"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Paulina Vera President, Hispanic Bar Association of DC PHOTO: Linkedin
As I have mentioned before, I’m proud that Paulina is an alum of the Legacy Arlington Immigration Court Internship Program and a “charter member” of the NDPA!
For those of you who don’t know her, here’s Paulina’s “official bio” from the GW Law website:
Paulina Vera supervises GW Law Immigration Clinic students and provides legal representation to asylum-seekers and respondents facing deportation in Immigration Court. She is a Professorial Lecturer In Law and has taught Immigration Law I.
Ms. Vera previously served as the only Immigration Staff Attorney at the Maryland-based non-profit, CASA.
She is a double GW alumna. In 2015, Ms. Vera graduated from the George Washington University Law School. During law school, she was a student-attorney at the Immigration Clinic. In 2012, she graduated from GW with a Bachelor in Arts in International Affairs, concentrating on Latin American Studies and International Politics and a minor in Spanish Language and Literature.
Ms. Vera is involved in a number of professional organizations. She is the President-Elect of the Hispanic Bar Association of DC (HBA-DC), a scholar for the American Bar Association (ABA) YLD Leadership Academy, and a member of the inaugural Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) National Task Force on Hispanic Law Professors and Deans. She also serves as the Public Relations Director for the GW Latino Law Alumni Association (LLAA).
Ms. Vera has been recognized locally and nationally; she is the recipient of the GW Latinx Excellence Awards, Alma Award (2019), DC Courts Community Agency CORO Award (2019), Hispanic Bar Association of DC (HBA-DC) Rising Star Award (2019), and the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) Top Lawyers Under 40 Award (2021).
Her passion project is managing an online community called Hermanas In The Law, where she features Latinas thinking about law school, Latina law students, and Latina lawyers. Ms. Vera is originally from Tucson, AZ and is the proud daughter of two immigrants.”
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You can also learn more about Paulina and her many accomplishments by clicking on her name in the “Courtside” sidebar!
Paulina is just the brilliant, honest, values-driven, charismatic leader that America needs for a better future!
Hiding in plain sight on a dusty corner of this remote west Texas town, the Blackwell School stands as a lasting reminder of what Mexican American students endured during decades of segregation.
“I learned about racism here in Marfa,” said Jessi Silva, 73, who attended the school as a child in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sitting in the schoolhouse last month, Silva gestured to a wooden paddle she said teachers used to spank classmates for speaking Spanish.
Opened in 1909 as a three-room “Mexican school,” Blackwell expanded to half a dozen buildings, educating more than 4,000 children before it closed in 1965.
“Students were told to speak only English on campus,” reads a state historic marker outside the stucco and adobe school, which is now a museum. “Spanish words written on slips of paper were buried on the grounds in a mock funeral ceremony.”
“One of the other teachers came into our classroom and wrote the word ‘Spanish’ on the blackboard, gave each one of us a small piece of paper and told us to write the letters that we saw on the blackboard,” Silva recalled.
Afterward, the teacher collected the slips of paper “and then they marched us all out to the flagpole.”
“They already had a hole dug, and they had this box,” Silva recalled. “They put all the students’ papers in that box and said that we can all vote to do away with the Spanish language. Therefore, we were burying ‘Mr. Spanish.’ And we were no longer allowed to speak Spanish in school.”
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Read Molly’s full article at the link.
Kids used to come to a “first master” before me speaking a few words of English. By their second master they were speaking English and helping their family members understand. I’d tell them that they had now surpassed me in language achievement. Bilingualism is a fantastic life skill!
Maria Sacchetti Immigration Reporter, Washington Post, Photo: WashPostArelis R. Hernandez Southern Border Reporter Washington Post, Photo: WashPost
By Maria Sacchetti and Arelis R. Hernández in WashPost:
Prominent Black lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants to nations such as Haiti that are engulfed in political turmoil, fearing that they could be harmed or killed.
