Combatting Gangs – immigrationcourtside.com

SESSIONS & TRUMP: MS-13’S BEST FRIENDS! – Tal Kopan @ CNN Confirms What I Have Been Saying All Along! – Administration’s “Gonzo” Immigration Enforcement Strengthens, Empowers, Emboldens Gangs While Harming Victims!

Trump admin was warned a policy change could strengthen MS-13. They did it anyway.

By Tal Kopan, CNN

The Trump administration was warned that ending US protections for more than 300,000 Central Americans would strengthen and grow MS-13 and gangs that President Donald Trump has called “animals,” according to an internal report obtained by CNN.

But the administration went on to end the protections for citizens of El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua regardless.

The warnings came from experts at the State Department in October 2017, and were attached to a letter from then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke.

The State Department also warned that ending the “temporary protected status” program could also hurt US national security and economic interests, including by driving up illegal immigration.

The program covers migrants in the US of countries that have been hit by dire conditions, such as an epidemics, civil war or natural disasters. Previous administrations spanning party had all opted to extend the protections for Central America every roughly two years.

“Many of the deportees would be accompanied by their US-born children, many of whom would be vulnerable to recruitment by gangs,” warned the section on Honduras.

“The lack of legitimate employment opportunities is likely to push some repatriated TPS holders, or their children, into the gangs or other illicit employment,” warned the section on El Salvador.

“With no employment and few ties, options for those returning to El Salvador and those overwhelmed by the additional competition will likely drive increased illegal migration to the United States and the growth of MS-13 and similar gangs,” the report added.

Trump has called MS-13 “animals.” “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in. … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals,” he said in May, later explaining he was speaking about the vicious gang.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/07/25/politics/trump-gangs-temporary-protected-status/index.html

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Once again, ignorant and biased Administration political officials ignore the advice of the Government’s own experts!

This article doesn’t even focus on another major way in which Trump & Sessions empower MS-13. By unnecessarily sowing terror in ethnic communities in the U.S., they are precluding cooperation with local police against gangs, making young people in the community “easy marks” for gangs, and by dehumanizing all migrants they are sending a strong message that a young person can only be empowered and respected by joining a gang. Not only that, but the perception of “Old Anglo White Guys” like Trump & Sessions in charge of the Administration’s anti-gang initiatives makes them totally ineffective.

Combatting gangs in a difficult problem that requires well-considered, nuanced solutions involving local police, educators, social workers, positive role models, and local communities, including both documented and undocumented community members.

We’ve proven over and over again that “deportation only” approaches not only don’t solve gang problems, but make them much worse. When policies are driven by racism, bias, and White Nationalism, the result is almost certain to be stupidity and futility.

PWS

07-25-18

PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP — PROFESSOR LAILA HLASS @ TULANE LAW TAKES ON “GUILT BY ASSOCIATION” AND “IMPLICIT BIAS “ IN IMMIGRATION ADJUDICATIONS INVOLVING GANG ALLEGATIONS!

HERE’S PROFESSOR HLASS:

HERE’S THE “ABSTRACT:”

The School to Deportation Pipeline

Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2018

Tulane Public Law Research Paper No. 18-1

60 Pages Posted: 8 Mar 2018

Laila Hlass

Tulane University – Law School

Date Written: 2018

Abstract

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes. Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system, over-policing within schools, and law enforcement, all of which can be compounded by racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime. The confluence of these systems results in a trajectory that has been referred to as “the school to deportation pipeline.”

Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are an emerging practice in this trajectory. Using non-uniform and broad guidelines, law enforcement, school officials, and immigration agents may label immigrant youth as gang-affiliated based on youths’ clothes, friends, or even where they live. These allegations serve as the basis to detain, deny bond, deny immigration benefits, and deport youth in growing numbers. This Article posits that gang allegations are a natural outgrowth of the convergence of the criminal and immigration schemes, serving as a means to preserve racial inequality. This Article further suggests excluding the consideration of gang allegations from immigration adjudications because their use undermines fundamental fairness. Finally, this Article proposes a three-pronged approach to counter the use of gang allegations, including initiatives to interrupt bias, take youthfulness into account, and increase access to counsel in immigration proceedings.

