🏴‍☠️TRUMP REGIME’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: IMMIGRATION SUPERSTAR LINDSAY MUIR HARRIS & ONE OF HER ASYLEE CLIENTS SPEAK OUT AGAINST MILLER’S NEO-NAZI PROPOSAL TO BAR ASYLUM! — “My husband and I may not be alive today and our daughter would have been married off as the third wife of a man in his fifties by the time she was twelve.”

https://msmagazine.com/2020/07/13/an-american-mother-on-asylum-trumps-new-rules-would-have-rewritten-my-story/

An American Mother on Asylum: Trump’s New Rules Would Have Rewritten My Story

7/13/2020 by NENE BAH and LINDSAY M. HARRIS

Asylum is not a perfect solution for families like mine, who are fleeing human rights abuses. Starting all over again in another country is not easy.

We have, at times, struggled to survive. I have worked night shifts in a factory, as a janitor for a public school system, and in retail. I have worked hard to provide for my family.

Today, I am a U.S. citizen and my children are in college. My daughter can’t make up her mind about which major to choose. Above all, we are safe from physical harm and threats to my daughter’s safety and my own that we fled in our home country.

But, if the new asylum rules proposed by the Trump administration are put into practice, others like me will not have the same protection. They will be returned to danger.

This is my story.

I fled my home country in West Africa in 2010. My husband and I had a happy life and after university I worked as a high school biology teacher.

Things became too dangerous for us to stay, however, when family and community members came after us, insisting that my young daughter be subjected to female genital cutting and early forced marriage to a much older man.

Wanting to protect my child from what I myself had endured when I was young, I decided to take a stand. My husband and I were united in our opposition to female genital cutting, which is very common in our country, especially for girls between 5 and 9 years old. Given my traumatic and painful experience and how it has affected me throughout my life, we did everything we could to protect our daughter.

This antagonized our community and families, and we both endured numerous threats, physical attacks, and beatings, in an attempt by our family to convince us to let her be cut. We lived in constant fear of my daughter being kidnapped and cut.

At one point, an extended family member who insisted that we agree to let our daughter be cut ran over my husband, causing him to suffer brain damage and severe injuries. The authorities refused to intervene in what they saw as “family matters,” and the law against female genital cutting is not enforced in my country. To protect our child, I knew we had to leave.

I had visited the United States before and knew it would be a safe place to raise our family. There was no way to apply for asylum outside the U.S., so I obtained tourist visas for us. There are no direct flights from my home country to the United States, so we stopped in North Africa for a brief layover, before arriving in the U.S.

Soon after arrival, I found a lawyer, to help me with my case: Lindsay Harris, with the Tahirih Justice Center. I was lucky to find a lawyer, but the process of applying for asylum was extremely challenging—although Lindsay spoke French, one of the languages I speak comfortably, we had to complete all of the paperwork in English. I had to re-tell my story time and time again and eventually before an asylum officer.

I realize now that I was actually lucky because I had my asylum interview in 2011, and my case was granted only six months later that same year. Now, asylum seekers often wait several years before an interview, and the U.S. government just made the waiting period longer. During those six months, I lived with the constant anxiety of being sent back to my country where my daughter would be cut and our lives were in danger.

When we were granted asylum, we were finally able to live in safety and peace. My daughter was able to focus on school and have a happy childhood.

My heart sank earlier this month when I learned that other women and girls may not have the same access to safety that we did. The Trump administration wants to make major changes to the rules for asylum law. If these rules were in effect when I sought asylum in 2011, I would not have been granted.

The more I learn about these policy changes, the more stunned and saddened I am. It’s staggering to think that under these new rules, gender-based violence would not count—as if it’s not important enough to matter.

In my country, and many countries around the world, women are subjected to specific forms of harm based on their gender: gender-specific violence. Men simply are not at risk of female genital cutting and generally not child or forced marriage.

Under the new rules, what happened between my family and community members would be considered just a “private dispute”—despite the strong evidence then and now to show that my government would not intervene in what they see as family issues, even where serious physical harm and death are involved.

Part of my asylum claim was that I was targeted because of my feminist political opinion: I believe women and girls have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. These new rules would prevent those claims too.

It’s unbelievable that things like taking a non-direct flight, as my family did—which had nothing to do with how much we needed protection or whether or not we were telling the truth—could bar someone from being granted asylum protection. That stop, briefly, at another airport in North Africa, would have undermined our entire claim for protection. My husband and I may not be alive today and our daughter would have been married off as the third wife of a man in his fifties by the time she was twelve.

It angers me that the government wants to create all of these new bars to asylum, leaving some asylum seekers with access only to something called “withholding of removal.”

For me, this would have meant separation from my husband and children—who would not have also been granted that protection as my derivatives or who would each have to have their own asylum claim—never being able to travel outside the U.S., never being able to become a lawful permanent resident or a citizen, and continually renewing a work permit and reporting to a deportation officer on a routine basis. We would be living in limbo.

Take Action

The public can comment on the proposed rules to change asylum until July 15, 2020.

It is painful and frightening for me to speak out, but I have chosen to do so.

I want to ensure that the women who come after me, seeking protection for themselves and their daughters, will not find that the United States has closed its doors and shut its eyes to human rights abuses and persecution against women and girls.

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

These proposals have been developed and promoted by neo-Nazi racist xenophobe Stephen Miller. They are totally outrageous and illegal. Many entitled to our nation’s protection have already been maimed, tortured, raped, or died as a result of our nation’s failure to stand up against this arrogant human rights abuser on our public payroll.

The humanity of every American is diminished by Miller’s White Nationalist hate agenda and the corrupt regime that employs him.

PWS

07-14-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮THE UGLY TRUTH BEHIND TRUMP’S COVID-19 LIES: Immigrants Don’t Spread COVID-19, But ICE Spreads It Throughout The U.S. & The World, According To a New Report From The NY Times & The Marshall Project!

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮THE UGLY TRUTH BEHIND TRUMP’S COVID-19 LIES: Immigrants Don’t Spread COVID-19, But ICE Spreads It Throughout The U.S. & The World, According To a New Report From The NY Times & The Marshall Project!

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/07/10/how-ice-exported-the-coronavirus

By Emily Kassie & Barbara Marcolini

This video was produced in collaboration with The New York Times.

Admild, an undocumented immigrant from Haiti, was feeling sick as he approached the deportation plane that was going to take him back to the country he had fled in fear. Two weeks before that day in May, while being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana, he had tested positive for the coronavirus — and he was still showing symptoms.

He disclosed his condition to an ICE official at the airport, who sent him to a nurse.

“She just gave me Tylenol,” said Admild, who feared reprisals if his last name was published. Not long after, he was back on the plane before landing in Port-au-Prince, one of more than 40,000 immigrants deported from the United States since March, according to ICE records.

Even as lockdowns and other measures have been taken around the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, ICE has continued to detain people, move them from state to state and deport them.

An investigation by The New York Times in collaboration with The Marshall Project reveals how unsafe conditions and scattershot testing helped turn ICE into a domestic and global spreader of the virus — and how pressure from the Trump administration led countries to take in sick deportees.