Hundreds of immigrants have been swept out of the United States in recent days, a blow to groups that had been counting on President Biden and Vice President Harris, the daughter of immigrants and the first Black vice president, to halt deportations and overturn the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
Biden attempted to pause most deportations on Jan. 20, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. Immigration officials say the recent removals match Biden’s new enforcement priorities — such as people who recently crossed the border or who were convicted of serious crimes — but advocates say immigrants are being sent to nations where they could face danger.
“The community should not still be in panic across this nation when we have an administration that is willing to do the work of stopping these deportations,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Friday in a call with reporters. “They have the authority to say no more flights will leave the United States.”
Migrants who cross the border are still being removed under a Trump administration order that allowed the expulsion of recently arrived people under Title 42, Section 265, of the public health law that aims to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Advocates for immigrants tracking the flights say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled approximately 900 Haitians, including dozens of children, in the past two weeks.
Advocates for immigrants say the situation is urgent, as Haiti and nations in Africa are facing varying threats. Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has seen its democracy plunge into a constitutional crisis with allegations of a coup attempt and conflicting claims to the presidency.
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ICE deported New York resident Paul Pierrilus to Haiti on Feb. 2, even though he has never been to that country and has lived 35 of his 40 years in the United States.
He had fought deportation since 2004 after a drug conviction. His parents are of Haitian descent, but they are U.S. citizens and Pierrilus was born on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
Haiti had never recognized him as a citizen, he said, but an immigration judge ordered him deported more than 16 years ago and he lost his appeals.
In an interview, Pierrilus described how he had to be dragged off the airplane. He wore the parka he used to wear in New York into the tropical 85-degree air. He said he is stunned and defeated.
“I’m not a Haitian citizen! I’m not a Haitian citizen!” Pierrilus recalled yelling as local officials pushed him onto a bus. “I felt helpless because it’s a situation out of my control. It’s a situation I can’t do anything about. No one is hearing what I’m saying.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
The Pierrilus story is particularly indicative of ICE’s attitude toward people of color: If he’s black send him to Haiti, ask questions later!
Courtside was “on top” of Ed Pilkington’s recent Guardian article on deporting babies and children to total disorder and danger in Haiti.
Remember, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in ethnic communities throughout the United States was a key priority of the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy — with a some help from the Supremes’ majority. It has been very successful. In fact, as noted by Vice President Harris, hate crimes directed against Asian Americans are up astronomically.
But, of course, there aren’t any Asian American Justices, are there? So, out of sight out of mind for perhaps Ameria’s “least representative” court (with the possible exception of the EOIR “courts”).
I’ve consistently been making several points that others are finally starting to pick up on and that will be essential for Biden Administration policy makers to keep in mind:
The issues of racial justice and immigrant justice are deeply intertwined — one can’t be solved without addressing the other;
Dehumanization of “the other” (Black, Latino, Asian-American, women, immigrants, asylum seekers, etc.) — “Dred Scottification” — has been promoted over the past four years and essentially endorsed and furthered by a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority;
Racist attitudes and misogyny are deeply ingrained in the current DHS and EOIR (now operating as an adjunct of DHS Enforcement) enforcement mechanisms and in some of the personnel carrying out enforcement policies, including some EOIR judges;
An aura of impunity and unaccountability infects both DHS and DOJ;
Racial justice and equal justice under law will not be achieved without significant personnel and attitude changes at the “retail level” of both DHS and EOIR.
Finally, complaining is a start. But, it won’t result in the necessary systemic changes.
The only way that African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and female lawmakers are going to get durable change is by prevailing on their colleagues to recognize the humanity of all persons in the United States and to make the necessary statutory changes in the immigration laws, beginning, but not ending, with an independent Article I Immigration Court.
Now that we are deep into protests over racism, inequality and police brutality — protests that I’ve come to see as a revisiting of Freedom Summer — it is clear that Donald Trump sees the activation of white nationalism and anti-otherness as his path to re-election. We are engaged in yet another national conversation about race and racism, privilege and oppression.
But, as is usually the case, the language we used to describe the moment is lacking. We — the public and the media, including this newspaper, including, in the past, this very column — often use, consciously or not, language that shields anti-Black white supremacy, rather than to expose it and hold it accountable.
