection criteria when the GOP was in charge.

Ending white supremacy in America will require ousting Trump and the GOP and ending the GOP’s power to put more unqualified judges who are opposed to racial and social justice in America on the Federal Bench.

This November, vote like your life and our nation’s future depend it it. Because they do!

PWS

07-09-20

JULY 4, 2020: Colbert I. King @ WashPost With a “Declaration of Independence” For Our Time! 🗽👍🏼⚖️💥 — DUMP TRUMP! ☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-declaration-this-independence-day-should-be-liberation-from-trump/2020/07/03/bfa53998-bc98-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

. . . .

Yes, the Fourth of July is a date to honor. But this year, it is also a day of sorrow for where we now find ourselves.

The United States of America, created in 1776 by men who put love of country over their own private interests — who staked their lives, fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of their new nation — is now in the grasp of a man whose entire life has been spent taking, while giving nothing in return.

Trump’s successes are displayed in shrines across the country and around the world emblazoned with his name — Trump towers, Trump plazas, Trump golf courses, Trump casinos, and Trump streets and roads. Trump’s love is limited to his private interests. He stakes his life and fortune only on the cause of Trump.

To further sully the celebration of the most pivotal day in U.S. history, the White House is in the grasp of a president who thinks the United States’ heritage is exemplified by the legacy of the Confederate flag and the traitorous generals who fought under that symbol of white supremacy.

Trump’s meltdown over the attempted takedown of the slaveholding Andrew Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Square is, for instance, of a kind with his cherishing of monuments of the War of Southern Aggression, which started when the Confederacy fired on the American flag at Fort Sumter.

Douglass would be revolted by Trump’s infatuation with a history in which generations of blacks were robbed of their liberty and forced to show obedience to the master. As outraged as I am now.

Trump’s warm embrace of white nationalism on Independence Day 2020 makes a mockery of the concepts of justice and liberty entrusted to the nation in the Declaration.

Gwen and I celebrated our 59th wedding anniversary on July 3. The first four Fourth of Julys of our marriage were spent as citizens of a country with a large swath of areas that had hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment that we were not allowed to enter because we were black. Two of those years I spent proudly wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army commissioned officer.

Try living with that.

Today, we have the bodies of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery — with a preening, coldblooded bully ensconced in the Oval Office.

Whose Fourth of July is this?

The Founders discovered themselves faced with an oppressive Crown.

Separation from the Crown was right.

So, too, will be America’s liberation from Donald Trump.

That should be our declaration on this Independence Day.

**********

Read the rest of Colby’s statement at the link.

RESOLVE: To take back our nation from the White Nationalist racist kakistocracy of hate and malicious incompetence that has assumed power as our democratic institutions have failed their “stress test” and plunged us into a daily exhibition of “crimes against humanity.”

This November, vote like your life and the future of America depend on it. Because they do!

PWS🇺🇸⚖️🗽👍🏼💥😎

07-04-20

⚖️🇺🇸THE KIND OF JUDGE AMERICA NEEDS: Judge Nolan Dawkins, Alexandria’s First African-American Judge, Interviewed by NBC 4’s Julie Carey On His Retirement: “I don’t come to court as a judge. I come to court and I see people.”

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/alexandria-judge-considered-trailblazer-retires-after-26-years-on-the-bench/2345595/

Trailblazing Alexandria Judge Retires With Warm Community Send-Off

By Julie Carey and NBCWashington Staff • Published June 26, 2020 • Updated 5 hours ago

People in Old Town Alexandria held a big celebration Friday for the retirement of the city’s first Black judge. After serving on the bench for nearly three decades, Judge Nolan Dawkins hung up his robe.

Well-wishers gathered outside the courthouse and sheriff’s deputies led a 60-car parade down Pitt Street to surprise Dawkins as he made his final goodbyes.

Dawkins grew up in the community he served and said he saw the people in his court first as humans.

“I did know that sometimes what you were seeing in court is not in fact the person,” Dawkins told News4. “Sometimes we need to see through the law and make the decision based on who the person is.”

Even though Dawkins operated that way from the bench, he said he wasn’t always treated with the same regard growing up in segregated Alexandria.

He recounted the time a woman called the police on a friend and him playing behind a grocery store when he was a young child.

“They carried a fingerprint kit and at 8 years old I was fingerprinted,” Dawkins said. “I wondered all my life, ‘Have those fingerprints followed me?'”

Despite the mistreatment he faced, Dawkins broke barriers. He became one of the first students to integrate the former George Washington High School. He was one of five Black students in his graduating class.

“In order to transfer to the all-white school, we had to get an application and essentially prove we could perform in the school system,” he said.

That’s exactly what Dawkins went on to do. He got an ROTC scholarship in college and then served as an officer in Vietnam. When he returned, he attended law school.

In 1994, he became the first Black judge to serve in Alexandria, starting in juvenile and domestic relations court. Dawkins said it’s “one court where you can make a difference.”

Dawkins created one of the first family drug treatment courts, giving addicted parents who had their children taken away a second chance. He says it’s not uncommon now for people to come up to him in the grocery store to say thank you.

For the past 13 years, Dawkins has worked on civil cases in circuit court. Regardless of the type of work, Dawkins said his guiding principle as a judge has been simple.

“I don’t come to court as a judge. I come to court and I see people,” he said.

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

Get our long-time friend Julie’s full video report at the above link (our daughter, Anna, was once the Carey-Tackett’s “summer child care provider” — now everyone in both our families is “all grown up and moved out”).

I don’t know what some judges in the “Trump era” are seeing out there, but it often doesn’t seem to be the people or humanity. Indeed, many seem willfully ignorant of reality and the human consequences of some of Trump’s worst shenanigans. Law is written by humans to govern human conduct and should always be applied with humanity in mind.

Congratulations, Judge Dawkins and our deepest appreciation for your service to our Alexandria community and to justice in America. You are indeed a trail blazer and an inspirational role model for future generations of American judges. ⚖️🗽🇺🇸👍

PWS

06-27-20

THE GIBSON REPORT — 06-22-20 – Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group – WORLD REFUGEE DAY WAS JUNE 20 – AMERICA’S TRUMP REGIME CELEBRATED BY ADVANCING A DISINGENUOUS RACIST ATTACK ON WORK AUTHORIZATION FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS – Just A Few Days After 8 Justices of Supremes Claimed Cluelessness About Trump’s Racist Immigration Agenda! (See, Item #2 Under “Top News”)

COVID-19
Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify the latest policies on the relevant government websites and with colleagues on listservs as best you can.

New
• Opening dates for some non-detained courts: The Honolulu Immigration Court resumed hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, June 15, 2020. The Boston, Buffalo, Dallas, Hartford, Las Vegas, Memphis, and New Orleans Immigration Courts will resume hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, June 29, 2020. Hearings in non-detained cases at all other immigration courts are postponed through, and including, Thursday, July 2, 2020. All immigration courts will be closed Friday, July 3, 2020, in observance of Independence Day. The Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Saipan, and San Diego Immigration Courts will resume hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, July 6, 2020.
• USCIS Reopening
o Newark Asylum Office Remains Closed due to unresolved facility issues unrelated to COVID-19
o New York City and Brooklyn field offices are listed as closed to public, emergency services only

Closures
• EOIR Operational Status & Standing Orders
• EOIR Case Status
• EOIR Updates via Twitter
• ICE Updates (Including ERO and Detention)
• USCIS Updates
• Consular Updates
• NY Courts Updates

Guidance:
• IJ Email Filings
• BIA Email Filings
• EOIR Standing Orders
• EOIR Electronic Signature Guidance
• EOIR Update Regarding EOIR Practices Related to the COVID-19 Outbreak
• USCIS’s Signature Policy Update
• USCIS Announces Flexibility for Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Deny

TOP NEWS

Trump suggests another attempt at rolling back DACA
Roll Call: The president in a series of tweets said the administration “will be submitting enhanced papers shortly in order to properly fulfil the Supreme Court’s ruling & request of yesterday.” See also DACA ‘unlawful’ despite Supreme Court ruling, acting Homeland Security chief says.

The Trump Administration Will Soon Deny Work Permits For Asylum-Seekers Who Enter The US Without Authorization
BuzzFeed: The policy, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News in August, will make asylum-seekers who do not cross into the country at a port of entry ineligible for a work permit in most cases. It will also delay the time it takes for those who apply for asylum — either while already in the US or after crossing the border and referred to immigration court — to become qualified to get a work permit, from 150 days to 365 days. Asylum-seekers who do not file for protections within one year of arriving in the US will also be denied a permit.

Businesses Brace for Possible Limits on Foreign Worker Visas
NYT: Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. See also Chasing Down the Rumors: Possible Extension and Expansion of Presidential Proclamation Suspending Entry of Certain Immigrants into the United States (Updated 6/19/20).

Representation at Bond Hearings Rising but Outcomes Have Not Improved
TRAC: Despite the rising rate of representation, bond grant rates have not improved. During FY 2015 and FY 2016, immigration judges granted bond at 56 percent of these hearings. This fell to 50 percent during FY 2018. Since FY 2018 grant rates have fallen to 48 percent where they have remained for the last three years.

Immigration attorneys face courtroom challenges amid pandemic
Roll Call: Even when courts remain open, to limit personal contact, most procedures are being conducted by video or phone, lending themselves to technical problems that have made it difficult, if not nearly impossible, for lawyers to effectively consult with clients.