Keywords: Immigration, Children, Deportation, Immigration Representation, migrant youth, school-to-deportation-pipeline, race, gangs

Suggested Citation:

Hlass, Laila, The School to Deportation Pipeline (2018). Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2018; Tulane Public Law Research Paper No. 18-1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3132754

HERE ARE SOME “KEY QUOTES:”

“To be sure, the problem of gang violence in this country is a serious one. It is a problem that requires sustained attention to the complex (and diverse) sociological and neurological reasons that young people decide to associate with gangs or, as the case may be, disengage from them.27 Those concerns, however important, are beyond the scope of this Article. Instead, the goal of this Article is to shed light on the practical realities faced by immigrant youth caught in the school to deportation pipeline, where entrenched biases and insufficient procedural safeguards virtually guarantee their removal based on gang affiliation, no matter how flimsy the evidence supporting that label.28”

. . . .

“Gang allegations in immigration proceedings are part of the immigration regime’s long and ignoble history of explicit and implicit racism. Immigrant children, particularly youth of color, increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs of a punitive immigration system and subject to over-policing within schools and by law enforcement. These factors converge with existing racial biases and a lack of special protections for youth in the immigration regime, creating a perfect storm. To address this problem, gang allegations and related evidence should be excluded from immigration adjudications due to their unreliability and prejudicial nature. Furthermore, safeguards must be implemented to address this phenomenon, particularly as gang allegations appear to be on the rise. The immigration agency should attempt to interrupt adjudicator bias through education, improved decision-making conditions, and data collection. Secondly, youth should explicitly be a positive factor in discretion and bond decisions. Finally, to stall the school to deportation pipeline, children should have access to representation in immigration adjudications.”

AND, HERE’S A LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW:

Hlass-Gangs

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

Laila was my colleague at Georgetown Law when she was a Fellow at the CALS Asylum Clinic. In fact, she was a “Guest Lecturer” in my Immigration Law & Policy class.

Although Laila takes the much more scholarly approach, I have been saying consistently that this Administration’s harsh rhetoric and strictly law enforcement approach to diminishing the power of gangs is not only likely to fail, but is almost guaranteed to make the problems worse. Indeed, it’s basically an “on rhetorical steroids” version of the gang enforcement policies that have consistently been failing since the Reagan Administration.

But, we now have folks in charge who glory in their ignorance and bias. Consequently, they refuse to learn from past mistakes and will not embrace more effective community-based strategies that over time would deal with the causes of gang membership and help reduce gang violence.

PWS

03-14-18

GONZO’S WORLD: BEYOND ITS RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST OVERTONES, & ITS INTENTIONALLY FALSE NARRATIVE CONNECTING IMMIGRANTS WITH CRIME, THERE’S A MAJOR PROBLEM WITH “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT INTENDED TO “TERRORIZE” LATINO COMMUNITIES – IT’S HIGHLY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE AS A LAW ENFORCEMENT TOOL! –“Whenever we show up in Arlandria, people worry we’re there to enforce immigration law!”

Just happened to be reading this item about trying to combat gangs in our local newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette Packet:

Carr said one of the biggest challenges facing the police department’s anti-gang work is backlash from the national level rhetoric on immigration. “Whenever we show up in Arlandria, people worry we’re there to enforce immigration law,” said Carr. “Having difficulty building up that trust. We’re a local police department looking for people breaking local law.”

Seldom, if ever, do I read or see a TV report on gang violence where the victim is Anglo or Black. No, virtually 100% of the victims of gang violence in this area are Hispanic.

It wouldn’t take a “rocket scientist” — just somebody other than a 70-or-so-year-old Anglo White Nationalist with a history of anti-Hispanic racism — to understand that you can’t effectively combat or prevent gang violence without the trust of the local Hispanic community — in Alexandria, VA or anywhere else. It also doesn’t take much “smarts” to recognize that combatting gang violence with threats to arrest law-abiding, productive members of the community who happen to be without documents is going to discourage victims and witnesses from cooperating, destroy trust between the local community and the local police, and make enforcement ineffective.