We spoke to more than 30 immigrant detainees who described cramped and unsanitary detention centers where social distancing was near impossible and protective gear almost nonexistent. “It was like a time bomb,” said Yudanys, a Cuban immigrant held in Louisiana.

At least four deportees interviewed by The Times, from India, Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador, tested positive for the virus shortly after arriving from the United States.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the introduction and view the video at the link.

There is no reliable evidence that migrants and asylum seekers are a significant source of COVID-19 spread, particularly if they are properly screened, tested, and quarantined when necessary. https://www.cato.org/blog/no-mr-president-immigration-not-correlated-covid-19-united-states

On the other hand, as this report as well as numerous Federal Court actions have shown, there is powerful evidence that the “maliciously incompetent” immigration policies of the Trump regime are spreading COVID-19 in the U.S. and the world.

Consequently, Trump’s COVID-19 based immigration and asylum restrictions are a bad faith pretext for a White Nationalist, racist, xenophobic agenda. It’s a cowardly coverup for the truth that the Trump Administration threatens America’s health, not migrants and asylum seekers.

Reality is actually pretty straightforward, even if some Federal Courts and most GOP legislators pretend otherwise.

PWS

07-13-20

10 LEGAL REPAIRS FOR A POST-CLOWN 🤡 WORLD — From Jennifer Rubin @ WashPost

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/12/ten-ideas-post-trump-reform/

President Trump granting clemency to his crony Roger Stone, who served as the go-between for the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, on practically the eve of Stone’s incarceration for multiple crimes attendant to his coverup on behalf of the president, is grotesquely corrupt but unsurprising. Stone virtually confessed to a quid pro quo, telling Howard Fineman, “He [Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” Silence for clemency. A separate system of justice for the president’s henchmen. This is the very definition of corruption.

“By this action, President Trump abused the powers of his office in an apparent effort to reward Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with investigators examining the President’s own conduct,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a written statement released Friday. “No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose.”

Stone’s clemency should remind all Americans of the necessity of removing Trump at the ballot box and seeking a full accounting of Attorney General William P. Barr’s role in running interference for the president (e.g., spinning the Mueller report, turning a blind eye toward criminality in the Ukraine scandal, intervening to block Stone’s and Michael Flynn’s punishments). It should remind voters that if not for the spinelessness of every Republican senator save Utah’s Mitt Romney, Trump would not have survived impeachment to seek vengeance on witnesses (e.g., Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman), corruptly protect his friends and incompetently manage a pandemic, leading to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands. With the pardon of Stone, we can affirm that Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s assertion that he learned his lesson from impeachment was delusional.

In 2019, The Post’s editorial board argued the president tried to manipulate the justice system, wrongdoing that Congress must not let go. (The Washington Post)

However, we will need far more than an electoral shellacking of Republicans to address the damage Trump has done to the Justice Department and the rule of law. Ten simple measures would begin to repair our justice system:

1. A thorough redo of the special counsel/independent counsel law is necessary. The counsel’s final report should be issued to Congress and/or the courts, depriving a potentially corrupt attorney general or president the opportunity to pre-edit or spin it. Additional legislation should clarify that a special counsel is empowered to make specific findings of illegality. The DOJ guidelines preventing prosecution of the president while still in office should be revisited.

2. Congress must reassert the power of the purse. The executive branch must report all holds/impounds on congressionally appropriated funds. “Emergency” powers should be reexamined, tightened and clarified to prevent the sort of unilateral misappropriation of funds we saw regarding the wall.

3. Severe criminal penalties should be exacted for revealing the identity of whistleblowers or threatening and/or punishing federal employees for providing truthful testimony.

4. A new, speedy enforcement mechanism is required for contempt of Congress citations, allowing lawmakers to get a swift and definitive resolution of its conflicts with the executive branch.

5. We need a barrier between the White House and Justice Department to prevent political interference in specific cases, targets of investigation and prosecutorial recommendations. Any such communications must be logged and made available to the inspector general and/or Congress.

. . . .

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

Get the rest of the article with five more good ideas at the above link.

An essential that should have been #1 on the list: An independent Article I Immigration Court with an open, merit-based judicial selection process involving public input!

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

PWS

07-13-20

🏴‍☠️KAKISTOCRACY UPDATE W/ CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump’s Morally & Financially Bankrupt USCIS Stops Making Green Cards — Literally!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-trump-administration-is-turning-legal-immigrants-into-undocumented-ones/2020/07/09/15c1cbf6-c203-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html

By Catherine Rampell

July 9 at 7:30 PM ET

The Trump administration is turning legal immigrants into undocumented ones.

That is, the “show me your papers” administration has literally switched off printers needed to generate those “papers.”

Without telling Congress, the administration has scaled back the printing of documents it has already promised to immigrants — including green cards, the wallet-size I.D.’s legal permanent residents must carry everywhere to prove they are in the United States lawfully.

In mid-June, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ contract ended with the company that had been printing these documents. Production was slated to be insourced, but “the agency’s financial situation,” USCIS said Thursday, prompted a hiring freeze that required it to ratchet down printing.

. . . .

USCIS, which is funded almost entirely by fees, is undergoing a budget crisis, largely caused by financial mismanagement by political leadership. The printing disruptions are no doubt a preview of chaos to come if the agency furloughs about 70 percent of its workforce, as it has said it will do in a few weeks absent a congressional bailout.

In recent conversations with congressional staffers about cutting contracts to save money, USCIS mentioned only one contract, for a different division, that was being reduced — and made no reference to this printing contract, according to a person who took part in those discussions. The company that had this contract, Logistics Systems Inc., did not respond to emails and calls this week requesting comment.

The administration has taken other steps in recent months that curb immigration. Presidential executive orders have almost entirely ended issuance of green cards and work-based visas for people applying from outside the country; red tape and bureaucracy have slowed the process for those applying from within U.S. borders. For a while, the agency refused to forward files from one office to another. The centers that collect necessary biometric data remain shuttered.

These pipeline delays are likely to dramatically reduce the number of green cards ultimately approved and issued this year.

Under normal circumstances, immigrants who need proof of legal residency but haven’t yet received their green card would have an alternative: get a special passport stamp from USCIS. But amid covid-related changes, applicants must provide evidence of a “critical need,” with little guidance about what that means.

“The bottom line is that applicants pay huge filing fees, and it appears that these fees have apparently been either squandered through mismanagement or diverted to enforcement-focused initiatives, to the great detriment of applicants as well as the overall efficiency of the immigration process,” says Anis Saleh, an immigration attorney in Coral Gables, Fla. “The administration has accomplished its goal of shutting down legal immigration without actually changing the law.”

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

Read the rest of Catherine’s article at the link.

It should come as no surprise that an agency under unqualified White Nationalist Ken “Cooch Cooch” Cuccinelli is being run into the ground and has lost its mission through misdirection and mismanagement. That’s basically Cooch’s story in a nutshell as those of us know in Virginia, where we count ourselves most fortunate not to have him as our Governor.