Under Threat & Left Out: NYC’s Immigrants And The Coronavirus Crisis
CUF: Immigrant New Yorkers are enduring unprecedented economic pain from the pandemic—and yet they have been almost completely shut out of government programs created for those in need, CUF research and interviews with two dozen nonprofit leaders reveals.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

Supreme Court Upholds DACA, Says DHS’s Decision to Rescind Was Arbitrary and Capricious
On June 18, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that DHS’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, also known as DACA, was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. (DHS v. Regents of the University of California) AILA Doc. No. 20061801

CA2 Remands CAT Claim of Petitioner Who Fled El Salvador After Threats from MS-13 Gang
The court held that the IJ erred as a matter of law in penalizing the petitioner for her prompt flight from El Salvador after members of the MS-13 gang threatened her, and thus remanded her Convention Against Torture (CAT) claim to the BIA. (Martinez De Artiga v. Barr, 6/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061702

Naturalization Applicants File Lawsuit Seeking to Compel USCIS to Conduct Immediate Administrative Naturalizations
The plaintiffs, who have been unable to complete the naturalization process due to the COVID-19 pandemic, filed a class action lawsuit seeking to compel USCIS to conduct immediate administrative naturalizations pursuant to INA §337(c). (Campbell Davis, et al. v. USCIS, et al., 6/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061602

BIA Issues Decision on K-1 Visas and INA §204(c)(2)
The BIA ruled that an individual who has conspired to enter into marriage for the purpose of evading immigration laws by seeking to secure a K-1 fiancé(e) nonimmigrant visa is subject to the bar under INA §204(c)(2). Matter of R.I. Ortega, 28 I&N Dec. 9 (BIA 2020) AILA Doc. No. 20061909

BIA Reverses Finding That Misdemeanor Conviction Was a Particularly Serious Crime
Unpublished BIA decision reverses finding that conviction for third degree assault under N.Y.P.L. 120.00(01) was a particularly serious crime because offense was a misdemeanor unaccompanied by any unusual circumstances. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of G-G-G-, 2/27/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061608

BIA Upholds Termination of Proceedings Based on Regulatory Violation
Unpublished BIA decision upholds termination of proceedings based on DHS’s violation of 8 C.F.R. 287.3(d), which requires ICE to decide within 48 hours of arrest whether to grant bond and issue an NTA. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Pablo-Nicolas, 2/25/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061607

BIA Holds Florida Aggravated Battery Does Not Require Use of Force
Unpublished BIA decision holds that aggravated battery under Fla. Stat. 784.045(b) does not require the use of force because it encompasses simple battery against a pregnant victim. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Campbell, 2/19/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061606

CA1 Finds Salvadoran Petitioner Was Denied Her Statutory Right to Counsel
The court concluded that the IJ had denied the Salvadoran petitioner her statutory right to be represented by the counsel of her choice, and found that the assistance of a lawyer likely would have affected the outcome of her removal proceedings. (Hernandez Lara v. Barr, 6/15/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061905

CA4 Reverses District Court with Instructions to Dismiss Plaintiffs’ Complaints in Travel Ban Case
In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii, the court reversed the district court’s order of May 2, 2019, denying the government’s motion to dismiss, and remanded with instructions to dismiss the plaintiffs’ complaints with prejudice. (IRAP v. Trump, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 17031332

CA5 Upholds BIA’s Denial of Asylum to Petitioner from Trinidad and Tobago Who Alleged Membership in Three PSGs
The court held that petitioner had failed to demonstrate a legal or constitutional error in BIA’s denial of his application for asylum based on membership in three alleged particular social groups (PSGs), including children unable to leave a family relationship. (Alexis v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061704

CA6 Upholds Denial of Asylum to Salvadoran Who Was Found to Be a UAC at Time of Entry
The court held that the IJ had properly exercised jurisdiction over the case of the petitioner, who had entered the United States when he was 18 years old and had been found by an immigration official to be an unaccompanied child (UAC) at the time of his entry. (Garcia v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061811

CA9 Holds Petitioner’s Conviction for Being Under the Influence of Amphetamines in California Rendered Him Removable
The court held that a conviction for being under the influence of a controlled substance in violation of California Health and Safety Code §11550(a) is divisible with respect to controlled substance and thus the modified categorical approach applied and was satisfied. (Tejeda v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061913

CA9 Rejects Petitioner’s Equal Protection Challenge to Former Derivative-Citizenship Statute
The court dismissed the petition for review, rejecting the petitioner’s argument that the second clause of INA §321(a)(3) discriminates by gender and legitimacy and thus violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. (Roy v. Barr, 6/4/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061912

CA11 Upholds Denial of Motion to Remand Based on Ineffective Assistance Where Petitioner Did Not Substantially Comply with Lozada
The court held that petitioner had failed to meet the three Lozada requirements for presenting an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, finding that his attorney lacked actual notice of allegations that his assistance had been ineffective. (Point Du Jour v. Att’y Gen., 6/4/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061914

AILA and Partners Send Letter to EOIR on Premature Decision to Resume the Non-Detained Docket
AILA, the Council, CLINIC, HRF, NIJC, and NIPNLG sent a letter to EOIR recommending that the overwhelming majority of non-detained hearings be postponed for the duration of the national public health emergency. Additional recommendations include a moratorium on the issuance of in absentia orders. AILA Doc. No. 20061500

DHS Extends Flexibility in Requirements Related to Form I-9 Compliance
DHS announced that it has extended the flexibilities in rules related to Form I-9 compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic by an additional 30 days. The accommodations, which now expire on July 19, 2020, include discretion to defer physical presence requirements and extension for NOIs served in 3/20. AILA Doc. No. 20032033

DHS Acting Secretary Announces Extension of Border Restrictions
DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf announced that DHS will continue to limit non-essential travel at U.S. land ports of entry with Canada and Mexico due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that DHS’s Canadian and Mexican counterparts agree with the need for this extension. AILA Doc. No. 20042031

DHS Announces Imposition of Visa Sanctions on Burundi
DHS announced that it has imposed visa sanctions on Burundi “due to lack of cooperation in accepting its citizens and nationals ordered removed” from the U.S. As of 6/12/20, the Bujumbura U.S. embassy has discontinued issuance of all NIVs, with exceptions, for Burundian citizens and nationals. AILA Doc. No. 20061903

RESOURCES

• Post-Supreme Court Decision DACA Guidance
• ILRC: Understanding the 2020 Supreme Court Decision on DACA
• ILRC: All Those Rules About Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude (June 2020)
• Practice Alert: Impact of the Supreme Court Decision Blocking DACA Rescission
• Practice Alert: Submitting Initial Evidence and Documentation with Form I-485
• Practice Alert: COVID-19 and the Public Charge Rule
• Practice Alert: Presidential Proclamations Suspending Entry Due to 2019 Novel Coronavirus
• Think Immigration: Fight Back Against Chevron Deference in Asylum and Withholding Cases
• DHS Releases Fact Sheet on Measures on the Border to Limit the Further Spread of Coronavirus
• Bite-Sized Ethics: Dual Representation and Secrets Between Clients
• OIG: CBP Struggled to Provide Adequate Detention Conditions During 2019 Migrant Surge
• COVID-19 IN ICE CUSTODY Biweekly Analysis & Update
• Practice Advisory: Criminal Consequences Updates from the BIA and the Ninth Circuit

EVENTS

Note: Check with organizers regarding cancellations/changes
• 6/22/20 The Supreme Court Ruling on DACA: What the Decision Means and What’s Next
• 6/24/20 I-730 Petition Training
• 6/24/20 Thought Getting an EAD Was Straightforward? Think Again!
• 6/26/20 Our Asylum System at Grave Risk: What You Can Do
• 6/29/20 Climate Change and Migration: Converging issues, diverging funding
• 7/7/20 Winning Withholding of Removal and Convention Against Torture Cases
• 7/15/20 Understanding Motions to Reopen Based on Changed Country Conditions
• 7/16/20-7/30/20 Webinar Series: Navigating Refugee and Asylee Issues in Turbulent Times
• 7/20/20 2020 AILA Virtual Annual Conference on Immigration Law
• 7/22/20 Tax Issues in Immigration Cases
• 7/23/20 Defending Immigration Removal Proceedings 2020
• 7/30/20 How to File a Successful Travel Ban Waiver
• 8/5/20 Unraveling Aggravated Felonies and Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude
• 8/18/20 Strategies for I-601 Waivers in Adjustment of Status Cases
• 8/26/20 Immigration Legal Services in Rural America
• 8/27/20 Crafting a Winning Particular Social Group for an Asylum Case
• 9/14/20 Working with Domestic Violence Immigrant Survivors: The Intersection of Basic Family Law, Immigration, Benefits, and Housing Issues in California 2020
• 9/22/20 Defenses to Denaturalization
• 9/23/20-10/7/20 3-Part Webinar Series: Integrating Technology to Improve Your Immigration Legal Services
• 10/1/20 Representing Children in Immigration Matters 2020: Effective Advocacy and Best Practices

ImmProf

Monday, June 22, 2020
• Immigration Article of the Day: Banished and Overcriminalized: Critical Race Perspectives of Illegal Entry and Drug Courier Prosecutions by Walter Goncalves
Sunday, June 21, 2020
• Will President Trump Make the Supreme Court’s DACA Decision a 2020 Presidential Campaign Issue?
• Immigration Article of the Day: Discriminatory Cooperative Federalism by Ava Ayers
Saturday, June 20, 2020
• “DREAMers” versus the Labels Used in Government Documents and Judicial Opinions in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California by Professor Maritza Reyes
• The Equal Protection Claim in the DACA Cases
• World Refugee Day – June 20, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
• DACA Victory at Supreme Court Is Precarious at Best
• Immigration Article of the Day: Injustice and the Disappearance of Discretionary Detention Under Trump by Robert Koulish
• DACA, College and University Students, and the Future of U.S. Immigration Law
• Guest Post: Minyao Wang, The Supreme Court Decides DACA Rescission Case on Administrative Law Grounds, Avoids Deciding Lawfulness of DACA
Thursday, June 18, 2020
• Responses to Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California
• Breaking News: DACA Lives Another Day: Supreme Court Vacates Rescission of DACA
• Some more good news: DACA recipients and noncitizens win two lawsuits that provide financial assistance
• Proposed rule bars colleges from granting covid-relief funds to DACA recipients [Updated 6/17/20]
• Immigration Article of the Day: Law Enforcement in the American Security State by Wadie Said
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
• From the Bookshelves:Mary Jordan, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump
• Immigration Article of the Day: Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair
• UVA to Enroll Students Regardless of Immigration Status
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
• From The Bookshelves: Dominicana by Angie Cruz
• Immigration and Economic Recovery Symposium
Monday, June 15, 2020
• White House attributing covid-19 increase to travel from Mexico
• Lessons learned in the journey from Prop. 187 to DACA to the Supreme Court
• Supreme Court Denies Cert in United States v. California, State Sanctuary Law Case
• Supreme Court Grants Review in Immigration Detention Case
• DACA Decision Today?
• “Trump is quietly gutting the asylum system amid the pandemic President Trump’s election-year push to foreground immigration is officially in full swing.”

