"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
One is the “practical wisdom” that was
Kronman’s focus. That’s a big topic, of course, but
part of it involves recognition that the function of
the legal system is ultimately to provide answers to
very practical questions.
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PWS
05-31-25
By Rebecca Brenner Graham
Citadel Press 2025
Reviewed by Paul Wickham Schmidt[1] for immigrationcourtside.com
As someone who has spent more than five decades working on immigration issues, many of them involving refugees and those seeking asylum, in and out of Government, I found Dear Miss Perkins by Rebecca Brenner Graham interesting and in many ways moving.
True, the book suffered from some editorial and organizational difficulties: more like a string of essays than a unified volume with a thesis or overall theme; lots of repetition; some awkward sentence structure; and lack of a comprehensive index were among the most noticeable and occasionally annoying. Full disclosure: I mostly listened to the audiobook while driving from the D.C. area to Kansas City, Missouri to participate as a faculty member in the 2025 Immigration Court Trial Litigation College sponsored by Pen & Sword. The “road trip audio experience” might have minimized some of the book’s weakness as noted above.
I related to Perkins’s struggle to achieve “good government” and humane, sensible, practical administration of the immigration laws, as well as her frustrations on being thwarted, mirrored by my own Government experiences. Like her, my efforts at institutionalizing best practices and interpretations were ultimately largely unsuccessful. Yet, like her, I was able to solve “real life” (often life or death) problems, save lives, teach and inspire others, and get some degree of personal satisfaction in achieving things that helped others and overall benefitted our nation.
Here, in my own somewhat random order, are my major “takeaways” from the book, most of which remain as troublesome today as they did in Perkins’s era.
1) The prevalence of antisemitism in Government and society, a continuing issue.
2) The persistence of racism, misogyny (frequently directed at Perkins herself), bigotry, and false economic arguments being used against immigrants.
3) The use of “legal fictions” in place of common sense in immigration legal opinions (e.g., the “charge bond controversy”).
4) Focusing more on what particular immigrants can do for the U.S., than on the humanity, needs, situation, and potential of the immigrants themselves.
5) Lumping Nazism, socialism, and communism together as “totalitarianism.”
6) Minimizing the culpability of the German people for Nazism and the holocaust.
7) The extraordinarily poor performance of Congress in protecting refugees and other immigrants in a nation of immigrants.
8) The subservience of legal, Constitutional, and human rights of immigrants to domestic political considerations.
9) The enduring, and often toxic, nature of “turf battles” and arcane bureaucratic distinctions in overruling “good government,” efficiency, and practicality in the immigration bureaucracy.
10) Who you know often trumping fair treatment in individual cases.
11) Creative, progressive actions within the bureaucracy, such as those championed by Perkins, can save individual lives even if they can not systematically save everyone who should be saved.
12) The remarkable lack of empathy for child migration and family separation.
13) “Sanitization” of the saga of World War II (e.g., “Hogan’s Heroes Syndrome”), and diffusing or watering down the responsibility for the holocaust, and the other dehumanizing effects.
14) Intentionally overplaying immigration, particularly by refugees and other forced migrants, as primarily a national security/law enforcement concern rather than as a practical humanitarian response to recurring situations (e.g., the transfer of immigration responsibility from DOL to DOJ and eventually to DHS).
My parting thought is that Perkins’s tale confirmed what many of us already knew. It’s hard to survive as a progressive in Government even with friends in high places.
In an age of human progress in technology, I find it disturbing and puzzling indeed that regression has come to dominate immigration policy and that so many of the deadly and tragic mistakes, misconceptions, and lack of courage that faced Perkins remain very much with us today. As caring and engaged humans, we must strive for just solutions for the sake of future generations. Despite the current, largely unrelentingly negative rhetoric, immigration is integral to our country, is here to stay, and will continue to shape our nation and our world.
[1] *Retired U.S. Immigration Judge, retired adjunct law professor, former Chairman, Board of Immigration Appeals, former Deputy General Counsel and Acting General Counsel, “Legacy” Immigration & Naturalization Service, former law partner, current member of the Round Table of Former Immigration Judges. These are my views and do not represent the views of any organization or entity with which I am currently associated, have been associated in the past, or might become associated with in the future.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/02/05/everyone-gone-here-blitzer-review/
Blitzer’s villains include “[n]umerous U.S. institutions, bureaucrats, and presidents” who supported and enabled “savage governments responsible for vast numbers of people killed — many of them poor and Indigenous.”
Blitzer has particular contempt for “one of the most ineptly titled American officials ever — the State Department’s assistant secretary for human rights, Elliott Abrams — [who] tried to suppress information about the massacre of 978 people, including 477 children, in the Salvadoran village of Mozote.” Abrams, later was convicted of misdemeanors for withholding information from Congress in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal, but was pardoned by Bush I.