I have written previously about how the regime’s “malicious incompetence” has bankrupted once self-sustaining USCIS while destroying our legal immigration and asylum systems that benefit the US and individual migrants and refugees in numerous ways. I made the rather obvious point that the House Dems should not bail out this regime on USCIS, but rather require that the money be found by reprograming funds from bloated, wasteful, ineffective, and inhumane DHS enforcement programs, starting with the wall.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/07/07/%f0%9f%8f%b4%e2%80%8d%e2%98%a0%ef%b8%8f%e2%98%a0%ef%b8%8f%e2%9a%b0%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%a4%ae%f0%9f%91%8ekakistocracy-korner-trumps-malicious-incompetence-bankrupts-once-profitable-immigration-age/

The solution to maliciously incompetent freeloaders like the Trump immigration kakistocracy is not to provide more bailouts as rewards for their misconduct and mismanagement.

A recent report from the American Immigration Council shows how DHS enforcement spending has bloated to over $25 billion annually at then same time the Trump kakistocracy has mismanaged USCIS into bankruptcy. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security

And, we haven’t really gotten much return on that investment, Here’s a key quote from the AIC Report:

What has this spending bought? The United States currently has roughly 700 miles of fencing along the Southern border, record levels of staff for ICE and CBP, as well as a fleet of drones, among other resources. Some of these resources have been spent on ill-conceived projects, such as the $1 billion attempt to construct a “virtual fence” along the Southwest border, a project initiated in 2005 that was later scrapped for being ineffective and too costly. CBP announced a similar project in July 2020 to install a total of 200 “Autonomous Surveillance Towers” along remote areas of the southern border at a reported cost of several hundred million dollars.

Even with record level spending on enforcement, enforcement alone is not sufficient to address the challenges of undocumented migration. It also has significant unintended consequences; according to U.S. Border Patrol statistics, the Southwest border witnesses close to one death per day. All of these efforts that have accumulated in the name of security, however, do not necessarily measure border security properly, or make the border more secure. It is past time for the United States to turn away from costly and haphazard efforts to secure the border and instead focus on reining in the costs of border enforcement.

I argue that the regime’s focus on removing folks who were peacefully residing in the U.S. and contributing to our economy, many with U.S. citizen family members who are then left in dire straits, has actually been detrimental to America, in addition to killing the Immigration Courts.

Likewise, the shutdown of our legal refugee, asylum, and immigration systems without legislation has not only placed our nation among the ranks of human rights violators and harmed or endangered human lives, but also deprived us of individuals with a powerful history of making outsized contributions to our society and our economy.

I doubt that a rational immigration policy and system that looked at the real national interest, rather than the mythologized White Nationalist, fundamentally racist version of it, would require such a huge, yet largely counterproductive, enforcement apparatus. At a minimum, costs for civil detention and removals could be cut substantially in a better system.

Due Process Forever! More public welfare handouts for the kakistocracy, never!

PWS

07-12-20

⚖️👎🏻ADAM SERWER @ THE ATLANTIC DE-GOBBLEDYGOOKS SUPREMES: Nobody Is Above The Law, But Trump Can Evade It — All Trump Wanted From “His” Supremes Was To Avoid The Legal Process Until After The Election, & That’s Exactly What He Got From A Court Unwilling To Stand Up To A Patently Dishonest President & Gross Abuses Of Executive Authority!

https://apple.news/ARMzjBjhvTLKSg1So3tghpg

Seven Supreme Court justices ruled yesterday morning that Donald Trump is not a king.

But Trump still got what he wanted.

Since Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he has vowed to release his tax returns, and has also refused to release his tax returns. After the 2018 midterms, Democrats in the House sought to subpoena financial institutions for Trump’s records, and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance sought Trump’s financial records for a grand-jury investigation into whether Trump broke the law when he concealed hush-money payments to hide past affairs during the 2016 election. In one opinion, Trump v. Mazars, the Court affirmed Congress’s subpoena power but sent the case back to lower courts for further litigation; in Trump v, Vance, it affirmed Vance’s authority to seek the records but sent the case back to the lower courts for further litigation.

[David A. Graham: Trump is successfully running out the clock]

In other words, what is apparently a defeat for Trump is still a victory for his presidential campaign: The public will not see the financial records that he has been promising to reveal for the past five years, and voters will remain in the dark about the president’s potential entanglements and conflicts of interest as they go to the polls for the second time.

“In our judicial system,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Vance, quoting an old legal maxim, “‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence.’ Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.” Nevertheless, Roberts wrote, while Trump does not have absolute immunity to Vance’s subpoenas, he can continue to contest particular subpoenas individually on various grounds in the lower courts, including arguing “that compliance with a particular subpoena would impede his constitutional duties.” Vance’s grand jury may ultimately get its hands on the president’s documents, but the public will not see them anytime soon, if at all.

In Mazars, Roberts acknowledged that “the standards proposed by the President and the Solicitor General—if applied outside the context of privileged information—would risk seriously impeding Congress in carrying out its responsibilities,” but he also rebuked the House for its own argument, which would leave “essentially no limits on the congressional power to subpoena the President’s personal records.”

The exalted language of Roberts’s opinions conceals their results, which are, to paraphrase Saint Augustine: Give me oversight, and give me transparency, but not yet.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Actions over words. Results over rhetoric.

There are lots of losers here: the public’s right to know, Congressional oversight, Executive accountability, ethics in Government, the rule of law, separation of powers, judicial independence, intellectual honesty, the integrity of our revenue system, ordinary taxpayers. But there’s really only one winner: Trump.

Don’t bet that a future Democratic President would get the same exemptions from timely Congressional oversight.

As for the “theoretically non-political” Supremes, you might want to ask Al Gore, disenfranchised and gerrymandered minority voters, or more recently, Wisconsin voters who risked their lives to vote in person during a pandemic about that.

PWS

07-12-20

🏴‍☠️THE PLAGUE STATES OF AMERICA: Where ☠️ Plague, Stupidity, & Inhumanity Rule, & Your U.S. Passport Is Largely Worthless (Except, If You Are A Person of Color To, Perhaps, Protect You From “Expedited Removal” By ICE & Trump’s Complicit Supremes)! — Welcome To The “Trump Hotel California!”🤮

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

“Relax”, said the night man

“We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave”

—— From “Hotel California” by The Eagles

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Glenn Lewis Frey / Don Felder / Donald Hugh Henley

Hotel California lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG Rights Management

Full Lyrics & Music here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjZqsKZpcXqAhU0oXIEHaegAiQQwqsBMAp6BAgLEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DvcmjDPDOk7c&usg=AOvVaw3ay3l2d6R_UlBVOg1k6Fnz

https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e?source=email-dafc55faa6fd-1594452458433-digest.reader——0-50——————1f52bfff_711d_4def_918f_7e9b8eddea74-1-1b0c1765_594d_4c73_8665_f93e3a786b9f—-&sectionName=top

American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map)

Oh the places you can’t go

Indi Samarajiva

Follow

America is not united anymore and it’s barely a state. They have crashed right through failed state into a plague state, unwelcome across the world. This has been predicted, including here. Now it has come to pass. Just look at the map.

