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🇺🇸🗽😎👍🏼⚖️BREAKING: SOCIAL JUSTICE EEKS OUT A SUPREME VICTORY: CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FINALLY RISES TO OCCASION, BACKS HUMANITY, SAVES LIVES, HEADS OFF FURTHER SOCIAL UNREST FOR NOW — Four GOP Justices Remain Shills For White Nationalist Regime, Its Invidiously Motivated Racially-Driven Immigration Agenda, & Promoting Social Injustice Under Law! — DHS v. Regents of U. of Cal. — This Might Be Roberts’s Finest Hour As Chief Justice!

DHS V. Regents of U. of Cal., U.S. Supreme Court, 06-18-20

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-587_5ifl.pdf

Supreme Court Syllabus:

Syllabus

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ET AL. v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

No. 18–587. Argued November 12, 2019—Decided June 18, 2020*

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memo- randum announcing an immigration relief program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows certain unauthor- ized aliens who arrived in the United States as children to apply for a two-year forbearance of removal. Those granted such relief become eligible for work authorization and various federal benefits. Some 700,000 aliens have availed themselves of this opportunity.

Two years later, DHS expanded DACA eligibility and created a re- lated program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). If implemented, that program would have made 4.3 million parents of U. S. citizens or lawful perma- nent residents eligible for the same forbearance from removal, work eligibility, and other benefits as DACA recipients. Texas, joined by 25 other States, secured a nationwide preliminary injunction barring im- plementation of both the DACA expansion and DAPA. The Fifth Cir- cuit upheld the injunction, concluding that the program violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which carefully defines eligi- bility for benefits. This Court affirmed by an equally divided vote, and

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*Together with No. 18–588, Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People et al., on certiorari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and No. 18–589, Wolf, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, et al. v. Batalla Vidal et al., on certiorari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY v. REGENTS OF UNIV. OF CAL.

Syllabus

the litigation then continued in the District Court.

In June 2017, following a change in Presidential administrations,

DHS rescinded the DAPA Memorandum, citing, among other reasons, the ongoing suit by Texas and new policy priorities. That September, the Attorney General advised Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine C. Duke that DACA shared DAPA’s legal flaws and should also be rescinded. The next day, Duke acted on that advice. Taking into consideration the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court rulings and the At- torney General’s letter, Duke decided to terminate the program. She explained that DHS would no longer accept new applications, but that existing DACA recipients whose benefits were set to expire within six months could apply for a two-year renewal. For all other DACA recip- ients, previously issued grants of relief would expire on their own terms, with no prospect for renewal.

Several groups of plaintiffs challenged Duke’s decision to rescind DACA, claiming that it was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and infringed the equal protec- tion guarantee of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. District Courts in California (Regents, No. 18–587), New York (Batalla Vidal, No. 18–589), and the District of Columbia (NAACP, No. 18–588) all ruled for the plaintiffs. Each court rejected the Government’s argu- ments that the claims were unreviewable under the APA and that the INA deprived the courts of jurisdiction. In Regents and Batalla Vidal, the District Courts further held that the equal protection claims were adequately alleged, and they entered coextensive nationwide prelimi- nary injunctions based on the conclusion that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their APA claims. The District Court in NAACP took a different approach. It deferred ruling on the equal protection chal- lenge but granted partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs on their APA claim, finding that the rescission was inadequately explained. The court then stayed its order for 90 days to permit DHS to reissue a memorandum rescinding DACA, this time with a fuller explanation of the conclusion that DACA was unlawful. Two months later, Duke’s successor, Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen, responded to the court’s or- der. She declined to disturb or replace Duke’s rescission decision and instead explained why she thought her predecessor’s decision was sound. In addition to reiterating the illegality conclusion, she offered several new justifications for the rescission. The Government moved for the District Court to reconsider in light of this additional explana- tion, but the court concluded that the new reasoning failed to elaborate meaningfully on the illegality rationale.

The Government appealed the various District Court decisions to the Second, Ninth, and D. C. Circuits, respectively. While those ap- peals were pending, the Government filed three petitions for certiorari

Cite as: 591 U. S. ____ (2020) 3 Syllabus

before judgment. Following the Ninth Circuit affirmance in Regents, this Court granted certiorari.

Held: The judgment in No. 18–587 is vacated in part and reversed in part; the judgment in No. 18–588 is affirmed; the February 13, 2018 order in No. 18–589 is vacated, the November 9, 2017 order is affirmed in part, and the March 29, 2018 order is reversed in part; and all of the cases are remanded.

No. 18–587, 908 F. 3d 476, vacated in part and reversed in part; No. 18– 588, affirmed; and No. 18–589, February 13, 2018 order vacated, No- vember 9, 2017 order affirmed in part, and March 29, 2018 order re- versed in part; all cases remanded.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV, concluding:

1. DHS’s rescission decision is reviewable under the APA and is within this Court’s jurisdiction. Pp. 9–13.

(a) The APA’s “basic presumption of judicial review” of agency ac- tion, Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner, 387 U. S. 136, 140, can be rebut- ted by showing that the “agency action is committed to agency discre- tion by law,” 5 U. S. C. §701(a)(2). In Heckler v. Chaney, the Court held that this narrow exception includes an agency’s decision not to insti- tute an enforcement action. 470 U. S. 821, 831–832. The Government contends that DACA is a general non-enforcement policy equivalent to the individual non-enforcement decision in Chaney. But the DACA Memorandum did not merely decline to institute enforcement proceed- ings; it created a program for conferring affirmative immigration re- lief. Therefore, unlike the non-enforcement decision in Chaney, DACA’s creation—and its rescission—is an “action [that] provides a focus for judicial review.” Id., at 832. In addition, by virtue of receiving deferred action, 700,000 DACA recipients may request work authori- zation and are eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Access to such benefits is an interest “courts often are called upon to protect.” Ibid. DACA’s rescission is thus subject to review under the APA. Pp. 9–12.

(b) The two jurisdictional provisions of the INA invoked by the Government do not apply. Title 8 U. S. C. §1252(b)(9), which bars re- view of claims arising from “action[s]” or “proceeding[s] brought to re- move an alien,” is inapplicable where, as here, the parties do not chal- lenge any removal proceedings. And the rescission is not a decision “to commence proceedings, adjudicate cases, or execute removal orders” within the meaning of §1252(g). Pp. 12–13.

2. DHS’s decision to rescind DACA was arbitrary and capricious un- der the APA. Pp. 13–26.

(a) In assessing the rescission, the Government urges the Court to consider not just the contemporaneous explanation offered by Acting Secretary Duke but also the additional reasons supplied by Secretary

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DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY v. REGENTS OF UNIV. OF CAL.