No wonder gang leaders, particularly recruiters, literally “jump for joy” every time Gonzo opens his mouth to utter another anti-Hispanic , anti-immigrant rant. Not only does that give the gangsters “a free shot” at their victims in the Hispanic community, but it’s also is a prime recruiting tool. It demonstrates that Sessions and his restrictionist cronies in the Anglo community aren’t going to give any respect to “Dreamers” or any other law-abiding undocumented individuals. So, why not join up with the folks who wield some power and demand respect — and who obviously have been able to create a climate of fear in the Anglo community just by victimizing Hispanics?

Here’s a copy of the Gazette article:

State of Gangs

PWS

01-29-18

“GANGDOM” THRIVES IN VIEW OF CAPITOL — Michael E. Miller and Dan Morse @ WashPost Tell The Shockingly Ugly “Inside Story” Of How Gangs Terrorize The Undocumented Community In Langley Park, MD! — The Trump/Sessions “Gonzo” Approach To Immigration Seems Likely To Make Things Even Worse!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/people-here-live-in-fear-ms-13-menaces-a-community-seven-miles-from-the-white-house/2017/12/20/6cebf318-d956-11e7-b859-fb0995360725_story.html

Miller & Morse write:

‘People here live in fear’: MS-13 menaces a community seven miles from the White House
By Michael E. Miller and Dan Morse December 20 at 8:00 AM

Abigail Bautista, 34, of Langley Park, Md., describes what MS-13 did to her and then to her son. “People here live in fear,” she said. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
It took Abigail Bautista less than a month of living in Langley Park to learn that her new neighborhood in Maryland had its own set of laws, written not in statutes but in gang graffiti and blood.

The Guatemalan mother of five was pushing a cart of merchandise along University Boulevard one winter morning in late 2012 when three young men approached.

“Do you know who we are?” one asked her in Spanish.

Bautista shook her head.

“We are La Mara Salvatrucha,” he said. “And here, there are rules.”

Pay $60 “rent” per week or there would be trouble, he said. Undocumented and afraid of being deported if she went to police, Bautista began handing over the cash.

She had heard of the international street gang growing up in Central America, where MS-13, as it’s known, controls cities through brutality and corruption. But she had lived for the better part of a decade in the United States without crossing its path.

Now, she realized, she’d unwittingly moved into MS-13 territory a mere seven miles from the White House.

As the gang has grown in strength in recent years, so has its sway over communities across the country. From Boston to Northern Virginia to Houston, a string of grisly MS-13 murders has highlighted its resurgence, drawing a response from the White House.

“One by one, we’re liberating our American towns,” President Trump said this summer in Long Island, where MS-13 has been linked to more than a dozen recent killings.

Left out of Trump’s speeches, however, is the fact that most of the gang’s victims are not Americans but undocumented immigrants like Bautista. And when it comes to the gang’s infamous motto of “kill, rape, control,” it’s the third — enforced daily through extortion and intimidation — that defines life for some immigrants in places such as Langley Park.

“They are preying on the communities that they are living in,” said Michael McElhenny, a supervisory special agent for the FBI in Maryland.

More than a decade after a string of MS-13 killings shook the heavily Latino neighborhood, Langley Park is still struggling to shake off the gang’s influence. Despite aggressive policing, the area continues to be plagued by MS-13 drug dealing, prostitution, robbery, extortion and murder, according to court records and interviews with residents, activists, prosecutors and gang experts, as well as local and federal law enforcement officials.

. . . .

Federal authorities say the racketeering case and two other recent MS-13 indictments show they are serious about again dismantling the gang in Maryland. But Bautista won’t be satisfied until authorities lock up the man she suspects of leading MS-13 in Langley Park.

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Two weeks after her son’s body was found, and a few days before his vigil, she said, a letter was slipped under her door.

“If you keep talking, there will be consequences,” it warned in childlike handwriting, according to Bautista.