We use all manner of euphemisms and terms of art to keep from directly addressing the racial reality in America. This may be some holdover from a bygone time, but it is now time for it to come to an end.
Take for instance the term “race relations.” Polling organizations like Gallup and the Pew Research Center often ask respondents how they feel about the state of race relations in the country.
I have never fully understood what this meant. It suggests a relationship that swings from harmony to disharmony. But that is not the way race is structured or animated in this country. From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof.
Protests, and even violence, have erupted when white people felt their hold on those things was threatened or when Black people — or Indigenous people, or Hispanics — rebelled against those things being denied.
So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
White Supremacy is at the core of Donald Trump and today’s GOP. It is willfully enabled by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Supreme Court Justices who refuse to acknowledge the obvious anti-Hispanic and anti-people of color motivations behind unconstitutional and inhuman immigration and asylum restrictions designed by notoriously outspoken neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller.
Likewise, the intellectually corrupt Supremes’ majority fails to prevent the GOP’s racist strategy of suppressing voting rights of African Americans and Latinos. The unconstitutionality of these schemes to deny the vote and dilute the political power of people of color has been crystal clear under our Constitution since the enactment of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.
You don’t need a Harvard law degree to figure this out. Just honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity — things that I once took for granted among Supreme Court Justices, but now see are sorely missing on today’s Court where extreme rightist ideology identified with white supremacy has replaced judicial qualifications as selection criteria when the GOP was in charge.
Ending white supremacy in America will require ousting Trump and the GOP and ending the GOP’s power to put more unqualified judges who are opposed to racial and social justice in America on the Federal Bench.
This November, vote like your life and our nation’s future depend it it. Because they do!
The Supreme Court will soon release an opinion on the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s choice to end DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Former President Barack Obama rolled out DACA in June 2012 and the Department of Homeland Security implemented it two months later through a memorandum signed by then-Secretary Janet Napolitano.
DACA, based on a conventional concept of prosecutorial discretion, provided limited relief from removal – and work authorization — to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants through a discretionary tool called “deferred action.” All legal challenges to DACA, including one by campus immigration hawk former Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, failed. How will the story of DACA be remembered?
Much more than the sum of its parts, DACA will be remembered as an intriguing political story. For years, Congress introduced legislation known as the DREAM Act to provide legal status and a pathway to permanent residency for young undocumented college students. Congress has debated some kind of comprehensive immigration reform over two decades. All of these efforts failed. Said President Obama in announcing DACA “In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places.” DACA helped jump start the forceful movement across the nation calling for the vindication of the rights of immigrants.
Politics led to DACA’s demise. Donald J. Trump ran for President on a strident immigration enforcement ticket and promised to end the “unconstitutional” DACA policy. After the inauguration of President Trump and lobbying by some Republican leaders to keep DACA, the administration tried to terminate DACA and announced this “wind-down” in a press conference on September 5, 2017. Ultimately, political slogans, not reasoned analysis, were offered for the decision to end DACA.
The Trump administration’s arguments to the Supreme Court defending the end of DACA were also mired in politics. In a convoluted fashion that wended its way to federal appellate courts from coast to coast, the administration—through a series of Interim leaders—simply ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and in an arbitrary and capricious way simply declared that DACA was “illegal,” and that they were required to end it.
The claim that DACA was somehow “illegal” was simply not true. No court found it to be, and for good reason. Deferred action is an instrument of discretion used to shield “low priority” immigrants from deportation. Deferred action enjoys a long history and legal foundation across both Republican and Democratic administrations. The administration could decide to end the policy it, but not by undertaking the judicial role of declaring their own exercise of discretion to be unconstitutional. As it did in the Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) in manufacturing a civil rights rationale for a U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 Census that would have chilled the participation of many Latina/os and immigrants, the administration simply misrepresented facts. The Supreme Court should require the Department of Homeland Security to undertake the searching analysis of facts and policy impacts, and honestly proceed, playing by the rules. Those with DACA have upheld their part of this bargain, and the administration must abide by open and fair procedures required by the law.