Syllabus

Nielsen nine months later. Judicial review of agency action, however, is limited to “the grounds that the agency invoked when it took the action.” Michigan v. EPA, 576 U. S. 743, 758. If those grounds are inadequate, a court may remand for the agency to offer “a fuller expla- nation of the agency’s reasoning at the time of the agency action,” Pen- sion Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. LTV Corp., 496 U. S. 633, 654 (emphasis added), or to “deal with the problem afresh” by taking new agency action, SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U. S. 194, 201. Because Sec- retary Nielsen chose not to take new action, she was limited to elabo- rating on the agency’s original reasons. But her reasoning bears little relationship to that of her predecessor and consists primarily of imper- missible “post hoc rationalization.” Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, Inc. v. Volpe, 401 U. S. 402, 420. The rule requiring a new decision before considering new reasons is not merely a formality. It serves important administrative law values by promoting agency accounta- bility to the public, instilling confidence that the reasons given are not simply convenient litigating positions, and facilitating orderly review. Each of these values would be markedly undermined if this Court al- lowed DHS to rely on reasons offered nine months after the rescission and after three different courts had identified flaws in the original ex- planation. Pp. 13–17.

(b) ActingSecretaryDuke’srescissionmemorandumfailedtocon- sider important aspects of the problem before the agency. Although Duke was bound by the Attorney General’s determination that DACA is illegal, see 8 U. S. C. §1103(a)(1), deciding how best to address that determination involved important policy choices reserved for DHS. Acting Secretary Duke plainly exercised such discretionary authority in winding down the program, but she did not appreciate the full scope of her discretion. The Attorney General concluded that the legal de- fects in DACA mirrored those that the courts had recognized in DAPA. The Fifth Circuit, the highest court to offer a reasoned opinion on DAPA’s legality, found that DAPA violated the INA because it ex- tended eligibility for benefits to a class of unauthorized aliens. But the defining feature of DAPA (and DACA) is DHS’s decision to defer re- moval, and the Fifth Circuit carefully distinguished that forbearance component from the associated benefits eligibility. Eliminating bene- fits eligibility while continuing forbearance thus remained squarely within Duke’s discretion. Yet, rather than addressing forbearance in her decision, Duke treated the Attorney General’s conclusion regard- ing the illegality of benefits as sufficient to rescind both benefits and forbearance, without explanation. That reasoning repeated the error in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm— treating a rationale that applied to only part of a policy as sufficient to rescind the entire policy. 463 U. S. 29, 51. While DHS

Cite as: 591 U. S. ____ (2020) 5 Syllabus

was not required to “consider all policy alternatives,” ibid., deferred action was “within the ambit of the existing” policy, ibid.; indeed, it was the centerpiece of the policy. In failing to consider the option to retain deferred action, Duke “failed to supply the requisite ‘reasoned analysis.’ ” Id., at 57.

That omission alone renders Duke’s decision arbitrary and capri- cious, but it was not the only defect. Duke also failed to address whether there was “legitimate reliance” on the DACA Memorandum. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 742. Certain features of the DACA policy may affect the strength of any reliance interests, but those features are for the agency to consider in the first instance. DHS has flexibility in addressing any reliance interests and could have considered various accommodations. While the agency was not required to pursue these accommodations, it was required to assess the existence and strength of any reliance interests, and weigh them against competing policy concerns. Its failure to do so was arbitrary and capricious. Pp. 17–26.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE, joined by JUSTICE GINSBURG, JUSTICE BREYER, and JUSTICE KAGAN, concluded in Part IV that respondents’ claims fail to establish a plausible inference that the rescission was motivated by animus in violation of the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment. Pp. 27–29.

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part IV. GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined that opinion in full, and SO- TOMAYOR, J., joined as to all but Part IV. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which ALITO and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. ALITO, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed opinions concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.

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Whew! Disaster avoided, at least for now! That was close for America and 800,000 of our most promising young people. A good day for justice, humanity, and common sense. The Supremes finally slow down the White Nationalist immigration juggernaught.

Thanks Chief Justice Roberts! Thanks for having the legal acumen, moral courage, independence, and human decency to get to the correct result. This could be your finest moment, where you have saved America from further social upheaval and outrage at a time of national instability and lack of credible leadership. That’s actually what your job is all about. You have missed some opportunities in the past, but better late than never in one of our darkest and most difficult hours as a nation! Justice without mercy and humanity is not justice at all. Thanks for recognizing that in this particular case.

In Plain English: Cutting Through The Legalese:

Roberts’s Majority: It would be insane, inane, and inhumane to do this to our kids at this point in time.

Sotomayor’s Concurring/Dissenting: Come on guys, you don’t have to be rocket scientists to connect the dots between the Administration’s racist approach to immigration and possible violations of constitutional Equal Protection.

Thomas’s Dissenting/Concurring: Stupidity, inhumanity, and injustice need no justification so long as they are directed against vulnerable migrants. Never let your sense of justice, practicality, or human decency interfere with right-wing ideology.

As an Immigration Judge I saw the justice, beauty, practicality, and real life positive results for America and for humanity from DACA. Lives saved! Cases that never should have been brought in the first place, taken off overcrowded dockets! Human potential unleashed! Fair, professional, uniform nationwide administration by USCIS! A “big win” for America, humanity, and everyone involved! Probably the best thing the Obama Administration achieved in its otherwise largely inept, lackadaisical, and tone-deaf approach to justice for immigrants.

The reprieve is narrow and temporary. It will become a pyrrhic victory for social justice if we don’t remove Trump and the GOP from power in November.

This November, vote like your life and the lives of many others depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

06-28-20

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

AMY WRITES IN SCOTUSBLOG:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-17-20

👍🏼GOOD NEWS: FINALLY, SUPREMES DEAL DOUBLE DEFEAT TO TRUMP REGIME BIGOTS — High Court Thwarts Latest Attacks on America’s Latino, LGBTQ Communities!

SESSIONS’S SCOFFLAW ANTI-SANCTUARY CAMPAIGN ENDS IGNOMINIOUSLY WITH WELL-DESERVED BEATDOWN BY COURTS

David G. Savage reports for the LA Times:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-15/supreme-court-rejects-trumps-challenge-to-california-sanctuary-law

In major victory for California, Supreme Court rejects Trump’s challenge to state sanctuary law

The U.S. Supreme Court’s action is a major victory for California in its long-running battle with President Trump. (Associated Press)

By DAVID G. SAVAGESTAFF WRITER

JUNE 15, 20206:42 AM UPDATED8:03 AM

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the Trump administration’s challenge to a California “sanctuary” law, leaving intact rules that prohibit law enforcement officials from aiding federal agents in taking custody of immigrants as they are released from jail.

Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted to hear the administration’s appeal.

The court’s action is a major victory for California in its long-running battle with President Trump.

At issue was a clash between federal power and states’ rights.

. . . .

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Ryan Grenoble
National Reporter
HuffPost

SESSIONS-HATCHED ATTACK ON CIVIL RIGHTS & HUMANITY OF AMERICA’S LGBTQ COMMUNITY GOES DOWN IN FLAMES

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scotus-lgbtq-transgender-decision_n_5ebefe48c5b6299362046713

Ryan Grenoble reports for HuffPost:

The Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ employees from being discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The court on Monday issued opinions on two major decisions with far-reaching implications for the civil rights of transgender and LGBTQ individuals.

It was a 6-3 ruling, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the four liberal justices in the majority.

Writing for the majority, Gorsuch argued that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is fundamentally no different than discrimination based on sex.

“An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions,” Gorsuch wrote. “That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex,” he added later. “But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”

The rulings rest on a pair of arguments the court heard in October in which justices considered whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination, applies to LGBTQ and transgender workers.