Americans have gone from having access to most of the world to being banned from most of it. Today, Americans are only allowed in a few Caribbean islands and the Balkans. An American passport is now worthless. Worse than worthless, it’s a plague.

In the absence of a humane government, America is now ruled by COVID-19. Welcome to the Plague States of America.

It’s too late

<img alt=”Image for post” class=”s t u hk ai” src=”https://miro.medium.com/max/6800/1*EoSrvKpq71W0jTbJCKmBfw.png” width=”3400″ height=”2400″ srcSet=”https://miro.medium.com/max/552/1*EoSrvKpq71W0jTbJCKmBfw.png 276w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1104/1*EoSrvKpq71W0jTbJCKmBfw.png 552w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*EoSrvKpq71W0jTbJCKmBfw.png 640w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*EoSrvKpq71W0jTbJCKmBfw.png 700w” sizes=”700px”/>

Only America has self-inflicted a second wave

I think it is difficult for Americans to understand that they are, to use an epidemiological term, completely fucked. COVID-19 could have been managed in January, or February, or even now, but not a full year later, in January 2021. Given than you need a functioning government to manage this pandemic, that’s the soonest Americans can get one.

It’s far too late.

The most reliable projections are saying 200,000 dead and 50 million infected by election day in November. Even these projections struggle to account for completely irrational federal actions like denigrating masks, pushing to reopen early, and pushing students back into schools. This is not the absence of public health, this is its opposite.

It is, in effect, governance by COVID-19. Not a failed state. A plague state.

Even after election day, Donald Trump will still be in power for nearly 3 months, until January 20th. Besides impeaching a dead-duck President, there’s nothing America can do but wait, while COVID-19 grows ever stronger. Grows completely out of control. In a pandemic, days matter, hours matter. A year is entirely too late.

America will be lucky to exit this pandemic with less than a million dead and 100 million infected. The living will be lucky to exit their country within the next five years.

The worthless passport

<img alt=”Image for post” class=”s t u hk ai” src=”https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*dcgKqItSATd-t8a1R42Sbw.jpeg” width=”1600″ height=”1137″ srcSet=”https://miro.medium.com/max/552/1*dcgKqItSATd-t8a1R42Sbw.jpeg 276w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1104/1*dcgKqItSATd-t8a1R42Sbw.jpeg 552w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*dcgKqItSATd-t8a1R42Sbw.jpeg 640w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*dcgKqItSATd-t8a1R42Sbw.jpeg 700w” sizes=”700px”/>

Welcome to the club. Post-colonial bullshit and racism have made my Sri Lankan passport worthless for years. Now the American passport is worse. America has crashed straight through the third world into the fourth.

Here is a list, in total, of all the places Americans can go. Most of them are small Caribbean islands.

<img alt=”Image for post” class=”s t u hk ai” src=”https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*ddImUOx1j0smBVcsVeqbPg.png” width=”1600″ height=”1022″ srcSet=”https://miro.medium.com/max/552/1*ddImUOx1j0smBVcsVeqbPg.png 276w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1104/1*ddImUOx1j0smBVcsVeqbPg.png 552w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*ddImUOx1j0smBVcsVeqbPg.png 640w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*ddImUOx1j0smBVcsVeqbPg.png 700w” sizes=”700px”/>

ALL THE PLACES YOU CAN GO

1. Albania | 15. Lebanon

2. Antigua and Barbuda | 16. Maldives

3. Aruba | 17. Mexico

4. The Bahamas | 18. North Macedonia

5. Barbados | 19. St. Lucia

6. Belize | 20. St. Maarten

7. Bermuda | 21. St. Vincent &

8. Croatia | 22. Serbia

9. Dominican Republic | 23. Tanzania

10. Ecuador* | 24. Turkey

11. French Polynesia | 25. Turks &

12. Ireland* | 26. Ukraine

13. Jamaica | 27. UAE*

14. Kosovo | 28. UK*

*14 day quarantine required, not included in map.

American now have access to exactly two dozen states, four more (*) if they want to endure a 14-day quarantine on the end. Americans have gone from world power to getting the side-eye from Ecuador in a matter of months. Right now Americans are only really welcome on remote islands or at corralled resorts in Mexico, where they can be isolated from everyone else.

It’s not that other nations don’t want to welcome Americans, they just can’t. The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of their citizens at all. America’s public health regime is far less trustworthy than Liberia’s (which is actually quite good). Its sovereign is mad.

At the same time, you can’t trust Americans. Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, break quarantine, and generally follow rules. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers.

They have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. Some of them, I assume, are good people, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a plague passport. Return to sender.

The Plague States

<img alt=”Image for post” class=”s t u hk ai” src=”https://miro.medium.com/max/4000/1*weJ8xV5Wt2kCaKGnLXj4Hg.png” width=”2000″ height=”1149″ srcSet=”https://miro.medium.com/max/552/1*weJ8xV5Wt2kCaKGnLXj4Hg.png 276w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1104/1*weJ8xV5Wt2kCaKGnLXj4Hg.png 552w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*weJ8xV5Wt2kCaKGnLXj4Hg.png 640w, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*weJ8xV5Wt2kCaKGnLXj4Hg.png 700w” sizes=”700px”/>

That’s the near future of the United States. An epidemic that spreads largely unchecked until next year. A population to unprotected and ignorant to be allowed anywhere else. A world that largely suppresses the virus — from Mongolia to Ghana to Trinidad & Tobago — but which has to keep America in isolation.

In the end, Trump did what he said. He built a wall around America and made the world pay for it. He just never told Americans that they’d be stuck inside. Welcome to the Plague States of America. You can check out, but you can never leave.

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

Check out the map accompanying the original article at the above link.

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

PWS

07-11-20

🏴‍☠️TRUMP “JUSTICE” — DHS DEATH CAMP ⚰️ IN VIRGINIA — Convicted Criminal Sleezeball Roger Stone Gets Out of Jail Free, But ICE Non-Criminal Prisoners @ Farmville Face COVID-19 Detain Until Dead ☠️ (“DUD”) Policy!🤮

NBC 4 Washington reports in this video:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/covid-19-outbreak-at-ice-detention-center-in-virginia/2358116/

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

This is justice? Unhappily, it’s what passes for justice for people of color in the era of Trump.

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

PWS

07-11-20

🇺🇸🗽👍🏼⚖️LEGENDARY IMMIGRATION LITIGATOR/GURU IRA KURZBAN CREAMS TRUMP IN 11TH CIR. — Regime Scofflaws Wrong on APA Again — But Where Are The Sanctions For DHS’s Frivolous Position? — CANAL A MEDIA HOLDING, LLC v. USCIS

Ira Kurzban ESQUIRE
Legendary American Immigration Lawyer

http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201911193.pdf

CANAL A MEDIA HOLDING, LLC v. USCIS, 11th Cir., 07-09-20, published

PANEL: MARTIN and NEWSOM, Circuit Judges, and WATKINS,* District Judge.