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

Just so we understand the work authorization fraud perpetrated by Trump, currently individuals who seek asylum at ports of entry are “rocketed” to the exceptionally dangerous countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (none of which have a fair or functional asylum system) without any hearing, meaningful inquiry, or a chance to apply for asylum in the U.S. So, no work authorization for them.

Those who recognize the futility of trying to use our now-fraudulent legal system to seek protection might therefore cross the border and turn themselves in to DHS or, if they get to the interior, turn themselves in to USCIS to apply for asylum. They also will be denied work authorization under the latest Trump scheme.

So you, or some Federal Judge actually interested in upholding the law, might ask: “Who gets employment authorization under Trump’s shell game?” The answer: “Pretty much nobody.”

So, you might then ask, isn’t this government fraud, or at least grotesque dishonesty? Of course, but but “it’s only refugees not real humans.” For the most part, courts have allowed Trump, Miller, and company to run roughshod over the legal rights and humanity of migrants, with particular emphasis on looking the other way while refugees, women, and children are abused. So, it’s OK. Until Trump strips you of your humanity without recourse.

As if to punctuate the Constitutional malpractice and moral vapidity of everyone on the Supremes save Justice Sonia Sotomayor, on Saturday Trump headed off to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the worst White-led race massacres in U.S. history, one day after the Juneteenth Celebration of African American liberation in America. Given the timing and the mood in the nation, it appeared to be a rather thinly disguised attempt by Trump to provoke some type of racial confrontation that he thought would benefit him politically.

Failing that, and faced with a smaller-than-expected audience of cultists, Trump turned the evening into a celebration of lies, hate, insults, and racism – denying the reality and justice of the cause of equal justice under law, using an offensive racist slur against Asians, and “joking” about 120,000 dead Americans and his totally incompetent response to COVID-19, to name just a few of his very public and intentional transgressions against our nation and human decency.

America can’t go any further with Trump and the GOP in charge and promoting an agenda of racism, hate, division, and inequality. But, it’s also worth asking how far we can get with eight Justices who are willfully blind to Trump’s obvious racism, his and his lawyers’ lack of honesty and ethics, and the toxic agenda of prolonging and deepening institutional racism in America that he and his supporters so ardently back and, to be frank, only exists because the Supremes and other government institutions have assisted it for more than a century.

Over more than two centuries, America has failed over and over again to deal honestly, ethically, courageously, and realistically with racism. At some point, the failures will become fatal for our republic. A house divided against itself and with rot in its structural integrity cannot stand for much longer.

Those in charge might claim cluelessness; but you should have your eyes open to the pernicious effects of malicious incompetence and systemic racism.

Some day, the full ugly truth of the Trump regime, its unbridled racism, its total dishonesty, its selfishness, its cowardice, its “crimes against humanity,” and our disgraceful national complicity will come out. It always does. Then, those in charge who were derelict their duties and looked the other way in the face of tyranny and needless human suffering will claim “just doing my job” or “how could I have known?” Don’t let them and/or their apologists get away with the “Nuremberg Defense!” We know; they know! It’s time to end the willful blindness and deal with the truth!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Institutions, Never!

PWS

06-22-20

AMY HOWE @ SCOTUSBLOG — Supremes Take Up 4th Cir. Case Granting Bond Hearings in “Withholding Only” Cases –Albence v. Guzman Chavez

AMY WRITES IN SCOTUSBLOG:

And in Albence v. Guzman Chavez, the justices will decide which provision of immigration law – 8 U.S.C. § 1231 or 8 U.S.C. § 1226 – applies to the detention of a noncitizen who is seeking withholding of removal after a prior removal order has been reinstated. As John Elwood explained last week, the issue is arcane but the distinction between the two provisions matters, because under Section 1226 noncitizens generally have the right to a bond hearing, while the government argues that they do not have that right under Section 1231.

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

This was another of Solicitor General Francisco’s petitions, after the DHS and DOJ quite deservedly lost on the bond issue in the Fourth Circuit.

While presented as an issue of statutory interpretation, the DOJ/DHS restrictive bond procedures are riddled with 5th Amendment unconstitutionality, including denial of opportunity to seek a bond before an fair and impartial decision-maker, putting the burden of proof on the prisoner, and failing to consider ability to pay, to name a few.

These abuses came to light recently in a comprehensive ruling invalidating unconstitutional bond practices in the Baltimore Immigration Court, Miranda v. Barr, U.S.D.C. D. MD., U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake, 05-29-20.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/05/30/due-process-victory-us-district-judge-requires-baltimore-immigration-court-to-comply-with-due-process-in-bond-hearings-round-table-warrior-judge-denise-noonan-slavin-provides-key-evidence/

It’s not a difficult constitutional issue. It would take a Court that saw immigrants as fellow human beings and were willing to apply its own due process precedents about six sentences to unanimously throw DOJ and DHS out on their tails for such unconstitutional behavior, statute or no.

But, this version of the Supremes is all over the place on immigration. While immigrants have scored a few well-deserved victories, mostly on issues involving misinterpretation of statutes by the immigration bureaucracy, the Supremes have “tanked” on the larger issues involving constitutional and human rights.

They actually have furthered and in some cases bought into the false narratives and dehumanization of migrants, particularly asylum seekers, by Trump & co. That’s why folks who probably should be granted asylum or long since admitted as refugees were the government required to follow the law and the Court’s 1987 ruling in INS v. Cardoza Fonseca are instead illegally condemned to rot in Mexico, suffer in refugee camps, arbitrarily and capriciously returned to danger zones to face torture and possible death, separated from their families, or put in cages and “iceboxes.”

Depending on how you characterize it, the Supremes’ majority have been part of judicially-enabled child abuse or “Dred Scottification” of immigrants. Either way, it’s legally wrong and morally indefensible. Equal justice and social justice for all in America will continue to be both elusive and divisive until we get a majority of Supreme Court Justices who believe in it, put it first, and require it even in the face of a recalcitrant Executive whose political agenda is built on the exact opposite.

I’m certainly not the first or last critic of the “Supreme failure” of our highest judges to show the necessary legal and moral leadership at this key point in our history. Professor Steven I. Vladeck from U. of Texas Law essentially says the same thing in a more circumspect manner in an op-ed today’s NY Times. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/05/30/due-process-victory-us-district-judge-requires-baltimore-immigration-court-to-comply-with-due-process-in-bond-hearings-round-table-warrior-judge-denise-noonan-slavin-provides-key-evidence/

I find no reason for circumspection about the failure of privileged judges at the top of our legal system who are unwilling to treat vulnerable individuals as human beings and to give them the legal and constitutional protections to which they are entitled. Enabling the cruel, illegal, and racially-driven Trump immigration agenda is disgraceful conduct that deserves to be called out. Three-plus years into a regime dedicated to running roughshod over our Constitution and eradicating human rights we “are where we are” to a large extent because those empowered and entrusted to prevent such abuses have failed — miserably!

And, with an emboldened scofflaw Administration promoting an unconscionable and illegal trashing of the little still left of our imperfect, yet previously functional and occasionally aspirational, asylum system by Executive fiat, the worst is yet to come if we don’t get better performance from the Supremes! We have a “Frankenstein proposal” out now because we have a Supremes’ majority who think “Frankenstein is OK” as long as the monster only devours migrants and their families (folks apparently below their “humanity index”). Wait till it turns on them and their families!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-17-20

AMERICA’S FLAILING & FAILING JUDICIARY: ACHIEVING “EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL” REQUIRES COURAGEOUS AND EMPATHETIC JUDICIAL LEADERSHIP — Don’t Expect It From A Supremes’ Majority Firmly Wedded to Promoting “Dred-Scottification” (De-Humanization) of “The Other!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/sunday/supreme-court-religion-coronavirus.html

Linda Greenhouse writes in The NY Times:

The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

A Southern California church, represented by a Chicago-based organization, the Thomas More Society, which most often defends anti-abortion activists, had sought the justices’ intervention with the argument that by limiting worshipers to the lesser of 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, while setting a 50 percent occupancy cap on retail stores, California was discriminating against religion in violation of the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause.

Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California’s limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second-guessing.

So why did the court’s order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief?

It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like.

As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying.

Does that sound like an overstatement? Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion. “California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses,” he wrote. “Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”

It’s interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he’s just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. Fair enough, but he evidently couldn’t be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Linda’s op-ed at the above link.

This is just a symptom of an ongoing cancer at the Court. Cases like Hawaii v. Trump (“greenlighting” arbitrary and capricious punishment of refugees, Muslims, certain immigrants based on clearly pretextual “security grounds”), Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (“Let ‘Em Die in Mexico!” Particularly when they are “only” Central American asylum seekers), and Wolf v. Cook County (final greenlighting of Stephen Miller’s racist scheme to deny health care and spread deadly fears in American Hispanic communities) should all have been 9-0 in favor of those opposing Trump’s racially-biased, illegal, unconstitutional policies.

Additionally, Trump Toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco should have been strongly cautioned against continuing to bend the ethical codes with largely fabricated “emergencies” intended to interfere with the normal functioning of the Federal Courts.

Instead, the Supremes’ majority gave the regime totally undeserved, immoral victories in all three cases. As a result, many innocent individuals were denied rights, forced into life-threatening conditions, and some even died. The Supremes’ inflicted damage on society at large. They assisted in trampling social justice and human rights. They grotesquely perverted and “turned on its head” the concept of “irreparable harm.” They indelibly and irreparably damaged their reputation and our system of justice.