. . . .

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Read the rest of both articles at their respective links. So, at least for a day, justice rules in America, despite the efforts of the Trump regime kakistocracy to promote bigotry and intolerance.

In simple terms, this regime and its corrupt officials have consistently promoted acts of invidious discrimination, bias, and hate toward various American communities. It’s hardly any wonder that our nation is dealing with the traumatic effects of such government malfeasance on so many fronts. When you put a kakistocracy in charge, malicious incompetence, abuses, and unrest are naturally going to follow.

It’s beyond disgusting that homophobic, anti-Latino bigots like Trump, Sessions, Whitaker, Barr, Miller, and Francisco have wasted the public’s money, what little credibility to DOJ had left, and the Federal Courts’ time launching baseless legal attacks intended to spread the hate and dehumanization directed against some of America’s must vulnerable communities. Actually, these are communities that the Department of Justice should be working to protect, not persecute. But, don’t expect much real improvement until this scofflaw regime is removed from power.

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

PWS

06-15-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮TWO NEW ITEMS FROM IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG SHOW A MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT TRUMP REGIME IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY THAT BELIEVES AND FUNCTIONS LIKE IT IS ABOVE THE LAW, ACCOUNTABILITY, & HUMAN MORALITY!

TWO NEW ITEMS FROM IMMIGRATIONPROF BLOG SHOW A MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT TRUMP REGIME IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY THAT BELIEVES AND FUNCTIONS LIKE IT IS ABOVE THE LAW, ACCOUNTABILITY, & HUMAN MORALITY!

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/06/gao-says-customs-and-border-protection-spent-migrant-medical-funds-on-dirt-bikes.html

Friday, June 12, 2020

GAO Says Customs and Border Protection Spent Migrant Medical Funds on Dirt Bikes

By Immigration Prof

McCord Pagan for Law360 reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) violated the law by taking funds designated by Congress for consumables and medical care for migrants and instead used some of the money for its canine program, dirt bikes and upgrades to its computer system, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

While CBP spent some of the designated funds on baby products, food, defibrillators, and masks, CBP violated the law by spending certain funds meant for such migrant care on canines, boats, dirt bikes, ATVs, a vaccine program for its employees, and upgrades to its computer network, sewer system, as well as janitorial services, according to the GAO report.

The 2019 law providing supplemental funds to CBP to help address a surge of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border designated about $112 million to CBP for “consumables and medical care.”

“We conclude that CBP violated the purpose statute when it obligated amounts expressly appropriated for consumables and medical care and establishing and operating migrant care and processing facilities for other purposes,” according to the GAO opinion. The Congressional watchdog is conducting an audit of CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the care of the adults and children in its custody, it said.

In response to GAO’s findings, a CBP spokesperson sent Law360 a statement calling the violations “technical in nature” and said it will take prompt remedial action.

Nick Miroff for the Washington Post also reports on the story.

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Thursday, June 11, 2020

District Court Halts ICE Enforcement Operations at New York Courthouses

By Immigration Prof

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff

For several years, the Chief Justice of California has sought to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) away from the California courts. Last year, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked ICE courthouse arrests there.

CNN reports the latest skirmish between the state courts and federal immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued an order yesterday blocking ICE from making arrests in New York courts, finding that the practice is illegal. The introductory paragraph of his ruling reads as follows:

“Recent events confirm the need for freely and fully functioning state courts, not least in the State of New York. But it is one thing for the state courts to try to deal with the impediments brought on by a pandemic, and quite another for them to have to grapple with disruptions and intimidations artificially imposed by an agency of the federal government in violation of long-standing privileges and fundamental principles of federalism and of separation of powers.”

State and local officials argue that when ICE officers apprehends immigrants at courthouses — where they are making appearances as defendants, witnesses or victims — it endangers public safety by making it harder to prosecute crimes.

ICE has defended the arrests, saying apprehending people in controlled settings is safer than arresting them on the streets.

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Baby jails, stealing from kids, interfering with the administration of justice. Just another day in the Disunited Kakistocracy of Trump.

These situations result in part from a feckless Congress led by Mitch and a failed Supremes led by Roberts who won’t stand up for our Constitutional rights and restrain an obviously corrupt and lawless Executive with a racist agenda.

It’s no surprise that much of Trump’s wrongdoing is exposed by the Government’s own ”watchdogs.” Unlike GAO, which works for Congress, those in the Executive Branch often are then unethically fired by Trump as Congress and the Supremes fail to stand up for honesty in Government. Worse yet, they fail to protect public employees who courageously expose corruption.

And, the high ranking legislators and judges who have watched and enabled Trump’s scurrilous attacks on our Constitution and human values ultimately bear much of the responsibility! As my friend Ira Kurzban would say, “this is not normal.” “Normalizing” and “enabling” illegal, unethical, and racist-driven behavior is obscene. If “watchdogs” and U.S. District Court Judges can speak out against lawless actions and corruption, how is it that Mitch, Roberts, and the rest of the GOP have “swallowed the whistle?”

PWS

06-12-20

KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Catherine Rampell @ WashPost Shows How Regime’s Maliciously Incompetent White Nationalist Stupidity @ USCIS Has Bankrupted Once-Profitable Agency! PLUS: Once Again, Failed Supremes Big Part of The Problem! — What’s The Purpose of A Court That Promotes Injustice And Fails To Resist Evil?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-so-set-on-harassing-immigrants-that-his-immigration-agency-needs-a-bailout/2020/06/11/52c2ae06-ac1b-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html

Catherine writes:

The immigration agency admonishing immigrants to pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems to have destroyed its own boots.

For three years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that processes visas, work permits and naturalizations — has lectured immigrants about how they should become more self-sufficient. It has alleged, without evidence, that too many immigrants are on the dole. (Actually, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and the foreign-born use fewer federal benefits than do their native-born counterparts.)

The agency implemented a broad, and likely illegal, rule allegedly designed to weed out immigrants who might ever be tempted to become a “public charge” and try to benefit from taxpayer largesse.

Well, now USCIS is broke — and is trying to become a “public charge” itself, by begging Congress for a bailout.

The agency is funded almost entirely by user fees, rather than congressional appropriations. But under President Trump’s leadership, it has mismanaged its finances so badly that it has sought an emergency $1.2 billion infusion from taxpayers.

Unless it get a bailout, the agency will furlough three-quarters of its workforce next month, Government Executive reported Thursday.

The agency claims it’s a novel coronavirus victim. No doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted operations. But USCIS was in financial trouble long before the virus’s outbreak.

[[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]]

It acknowledged as much in public documents last fall, when it proposed a massive increase in user fees because of large projected budget deficits.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Trump took office, USCIS inherited a budget surplus. Last year, the agency saw record highs in both revenue and revenue per user.

So what went wrong?

The administration has frittered away funds on phantom cases of immigration fraud — which, like the president’s allegations of voter fraud, it has struggled to prove is an actual widespread problem that’s been going undetected.

USCIS has siphoned resources to create a denaturalization task force, which strips citizenship from immigrants found to have lied or otherwise cheated on applications. Last year, the agency revealed intentions to double the size of its fraud detection unit.