Our political bureaucracy continues to have infinite capacity for inventing intentionally misleading, mocking titles that directly contravene truth, particularly when it comes to abusing human rights. For example, the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (a/k/a “Remain in Mexico”) were quite specifically intended to unlawfully reject migrants who had established a “credible fear” of persecution! The MPP resulted in numerous “publicly documented cases of rape, kidnapping, assault, and other crimes committed against individuals sent back under MPP.” See https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjq1pmw_qWEAxUwL1kFHUbSDMIQFnoECBAQAw&url=https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/migrant-protection-protocols#:~:text=According%20to%20Human%20Rights%20First,individuals%20sent%20back%20under%20MPP.&usg=AOvVaw2ehZRBR_jXYoI41NZZN2DK&opi=8997844.
According to U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal, the MPP “trapped [] asylum seekers in Mexico in dangerous conditions that impeded their ability to access the U.S. asylum system or obtain legal representation.” See https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjLgaLW_6WEAxUqFmIAHb5MDlEQFnoECCYQAQ&url=https://immigrationimpact.com/2023/03/24/where-the-migrant-protection-protocols-stand-four-years/&usg=AOvVaw18vgP5kU86mgTigCBEFLNY&opi=89978449%0A%0A.
Among Blitzer’s unsung heroes are “relentless US. immigration advocates,” the late Rep. Joe Moakley (D-MA) who “grasped all the nuances of U.S.-manufactured border crises,” and of course, an “array of migrants” who bravely persevered in the face of treacherous, dishonest, ill-informed, and often deadly U.S. immigration policies intended to “break them” and destroy their humanity. That disgraceful process continues today — on steroids!
The review ends on a perhaps unexpectedly optimistic note:
And yet, after reading Blitzer’s book, one can’t help but think that the impossible might be possible — that maybe, just maybe, this could be fixed. He’s not trying to lay out a set of policy solutions. He’s making a more nuanced plea, a rejection of the “selective amnesia” of politics in favor of a deeper understanding of how we — as a nation and as a region — got here.
It is a book with a “mission,” he writes, a nudge for U.S. decision-makers and a platform for voices on the other side of the border, a “kind of go-between: to tell each side’s story to the other; to find a way to bring the Homeland Security officials into the housing-complex basement; and to allow the migrants in the basement to participate, for once, in the privileged backroom conversations that decide their fate.”
Hopefully, those with the power to change things will listen.
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post features writer and formerly served as The Post’s bureau chief in Miami and Mexico.
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Following up on the last point — the “seldom-heard and never-heeded by our politicos and media” voices of those whose lives and humanity are threatened by our failed policies, this Thursday, Feb. 15, @ 3 PM EST, Immigration Law & Justice Network & The Hope Border Institute will present a free webinar, “Stop The War On The Border: Migrants Speak:
Stop the War on the Border: Migrants Speak – Detengan la Guerra en la Frontera: Migrantes Hablan
Date & Time
Feb 15, 2024 03:00 PM in
Description
ILJ Network and our partners invite you to participate in this webinar and hear directly from migrants in the northern Mexican border and the U.S. interior on how restrictions to asylum and humanitarian parole impact their lives.
ILJ Network y compañeros de coaliciones los invita a participar en este evento virtual para escuchar directamente de migrantes, ubicados entre la parte Norte de México y el interior de los Estados Unidos, acerca de cómo dichas restricciones al derecho de asilo y de parole humanitario impactan sus vidas.
Webinar Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_efx1ZeUqTCmSOVCBNTRxrg#/registration?os=ipad
Information you provide when registering will be shared with the account owner and host and can be used and shared by them in accordance with their Terms and Privacy Policy.
This is very timely! Rarely do we hear from those whose lives, dignity, and safety are being bargained away and devalued as if they were “commodities” at the disposal of disingenuous politicos and interests who have turned their misery and desperation into “profit centers” and political rallying cries.
🏈🏆Finally, on another topic, congrats to Coach Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, the rest of the Kansas City Chiefs, and “Chiefs’ Superfan” Taylor Swift on their second consecutive Lombardi Trophy and third in five seasons. As almost everyone in sleep-deprived America knows by now, KC outlasted the SF 49ers in yesterday’s Super Bowl ending with a thrilling overtime finish 25-22!
For everyone else, including my Green Bay Packers, it’s “wait till next season!”😎
PWS
02-12-24
. . . .
“The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns’s deeply researched and revelatory new book, is the story of the remarkable Mahoney clan and how their lives, nearly a century and a half after Ann Joice’s, intersected with those of Mulledy, McSherry and the Jesuits in one of American slavery’s most withering tragedies. “The 272” is a fascinating meditation on the meaning of slavery and of people converted to property and commodities — assets of wealth and objects of sale. It’s a book that journeys to slavery’s heart of darkness: to the separation of families, the terror of being sold into the vast unknown and of bodies transformed into profits and investments. But it is also the moving human story of some of the people who endured and survived this ordeal, and who have long awaited rediscovery.