In the meantime, the message to Francisco and the rest of his human rights denying scofflaw crowd over at the DOJ is clear: Justice is dead, courage has fled, you’re in charge.

Unhappily, by most accounts, the tone-deaf and disconnected Supremes’ majority might be on the cusp of throwing more gasoline on the fires of social justice, at the worst possible time for our nation. If, as expected, they endorse the regime’s intentionally cruel, illegal, dishonest, and racially charged scheme to,”shaft” Dreamers — some of our finest young people, many of whom are “essential workers” — it’s likely to spark more justified outrage and further protests!

So certain are the regime’s White Nationalists that they have the “J.R. Five” in their pocket that they reportedly already are planning to use these American youths as “hostages” to demand even further immigration restrictions as “ransom” from House Dems. The Dems are unlikely to bite, so Dreamers will be left to “twist in the wind” pending the results of the election.

The Supreme Court majority has been hand selected by the GOP to insure that a minority, anti-democratic ideology, often willfully devoid of humanity and historical awareness, will continue to exercise disproportionate influence over the U.S. legal system for years, perhaps decades, to come.

We can’t change the past. But, a better “appointing authority” will be a start of long overdue change and “pushback” from the forces and institutions of democracy, humanity, and racial justice to restore integrity to our highest Court that, in actuality, now functions more like the lowest denominator and an instigator of racial and institutional injustice in our hurting nation.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-06-20

TA-NEHISI COATES IS OPTIMISTIC THAT WE’RE FINALLY AT A MOMENT OF CHANGE IN AMERICA’S APPROACH TO RACE RELATIONS — Read Ezra Klein’s Vox News Interview With Ta-Nehisi to Find Out Why!

https://apple.news/Tn2n0n8PnRUG6W-1mAp_OZw

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful

The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.

The first question I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates during our recent conversation on The Ezra Klein Show was broad: What does he see right now, as he looks out at the country?

“I can’t believe I’m gonna say this,” he replied, “but I see hope. I see progress right now.”

Coates is the author of the National Book Award winner Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, among others. We discussed how this moment differs from 1968, the tension between “law” and “order,” the contested legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Donald Trump’s view of the presidency, police abolition, why we need to renegotiate the idea of “the public,” how the consensus on criminal justice has shifted, what Joe Biden represents, the proper role of the state, and much more.

But there’s one particular thread of this conversation that I haven’t been able to put down: There is now, as there always is amid protests, a loud call for the protesters to follow the principles of nonviolence. And that call, as Coates says, comes from people who neither practice nor heed nonviolence in their own lives. But what if we turned that conversation around? What would it mean to build the state around principles of nonviolence, rather than reserving that exacting standard for those harmed by the state?

An edited transcript from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.

Ezra Klein

What do you see right now, as you look out at the country?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment.

I had an interesting call on Saturday with my dad, who was born in 1946, grew up dirt poor in Philadelphia, lived in a truck, went off to Vietnam, came back, joined the Panther Party, and was in Baltimore for the 1968 riots. Would’ve been about 22 at that time.

I asked him if he could compare what he saw in 1968 to what he was seeing now. And what he said to me was there was no comparison — that this is much more sophisticated. And I say, well, what do you mean? He said it would have been like if somebody from the turn of the 20th century could see the March on Washington.

The idea that black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods would resonate with white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London — that was unfathomable to him in ‘68, when it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.

I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black, that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is. I think that’s different.

Ezra Klein

Do you think there is more multiethnic solidarity today than there was then?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do. Within my lifetime, I don’t think there’s been a more effective movement than Black Lives Matter. They brought out the kind of ridiculousness that black folks deal with on a daily basis in the policing in their communities.

George Floyd is not new. The ability to broadcast it the way it was broadcasted is new. But black folks have known things like that were going on in their communities, in their families, for a very long time. You have a generation of people who are out in the streets right now, many of whom only have the vaguest memory of George Bush. They remember George Bush the way I remember Carter. The first real president who they actually grappled with was a black dude. That’s a different type of consciousness.

Ezra Klein

I was watching the speech Trump gave before tear-gassing the protesters in the park in DC. What so chilled me about that speech was how much he clearly wanted this — like this was the presidency as he had always imagined it, directing men with guns and shields to put down protesters so he could walk through a park unafraid and seem tough.

He’s always seemed so disinterested and annoyed by the actual work of being president, even during coronavirus. But this is the thing that he seems energized and excited by. And that’s been the scary part of it to me — that you have somebody in that role who is eager for escalation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is pretty clear that the war-making part of being head of state was the part that most appeals to Donald Trump.

What does this mean for the election? It may be true that Donald Trump will win. Maybe this will lead to some sort of white backlash that ultimately helps him. I can’t really call that. But what I will say is this is a massive denial of legitimacy. Donald Trump may win the election in November, but he will be a ruler and not a president.

I think that those things need to be distinguished. When you’re calling out the military to repress protests that are in cities across the country, not just in ghettos and in hoods, all you have is force at that point. Most likely if he wins, he’ll be someone who won with a minority of the vote two times, which will be a first in American history. And violence will be the tool by which he rules. I think it’s a very different situation to be in.

Ezra Klein

I’m glad you brought in that word legitimacy. I wrote a piece the other day called “America at the breaking point,” and one of the things that I was imagining as I wrote that was a legitimacy crisis. The stakes have been going higher and higher this year: coronavirus, the entire country locked in houses, upset, angry, scared. Then you add on a series of basically televised lynchings.

And then you think: This is an election year. In some ways, I’m more afraid of the situation you just described. If Donald Trump is reelected in a way that does not feel legitimate to people — if he loses by more votes than he did in 2016, or there’s a contested-vote situation — this could turn out badly. Legitimacy crises are scary things. And I don’t think we’re really well equipped for one right now.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I agree. But when I look back historically, the alternative to me is 1968.

I think, amongst a large swath to a majority of black people in this country, the police are illegitimate. They’re not seen as a force that necessarily causes violent crime to decline. Oftentimes you see black people resorting to the police because they have no other option, but they’re not seen with the level of trust that maybe Americans in other communities bestow upon the police. They know you could be a victim to lethal force because you used a $20 bill that may or may not have been counterfeit, because you were asleep at night in your home and somebody got a warrant to kick down your door without knocking.

I would argue that [feeling] has been nationalized. I don’t know that everybody in America feels that way, but I think large swaths of Americans now feel that Trump is the police. And they feel about Trump the way we feel about cops: This is somebody that rules basically by power. I would prefer that situation to 1968, where we’re alone in our neighborhoods and we know something about the world and we know what the police do, but other folks can’t really see it — and if they can, they’re unsympathetic. I would prefer now.

The long history of black folks in this country is conflict and struggle, between ourselves and the state and other interests within the society so that we can live free. And this is the first time that I think a lot of us have felt that the battle was legitimately joined, not just by white people but other people of color. When I hear that brother in Minneapolis talk about how his store was burned down and him saying, “Let it burn.” That’s a very different world. It’s a very, very different situation. It’s not a great one. It’s not the one we want. But it’s not ‘68.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the interview at the link.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Coates’s novel about slavery and freedom, The Water Dancer, which I highly recommend.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️I also found the just-released streaming movie Just Mercy instructive. It’s based on the true story of unjustly convicted Alabama death-row inmate Walter McMillan and his courageous young just-out-of-Harvard African-American attorney Bryan Stevenson, played by Michael B. Jordan. In the movie, as in real life, justice was achieved in the end.

But, was it really?

Why should justice in America a be so dependent on both the “right lawyer” and the particular location and judges before whom you are tried? Why should it be so difficult, time consuming, painful, and uncertain to obtain? Why weren’t the crooked sheriff and the other perpetrators of deadly fraud held accountable? Why was such a tone-deaf judge on the bench in the first place? Why was a corrupt system not interested in real justice for the murder victim? Why do we still have the death penalty — clearly “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Constitution by any rational definition?

It’s also worth remembering that one of the greatest advocates of putting African Americans in Alabama to death was none other than White Nationalist prosecutor Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. Sessions then went on to a further career involving child abuse, squandering of taxpayer funds on “gonzo” prosecutions of legal asylum seekers, and unfairly sentencing Hispanic refugee women to torture, and even death. Yet, Sessions walks free. He even has the audacity to run for public office again based on his perverted, racist views of “justice” in America.

Whether or not he, or the equally repulsive and bigoted other GOP candidate, former football coach Tommy Tuberville, get elected will be a true test of how far we have come as a nation, and in particular, how far Alabama has come in atoning for past wrongs. Anybody who cares about equal justice for all should send at least a few bucks to the re-election campaign of wholly decent, competent, U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) to help him fight the GOP “forces of darkness, racism, and inequality,” arrayed against him.

I really hope Coates is right. But, based on the “reality of the moment” we still have a long way to go. True social justice would involve accountability for individuals like Trump, Miller, Sessions, and Barr who have been actors and proponents of injustice toward “the other” in our society. When folks like unapologetic White Nationalist provocateur Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) are no longer placed in public office, then, and only then, will social justice and equal justice for all have been achieved.

And, I personally doubt our capacity as a nation for true due process and equal justice under law as long as the “JR Five” rule the Supremes. So far, there haven’t been many racial injustices or “Dred Scottifications” of the other that they have had the courage and integrity to condemn! Better judges, with more humanity and empathy, are a requirement for a truly just nation.

That pandering, maliciously incompetent, willfully ignorant, bigot Donald Trump, with his vile, intentionally racially divisive message of fear still polls at 42% shows just how far we have to go to achieve due process and equal justice for all in America. “Equal Justice For All” isn’t just a “snappy slogan;” it requires leaders who really believe in it!

Right now, save for Nancy Pelosi, we conspicuously lack such leaders in all three Branches of our National Government. Better results will require change at the top. It will also require a significant minority of voters to stop enabling the intolerant, incompetent, and divisive to rule.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once wrote:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The quote isn’t just an “abstract concept;” it has “real life” meaning. It’s from King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he was unjustly imprisoned in 1963 for participation in peaceful protests against racial injustice.