The bigger drain on resources, though, is its deliberate creation of more busy work for immigrants and their lawyers — as well as thousands of USCIS employees. These changes are designed to make it harder for people to apply for, receive or retain lawful immigration status.

For instance, the agency has demanded more unnecessary documentation (“requests for evidence”) and more duplicative, mandatory in-person interviews. Previously, staffers had more discretion to determine whether these interviews were necessary.

Staffers have been directed to comb through applications looking for minor (frivolous) reasons to reject otherwise eligible applicants.

. . . .

The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council offer a few obvious suggestions, including eliminating some of the stupid processing requirements that raise costs for both applicants and USCIS without actually adding value. Other ways to reduce costs include holding virtual naturalization oath ceremonies and allowing electronic payments for everything.

Congress could also demand the agency raise more money on its own, without gouging, say, poor asylum seekers. For instance, it could expand the cash cow known as “premium processing” (faster processing, for a fee) to more types of its applications.

Finally, get rid of the “public charge” rule. It’s a perfect example of everything that got USCIS into this mess: an expensive-to-administer — and, again, likely illegal — solution in search of a problem, whose only purpose is to punish immigrants just trying to follow the law.

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

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

Wow, what a terrific analysis! The “problems” were self-created by a regime with an irrational, White Nationalist, racist agenda. The solutions are actually quite obvious and readily available, as Catherine points out. But, they won’t happen until Trump is removed from office.

Catherine also raises a larger problem in America’s abject failure to insist on constitutionally-required social justice for everyone, regardless of color, status, or ethnicity. Stephen Miller’s racist changes in the public charge regulations never should have happened. It’s not rocket science. It’s Con Law 101, Administrative Law 101, with a dose of common sense and human decency thrown in.

In fact, the lower Federal Courts spotted the “racist stink-bomb” in Miller’s idiotic public charge changes right from the “git go” and properly stopped the change in its tracks. But, a GOP Supremes’ majority improperly granted Solicitor General Francisco’s unethical and blatantly disingenuous request for a stay of the injunction, providing no reasoning for their outrageous conduct. Four Justices dissented, led by Justice Sotomayor who lodged a vigorous dissent exposing the unlawful favoritism shown by her GOP colleagues to the Trump/Miller racist immigration agenda. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/22/complicity-watch-justice-sonia-sotomayor-calls-out-men-in-black-for-perverting-rules-to-advance-trump-miller-white-nationalist-nativist-immigration-agenda/

The current racial crisis, failure to achieve Constitutionally-required equal justice for all, and perhaps worst of all pandering to obviously fabricated pretexts for the Trump regime’s racist agenda, particularly as it has targeted asylum seekers and migrants of color, can be laid to no small degree at the feet of five GOP-appointed Supreme Court Justices disgracefully led by our failed Chief Justice.

They have failed to achieve and enforce equal justice for all because they don’t believe in what our Constitution requires. Millions of individuals who are neither lawyers nor judges know exactly what our Constitution requires and what morality and simple human decency mandates. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump stands for.

But, a Supremes’ majority that neither believes in Constitutional due process and equal justice for all nor possesses the guts and human decency to stand up to an overtly racist President and his toadies will continue to be part of the problem, rather than the solution to the blatant injustices that currently plague our society.

I’m certainly not the only former judge to recognize the intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption at the heart of today’s failed Supremes!

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/12/u-s-district-judge-lynn-s-adelman-channels-courtside-blasts-roberts-company-for-aiding-the-forces-seeking-to-destroy-our-democracy-instead-of-doing-w/

America needs and deserves better Justices who believe in and stand up for equal justice. Our Supremes’ institutional failure isn’t an exercise in legal academics or legitimate intellectual differences of opinion, like the majority often pretends.

No, bad judging injures, maims, and kills people every day. It undermines the health and safety of America every day. It allows baby jails and star chambers to flourish in our midst. It allows the illegal return of refugees to the dangerous countries they fled without any process at all, let alone “due” process. In enables corrupt Government officials to propose an outrageously unlawful, malicious, bogus, misogynist, and evil “administrative repeal” of asylum accompanied by a battery of racist-inspired lies because they know there is no legal accountability for their reprehensible conduct so long as the J.R. Five is there to protect their misdeeds. It allows police officers to act believing they won’t be held accountable for killing George Floyd.

It’s no wonder that democracy is crumbling before our eyes when the majority of Justices charged with protecting it place loyalty to a political party and its immoral, unqualified leader, perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and the rule of law in our history, above the common good.

Due Process Forever. Complicit, Racism-Enabling Courts, Never!

PWS

06-12-20

⚖️👍🏼🗽7TH CIR. REFUSES TO FOLD IN FACE OF “J.R. FIVE’S” KOWTOWING TO MILLER’S WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA — Circuit Court Re-Instates Injunction Against Illegal, Racially-Motivated “Public Charge” Regulation Change Aimed at Ethnic Communities — Cook County v. Wolf

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2020/D06-10/C:19-3169:J:Barrett:dis:T:fnOp:N:2529215:S:0

Cook County v. Wolf, 7th Cir., 06-10-20, published

PANEL: WOOD, Chief Judge, and ROVNER and BARRETT, Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: CHIEF JUDGE DIANE WOOD

KEY QUOTE:

WOOD, Chief Judge. Like most people, immigrants to the United States would like greater prosperity for themselves and their families. Nonetheless, it can take time to achieve the American Dream, and the path is not always smooth. Recognizing this, Congress has chosen to make immigrants eligible for various public benefits; state and local governments have done the same. Those benefits include subsidized health insurance, supplemental nutrition benefits, and housing assistance. Historically, with limited exceptions, temporary receipt of these supplemental benefits did not jeopardize an immigrant’s chances of one day adjusting his status to that of a legal permanent resident or a citizen.

Recently, however, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new rule designed to prevent immigrants whom the Executive Branch deems likely to receive public assistance in any amount, at any point in the future, from entering the country or adjusting their immigration status. The Rule purports to implement the “public-charge” provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(4). States, cities, and nonprofit groups across the country have filed suits seeking to overturn the Rule.

Cook County, Illinois, and the Illinois Coalition for Immi- grant and Refugee Rights, Inc. (ICIRR) brought one of those cases in the Northern District of Illinois. They immediately sought a preliminary injunction against the Rule pending the outcome of the litigation. Finding that the criteria for interim relief were satisfied, the district court granted their motion. We conclude that at least Cook County adequately established its right to bring its claim and that the district court did not abuse its discretion by granting preliminary injunctive relief. We therefore affirm.

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

The performance of the “J.R. Five” in granting a totally unwarranted, unjustified stay of the preliminary injunction in this case tells you all you need to know about why racial injustice and dehumanization of “the other” in America are continuing problems.

PWS

06-12-20

IN HIS OWN WORDS: AMERICA’S LEADING WHITE NATIONALIST “PUBLIC-CHARGE” TELLS YOU EXACTLY WHY REAL RACIAL JUSTICE CAN’T BE ACHIEVED WITHOUT “REGIME CHANGE” — As Arranged & Compiled by Dana Milbank of the WashPost — Plus: Why We Won’t Achieve Equal Justice for All With a Court That Doesn’t Believe in It!