It was signed, she said, by the roofer.

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

Read the entire, much longer, article at the link.

One thing is clear: The gang problem isn’t going to be “solved” by having having clueless, anti-Hispanic, White Guys like Trump and Sessions uttering threats against the entire immigrant community from Washington.

No, the irony is that prosecutions and deportations, although they might rack up impressive statistics, really don’t bother gangs much. Gangs control big chunks of the prisons, both in the US and, even moreso, in the Northern Triangle. To some extent, a prison sentence is just a “temporary work reassignment.”

And, deportations: well that’s actually how the MS-13 grew, when the US deported LA gang members to El Salvador during the Reagan Administration without thinking about how to deal with the long term problem — how they would grow to control and terrorize the places to which they were being deported.

It doesn‘t take a “rocket scientist” (just someone smarter and less racist than Trump and Sessions) to figure out that the overheated anti-immigrant rhetoric that lumps gang members with generally law abiding workers and asylum applicants is a “made to order” recruitment tool for the MS-13 and other gangs.

”Trump and Sessions don’t respect you and don’t want you in America. They don’t even like the ‘good’ immigrants, so don’t waste your time on the false ‘American Dream.’ We’re you’re ‘REAL’ family that isn’t afraid of Trump, and will give you power, respect, and control, as long as you remain loyal to us. What’s Trump got to offer Hispanic youth?”

Reducing gang violence will require a nuanced, time consuming, labor intensive multi-cultural approach that:

Treats Hispanic youth, documented and undocumented, with respect and shows them they are valued by society;
Provides positive role models from the Hispanic community;
Gives youth viable alternatives to gangs;
Gains the trust of all members of the Hispanic community, whether documented or not;
Involves bilingualism, more Hispanic police officers, and potentially dangerous undocover operations in the community;
Recognizes and deals with the problems of gang control in US prisons;
Deals with the difficult question of what happens when we deport gang members back to the Norther Triangle.

With respect to the latter point, if we merely send U.S. gang members back to terrorize communities in the Northern Triangle, that will lead more terrorized community members to flee to the U.S. The cycle will continue.

The Trump Administration’s ham-handed immigration policies taken from the “White Nationalist restrictionist playbook” will likely only exaberrate the problem of gangs and gang violence in the long run.

PWS

INSTEAD OF DOUBLING DOWN ON FAILED POLICIES, SESSIONS SHOULD TRY ANTI-GANG STRATEGIES THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/sunday/trump-gangs-soccer-education.html

Lauren Markham writes in the NY Times:

“SundayReview | OPINION

The Wrong Way to Fight Gangs
By LAUREN MARKHAMSEPT. 28, 2017

Lester, who is among the recent Central American students at Oakland International High School who crossed into the US, during soccer practice for the Soccer Without Borders program. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Oakland, Calif. — Young migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador come to this country fleeing violence and lives that are often dictated by savage gangs. It’s expensive to get here. They often arrive with thousands of dollars of high-interest debt and little or no English skills. And they face an administration that insists that they are gangsters bringing bloodshed and gang warfare to American cities.

In fact, these young people are often fleeing gangs. And the challenges they face in the United States make them particularly vulnerable for recruitment into the same violent gangs they left home to escape.

“They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields,” President Trump said of the members of MS-13, a transnational gang composed largely of Central American youth; its activity has been growing in recent years, both in the United States and in Central America. A few weeks ago, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told law enforcement officers that these young, undocumented immigrants were “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

I work at Oakland International High School in Oakland, Calif. It is a public school with a population made up entirely of recently arrived immigrant students. Today, over 25 percent are unaccompanied minors — young people who crossed into the United States without papers or parents — who have been released from immigration custody and placed in deportation proceedings to await their day in court. Since we opened 10 years ago, our students’ gang involvement has markedly decreased. This is because we have gotten better at what we were meant to do, namely: provide programs that teach skills, offer support services that reduce barriers to coming to school, and foster a sense of community.

We offer what the gangs offer, but better.