“Social Justice” isn’t just an idealistic concept. It’s an absolute necessity for a well-functioning, just, and fully productive society!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-07-20

JAMELLE BOUIE @ NYT: The Police & Often The Misuse of a “Bogus Rule of Law” (when used to allow the empowered to run roughshod over the legal and human rights of “the other”) Are Long-Standing Roadblocks to a Fair & Just Society —“The simplest answer to the question ‘Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?’ is that they were never intended to be.”

Jamelle writes in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/police-riots.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.

It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.

By Jamelle BouieJune 5, 2020

If we’re going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren’t destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many officers are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets.

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

Jamelle Bouie’s Newsletter: Discover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle.

African-American observers have never had any illusions about who the police are meant to serve. The police, James Baldwin wrote in his 1960 essay on discontent and unrest in Harlem, “represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are simply for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here in his place.” This wasn’t because each individual officer was a bad person, but because he was fundamentally separate from the black community as a matter of history and culture. “None of the police commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling.”

Go back to the beginning of the 20th century, during America’s first age of progressive reform, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad does in “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” and you’ll find activists describing how “policemen had abdicated their responsibility to dispense color-blind service and protection, resulting in an object lesson for youth: the indiscriminate mass arrests of blacks being attacked by white mobs.”

The police were ubiquitous in the African-American neighborhoods of the urban North, but they weren’t there to protect black residents as much as they were there to enforce the racial order, even if it led to actual disorder in the streets. For example, in the aftermath of the Philadelphia “race riot” of 1918, one black leader complained, “In nearly every part of this city peaceable and law-abiding Negroes of the home-owning type have been set upon by irresponsible hoodlums, their property damaged and destroyed, while the police seem powerless to protect.”

If you are trying to understand the function of policing in American society, then even a cursory glance at the history of the institution would point you in the direction of social control. And blackness in particular, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh argues, was a state of being that required “permanent supervision and sometimes direct domination.”

The simplest answer to the question “Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?” is that they were never intended to be. And to the extent that the police appear to be rejecting accountability outright, I think it reflects the extent to which the polity demanding it is now inclusive of those groups the police have historically been tasked to control. That polity and its leaders are simply rejected as legitimate wielders of authority over law enforcement, especially when they ask for restraint.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Jamelle’s op-ed at the above link.

Truth is, we have the legal tools to do things like prosecute police misconduct, honor the human and civil rights of African Americans, overcome the years of unfair and discriminatory treatment of African Americans in education, employment, and leadership, promote community cooperation to allow each individual to reach maximum levels of contribution and enjoyment, correct the due process and bias flaws in court systems, tax more rationally and equitably, grant asylum to refugees we are now unfairly and illegally turning away, end inhumane and counterproductive “civil” detention, stop putting disproportionate numbers of minority communities in jail and prison, and end “Dred Scottification” of the other.

What we lack is 1) the honest, courageous, humane, and wise public officials necessary to make the laws and existing tools work; 2) the political will to get those types of officials into the correct offices.

I don’t know how much it would cost. But, whatever it is, we need to invest in it. And some “ready funds” could be made available if we stop building unneeded walls, detention centers, prisons, separating kids, and wasting legal and judicial resources fighting against the institutional fascism and tyranny of the Trump regime.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-07-20

GEORGE PACKER @ THE ATLANTIC: With Failed Institutions & Lousy Leaders, Including a President Leading the Charge to the Bottom, America Faces An Uncertain Future — “A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.” — Joe Biden & The Dems Could Be The Last, Best Hope For American Democracy & Real Progress Toward “Equal Justice For All!”

George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://apple.news/A-6795FCPQU6LRBMW1_nzvw

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

IDEAS

Shouting Into the Institutional Void

Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.

In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.

The commission’s report, written by the executive director, David Ginsburg, an establishment liberal lawyer of New Deal vintage, appeared at the end of February 1968. It became an instant million-copy best seller. Its language is bracing by the standards of any era: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for far-reaching policy reforms in housing, employment, education, and policing, to stop the country from becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

[Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit]

It was too much for Johnson, who resented not being credited for his efforts to achieve civil rights and eradicate poverty, and whose presidency had just been engulfed by the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. He shelved the report. A few weeks later, on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The next night, Johnson—who had just announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection—spoke to a country whose cities were burning from coast to coast. “It is the fiber and the fabric of the republic that’s being tested,” he said. “If we are to have the America that we mean to have, all men of all races, all regions, all religions must stand their ground to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time, and in all times to come. Last evening, after receiving the terrible news of Dr. King’s death, my heart went out to his family and to his people, especially to the young Americans who I know must sometimes wonder if they are to be denied a fullness of life because of the color of their skin.” To an aide, he was more blunt in assessing the uprising: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”

King’s murder and the riots it sparked propelled Congress to pass, by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, the decade’s last major piece of civil-rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enforced fair standards in housing. Johnson signed it on April 11. It was too late. The very best reports, laws, and presidential speeches couldn’t contain the anger in the streets. That year, 1968, was when reform was overwhelmed by radicalization on the left and reaction on the right. We still live in the aftermath. The language and ideas of the Kerner Report have haunted the years since—a reminder of a missed chance.

The difference between 1968 and 2020 is the difference between a society that failed to solve its biggest problem and a society that no longer has the means to try. A year before his death, King, still insisting on nonviolent resistance, called riots “the language of the unheard.” The phrase implies that someone could be made to hear, and possibly answer. What’s happening today doesn’t feel the same. The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.

After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

[James Fallows: Is this the worst year in modern American history?]

If 2020 were at all like 1968, the president would go on national television and speak as the leader of all Americans to try to calm a rattled country in a tumultuous time. But the Trump administration hasn’t answered the unrest like an embattled democracy trying to reestablish legitimacy. Its reflex is that of an autocracy—a display of strength that actually reveals weakness, emptiness. Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman trying to show that he was still master of the country amid reports that he’d taken refuge in a bunker: the phalanx of armored guards surrounding him as he strutted out of the presidential palace; the tear gas and beatings that cleared his path of demonstrators and journalists; the presence of his daughter, who had come up with the idea, and his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square.

William Barr has reacted to the killing of George Floyd like the head of a secret-police force rather than the attorney general of a democratic republic. His first act was not to order a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, but—as he’s done before—to rush out ahead of the facts and try to control public opinion, by announcing that the violence following Floyd’s death was the work of left-wing agitators. Streets of the nation’s capital are now blocked by security forces from Barr’s Department of Justice—many from the Federal Bureau of Prisons—wearing uniforms that make them impossible to identify, like paramilitary troops with unknown commanders.

The protests have to be understood in the context of this institutional void. They resemble the spontaneous mass cry of a people suffering under dictatorship more than the organized projection of public opinion aimed at an accountable government. They signify that democratic politics has stopped working. They are both utopian and desperate.

[Read: The double standard of the American riot]

Some public figures—politicians, policy experts, civic leaders—have come forward with proposals for changing the mindset and tactics of the police. Terrence Floyd, the brother of the murdered man, urged protesters to educate themselves and vote. But the overwhelming message of the protests is simply “end racism,” which would be a large step toward ending evil itself. The protesters are demanding an absolute, as if they’ve stopped expecting the state to produce anything that falls a little short. For white protesters—who are joining demonstrations on behalf of black freedom and equality in large numbers for the first time since Selma, Alabama, 55 years ago—this demand means ending an evil that lies within themselves. It would be another sign of a hollow democracy if the main energy in the afterglow of the protests goes into small-group sessions on white privilege rather than a hard push for police reform.

. . . .

This is where we are. Trust is missing everywhere—between black Americans and police, between experts and ordinary people, between the government and the governed, between citizens of different identities and beliefs. There’s an election coming in five months. It won’t end racism or the pandemic, or repair our social bonds, or restore our democracy to health. But it could give us a chance to try, if we get that far.

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

Read the rest of Packer’s article at the above link.

Well said! The only thing missing is specific reference to the toxic failure of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We once had a Court with the legal experience, ethics, vision, and moral courage to lead America forward toward a more just and equal society. That’s been totally dissipated by years of GOP erosion of the Court’s legal expertise, practical problem-solving ability, humanity, courage, vision of a better future for all in America, and integrity.

The “journey downward and march backward” from Brown v. Board of Education to legal travesties like Trump v. Hawaii and Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (to name just two glaring examples of the Court’s disgraceful and illegal “Dred Scottification” of the other in our society) is certainly one of the most outrageous, disturbing, and disgusting tales in post-Plessy v. Ferguson American jurisprudence.

The Court’s abject failure to move forward and make voting rights and equal justice for all a reality is in no small measure linked to the death of George Floyd and other Americans of color and the nationwide protests of injustice. Failure of judicial integrity, vision, and leadership — in other words failures of both legal and moral justice — imperils our nation and many of its inhabitants.

America already faces long-term threats to our justice system and those it supposedly serves from the irresponsible and poorly-qualified life-tenured judicial appointments of Trump and the Mitch-led GOP. To them, things like “equal justice for all,” “voting rights,” “due process for all,” “women’s rights,” and “human rights” are just cruel hoaxes — things to be privately mocked, publicly “lip-serviced,” then buried forever beneath an avalanche of disingenuous and opaque legal gobbledygook intended to hide their true anti-democratic, White Nationalist enabling intent. The appointment of any more Justices along the lines of the “J.R. Five” likely would be the final “nail in the coffin” for our democratic republic! 🏴‍☠️👎🏻🥵

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-06-20

RELIGION & POLITICS: TRUMP IS A GROTESQUE INSULT TO CHRISTIANITY — Christ Died For Others’ Sins; Trump Too Cowardly, Corrupt, & Insecure to Take Responsibility For Own Screw Ups!🤮

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/trump-bible-speech-st-johns-church.html

Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The NY Times:

Late Monday afternoon, President Trump emerged from the White House and strode in the cool spring daylight to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square. It was supposed to be an act of defiance: Mr. Trump has bristled at the observation that during the protests roiling the capital he has burrowed into a fortified bunker rather than addressing the nation.