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:

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Here is Trump’s speech on race — word for word, alas

By
Dana Milbank
Columnist
June 10, 2020 at 7:15 p.m. EDT
President Trump’s planned address to the nation on race, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan reports, is being written by none other than Stephen Miller, a Trump aide and aficionado of white nationalism.

This is bound to raise a fuhrer. What next? Paul Manafort drafting a presidential address on business ethics?
But Miller can stand down. Trump has already given his remarks on race — many times, in fact. Here they are, entirely in Trump’s own words, excerpted:
I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks. Oh, look at my African American over here. Look at him.
Nobody has ever done for the black community what President Trump has done. My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln. George [Floyd] is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that is happening for our country. A great day for him.

Diamond and Silk, you’re so, so great. Thank you, Kanye, thank you. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.
Think of this: Blacks for Trump, Black Voices for Trump, African Americans for Trump. Call it whatever the hell you want. I have a group of African American guys and gals, by the way, that follow me around, and they think I pay them and I don’t.
A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage. Sadly, because President Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won’t see another black president for generations!

To the African American community, I say what the hell do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. Last in crime, last in this, last in homeownership, last in the economy, lowest wages. Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs.

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now”?
Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States? No human being would want to live there. A disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).

So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?
Why do we need more Haitians? Why are we having people from all these shithole countries come here? We should have more people from places like Norway.

An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud. His grandmother in Kenya said, “Oh, no, he was born in Kenya.” A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.
You ever see Maxine Waters? A low-IQ individual. LeBron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made LeBron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.

What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police? Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of “police brutality.” BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
You also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park, from Robert E. Lee to another name. Robert E. Lee was a great general. They’re trying to take away our culture. A Great American Heritage.

I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!

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

So, you think a speech on race written by neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller is going to bring the nation together and solve the problem of racial injustice? The very idea is so totally absurd that it shows why we won’t have anything approaching racial justice in America until Trump and the GOP are removed from power.

It can’t happen. The regime won’t allow it. And, we have a Supremes’ majority unwilling to stand up for justice in America. Heck, Trump could claim that an end of laws promoting racial justice is necessary because of COVID-19 and the “JR Five” would say “right on.” In case you haven’t noticed, Trump is a total legislative failure; he merely rules by Executive Decree. And the JR Five doesn’t bat an eye as democracy goes down the drain.

Miller, of course, is the architect of Trump’s White Nationalist racist attack program on the asylum system and other parts of our immigration laws and constitutional due process for persons of color. It’s called “Dred Scottification” or “dehumanization of the other.”

George Floyd was a tragic example, but by no means the only one. Ask separated families, caged kids, asylum applicants returned to constant danger and squalid conditions in Mexico, women and children “orbited” back to face torture and death in the Northern Triangle without hearings, Muslim refugees stuck in horrible camps and separated from families forever, non-criminals suffering in inhumane conditions in the “New American Gulag” primarily because of the color of their skin, Latinos too scared to seek the health care they need and are entitled to because of the “public charge” travesty, “Dreamers” left to twist in the wind so that they can be “bargaining chips”for politicos, or Blacks and Latinos intentionally disenfranchised from having their vote count by the GOP, to name just a few.

Of course, Miller’s real targets are all (non-GOP) people of color — Latino asylum seekers and migrants are just “first in line” because higher Federal Courts seem largely unwilling to recognize and stand up for their legal and Constitutional rights as well as their right to be treated with respect and human dignity. But, you can bet they won’t be the last of “the others” targeted by the Trump/Miller/Barr/Wolf/Cotton White Nationalist agenda.

The bigger problem is that the Trump/Miller racial agenda has “admirers in high places:” None other than John Roberts and four of his GOP-appointed colleagues on the Supremes. When lower Federal Courts have quickly and emphatically quashed the various outrageous White Nationalist assaults on our Constitution, laws, and human decency, the “JR Five” has been right there to intervene. There is no obvious pretext, legally disingenuous argument, or xenophobic racist myth that Trump Toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco can utter that wouldn’t find favor with “The Five.”

They even bend the rules so that Francisco and his ethics-free team of White Nationalist apologists won’t have to go through the trauma of defending their bogus, unethical, and morally repugnant positions in lower Federal Courts, like other “peons” in “The Five’s” twisted, distorted, and privileged legal world are forced to do.

In a show of extreme bias, toadyness, and complete tone-deafness, several Justices have even publicly bemoaned the fact that Trump and Francisco have to deal with the indignity of nationwide injunctions against the regime’s assaults on the rule of law. Why not make unrepresented migrants of color and those with pro bono lawyers have to win before all 600 some Federal District Judges to stop the abuse?

Why would folks with such feeble understanding of due process, asylum law, human rights, what really goes on in Immigration Court, what it’s like to be a lawyer defending migrants in a systemically biased, patently unfair system, and the real human lives and futures being ground into mush by the likes of Miller, Sessions, and Barr even be on the Supreme Court in the first place!

Actually knowing how the law works on human lives, experiencing the practical effects of bad judging, and having represented the most vulnerable trying to make their way through our “intentionally user unfriendly” system is 10x more important for a qualified Justice than an Ivy League law degree and fancy political connections. If we really want “equal justice for all” in America, rather than just another snappy buzz-phrase, we’ve been looking at the wrong candidates for our highest Federal Courts!

Does anyone really think that America would still have “Baby Jails” and “Immigration Star Chambers” if the Justices on our highest Court had actually experienced Professor Phil Schrag’s Baby Jails: The Fight to End The Incarceration of Refugee Children in America?” Of course not! But, “Baby Jails” are alive and well in America today, while the Supremes dither over how else to advance Trump’s agenda. Moral leadership and the courage to “just say no” to tyranny and racism counts! But, you wouldn’t know it by today’s Supremes’ majority.

How do we expect to achieve equal justice for all with a majority of Justices who lack the knowledge and experience to make the Constitution function in the real world? They also lack the human empathy, flexibility, ambition, and philosophical inclination to learn from others and make amends for their past mistakes. By, their often wooden, tone-deaf, and sometimes intentionally incomprehensible jurisprudence they show that they fully intend to retain their blind spots and continue making the same mistakes that promote inequality and injustice until someone stops them.

Of course there is institutionalized racism in America! How can it be otherwise when we have allowed a political party led by an overt racist like Trump to be in charge of our institutions?

Dr. Martin Luther King said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That’s why the murder of George Floyd affects us all.

I understand Dr. King’s message; you understand it. But a majority of the Supremes neither understand it nor are willing to honor it. Until we get a Court where the majority of the Justices actually believe in and stand up for equal justice under law, we won’t achieve it as a nation.

America needs and deserves a better Supreme Court. November is perhaps our last chance to start the process of change that we will need to move our nation forward to a future with equal justice for all. We can’t get there as long as we have a majority of Justices who share, enable, and support Trump’s and Miller’s belief that black, brown, and immigrant lives don’t matter and act accordingly.

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts That Enable Injustice, Never!