MARTIN, Circuit Judge:

Honorable W. Keith Watkins, United States District Judge for the Middle District of Alabama, sitting by designation.

OPINION BY: Judge Martin

CONCURRING OPINION: Judge Newsom

KEY QUOTE:

Plaintiffs Canal A Media Holding, LLC (“Canal A Media”) and Erick Archila appeal the District Court’s dismissal of their amended complaint for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. They seek to challenge the decision by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) to deny Canal A Media’s petition for a work visa for Mr. Archila. Having carefully reviewed this case, and with the benefit of oral argument, we have decided that the denial of Canal A Media’s visa petition was final agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”). Also, we hold that 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9) and (g) do not bar the Plaintiffs’ challenge to the visa petition denial. In keeping with these decisions, we reverse the District Court’s dismissal of the Plaintiffs’ claims.

JUDGE NEWSOM’S FULL CONCURRING OPINION:

I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately only to emphasize (what is to me, anyway) the obvious correctness of the Court’s holding that USCIS’s denial of Canal A Media’s Form I-129 visa petition constituted “final agency action” within the meaning of § 704 of the Administrative Procedure Act. See 5 U.S.C. § 704.

In determining whether agency action is “final” for APA purposes, the Supreme Court has emphasized, first and foremost, that “the action must mark the consummation of the agency’s decisionmaking process,” Bennett v. Spear, 520 U.S. 154, 177–78 (1997) (emphasis added) (quotation omitted), or, alternatively, that “the agency has completed its decisionmaking process,” Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U.S. 788, 797 (1992) (emphasis added). Those formulations tee up an important—and here, apparently dispositive—question: What is the relevant “agency”? It seems to me self-evident—and so far as I can tell, all agree—that the “agency” whose “decisionmaking process” we have to evaluate here is USCIS, the instrumentality of the federal government responsible for evaluating I-129 petitions. See 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(l).

The government contends here—and the district court held—that USCIS’s denial of Canal A Media’s I-129 petition didn’t constitute “final agency action” because Mr. Archila, on whose behalf Canal A Media sought the I-129, was still in

15

Case: 19-11193 Date Filed: 07/08/2020 Page: 16 of 17

the middle of removal proceedings before an immigration judge. That is triply wrong—and, it seems to me, at the most basic level(s).

First, the government asks us to agency-jump. USCIS’s decisionmaking process hasn’t run its course, the government says, because an immigration judge is still working. But USCIS and the immigration court are altogether different “agenc[ies].” Cf. 5 U.S.C. § 701(b)(1) (defining “agency” to mean “each authority of the Government of the United States, whether or not it is within or subject to review by another agency”). More than that, they are housed in altogether different departments—USCIS exists within the Department of Homeland Security,1 whereas the immigration court operates under the auspices of the Department of Justice.2 The executive branch has an architecture—granted, not always perfectly elegant, but an architecture nonetheless—and the government’s position defies it.

Second, not only are the agencies themselves different, the participants in the proceedings before them are different. The only party properly before USCIS was Canal A Media, the visa petitioner; Mr. Archila, although the petition’s intended beneficiary, was not a party to the I-129 proceedings. See 8 C.F.R.

1 See Operational and Support Components, U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., https://www.dhs.gov/operational-and-support-components (last visited July 7, 2020).

2 See Executive Office for Immigration Review, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/eoir (last visited July 7, 2020).

16

Case: 19-11193 Date Filed: 07/08/2020 Page: 17 of 17

§ 103.2(a)(3). Conversely, in the ongoing removal proceedings before the IJ, Mr. Archila is the lone participant; Canal A Media has no right to appear.

Finally, not only are the agencies different, and the parties before them different, but their respective jurisdictions—for purposes of this case, anyway—are different, as well. While USCIS and immigration courts share jurisdiction over a limited range of issues—for instance, eligibility for Temporary Protected Status, see, e.g., Mejia Rodriguez v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 562 F.3d 1137, 1140 (11th Cir. 2009)—only USCIS has authority to decide Canal A Media’s I-129 visa petition, see 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(l)(1)(i); Matter of Aurelio, 19 I. & N. Dec. 458, 460 (BIA 1987). The IJ handling Mr. Archila’s removal proceedings has no jurisdiction to consider, grant, or deny Canal A Media’s petition, let alone to review USCIS’s denial.

At 30,000 feet, then, the government’s position just can’t be right. USCIS’s rejection of Canal A Media’s I-129 petition is not non-“final” simply because a different agency that is housed in a different executive-branch department and is vested with jurisdiction over different issues and is presiding over a different proceeding involving a different party hasn’t finished its different business.

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

My take:

Congrats to Ira Kurzban one of the true giants of modern U.S. immigration law (and someone with whom I did battle numerous times during my 12 years in the “Legacy INS” Office of General Counsel);
It’s hard to beat the Government on an immigration case in the normally pro-Government 11th Cir.;
The Government has consistently been losing APA cases under the Trump regime all the way up to the Supremes;
Is it really THAT hard to read the APA and comply?
Judge Newsom’s concurring opinion points out that the Government’s position in this case is misleading at best, dishonest at worst, and totally frivolous in any event.
So where are the sanctions, warnings, or rebukes of DOJ attorneys for frivolous litigation and/or lack of candor to tribunals, both of which are violations of basic ethical requirements?
Frivolous litigation has become a staple of the Trump Administration. It’s used for dilatory purposes and to wear down, discourage, and punish private parties.
What’s wrong with Federal Courts that allow this type of unprofessional and unethical conduct by DOJ litigators to continue unabated?
For the Federal Courts to treat this lawless and contemptuous gang of scofflaws and thugs known as the “Trump Administration” as “normal” when it is nothing of the sort is both a dis-service to the public and a threat to our nation’s continued existence!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

07-10-20

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

🤮☠️🏴‍☠️ ⚰️As American Governance Crumbles, Desperate Neo-Nazi Regime Rolls Out Plans For More “Crimes Against Humanity” Targeting Helpless Refugees Legally Seeking Asylum — These Cowardly, Immoral, & Patently Unconstitutional Deeds Are Being Done in OUR Name While The Complicit Supremes Watch What They Have Enabled & Encouraged By Abandoning Humanity, Our Constitution, Intellectual Integrity, & American Values!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-plans-block-asylum-seekers-u-s-citing-public-n1233253

From NBC News:

July 8, 2020, 6:35 PM EDT

By Julia Ainsley and Adiel Kaplan

The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would allow it to deny asylum to immigrants who are deemed a public health risk.

The soon-to-be published rule would let the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to block immigrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. based on “potential international threats from the spread of pandemics,” according to a notice announcing it Wednesday.

The rule would apply to immigrants seeking asylum and those seeking “withholding of removal” — a protected immigration status for those who have shown they may well face danger if returned to their home countries.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

This outrageous, totally pretextual, racist proposal violates the Constitution, asylum laws, international agreements, morality, and human values. The factual basis is absurd since there has been no showing that asylum applicants are a source of COVID spread. To the contrary, unnecessarily detained asylum applicants have been victims of Trump’s failed policies. Moreover, if DHS actually were worried about COVID, they could easily test and quarantine to identify and deal constructively and humanely with the few applicants who might have been infected someplace other than DHS facilities.