Like most performances arranged by Mr. Trump and associates, it made only a disjointed sort of sense. Yes, the president’s decision to march through the heart of the city’s unrest caused police and National Guard units to blast a peaceful crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets, carving a punishing path to the steps of St. John’s. But the show of force seemed to emphasize only that his legitimacy has shrunk to the point that he feels moved to dominate his own people with military power.

As he took up his post before the church, which was partially boarded up after a minor fire that broke out during a recent protest, Mr. Trump set his face in a stony scowl and held up a black Bible, tightly closed. “Is it your Bible?” a reporter shouted. “It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump said neutrally. The entire routine was vulgar, blunt: There Mr. Trump was, holding aloft this mute book — neither opened, cited, nor read from — in the shadow of a vandalized church, claiming the mantle of righteousness.

After all, that was what he had come to do. A ruler maintaining order strictly by brute force has a problem. Such regimes are volatile and fragile, subject to eruptive dissolution. Mr. Trump may lack the experience or interest to even pantomime genuine Christian practice, but he has acute instincts when it comes to the symbolism of leadership. He seemed to know, as he positioned himself as the defender of the Christian faith, that he needed to imbue his presidency with some renewed moral purpose; Christianity was simply a convenient vein to tap.

“I think that’s a standard trope in American political frames of reference,” Luke Bretherton told me on a Monday night phone call. Mr. Bretherton, who is a professor of moral and political theology at Duke University’s Divinity School, cited Cold War efforts to demonize socialism as viciously atheistic and amoral. It was work undertaken with anxious eagerness precisely because socialist criticisms of American life were substantial and compelling.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Liz’s op-ed at the link.

Christ’s humanity, forgiveness, and empathy for the outcasts of the world is completely lost on the totally immoral and willfully ignorant Trump. The Bible is just another prop. If Jesus came back to earth today, he certainly would be found with the protestors seeking social justice rather than the current inhabitant of the White House and his equally corrupt and immoral cronies like Billy Barr.

PWS

06-03-20

UPDATE:

Check out Tom Toles’s cartoon “Sermon From the Pit” (“Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lowered”) from today’s WashPost here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/trump-does-photo-op-show-just-how-low-he-can-go/

Just when you think Trump has hit the rock bottom, he takes it to an even lower level!

PWS

06-03-20

🤡AMERICA’S CLOWN PRINCE DECLARES WAR ON: AMERICA! — As America Burns 🥵, He Throws Gasoline On Fire, Poses For Photo Op! — Malicious Incompetence, Unsuitability For Office On Full Display As Leaderless America Careens From Pandemic to Civil Rights Crisis! — “ Trump appeared to be trying to project strength at a moment when his presidency seems feckless and as the nation spins out of control. If it occurred abroad and not in the White House, Americans might perceive a ridiculous self-deluding act of a wanna-be strongman.”

Trump Clown — Donald J. Trump
Dangerous American Clown

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/politics/donald-trump-george-floyd-protest-military/index.html

Stephen Collinson reports for CNN:

(CNN)President Donald Trump‘s made-for-TV embrace of authoritarianism’s imagery and tools at a brittle national moment risks unleashing toxic political forces that threaten America’s democratic traditions.

Trump on Monday turned security forces on peaceful protesters in front of the White House, as tear gas and rubber bullets flew, before declaring himself the “law and order” President. Then, in one of the most bizarre moments in modern presidential history, he strode across the park to stand in front of an iconic church holding a Bible aloft in a striking photo op.

It was a moment of vanity and bravado — orchestrated for the cameras and transparently political — as Trump struggles to cope with protests sweeping the country after the killing of George Floyd and tries to cover up his botched leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, the White House’s official Twitter account released a triumphant video of the moment set to music but omitting any signs of the mayhem unleashed on the protesters.

Trump appeared to be trying to project strength at a moment when his presidency seems feckless and as the nation spins out of control. If it occurred abroad and not in the White House, Americans might perceive a ridiculous self-deluding act of a wanna-be strongman.

Trump threatens military force if violence in states isn’t stopped

“I thought I was watching a scene from something in Turkey, and not in the United States,” retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who commanded National Guard troops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

And after using St. John’s Church, the “church of the presidents,” which had experienced a basement fire during Sunday’s demonstrations, Trump drew immediate criticism from faith leaders, including Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

“The President just used the Bible, our sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” Budde said on “AC360.”

Trump’s showmanship was motivated in part by anger at media coverage saying he had sheltered in a bunker below the White House on Friday night amid protests in Washington, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak reported. It shows how far Trump will go to protect his own thin skin and how his power plays are often motivated by assaults on his dignity.

But his behavior is also alarming, considering the vast power at his command, uses of demagogic tropes and capacity to buckle the traditions and structures of civilian, democratic government. So while Trump’s turn to the rhetoric of the despotic leaders he so admires had elements of farce, it opened a sinister new chapter in his presidency and a challenge to American norms.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Stephen’s report at the link.

America’s national nightmare can’t end until Trump and his GOP enablers are removed from office at the ballot box. Just because he’s an incompetent, cowardly, bully doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. He is!

This November, vote like your life and our nation’s future existence depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

06-02-20

IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG: Johnson, Olivas, Wadhia on DACA: “DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope.“

Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
UC Davis School of Law

Professor Michael Olivas
University of Houston Law Center

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/06/the-meaning-of-daca-by-kevin-r-johnson-michael-a-olivas-and-shoba-sivaprasad-wadhia-.html

The Meaning of DACA

By Kevin R. Johnson, Michael A. Olivas, and Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

The Supreme Court will soon release an opinion on the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s choice to end DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Former President Barack Obama rolled out DACA in June 2012 and the Department of Homeland Security implemented it two months later through a memorandum signed by then-Secretary Janet Napolitano.

DACA, based on a conventional concept of prosecutorial discretion, provided limited relief from removal – and work authorization — to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants through a discretionary tool called “deferred action.” All legal challenges to DACA, including one by campus immigration hawk former Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, failed. How will the story of DACA be remembered?

Much more than the sum of its parts, DACA will be remembered as an intriguing political story. For years, Congress introduced legislation known as the DREAM Act to provide legal status and a pathway to permanent residency for young undocumented college students. Congress has debated some kind of comprehensive immigration reform over two decades. All of these efforts failed. Said President Obama in announcing DACA “In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places.” DACA helped jump start the forceful movement across the nation calling for the vindication of the rights of immigrants.

Politics led to DACA’s demise. Donald J. Trump ran for President on a strident immigration enforcement ticket and promised to end the “unconstitutional” DACA policy. After the inauguration of President Trump and lobbying by some Republican leaders to keep DACA, the administration tried to terminate DACA and announced this “wind-down” in a press conference on September 5, 2017. Ultimately, political slogans, not reasoned analysis, were offered for the decision to end DACA.

The Trump administration’s arguments to the Supreme Court defending the end of DACA were also mired in politics. In a convoluted fashion that wended its way to federal appellate courts from coast to coast, the administration—through a series of Interim leaders—simply ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and in an arbitrary and capricious way simply declared that DACA was “illegal,” and that they were required to end it.

The claim that DACA was somehow “illegal” was simply not true. No court found it to be, and for good reason. Deferred action is an instrument of discretion used to shield “low priority” immigrants from deportation. Deferred action enjoys a long history and legal foundation across both Republican and Democratic administrations. The administration could decide to end the policy it, but not by undertaking the judicial role of declaring their own exercise of discretion to be unconstitutional. As it did in the Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) in manufacturing a civil rights rationale for a U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 Census that would have chilled the participation of many Latina/os and immigrants, the administration simply misrepresented facts. The Supreme Court should require the Department of Homeland Security to undertake the searching analysis of facts and policy impacts, and honestly proceed, playing by the rules. Those with DACA have upheld their part of this bargain, and the administration must abide by open and fair procedures required by the law.

DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope. Said one DACA recipient one author spoke to described September 5, 2017, the day the end of DACA was announced as “just an awful day … Eventually you just get over the pain, get over the fear… and you continue to organize and protect your community in whatever way you can.” Throughout the time DACA has been tossed around in the courts, thousands continue to build families of their own, work in the frontlines of healthcare. and revitalize classrooms in colleges and universities across the country, a phenomenon we have seen first-hand as educators and administrators. DACAmented recipients are now our doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, repaying the investment this country has made in them.

If the Supreme Court fails to require the Trump administration to abide by the law, as we urge the Court to insist upon, those with DACA must live under a cruel Sword of Damocles, with no clear pathway to legal permanent residency. They deserve an honest policy determination, and the Supreme Court should insist on no less. Ultimately, it will take Congressional action to enact a DREAM Act, and comprehensive immigration reform to enable these young members a means to their rightful place in our society.

—–

Kevin R. Johnson is Dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law and Mabie/Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicanx Studies.

Michael A. Olivas is William B. Bates Distinguished Chair of Law, Emeritus, at the University of Houston Law Center and the author of Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of The DREAM Act and DACA.

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar, Founding Director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State Law in University Park, and the author of Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases and Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump.

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

I’ll be more blunt.

The Administration’s legal arguments for ending DACA have always been bogus and totally disingenuous. Indeed, they do not even remain the same from case to case as they essentially make it up as they go along. It’s all transparently about White Nationalist racism and political pandering to a right-wing minority.

The lower Federal Courts were nearly unanimous in rejecting the DOJ’s various bad faith positions. Yet, instead of unanimously blasting the Administration’s frivolous request for intervention out of hand and sending a clear message reaffirming the lower courts, the Supremes granted an audience to Francisco and the scofflaws.

By failing to send a clear message that political pandering at the expense of human lives won’t be tolerated, the Supremes have encouraged further lawless, insidiously-motivated acts by Trump and have become part of the problem. They have also unconscionably undermined lower Federal Court judges who stood up for the rule of law and removal of racism and dehumanization from government decision-making.