PWS

06-11-20

EX-US JUDGE UNLOADS TRUTH IN USDC FILING ABOUT BILLY BARR’S ATTEMPT TO SUBVERT JUSTICE BY UNDOING FLYNN PROSECUTION: Corrupt, Dishonest, Unethical, Unprofessional – DOJ’s Request to Dismiss Flynn Prosecution is “Preposterous” – Our Police Departments Aren’t The Only Part of Our Foundering, Rudderless, & Disturbingly Ineffective, Racially & Morally “Tone-Deaf” Justice System That Needs Substantial & Meaningful Reform!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/preposterous-court-appointed-lawyer-michael-flynn-case-slams-doj-attempt-n1229336

Pete Williams reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — The retired judge appointed to act as a friend of the court in the Michael Flynn case strongly urged the court Wednesday not to let the Justice Department abandon the prosecution.

In a scorching 83-page submission, John Gleeson said the government’s move to drop the case was “riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact,” which were contradicted by the positions it has taken in other false statement cases and by its own previous court filings about Flynn’s conduct as well as his decisions to plead guilty twice.

“Even recognizing that the Government is entitled to deference in assessing the strength of its case, these claims are not credible,” the retired judge wrote. “Indeed, they are preposterous. For starters — and most unusually — they are directly and decisively disproven by the Government’s own briefs filed just months ago in this very proceeding.”

Gleeson said judges must ordinarily defer to the wishes of the Justice Department about whether to pursue a prosecution, but not when the motives of the government are suspect. In Flynn’s case, the government’s move to dismiss the case “is based solely on the fact that Flynn is an ally of President Trump.”

Federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan of Washington appointed Gleeson to submit arguments about why the government should not be allowed to drop the case, so that Sullivan could consider both sides.

The appointment came after the Justice Department last month asked the judge to dismiss the case, having determined that even if Flynn lied to FBI agents in early 2017 about his phone calls with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., his lies were not “material” to any investigation and did not, therefore, violate the false statement law at the heart of his case.

Flynn told the FBI that he did talk to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition but denied that they talked about Russia’s response to the latest Obama sanctions or about a forthcoming UN vote. He later admitted that both those statements were untrue.

Those statements, Gleeson said, were clearly important to the FBI’s investigation into potential connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“It is hard to conceive of a more material false statement than this one,” Gleeson said.

Gleeson said without any firm legal basis for wanting to drop the case, the only other reason must be Flynn’s relationship with Trump. Wednesday’s brief noted that the president tweeted or re-tweeted about Flynn at least 100 times since March 2017.

Clearly the president is personally invested in ensuring that Flynn’s prosecution ends, Gleeson said, adding, “Everything about this irregular.”

. . . .

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

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

Add this to the absolute legal, ethical, constitutional, and management disaster going in in the U.S. Immigration Courts under Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” management, and the case for removing him from office is overwhelming. Won’t happen. But, it should!

Actually, filing a “preposterous motion” backed by clearly untrue assertions is a clear violation of an attorney’s role as an “officer of the court” owing “candor to the tribunal.” If Barr were a private practitioner, it would likely earn him a referral to his state bar authorities for possible discipline or license revocation.

But, in Federal Courts these days the “undue deference” and unfairly favorable treatment of DOJ attorneys continues. It has actually been institutionalized, and even unjustly rewarded, by the Supremes. Talk about encouraging worst practices and highlighting “negative role models!”

The whole ethical debacle of the Trump Administration DOJ and the overall feckless performance of our Federal Courts, particularly the Supremes and certain Circuit Courts of Appeals, at halting clear Executive abuses and requiring honesty and professionalism (including rejecting racist or religiously bigoted agendas) from the Federal Government before tribunals cries out for a serious re-examination of: 1) who should be sitting on the Federal Bench; 2) what ethical standards they should be held to; and 3) the undue favoritism and leniency traditionally shown by Federal Courts to Government lawyers engaging in misrepresentations, sloppy work, promoting pretexts for overtly racist agendas, and constantly using dilatory litigation tactics intended to punish individual litigants for asserting their legal rights.

The last three years have shown that better Federal Judges and much more courageous, effective judicial leadership committed to guaranteeing due process and fairness for all is absolutely necessary for our nation to achieve “equal justice under law.” The current sorry state of the Article III Judiciary shows that police departments are not the only part of our broken justice system that needs reform and some “different faces” to achieve equal justice under law. As a nation, we can’t achieve social and racial justice with the gang that promoted, enabled, and in some cases even encouraged injustice in charge. And, that goes for all three failed branches of our Federal Government.

George Floyd’s death should never have happened; nor should families be separated, kids put in cages, legal asylum applicants told to rot in Mexico, and Billy Barr be allowed to operate unconstitutional “Star Chambers” masquerading as “courts” (when they are nothing of the sort). The problems in our justice system go much deeper than the Minneapolis Police Department!

Yes, they can be solved! But, not without some new faces, new approaches, and some progressive thinking and input from all of society, particularly our younger generations! You have to believe in equal justice to achieve equal justice! We can’t get there with the current gang of “non-believers” in charge and promoting their failed, and all too often overtly or covertly racially biased, agendas.

Due Process Forever!

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

PWS

06-11-20

MILLER, OTHER TRUMP WHITE NATIONALISTS SEEK TO FURTHER DISHONESTLY EXPLOIT THE PANDEMIC TO ENACT NATIVIST IMMIGRATION PROGRAM W/O CONGRESS – Counting On Supremes & Feckless Federal Courts To Go “Belly Up” On Regime’s Racist, Xenophobic Agenda!

https://apple.news/A4blmWGWoQ1GmZyfSpSkpUw

Priscilla Alvarez reports for CNN:

White House prepares new immigration limits, using coronavirus as cover

7:40 PM EDT June 9, 2020 Washington

The Trump administration is preparing to roll outanother set of restrictions on legal immigration, citing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, even as it argues for the reopening of the US economy, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.

Despite a push from President Donald Trump to move past the pandemic, the administration is continuing to usher forward immigration measures, citing the outbreak and its toll on the economy.

One of the key figures behind the push to limit immigration is Stephen Miller, Trump’s lead immigration adviser and the architect of the President’s hardline immigration agenda. In April, Trump signed an executive order barring some immigration to the US after teasing an outright ban on immigration to the country. Trump argued that the order was needed to protect American jobs.

Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, the administration has pressed forward with a series of immigration measures that, prior to coronavirus, had struggled to break through. Among those changes is the closure of the southern border to migrants, including those seeking asylum, unless certain conditions are met.

After the President’s April proclamation, Miller cast the move as a first step toward reducing the flow of immigrants coming into the United States. That proclamation set up deadlines for review, one of which is approaching this weekend, and left the possibility open for its extension or modification.

The economic argument is expected to be raised again in an anticipated expansion or new immigration executive order. While Trump has touted recent job numbers,unemployment numbers remain high — though businesses have said in a series of letters to the President that continued immigration is important for economic recovery.

Interest groups, businesses and experts are fighting any new restrictions, saying that visas allowing immigrants to temporarily work in the US are critical to the economy.

“Why would he want to cut off critical workforce that will help the economy recover?” said Greg Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“It’s not a rational or reasonable approach to the stated goals of what they’re trying to achieve, which only points to the underlying purpose of effectuating the President’s campaign goals of cutting off immigration,” Chen added.