This is White Nationalist racism at its worst.

We need better judges, and particularly better Justices on the Supremes, for a better America! Judges who will prevent, rather than encourage, racist-driven “crimes against humanity.” Standing up against such crimes, particularly when they are disgracefully directed by a racist Executive at our most vulnerable humans, should be a “no-brainer” for a unanimous Supremes with Justices qualified for the high offices they hold. For the “JR Five” a “no brainer” has too often been a “non-starter.” So, the regime’s gross abuses of migrants and people of color and the damage, societal disorder, wasted time, squandered resources, and the human misery they cause roll on.

“Dred Scottification” is wrong! Period! And Supreme Court Justices who enable it are wrong for America!

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

PWS

07-09-20

🇺🇸👍🏼🗽🏅JULIÁN CASTRO: Former Presidential Candidate, Cabinet Secretary, Mayor, A Tireless Advocate For Equal Justice, & Now Biden Supporter Has Maliciously Incompetent Racist Trump Sized Up: “But he says the ‘scariest’ aspect of the Trump presidency is the fact that people still support ‘someone who is manifestly so unqualified.’”

https://apple.news/AYNljsGEARJmzW3bj8A6Tvw

From salon.com:

Former candidate tells Salon that Biden “gets it” on immigration and police reform, but Trump is “unconscionable”

Dean Obeidallah

Former Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro may not be on the ticket in 2020, but he’s looking forward to getting rid of Donald Trump, whose strategy he says is designed to deepen the culture war in America. During our recent conversation for Salon Talks, Castro explained why he’s strongly supporting Joe Biden, while at the same time pressing the former vice president on immigration and police reforms.

Castro told me that Trump, even more than in 2016, is “appealing to that sense of white superiority, white nationalism” that got him elected in the first place, But he says the “scariest” aspect of the Trump presidency is the fact that people still support “someone who is manifestly so unqualified.” Castro, who was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Barack Obama and before that mayor of San Antonio, is a senior advisor to Voto Latino, a grassroots political organization focused on empowering Latinx voters, who make up the largest ethnic or racial minority group of the electorate.

Castro laid out the top issues of concern to the Hispanic community, which is projected to account for a new high of 13.3 percent of all eligible voters in 2020 at 32 million. One of those is immigration reform, which Castro noted that Bernie Sanders successfully addressed during the 2020 Democratic primaries. Biden was less clear on the issue, but Castro explained that the certain Democratic nominee has since increasingly focused on outreach to the Hispanic community and is committed to bringing forth the “most progressive approach on immigration.”

Watch my Salon Talks episode with Castro embedded below, or read the following transcript — edited for length and clarity — to learn more about what Castro thinks about Biden’s approach to immigration and police reform, and his take on the COVID-19 public health crisis.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article and view the video of the interview at the link!

Yes, it is “scary.” Very much so, to know how many anti-Americans are living in our country. Taking back power from the White Supremacists masquerading as a legitimate political party is the first step to getting to where we need to be as a nation and as compassionate human beings. There will always be doubters and naysayers. But, never again should we let their dark vision control our destiny as a diverse nation of immigrants with equal justice for all!

Julián Castro “gets” it. He’s 10x more qualified than any of the “GOP Five” on the Supremes. Hopefully, he’ll get his chance to be on the Supremes in the future. Gosh knows, we need some real Justices who have the guts and decency to stand against overt racism and bigotry, instead of enabling, justifying, and encouraging it! He’d also be a great Attorney General or DHS Secretary.

Everything starts with replacing Trump with Biden and putting Democrats in every elected office. There is no excuse for Trump and today’s GOP and their morally and Constitutionally bankrupt racist agenda,

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

PWS

07-09-20

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: The GOP Lets Fly With Its Overtly Racist Vision of America! —A Party Without Ideas, Values, or Human Decency Peddles Hate & Lies As Its Message! ☠️💀🤮👎🏻

From “Letters From An American,” July 7, 2020

. . . .

The administration continues to court its base with a racist vision of the country. Yesterday, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Liz Harrington criticized presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of advancing “radical left socialism” for saying that “Independence Day is a celebration of our persistent march toward greater justice — the natural expansion of our founding notion from ‘all men are created equal’ to ‘all people are created equal and should be treated equally throughout their lives.’”

On the same day, Trump tweeted an attack on Black racecar driver Bubba Wallace, accusing him of advancing a “HOAX” because someone (not Wallace) had found and reported a noose hanging in his garage. In the same tweet, Trump expressed outrage that NASCAR has banned the use of the Confederate flag at its events. (Republican strategist Karl Rove told the Fox News Channel the president’s defense of the Confederate flag did not help his campaign.)

Then, out of the blue, the official White House Twitter account published a photo of Trump and Pence apparently gazing in to the sky, alongside a quotation that said: “Americans are the people who pursued our Manifest Destiny across the ocean, into the uncharted wilderness, over the tallest mountains, and then into the skies and even into the stars.” Manifest Destiny was a term coined in the 1840s by the editor of the Democratic Review magazine to explain why it was the divinely ordained duty of Americans to push west and take over the lands of indigenous peoples and Mexicans, spreading slavery into new lands. The term is widely associated with white supremacy and deadly dominance over people of color.

Meanwhile, the administration continues to move public money toward its supporters. Government data released this week shows that tax-payer funded bailouts went to churches whose leaders are Trump’s allies, as well as organizations traditionally opposed to government programs. Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform Foundation received between $150,000 and $300,000 in loans, while Norquist took a stand against the unemployment insurance in the CARES coronavirus relief act. The Ayn Rand Institute, named for the theorist who opposed government welfare programs despite using them herself, took a loan of between $350,000 and $1 million, calling it “partial restitution for government-inflicted losses.” Multiple businesses close to Trump got money, too; the government loaned as much as $273 million to more than 100 companies with ties to the president.

Also today, excerpts from the book written by Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, appeared in the media. Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the publication of the book. The excerpts don’t say much we didn’t already know, but the inside story of the Trump family is likely to get under the president’s skin. Dr. Trump, who holds a doctorate in psychology, portrays the president as a habitual liar who paid someone to take the SAT to get him into college. She shows a narcissist who can think only in terms of himself, and who is calculating and cruel to the point that he was willing to take away health care from a baby in order to gain leverage over his nephew.

After her dissection of Trump’s dangerous personality, Dr. Trump concludes that Trump himself “isn’t really the problem after all.” The problem is his enablers, including the Republican Senators who voted five months ago to acquit him of the charges for which the House of Representatives impeached him.

That those same Senators are now begging off from the upcoming Republican convention is too little a protest, too late.