Among other things, the Supremes have helped Trump: eradicate 40 years of asylum protections without legislation; weaponize the public charge provisions without legislation to endanger the health an safety of immigrants and our nation; allowed invidious discrimination against Muslims and refugees; and forced individuals who have established reasonable fear of persecution to be sent to live in life-threatening squalor and danger in Mexico.

The Supremes’ majority has knowingly and intentionally furthered the “Dred-Scottification” of “the other” in society: African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, asylum seekers, the poor, women, prisoners, workers, etc. Our nation is paying the price.

The solution eventually will require a re-examination of the type of individuals to whom we give the high privilege of serving on the Supremes: their humanity, courage, practical experience, empathy, moral leadership, problem-solving ability, expertise in furthering human rights, and commitment to equal justice for all, rather than narrow “out of the mainstream” political ideologies. The current outrage and unrest over the lack of social justice in the United States can be tied directly to the Supremes’ lack of leadership, courage, humanity, and an overriding commitment to equal justice under law. This version of the Supremes has failed America. Badly! We must do better in the future!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-01-20

WASHPOST EDITORIAL BOARD: TRUMP IS “EXACTLY THE WRONG LEADER FOR OUR TIMES” — “The right message would combine an insistence on keeping protest peaceful with assurances that justice will be done in Mr. Floyd’s death and a recognition that righting deeper wrongs is an urgent priority. That message will not come from a White House that has used racial hatred as a wedge and repeatedly made clear its contempt for urban America.”🤮

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/as-cities-burn-trumps-bullhorn-drowns-out-the-voices-of-our-better-angels/2020/05/31/97a259e8-a367-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

As cities burn, Trump’s bullhorn drowns out the voices of our better angels

AS BUILDINGS and businesses burn in many cities across America, state and local officials and community leaders are desperately and at times bravely saluting the justifiable moral outrage of peaceful protesters while seeking to ensure that looters and hooligans whose only agenda is mayhem do not irreparably sully the cause. Meanwhile, President Trump, whose words could matter most, plays his customary role as human flamethrower: exactly the wrong leader for the times.

No magic elixir could extinguish the rage overnight, nor ensure that the fury over George Floyd’s brutal killing in Minneapolis is channeled in a constructive direction. But this much is certain: Words matter, and a commitment to reform matters. Some leaders are trying to deliver both. They recognize the challenges of systemic injustice; the pattern of brutality suffered by African Americans at the hands of white officers; the racism manifested in so many ways, including unequal rates of imprisonment and, now, unequal suffering from the novel coronavirus, both medically and economically.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump, the divider in chief, fulminates as the nation burns. He does not counsel restraint; nor issue appeals for unity, nor acknowledge the roots and reasons for the fury of black Americans who see white men in uniform as threats to their lives. To his administration, there is no systemic challenge, only “a few bad apples” among police, as Robert C. O’Brien, national security adviser, said Sunday. Even as police train their weapons on journalists doing their jobs by covering the unrest, Mr. Trump attacks the media. As the president vents — warning that “the most ominous weapons” and “the most vicious dogs” would be unleashed on protesters; threatening to deploy the active-duty military; attacking Democrats; relishing the Secret Service’s readiness for “action”; suggesting he may summon his MAGA supporters to the streets — the country’s more emollient voices are muffled.

Live updates on Minneapolis

Wanton destruction, looting and firebombing are unacceptable and unjustified no matter what the provocation, as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said on Saturday. Responsible leaders are trying to send that message. But against the president’s bullhorn, it becomes harder to hear leaders like Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose anger at destructive rioters in her city was tempered by a heartfelt appeal. “We are better than this as a city, we are better than this as a country,” she said. “Go home. Go home!” It becomes more difficult to focus on the message of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who tweeted, “Minnesota consistently ranks highly for our public schools, innovation and opportunity, and happiness – if you’re white. If you’re not, the opposite is true. Systemic racism must be addressed if we are to secure justice, peace, and order for all Minnesotans.”

So much depends right now on moral authority, yet so little of it can break through the chaos of events and the venomous soundtrack from Washington. The right message would combine an insistence on keeping protest peaceful with assurances that justice will be done in Mr. Floyd’s death and a recognition that righting deeper wrongs is an urgent priority. That message will not come from a White House that has used racial hatred as a wedge and repeatedly made clear its contempt for urban America. It is left to other leaders to try to break through the mayhem of the moment, and give voice to our better angels.

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

Trump, already the worst President in U.S. history, has been a clear and present danger to the welfare, security, and continued existence of our nation since he took office.

His malicious incompetence, corruption, ignorance, racism, meanness, and lack of humanity are now on full display. Trump and his band of grifters, White Nationalists, toadies, and incompetents are a big part of the problem, not the solution!

Indeed, we can’t even get a constructive start on solving the problems of institutional racism, inequality, and failure to take equal justice for all as a serious goal with Trump in office. For example, Trump and the GOP have it very clear that they have the intent and a variety of schemes to suppress African-American and Hispanic-American voting and voting power this November — so far, with no meaningful pushback from the Supremes.

Still, we “are where we are” today because those institutions with a responsibility and the authority to curb his abuses, hold him accountable for his racism and dishonesty, and enforce our Constitution, namely, the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and the GOP have failed to do so. Beyond that, on many occasions they have actually encouraged and joined in his misdeeds.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-31-20

🗽⚖️A VOICE FOR THE TIMES: Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), Interviewed by Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith — “My vision comes from the pledge of allegiance: liberty and justice for all. That remains a vision—but we’re not doing much to make that vision a reality. Mitch McConnell goes on the floor of the Senate and calls me out, as if there’s something nasty about my vision. He never asked me what my vision was.”

Rep. James Clyburn
D-SC

Chris Smith
Writer
Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/james-clyburn-on-the-floyd-killing-and-the-role-of-race-in-the-coming-election?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=vf&utm_mailing=VF_HivePS_053020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67c363f92a41245df49eb&cndid=48297443&hasha=8a1f473740b253d8fa4c23b066722737&hashb=26cd42536544e247751ec74095d9cedc67e77edb&hashc=eb7798068820f2944081a20180a0d3a94e025b4a93ea9ae77c7bbe00367c46ef&esrc=newsletteroverlay&utm_campaign=VF_HivePS_053020&utm_term=VYF_Hive

“At Some Point the Country Is Going to Have to Wake Up”: James Clyburn on the Floyd Killing and The Role of Race In The Coming Election

Chris SmithMay 29, 2020

Clyburn, who helped hand Biden his presumptive nomination, talks about Biden’s “you ain’t black” and V.P. possibilities, and why this moment is defined by “raw politics and meanness.”

by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images.

James Clyburn grew up in a segregated South Carolina. He is now the longest-serving member of the state’s congressional delegation and the highest-ranking black Democrat in the House. In February, Clyburn basically saved Joe Biden’s presidential bid, endorsing Biden three days before South Carolina’s pivotal primary and helping deliver the decisive black vote. On Thursday evening, just after landing in his home state for a weekend visit, the 79-year-old Clyburn talked about holding on to his optimism in the wake of yet another brutal killing of a black man by police.

Vanity Fair: What was your reaction when you saw the video of a Minneapolis cop kneeling on the neck of George Floyd?

James Clyburn: I don’t know that I would describe my emotion as anger. I guess I should be angry. Maybe at my age, and as many of these kinds of things as I’ve experienced, you get to the point where you say, but for the video, I would not have seen it; other people would not have seen it; and the official word would be all anyone knew. I do feel, though, that at some point the country is going to have to wake up to this reality.

What do you tell black Americans, particularly young black male Americans, who say the country is long past the point when it should have awakened, and that the reality is just racism and hatred?

Going back to the student movement and the civil rights movement, I’ve really questioned many times whether or not what we were doing made any real sense. Whether there was any possibility of success. But along with people like John Lewis, who I met in October 1960, he’s held on to his faith in the country, and I’ve held on to mine. I went to jail several times. I ran for office three times before I got elected. You don’t give up. You aren’t going to win by giving up.

by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

The four Minneapolis police officers have been fired. Should they be tried for murder?

They certainly should stand trial. The hand of one is the hand of all, so four people need to be on trial.

In a conference call with House leaders two days after Floyd’s death, you talked about it being a symptom of larger problems that plague minority communities, and that it showed the need for systemic change. What did you mean?

I have been saying for a long time now that so much in this country needs to be restructured. Health care, education, the judicial system. Every time these issues are raised, folks on the Republican side find a way to parse the words and turn it to their agenda, and they get accommodated by too many people in the media. When we first started discussing the CARES Act, I said to my caucus, in a Zoom call, that this was a tremendous opportunity for us to restructure things in our vision. My vision comes from the pledge of allegiance: liberty and justice for all. That remains a vision—but we’re not doing much to make that vision a reality. Mitch McConnell goes on the floor of the Senate and calls me out, as if there’s something nasty about my vision. He never asked me what my vision was. I’ve got it on billboards all over Charleston: “Making America’s Greatness Accessible and Affordable for All.” What’s wrong with that? And that’s been weaponized by the other side as something untoward. It’s ideology, it’s raw politics, and meanness. That’s why we can’t fix these things.

Do you think the Floyd killing will end Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s chances of being picked as Joe Biden’s running mate?

It certainly won’t help. But it’s not just this. Her history with similar situations when she was a prosecutor came up time and again during the campaign. I suspect this incident plays into that.

You said you cringed when Biden told a radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”

I compare Joe Biden to the alternative, not the Almighty. One of the things I learned early in this business is that one of the worst things you can do in politics is to make a joke out of any serious matter. He would have been better off not doing that.

Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who happens to be black, said that Biden’s remark showed him to be “condescending and arrogant.”