I had one student who came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor from Honduras. His mother left him when he was little, and he never knew his father. He lived with his grandmother until she died. He was just 13. For two years he lived alone in her house, selling water bottles on the street on behalf of a neighboring family. Sometimes they invited him over for dinner; other times they didn’t.

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He told me that he saw this life in Honduras as a dead end. He crossed into Guatemala, rode on top of trains through Mexico, hiding what little money he had pressed against the inside of his cheek, and swam across the Rio Grande. He was apprehended at the border, placed into a youth detention center, and sent to live with his aunt in Oakland, pending his deportation hearing. He enrolled at Oakland International but, after a couple of weeks, his attendance waned. Soon he stopped coming altogether.

“I didn’t know anything,” he told me. Being in school felt impossible to him because he felt unable to succeed at it. He had an upcoming court case and no lawyer; that, he knew, would cost money he didn’t have.

One Saturday, I took the train into San Francisco to meet a friend. As I waited at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station outside the Civic Center, I watched as, in broad daylight, Latino teenagers sold drugs to the area’s vagrants. I knew this drug ring was connected to MS-13. There, on the other side of the plaza, was my student.

“These are animals,” President Trump said of MS-13 members. Most often, rather, they are like my student: young people, not unlike child soldiers, who enter a violent life by either force or force of circumstance. They do not come to the United States to participate in gang life; it winds up as the only option.

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Our school kept trying with this particular student. We conducted home visits in East Oakland, where he lived with his aunt, found him a therapist he could see at school, and encouraged him to join our school soccer team. He got a free lawyer. He quit selling at the Civic Center. He came back to school.

Newly arrived immigrants are a fast-growing demographic in American schools, and they will continue to be, regardless of the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Yet the Trump administration is pushing for cuts that will affect their ability to succeed in school, or even attend school at all.

The proposed 2018 education budget includes approximately $9 billion in cuts — 13.5 percent of the total. The cuts include an evisceration of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a $1 billion earmark which provides funding for enrichment opportunities for students in high-poverty schools.

Nearly all of the support our school was able to offer my student, and so many like him, was a result of 21st Century funding. It pays for Soccer Without Borders, which serves more than half of our student population, and for an organization called Refugee Transitions, which offers tutoring and homework help. It pays for mental health interns to provide therapy to youth in six languages.

Quality public education is a fundamental, if aspirational, American value. But altruism aside, investing in newcomer education makes practical sense. It costs far more to lock someone up for a year than it does to educate him.

“We’re going to destroy the vile, criminal cartel MS-13,” President Trump announced to a group of law enforcement officers on Long Island, N.Y., in July. To focus on police intervention rather than education isn’t only shortsighted, it’s also been proven not to work. All we have to do is look at El Salvador, where a series of failed iron fist campaigns that combined police crackdowns with a lack of social alternatives served to increase violence.

We could also look at history. MS- 13 was born in the United States among disenfranchised, traumatized immigrant youth in the 1980s and, through deportation, was exported to El Salvador (then spread to Honduras and Guatemala) — where it now relies on vulnerable young recruits, teenage and even younger, to grow its ranks.

Central America’s endemic violence is not going away anytime soon, so, like it or not, these young people will keep coming, regardless of the walls we build or the immigration policies we enact. Excluded and disenfranchised young people seek inclusion elsewhere: on the margins, in the shadows, in society’s dark underbelly. Gangs provide that sense of belonging, along with a feeling of success and upward mobility, for those who are not offered the same in mainstream society.

Last Tuesday afternoon, on a warm fall day in Oakland, more than 60 young men from more than a dozen countries played soccer together out on our misshapen soccer pitch. An additional 50 or so students sat in the cafeteria, working with teachers and volunteers to practice their English and finish their homework. A group of parents met in a classroom to help plan the year’s activities. It was just a typical day at the school — a day full of activities that depend on money that could disappear. If 21st Century funds go away, these programs vanish. Which means the students will find somewhere else to take them in.

MS-13, as it happens, welcomes young people with open arms.”

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Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. There ways of getting the job done. We really need to use them!

PWS

09-28-17

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