Trump pledged the previous order would “ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens.”

The White House did not immediately comment for this story.

CNN previously reported that Trump’s political advisers view the immigration steps as motivating for his base supporters at a moment when the President’s key election message — a strong economy — is badly weakened by the pandemic.

Legal immigration, which has already taken a hit during the outbreak, is again in focus in deliberations about an anticipated immigration executive order.

. . . .

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

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

Emboldened by the lack of judicial pushback and absence of legal and moral leadership from the Supremes on racial injustice, the regime is planning an all-out assault on non-white immigration with coronavirus as a cover. Blacks and Latinos have already been disproportionately affected by the Cornoavirus, which has been of little concern to Trump except as it relates to his reelection schemes. Now, sensing lack of support for racial justice from a Federal Judiciary already stacked with far rightists raced by Mitch through the Senate, Trump, Miller, Barr, Wolf, and their cronies see a chance to further their dehumanization and “Dred Scottification” of the other.

Sure, it’s despicable! But, when those whose responsibility it is to promote racial justice and resist Executive abuses go AWOL, that’s what tyrants do! Even incompetent tyrants can sense institutional weaknesses and lack of moral leadership in others.

PWS

06-10-20

ACLU SUES TO STOP REGIME’S BOGUS USE OF COVID-19 AS PRETEXT FOR ELIMINATING ASYLUM PROTECTIONS – Suit Tests Federal Courts’ Willingness To Stand Up to White Nationalist Regime’s Institutionalized Racism That Continually Invokes Pandemic As Transparently False Justification For Abrogation of Constitutional & Statutory Rights Disproportionately Affecting Those With Brown Skins!

Michelle Hackman reports for the WSJ:

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration, which has used the coronavirus health emergency to expel migrants at the border without allowing them to apply for asylum, faces its first court challenge over the practice in a lawsuit filed on behalf of a 16-year-old boy.

Since President Trump declared a public-health emergency in March, immigration agents have turned back nearly all migrants, including children, at the border without providing a chance to file asylum claims. The government invoked a 1944 public-health law allowing it to expel any noncitizen who poses a threat of spreading disease during an emergency. It extended that provision indefinitely in May.

The new process overrides immigration laws that allow any foreigner on American soil with a credible fear of persecution to apply for asylum, and laws prohibiting migrant children from being deported.

The lawsuit was filed in the district court in Washington by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a 16-year-old boy from Honduras, known only by his initials J.B.B.C. He crossed the border in early June to join his father, who is living in the U.S. and awaiting his own immigration case to be heard, after fleeing what the suit described as “severe persecution” in his home country.

Under the typical process, border agents would have turned over the child to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs a network of migrant shelters for children across the country and seeks to find them suitable guardians. Instead, border agents detained the boy in El Paso, Texas, and plan to deport him imminently, in accordance with the public-health emergency process.

Late Tuesday evening, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted J.B.B.C. a temporary restraining order, ordering the government not to deport him through at least Wednesday at midnight.

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit’s supporters acknowledge that the suit is a gamble. If a federal judge rules that immigration laws can be bypassed during an emergency—a novel application of the public-health law—the government would gain broad new authority. But not suing, they say, could allow deportations without due process to continue.

“If the courts don’t step in, the Trump administration will continue to indefinitely strip refugees of the right to seek asylum,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

. . . .

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

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

The name of the use is J.B.B.C. v. Wolf.

So far, in showing no genuine concern for human rights, the rule of law, or overt racism in major non-legislative eradications of asylum, refugee, and immigration protections by a scofflaw Administration, which has made only cosmetic efforts to disguise its racist immigration agenda, a Supremes’ majority has sent a strong chilling signal to lower Federal Judges willing to stand up for racial justice, equal justice before the law, and Executive accountability. Will the Trump regime continue to literally “get away with attempted (or actual) murder” of children and other asylum applicants? How far does the Supremes’ majority’s resolve not to give Black and Brown lives and rights their deserved legal protections, and to fold in the face of Trump’s racist bullying, extend?

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

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

PWS

06-10-20

BIGOTED BULLY BILLY BARR BRUTALLY BATTERS U.S. JUSTICE SYSYEM: B/T/W He Also Runs America’s Most Screwed Up, & Most Clearly Unconstitutional “Court” System Right Under The Noses of Feckless Article III Judges! — It’s Not “Justice” — Just The Open Fraud That Passes For Justice When Democratic Institutions & Moral Leadership Fails — Barr’s DOJ is a “Thugocracy,” Says Post’s Dana Milbank!

Bigoted Bully Billy Barr Brutalizes Justice as Federal Courts Fail

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/so-this-is-why-bill-barr-is-such-bully/

Milbank writes in WashPost:

Police in Buffalo shove a 75-year-old man to the ground and blood pours from his ear. Police in Brooklyn knock down a young woman and call her a “bitch” because she asked why she had to leave the street. Federal authorities in Washington fire tear gas at peaceful demonstrators, then lie about it.

Get the feeling law enforcement in this country is being run by a middle-school bully?

If so, you are not wrong.

Childhood bullies have a predisposition to become adult bullies, research shows, and, sure enough, it seems Attorney General William Barr was a teenage bully more than 50 years ago.

Back in 1991, during Barr’s confirmation to be George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, lawyer Jimmy Lohman, who overlapped with Barr at New York’s Horace Mann School and later Columbia University, wrote a piece for the little-known Florida Flambeau newspaper about Barr being “my very own high-school tormentor” — a “classic bully” and “power abuser” in the 1960s who “put the crunch on me every chance [he] got.”

Nobody noticed the Flambeau piece at the time, but Lohman posted it on Facebook when President Trump nominated Barr in 2018, and it took on “a life of its own,” Lohman told me Tuesday from Austin, where Post researcher Alice Crites tracked him down. The article resurfaces in social media each time Barr does something unconscionable — which is often.

The 1991 description of 1963 Barr’s harassment sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr. He “lived to make me miserable,” with a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass,” Lohman alleged, because he wore peace and racial-equality pins. He said the four Barr brothers picketed the school’s “Junior Carnival” because proceeds went to the NAACP, and he alleged that Billy Barr, the “most fanatic rightist” of the four, later “teamed with the New York City riot police to attack anti-war protesters and ‘long hairs.’ ”

The 1991 article says Barr, a “sadistic kid,” has “come a long way from terrorizing seventh graders just because they wore racial equality buttons.” The Justice Department didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Lohman’s account is consistent with Marie Brenner’s reporting for Vanity Fair: “A few who knew the Barr boys came to call them ‘the bully Barrs’; the siblings, these former classmates claimed, could be intimidating.” A petition from Horace Mann alumni asks the school to “rethink” an award for Barr, who “violated our school’s Core Values of Mutual Respect and Mature Behavior.”

Historian Paul Cronin, in Politico this week, says Barr was part of the “Majority Coalition” at Columbia that fought antiwar demonstrators. Barr had told the New York Times Magazine he was part of a “fistfight” in which “over a dozen people went to the hospital.” Cronin noted: “There appears to be no record of any trip to the hospital.”