I’ve known Joe Biden for a long, long time. I don’t perceive anything about him to be arrogant. Tim Scott supports [Donald] Trump, and I don’t. If he can reconcile his blackness with Trump, that’s fine. I can’t reconcile mine with Trump. I’ll never ever accept the president of the United States looking into a camera and calling a black woman a dog. I will never get over that. Nothing else he says will matter to me. And he said that not about one of his opponents—that was about one of his staffers! Who supported him! I have three daughters, and I know how I’d feel about any man calling one of them a dog.

With his attacks on former president Barack Obama, among other things, it’s clear that Trump is going to play the race card in his reelection campaign. Do you worry about the tensions becoming dangerous, or is it better to have the issue out in the open?

I think we’re in much better shape for it to be out in the open than for it to be hidden under a bushel. That’s what happened in 2016. The whole thing about African American males responding to Trump saying, “What do you have to lose?” I know from my visits to barber shops that it resonated. But if you fool me once, that’s on you. If you fool me twice, that’s on me. If black men allow themselves to be fooled twice, it’s on them. Four years later, if it ain’t clear what they have to lose, if they can’t count up their losses with Trump, ask them to ask me.

You have said that it isn’t “a must” for Biden to pick a black woman as the vice presidential nominee. Why not?

I remember Sarah Palin. She was fine until it turned out the vetting hadn’t been thoroughly done. I remember Geraldine Ferraro. She was fine. It was her husband that got exposed during the campaign. So if I say it’s a must and something turns up in the vetting, what does that make me? I’m never going to say it’s a must for him to choose a black woman. It would be a plus.

Are you confident that black turnout will be high enough to win no matter whom Biden chooses?

I don’t know about that. Black voters are incentivized already. You can always stimulate the vote. There are picks that could energize the vote.

If Biden said, “Jim, I’ll choose whomever you want,” what would say?

I’m not gonna tell you! But I would tell him.

There’s a tremendous amount of outrage right now about the George Floyd and the Ahmaud Arbery killings. But unfortunately, we’ve seen this cycle many times before, where attention fades after a few weeks.

I think something’s going to be different about this. After the Minneapolis killing, I saw the Minnesota attorney general on TV. For the first time in the state’s history, that attorney general is African American. Also Muslim. That, to me, helps set this whole issue on a different plane. Minneapolis had issues with the former mayor and the police. This mayor says he’s calling for these men to be indicted. To me, that’s progress in something all of us need to work on. You can’t take these things in silos. I’m a history guy. I’ve been studying this country’s history pretty much all my life. It’s pretty sordid in some areas. But that history ought to inform us. Everybody’s not going to learn the lessons. The ones who learn, you hope they change the world.

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

Our country can’t get to the better future we need with horrible, unqualified, bigoted leaders like Trump, Pence, Mitch, et al.

One of the most unhelpful of our failed institutions: A Supreme Court that has abandoned the courageous heritage of Brown v. Board of Education and instead encouraged, embraced, aided, and abetted the “Dred Scottification of the other” by a corrupt, bigoted, racist, overtly White Nationalist Executive and his equally corrupt cronies and toadies.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-31-20

“COURTSIDE REPLAY” — We Really Don’t Have To Look Far To See Why Police Continue To Devalue, Abuse, & Dehumanize the African American Community With Little Accountability — Jeff Sessions’s Overt Racism & Hostility To The Constitution, Civil Rights, The Rule Of Law, & Vulnerable Minorities Set The Ugly Tone For The Trump/Miller/Barr “New Jim Crow!”

James “Jim” Crow
Symbol of American Racism

Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions
“Police Brutality? What Police Brutality?”

From the April 4, 2017 edition of “Courtside:”

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/04/04/sessions-to-citizens-who-suffered-police-brutality-go-pound-sand-busting-criminals-deporting-migrants-policing-tech-employers-takes-precedence-over-civil-rights-protections-for-african-america/

A.G. Sessions To Citizens Who Suffered Police Brutality: Go Pound Sand! — Busting Criminals, Deporting Migrants, Policing Tech Employers Takes Precedence Over Civil Rights Protections For African Americans — Baltimore Police Reformers Forced To “Stand Alone” After DOJ Pulls The Rug Out From Underneath Them!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/baltimore-police-commissioner-pledges-reform-despite-justice-dept-action/2017/04/04/5b745ce8-b88b-4b5e-a14b-4f9f84376168_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-moreheds_baltimore-130pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.3d445d2028e7

Lynh Bui and Peter Hermann report in the Washington Post:

“BALTIMORE — After the federal government released a searing 163-page report in August condemning police practices in Baltimore, the police commissioner and mayor stood with Justice Department leaders to promise sweeping reform.

Change was necessary, they all said, not only to prevent riots like those that flared after the fatal injury of Freddie Gray in police custody, but also to repair the long-standing, deep rift between the city’s crime-weary residents and its police.

Nine months later, Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner again appeared before television cameras committing to overhaul the department.

But this time they stood by themselves.

“I’m asking the citizens of Baltimore to have faith that we will continue this work,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (D) said Tuesday. “It’s hard to deny that these kinds of reforms don’t need to take place in the city of Baltimore.”

On January 12, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Justice Dept. reached a deal for sweeping reforms to the Baltimore Police Dept. after a federal review found officers routinely violated residents’ civil rights. (Reuters)

The pledge to move ahead came hours after the Justice Department had asked a federal judge Monday night to postpone the department’s tentative police reform agreement with the city — part of a wider review of pacts nationwide ordered by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Baltimore consent agreement was announced days before President Trump took office and awaits a federal judge’s approval.

The request for a delay, which a judge has yet to rule on, left some Baltimore leaders and residents worried that momentum will wane and leave the city stuck in a familiar loop of unfulfilled promises.

Interim city solicitor David Ralph would not comment Tuesday on whether the city would file a response to the requested delay.

“It seemed clear that Justice was going ahead with these reforms, and now all of a sudden they don’t want to do it,” said Rebecca Nagle, co-director of the No Boundaries Coalition, a resident-led advocacy group.

The coalition helped organize residents to relay their experiences with city police to the Justice Department team that produced the August report, which concluded that the police department engaged in unconstitutional policing that discriminated against black residents in poor communities through illegal searches, arrests and stops for minor offenses.

“Residents invested two years doing this, and not going forward will destroy the trust that has built up,” Nagle said.

In Sessions’s two-page memo ordering the review of open and pending consent decrees, he said the department wants to guarantee the pacts are in line with Trump administration goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.

“The Federal government alone cannot successfully address rising crime rates, secure public safety, protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public, or implement best practices in policing,” the memo stated. “These are, first and foremost, tasks for state, local and tribal law enforcement.”

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

Now, I might only be a retired Immigration Judge, not a civil rights expert. But, even I can tell that if “state and local law enforcement” could solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.

In fact, until former Attorney General Lynch and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division intervened, state and local authorities had done their best to cover up the problems and avoid solving them. (And, I’m by no means a fan of Lynch. She was appropriately very interested in vindicating the civil rights of African Americans. But, she wasn’t interested in the human rights of mostly Hispanic women and children fleeing Central America. She aided and abetted a system of detention of such asylum applicants under deplorable conditions and hustling their cases through the U.S. Immigration Courts, in too many cases without full due process or even an opportunity for a fair hearing.)

No, what Sessions really means is that he has no interest whatsoever in helping the African American community vindicate their civil rights if it means clamping down on police abuses. After all, look at the “bang up” job that Session’s home state, Alabama, did on protecting its African American citizens from police abuses for most of the 20th Century. Who could ask for more? Or, perhaps we should get a “second opinion” from Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) who had his head split open by one of Sessions’s “police heroes,” an Alabama State Trooper.

That’s what often happens when the Feds rely on states and localities to vindicate citizen’s constitutional rights against the state’s own abuses. Classic “fox guarding the chicken coop.” Sort of like having Jeff Sessions protecting the rights of minorities and migrants. Yeah, the Birmingham Bridge incident was in 1965. But, Sessions and his gang have every intention of turning the clock back to those “glory days” of state’s rights.

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was “silenced” on the Senate floor for “disparaging” a colleague, Senator Sessions, by putting the truth about his tone-deaf record on civil and human rights “in the record.” But, silenced or not, Warren spoke truth about Session’s unsuitability to serve as Attorney General. Sadly, African Americans, Hispanics, members of the LGBT community, and migrants are likely to find out first hand that “he’s still the same ol’ Jeff.”

PWS

04-04-17

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

The George Floyd tragedy became largely inevitable the day a GOP-controlled Senate approved the stunningly unqualified 21st Century Jim Crow Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions to be Attorney General. The results have been disastrous for America and particularly cruel and tragic for people of color.

The beginning of the solution: Vote Trump and the GOP out of office; make sure Jeff Sessions remains “retired forever;” just say no to equally disgraceful “New Jim Crow” Tommy Tuberville (“birther,” racist, bigot, Trump shill https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/08/tommy-tuberville-perfected-his-folksy-trumpism-in-that-great-lab-of-democracy-local-sports-radio/); return Senator Doug Jones (D-AL), an incredibly competent and decent human being, who has been representing all of the people of Alabama in an outstanding manner, to the Senate.

Also, as a nation, we need to come to grips with the failure of our Supreme Court. The Supremes’ GOP majority has enabled, encouraged, and embraced the Trump regime’s “Dred Scottification” of “the other.”

They have disgracefully and improperly failed to set a legal and moral tone condemning racist abuses, kids in cages, gross mistreatment of legal asylum seekers, and blatantly biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Courts” that parody and mock justice every day. The Supremes have enabled GOP schemes to erode minority voting and political power and have shown a willingness bordering on enthusiasm to accept bogus security-related “pretexts” for racism, religious intolerance, and abuse of authority by Trump and his cronies!

Unwarranted favoritism toward unethical Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco is also a glaring, inexcusable problem. America’s future depends on a more diverse, courageous, humane, and “connected with reality” Supreme Court; a Court that rejects bogus right-wing legal nonsense; a Court that solves problems, upholds individual legal rights, insists on “equal justice for all,” and holds the Executive fully accountable for intentional abuses of authority.

This November, vote like you life and the survival of our democratic republic depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

05-29-20

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