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For the rest of Heather’s letter or to subscribe to her letter, click here:https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtUE1vhCAQ_TXL0QAC6oFDL3vonzAIo5IiGBh3a3992fXUpMkkk7yZl_dhDcKS8qn3VJAcBfLonZasp7RvidPCsV72xJdxzgCb8UFjPoDsxxS8NehTfBE4lW1LVs04TK4bWGcHAczMvVJsskzQdqaMD4q8ZEZzOA_RgoYH5DNFIEGviHu5tR83fq-zgsEVsk3f2dvVZFdSbMoxFTT2q7Fpqz_EV1lOaUd7KoWSQ8OaeQoP_InPztwE3Rb-h0Oy_oQYfVwK4_VuUnjDNctY93ZEj-cI0UwB3BUTr17ervHcQUd4lgCIkC-wZleSi1aRquRSLSjq_8z_AkvpfL0

Take our country back for a brighter future this November! Vote for a better, more inclusive, more just America! Vote to end racism and hate! Vote Trump and the GOP out on every level!🇺🇸👍🏼🗽⚖️

PWS

07-08-20

🏴‍☠️KAKISTOCRACY COSTS: Trump Regime’s White Nationalist Attack on Foreign Students Threatens $40 Billion 💸 Hit on U.S. Economy!

🤡☠️👎🏻

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-uses-the-coronavirus-to-impede-immigration-his-aim-at-foreign-students-is-a-new-low/2020/07/07/ec3ca966-c06a-11ea-b178-bb7b05b94af1_story.html

From WashPost Editorial Board:

By Editorial Board

July 7 at 3:54 PM ET

THE TRUMP administration has used the novel coronavirus as license to indiscriminately kill off and impede every sort of immigration — legal and illegal, permanent and temporary, work- and family-based. On Monday, it took aim at the more than 1 million international students enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities, threatening them with deportation if their classes move online, as many already have.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made the announcement as a growing number of colleges, facing a widening pandemic, have shifted entirely or largely to virtual learning for the fall. International students at those institutions, who represent a sizable cohort, will have to go home or transfer to another school that offers in-person classes.

ICE provided no rationale — unsurprising, given that it is unfair and irrational as a matter of policy. But within hours of its announcement, President Trump sought to make school closings into an election issue. Democrats, he claimed on Twitter, want schools closed “for political reasons, not health reasons,” to help them in the fall elections.

[[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]]

That’s preposterous. Colleges and universities have scrambled to devise plans to operate safely in the fall, in some cases pivoting from one scenario to another as the virus has spread. Last week, the University of Southern California reversed course, scrapping a mix of in-person and online classes at its campus in pandemic-plagued Los Angeles and shifting to a mostly virtual schedule. Those decisions have nothing to do with partisan politics, nothing to do with the fall elections and nothing to do with Mr. Trump.

The new rule means colleges that depend critically on tuition revenue from international students — many from China, India and South Korea — will be under pressure to offer in-person classes even in places where covid-19 is a major threat. International students will face deportation even if their colleges, facing a fresh outbreak, shift mid-semester from in-person to online classes. International students with preexisting conditions will feel forced to attend in-person classes despite the risk to their lives.

Those students, who constitute 5.5 percent of overall higher education enrollment, contributed more than $40 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2019-2020 academic year. They provide a steady stream of energetic, talented youth, some of whom make key contributions to the U.S. economy and form lifelong ties with U.S. businesses and scientific and cultural institutions.

None of that matters to Mr. Trump, who has made it a personal and political crusade to rid the nation, to the extent possible, of foreigners. Last month, his administration suspended work visas for various non-immigrant categories and widened a ban on new green cards for applicants outside of this country. Under cover of the pandemic, asylum seekers have been effectively banned from the United States for the first time in modern history, and many U.S. embassies and consulates remain shut, closing off other avenues of legal entry for visitors, workers and immigrants alike.

The president’s goal is to turn America’s back on the world. Sadly, it is Americans, and institutions like U.S. universities, that will pay the price.

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

This could well put some colleges and universities out of business. Racism is not only stupid and immoral, it costs the U.S. big time, in “real dollars” as well as in goodwill and “moral capital.”

Vote ‘Em Out in November — at all levels! Let America and everyone in it realize their full potential! End racism in America by sending the racists packing!

PWS

07-08-20

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Trump’s Malicious Incompetence Bankrupts Once-Profitable Immigration Agency — The Solution Is NOT More Public Assistance For The Regime’s Freeloaders!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-brings-atlantic-city-style-bankruptcy-to-americas-immigration-agency/2020/07/03/a4619ff8-bc04-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

From the WashPost Editorial Board:

By Editorial Board

July 4 at 8:30 AM ET

AS A business mogul in Atlantic City, Donald Trump ran casinos that teetered continually toward bankruptcy, costing gullible investors well over $1 billion. Now President Trump’s policies have bankrupted the federal government’s main agency overseeing legal immigration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is on the brink of imposing furloughs on thousands of its employees and is begging Congress for a bailout.

USCIS, which handles green cards for permanent legal residents, manages citizenship procedures and vets visa applicants, depends for its operating revenue almost entirely on fees from “customers,” meaning immigrants. The business model Mr. Trump’s administration devised for USCIS was a recipe for financial ruin: deplete income by driving away fee-paying applicants and pile up expenses by hiring thousands of new employees. Little wonder that after three-and-a-half years, USCIS has gone hat in hand to Congress, pleading for $1.2 billion. Without the extra funds — for an agency meant to be self-sufficient — USCIS has said more than 13,000 employees, of some 20,000 total workers, will be furloughed without pay indefinitely, starting next month.

Under Mr. Trump, USCIS has become a model of dysfunction. Perversely, that may be just fine with a White House that has been intent on deterring not only undocumented migrants but legal immigrants as well. It has done the latter largely through a matrix of policies that have made the agency much less a means by which immigrants are connected with U.S. employers and reconnected with relatives living in this country, and much more a nearly impassable obstacle course.

Well before the pandemic, applications for an array of immigrant categories plummeted as word spread that layers of new rules and vetting were driving down approval rates, and even trivial mistakes such as typos in applications would trigger rejections. In-person interviews were added as requirements for applicants who had not previously needed them, including skilled workers already in the country who needed visa extensions. Green card applications slumped in the Trump administration’s first two years and might fall further as applicants learn they would be disqualified if deemed likely to need public benefits such as subsidized housing or food stamps. The pandemic accelerated the agency’s death spiral as revenue derived from fees has dropped by half since March.

The effect of a mass furlough of USCIS staff would be to throw even more grit into the bureaucratic gears, further slowing approvals for work permits, including for high-skilled immigrants, and green cards. If the administration is intent on breaking the nation’s complex immigration machinery, which has supplied American businesses with the talent and energy of millions of employees, it is on the right path.

Employers are alarmed at the prospect of such a breakdown, with good reason. Virtually every sector of the country’s economy depends on a steady supply of immigrants, which in itself is justification for Congress to reassess USCIS’s fee-based model. Immigrants have provided the spark, drive and muscle that have driven growth and success in the United States since its founding. Given their contributions, it seems a gratuitous burden that they are also required to shoulder the cost of their admission to the country.