Now Barr exaggerates violence on a grand scale. After he directed the forceful eviction of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square, he claimed to Fox News on Monday that the image of peaceful demonstrators was “miscreated” to ignore “all the violence that was happening preceding that.” He alleged that there were two “bottles thrown at me” when he surveyed the scene; footage showed him at a safe distance. He charged that previously “things were so bad that the Secret Service recommended that the president go down to the bunker”; Trump claimed it was merely a bunker “inspection.”

. . . .

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

Sadistic kid grows up to be racist bully, becomes Attorney General, institutes thugocracy, perverts justice, enabled by courts who look the other way. Wow! What a “great American success story.”

What’s the purpose of an independent life-tenured judiciary that lacks the courage, integrity, and commitment to our Constitution to hold Barr accountable for his attacks on truth, the rule of law, and human decency?

The road from Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Lafayette Park leads directly to the Supremes’ failure of legal and moral leadership. “Equal justice for all” will never become a reality until we get a Supremes’ majority that actually believes in it and has the guts to make it happen! When judges will neither admit nor engage the problem, they are the problem!

Better judges for a better, fairer, more equal America!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-10-20

Ananya Bhattacharya @ QUARTZ: Yes, Trump’s B.S. White Nationalist Attack on Immigrants, Using COVID-19 as a Pretext, Will Harm U.S. Workers & the U.S. Economy, Says New Study by U.C. San Diego Profs!

https://apple.news/ATn0lgkBSTay-a1C2lMlh4A

Ananya writes in QUARTZ:

GOOD FOR YOU

A new study shows Trump’s anti-immigration policies will end up hurting the US

The Donald Trump administration’s planned measures to help American graduates find jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic may backfire in the long term.

Over the past couple of months, the US government has proposed several restrictions on foreign skilled workers, which it believes will open up opportunities for locals. However, a recent University of California San Diego immigrant rights study (pdf) has said immigrant rights enhance the lives and livelihoods of native workers in many ways such as improvement in incomes, sparking innovation, reducing crime and increasing tax revenues.

“We find there are several areas where strengthening migrant worker rights benefits native-born workers, outweighing any costs borne by them,” researchers Gaurav Khanna and Anna Brown found.

The research comes after Trump hit pause on immigration into the US via employment and family routes in April, affecting more than 20,000 people each month. A May 7 letter from a group of four Republican senators urged Trump to suspend the Optional Practical Training programme (OPT), which allows international students to work in the US for up to three years. Six days later, the New York Times reported Trump is considering barring the issuance of new visas in certain employment-based categories, including H-1B.

Here’s a break-down of how hurting immigrant sentiment is tied to the welfare of the US economy:

Entrepreneurship and innovation

Any change to immigrant laws could hurt the US’s long-term plans around innovation and new ventures because giving immigrants legal permanence and a sense of stability incentivises local investments.

“These new businesses may lead to an increase in jobs and a larger tax base,” the researchers said. “While much of the literature has focused on the potential of H-1B visa-holders to develop new patents and technologies, there is strong evidence suggesting that this relationship between immigration and innovation holds more broadly.”

Around 45% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. These companies amass more than $6 trillion in revenue per year and include tech giants like Google-Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple. A previous study by Khanna revealed that hiring H-1B workers was strongly associated with firms introducing newer products.

Threat of reverse brain drain

The report also says America’s talent crunch could worsen if foreign professionals are not retained.

“When the US crisis abates, there may be a scarcity of high-skill professionals, which could stall a robust recovery,” Khanna, co-author and assistant professor of economics at the school of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), said in a June 4 press release.

Silicon Valley’s gaping tech skills gap has long been plugged by foreign talent.

Back in 1994, the number of computer scientists in the US who were born abroad was less than one in 10. By 2012, the share was up to a quarter.

Most tech workers are employed under the H-1B programme, which is only renewable for up to six years. Workers who are not on track for a green card have to return home. “Such forces, set into motion by the six-year H-1B limit, have shifted production from the United States to India,” the research states. Extending the H-1B limit or making the green card process easier would allow employers to retain this high-skill talent.

And it’s not just about Silicon Valley. The IT sector has downstream effects on other industries that use software, such as banking and manufacturing.

Higher wages, more jobs for locals

The presence of immigrants had a more favourable effect on incomes, the researchers found. A study conducted by the US Department of Labor showed that granting legal status to migrant workers resulted in their wages rising by 15.1%.

Restrictions on the H-1B will have an outsize effect on Indians, who receive three-quarters of the visa, but they wouldn’t be the first group to fall prey. Historically, Chinese, European, and Mexican labour flow into the US has been limited or stopped altogether based on unsubstantiated evidence about these workers depressing wages.

“Often, such policies have been motivated by resentment against foreign workers; however, this fear may be based on false perceptions and lack of evidence,” the authors of the paper write. “This resentment may also be driven by racial prejudices and xenophobia.”

However, the reality is that protecting migrant workers from exploitation eventually levels the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants. “Migrant workers, who are not legally protected, face much lower wages compared with their native counterparts,” according to Khanna. “This is detrimental to US-born workers, who are less likely to be hired. Ensuring migrant workers have substantial rights inadvertently helps US-born workers as well.”

A better tomorrow for America

Less crime: Trump has often tried to draw a link between immigrants and rising crime rates. But there is little truth in these claims. Between 1970 and 2010, increases in immigration in US metropolitan areas were correlated with decreases in both violent (homicides, assaults, etc) and property crimes (burglary, motor vehicle theft, etc), past research shows. Then, a 2007 studyfound that incarceration rates are lower for immigrants and far lower for newly arrived immigrants.

More taxes: Contrary to popular belief, undocumented migrant workers pay taxes, mostly income taxes, which are estimated to be at $11.7 billion. This number would rise by $2.2 billion if undocumented migrants were granted legal status. For a country with $804 billion in fiscal debt, every penny counts.

Future workforce: Children of currently undocumented individuals who are born in the US can join the country’s workforce, adding to productivity and expanding the tax base.

Quartz Daily Brief

Subscribe to the Daily Brief, our morning email with news and insights you need to understand our changing world.

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

I’ve featured this particular study in prior posts. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/06/06/debunking-the-trump-regimes-white-nationalist-myths%EF%B8%8F-furthering-protecting-immigrants-rights-benefits-society-bogus-covid-19-visa-rest/

But, Ananya’s summary is so highly relevant and beautifully written that it deserves its own post. One of her most important points: “[T]he reality is that protecting migrant workers from exploitation eventually levels the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants.”

I’ve pointed out to my students that bigger investments by the Feds in Wage & Hour and OSHA enforcement, as an alternative to expensive, inhumane, wasteful, and often counterproductive civil immigration detention and enforcement, is something that a wiser and more intellectually honest Administration should consider in the future, in combination with a more robust and realistic legal immigration system.

PWS

06-09-20

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

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

Linda Greenhouse writes in The NY Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

06-06-20

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

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

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

Ezra Klein

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the interview at the link.

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

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

But, was it really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-07-20

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

Jamelle writes in the NYT:

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

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

It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.

By Jamelle BouieJune 5, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

06-07-20

This November, vote like your life and the lives of many others depend on it! Because they do!

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