Swarns, a contributing writer for The New York Times and a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., is an African American Catholic who was raised on Staten Island. Beginning with an article in The Times in 2016, she revealed the story of the Jesuits as slaveholders and traders, leading to a stunning reckoning by Georgetown University with its past as well as one within the Jesuit order itself. Swarns writes with a keen eye and distinctive voice both about her Black subjects and about the hypocrisy and brutality of their onetime owners. The Jesuits were no monolith of greed and evil, however; Swarns sustains empathy for some who tried, largely unsuccessfully, to protect the enslaved people they had known so closely from the agony of sale that looms over this story.
. . . .
What comes through most effectively is the sorrow and the determination to survive of the enslaved people whom Swarns brings to light through her sleuthing and resonant prose. (Of Ann Joice, Swarns writes, “She would have no wealth, no land and no savings to leave her family, but she still had her story. … The story would be her legacy.”) Swarns also underscores the importance of Georgetown’s ongoing efforts at serious reparations for the deeds of its early leaders. An independent nonprofit, the Georgetown Memory Project, has identified around 6,000 living descendants of the original 272. In turn, the university has offered descendants formal “legacy” status for admission, sought atonement through a highly publicized apology and created a fund that would dedicate $400,000 a year to community projects, including support for health clinics and schools, likely to benefit descendants. Leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests have also vowed to establish a $100 million trust to benefit descendants and promote racial reconciliation.
No single work of history can remedy the vexing issue of repair for slavery in America, but “The 272” advances the conversation and challenges the collective conscience; without knowing this history in its complexity we are left with only raw, uncharted memory.
David W. Blight is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” and the forthcoming “Yale and Slavery: A History.”
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Read Blight’s full review at the above link.
This is the kind of important, often intentionally buried, history that GOP white nationalists like DeSantis, Trump, and others don’t want read and honestly discussed. But, as with most artificially suppressed works, the truth will out! There are just too many people speaking it these days for even the neo-fascist censors to silence them all.
It also illuminates the heretofore unknown and unheralded stories of enslaved African-Americans like Ann Joice who, against the odds, persevered in a grotesquely unjust and horrible system so that future generations could have a chance at a better life. These are are among the real heroes of American history who helped make our country what it is today. Their stories deserve to be told and studied.
Full disclosure: I am an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law School.
PWS
07-09-23
. . . .
After the election, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Trump “lost his grip” and that his false claims of voter fraud led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters trying to thwart the certification of Mr. Biden’s November 2020 victory.
“The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Barr writes.
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Duh!
PWS
02-27-22
John Reeves reviews Ty Seidule’s “Robert E. Lee & Me” in WashPost:
January 1872, Jubal Early, a former Confederate corps commander, delivered an address at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., to honor Robert E. Lee, who had recently died. Believing that Lee was one of the finest military leaders in history, Early declared, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime, needing no borrowed lustre; and he is all our own.” In subsequent years, Early and several elite ex-officers would deify Lee while creating the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. According to that view, the war wasn’t about slavery but rather states’ rights. And the North won only because of its superior resources. An additional tenet is that Lee was the greatest soldier in the war on either side.
At the same time the Lee myth was being created, former rebels began reinforcing white supremacy all across the South. In Walton County, a rural community in Georgia, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized freedmen after the war. In 1871, Jake Daniels, an African American blacksmith from the county, was killed by 20 disguised men after refusing to repair a buggy for a White man, who still owed him money from previous jobs. The Klansmen showed up at Daniels’s door in the middle of the night. Daniels went outside but quickly recognized the danger. He tried to reenter his house but was shot in the back of the head. The men then shot him five or six more times before leaving the scene.
This type of violence was not uncommon in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Georgia alone, 589 people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. As Ty Seidule writes in his powerful new book, “Robert E. Lee and Me,” “If Lee and Confederate worship created one side of the white supremacy coin, violent terror to enforce racial domination provided the other side.”
Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: “I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.”
Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders. Perhaps the best attribute of this fine book is the author’s honesty. When talking of his personal metamorphosis, he vows to “quit hiding behind the impartial, know-it-all historian and open up about the southerner, the boy who grew up on Lee idolatry, and the man who wrapped his identity around the heroes of the Confederacy. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Above all, tell the truth.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of the review at the link.
It’s never too late for the truth.
Lots of White folks still have the audacity to be upset and offended because “their” factionalized account of U.S. history — one that even those of us who grew up in the North were fed to a large extent — is (finally and incrementally) being replaced with a more accurate accounting of the truth, unhappy as facing it sometimes can be.
“Their” myths and false narratives are more important than the many African-American lives and futures snuffed out by racism. Shows that BLM has it right — the myths and fabricated visions of the past so integral to the White self-esteem of many are more important than the lives and futures of African-Americans snuffed out by institutionalized racism, much of it perpetrated by our Government and our legal system.
A frank accounting of our past, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is a necessary step to our moving forward as a nation.
PWS
02-08-21