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

The solution is actually very simple. Congress should require DHS to reprogram the necessary funds to run USCIS from the unneeded wall, unnecessary and often illegal immigration detention, and counterproductive civil deportations. All private detention contracts should be terminated and the money repurposed to USCIS. There should be a moratorium on DHS removals until USCIS is back in full operation and has eliminated all backlogs. Fee increases should be barred.

Exceptions should be made allowing deportations for those convicted of “aggravated felonies” and those whom the DHS can show by clear and convincing evidence entered the U.S. illegally after the date of enactment, following an opportunity for a full and fair hearing before a U.S. Magistrate Judge at which they will have an opportunity to apply for asylum and other protections without regard to any regulation or precedent decision issued during the Trump Administration. Appeal from any adverse decision may be had by either party to the U.S. District Judge and from there to the Court of Appeals with an opportunity to petition the Supreme Court for review. U.S. District Judges shall have the option of designating sitting U.S. Immigration Judges (but not anyone who has served a BIA Appellate Immigration Judge) with five or more years of judicial experience to serve as a “Special U.S. Magistrate Judge” to hear such immigration cases.

If Democrats can’t get a “veto proof majority” in both houses, they should just let the USCIS remain in bankruptcy until we get better Government. Like the rest of the Trump immigration kakistocracy, USCIS is a dysfunctional mess 🤮 that serves no useful purpose under current conditions.

Welfare Reform: We’ve identified the largest group of “welfare cheats” in U.S. history. Collectively, this gang of public benefits fraudsters is known as “The Trump Administration.” Its Members are worse than useless. We are actually paying them to pollute our environment, inhibit our voting, spread deadly disease, block access to health insurance, undermine scientific truth, destroy our justice system, defend Confederate statues, spread racism and hate, commit crimes against humanity, turn our nation into a despised international laughingstock, and often line their own pockets and pockets of their cronies with ill-gotten loot while doing it.

But we have it in our power to end these gross abuses of our public purse and to throw this dangerous band of indolent sponges on society off the public dole! This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

07-06-20

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!

Trump Administration Makes Immigration Courts an Enforcement Tool by Appointing Prosecutors to Lead

AILA Doc. No. 20070696 | Dated July 6, 2020

CONTACTS:

George Tzamaras
202-507-7649
gtzamaras@aila.org Belle Woods
202-507-7675
bwoods@aila.org

WASHINGTON, DC — The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) condemns the Trump administration’s recent ramp-up of efforts to turn the immigration court system into an enforcement tool rather than an independent arbiter for justice. The immigration courts are formally known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and are overseen by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

AILA President Jennifer Minear, noted, “AILA has long advocated for an independent immigration court, one that ensures judges serve as neutral arbiters of justice. This administration has instead subjected the courts to political influence and exploited the inherent structural flaws of the DOJ-controlled immigration courts, which also prosecutes immigration cases at the federal level. The nail in the coffin of judicial neutrality is the fact that the administration has put the courts in the control of a new Chief Immigration Judge who has no judicial experience but served as ICE’s chief immigration prosecutor. No less concerning is DOJ’s recent choice for Chief Appellate Immigration Judge – an individual who also prosecuted immigration cases and advised the Trump White House on immigration policy. This administration continues to weaponize the immigration courts for the sole purpose of accelerating deportations rather than dispensing neutral justice. Congress must investigate these politically motivated appointments and pass legislation to create an independent, Article I immigration court.”

Among the recent actions taken by this administration to bias the immigration courts:

Attempting to decertify the immigration judges’ union.

Blocking immigration judges’ ability to educate the public about the court system.

Endangering lives through haphazard and inconsistent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attempting to buy out and then outright dismantling the Board of Immigration Appeals.

More AILA resources on the immigration courts can be found at: https://www.aila.org/immigrationcourts.

Cite as AILA Doc. No. 20070696.

CONTACTS:
George Tzamaras 202-507-7649 gtzamaras@aila.org	Belle Woods 202-507-7675 bwoods@aila.org

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

As a friend and former colleague said recently “I would have thought that the one thing everyone could get behind, regardless of political philosophy, would be a neutral court system.” Sadly, not so in today’s crumbling America.

There are three groups blocking the way:

The Trump Administration, where due process only applies to Trump and his corrupt cronies;
GOP legislators whose acquittal of Trump against the overwhelming weight of the evidence shows exactly what due process means to them;
Five GOP-appointed Justices on the Supremes who don’t believe that due process applies to all persons in the US, notwithstanding the “plain language” of Article 5 of our Constitution — particularly if those persons have the misfortune to be asylum seekers of color.

The end result is “Dred Scottification” — that is, dehumanization or “de-personification” of “the other.” The GOP has made it a centerpiece of their failed attempt to govern, from voter suppression, to looting the Treasury for the benefit of the rich and powerful, to immunity for law enforcement officers who kill minorities, to greenlighting cruel, inhuman,and counterproductive treatment of lawful asylum seekers and immigrants. Not surprisingly, this essentially “Whites Only” view of social justice is ripping our nation apart on many levels.

I find it highly ironic that at the same time we are rightfully removing statutes of Chief Justice Roger Taney, a racist who authored the infamous Dred Scott Decision, Chief Justice Roberts and four of his colleagues continue to “Dred Scottify” asylum seekers and other immigrants, primarily those of color, by denying them the due process, fundamental fairness, fair and impartial judges, and, perhaps most of all, racist-free policies that our Constitution demands!

Compare the “due process” afforded Trump by the GOP Senate and the pardon of a convicted civil and human rights abuser like “Racist Sheriff Joe” with the ugly and dishonest parody of due process afforded Sister Norma’s lawful asylum seekers whose “crime” was seeking fair treatment, justice, and an acknowledgement of their humanity from a nation that has turned it’s back on those values.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/07/06/%f0%9f%98%8e%f0%9f%97%bd%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8fgood-news-9th-cir-deals-another-blow-to-stephen-millers-illegal-white-nationalist-war-on-asylum-now-will-the-supremes-majority-stan/

What Sister Norma’s article did not mention is that those who survive in Mexico long enough to get to “court” have their asylum claims denied at a rate of about 99% by an unfair system intentionally skewed and biased against them. Most experts believe that many, probably a majority, of those being denied actually merit protection under a fair and impartial application of our laws.

But, as pointed out by AILA, that’s not why Billy the Bigot has appointed prosecutors as top “judges” and notorious asylum deniers as “appellate judges.” He intends to perpetuate a highly unfair “deportation railroad” designed by infamous White Nationalist racist Stephen Miller. In other words, our justice system is being weaponized in support of an overtly racist agenda formulated by a racist regime that has made racism the centerpiece of its pitch for remaining in office. Incredible! Yet true!

The Supremes have life tenure. But, the other two branches of our failing Government don’t. And, a better Executive and a better Legislature that believe in our Constitution and equal justice for all is a necessary start on a better Federal Judiciary — one where commitment to due process, fundamental fairness, and equal justice for all is a threshold requirement for future judicial appointments. Time to throw the “non-believers” and their enablers out of office.

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

PWS

07-07-20

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