DACA will be reminisced as a story about human pain and hope. Said one DACA recipient one author spoke to described September 5, 2017, the day the end of DACA was announced as “just an awful day … Eventually you just get over the pain, get over the fear… and you continue to organize and protect your community in whatever way you can.” Throughout the time DACA has been tossed around in the courts, thousands continue to build families of their own, work in the frontlines of healthcare. and revitalize classrooms in colleges and universities across the country, a phenomenon we have seen first-hand as educators and administrators. DACAmented recipients are now our doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, repaying the investment this country has made in them.
If the Supreme Court fails to require the Trump administration to abide by the law, as we urge the Court to insist upon, those with DACA must live under a cruel Sword of Damocles, with no clear pathway to legal permanent residency. They deserve an honest policy determination, and the Supreme Court should insist on no less. Ultimately, it will take Congressional action to enact a DREAM Act, and comprehensive immigration reform to enable these young members a means to their rightful place in our society.
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Kevin R. Johnson is Dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law and Mabie/Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicanx Studies.
The Administration’s legal arguments for ending DACA have always been bogus and totally disingenuous. Indeed, they do not even remain the same from case to case as they essentially make it up as they go along. It’s all transparently about White Nationalist racism and political pandering to a right-wing minority.
The lower Federal Courts were nearly unanimous in rejecting the DOJ’s various bad faith positions. Yet, instead of unanimously blasting the Administration’s frivolous request for intervention out of hand and sending a clear message reaffirming the lower courts, the Supremes granted an audience to Francisco and the scofflaws.
By failing to send a clear message that political pandering at the expense of human lives won’t be tolerated, the Supremes have encouraged further lawless, insidiously-motivated acts by Trump and have become part of the problem. They have also unconscionably undermined lower Federal Court judges who stood up for the rule of law and removal of racism and dehumanization from government decision-making.
Among other things, the Supremes have helped Trump: eradicate 40 years of asylum protections without legislation; weaponize the public charge provisions without legislation to endanger the health an safety of immigrants and our nation; allowed invidious discrimination against Muslims and refugees; and forced individuals who have established reasonable fear of persecution to be sent to live in life-threatening squalor and danger in Mexico.
The Supremes’ majority has knowingly and intentionally furthered the “Dred-Scottification” of “the other” in society: African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, asylum seekers, the poor, women, prisoners, workers, etc. Our nation is paying the price.
The solution eventually will require a re-examination of the type of individuals to whom we give the high privilege of serving on the Supremes: their humanity, courage, practical experience, empathy, moral leadership, problem-solving ability, expertise in furthering human rights, and commitment to equal justice for all, rather than narrow “out of the mainstream” political ideologies. The current outrage and unrest over the lack of social justice in the United States can be tied directly to the Supremes’ lack of leadership, courage, humanity, and an overriding commitment to equal justice under law. This version of the Supremes has failed America. Badly!We must do better in the future!
“WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.
The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses.
Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.
The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.
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The pending start of the affirmative action project — division lawyers who want to work on it must submit their résumés by Aug. 9, the announcement said — joins a series of changes involving civil rights law since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
In a lawsuit challenging Texas’ strict voter identification law, the Justice Department switched its position, dropping the claim that the law was intentionally discriminatory and later declaring that the law had been fixed. Mr. Sessions has also made clear he is not interested in using consent decrees to impose reforms on troubled police departments and has initiated a sweeping review of existing agreements.
Last week, the Justice Department, without being asked, filed a brief in a private employment discrimination lawsuit. It urged an appeals court not to interpret the ban on sex-based discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation. The Obama administration had shied from taking a stand on that question.
Vanita Gupta, who ran the civil rights division in the Obama administration’s second term and is now president of the liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted that the briefs in the Texas voter identification and gay-rights cases were signed only by Trump administration political appointees, not career officials, just as the affirmative action project will apparently be run directly by the division’s front office.
“The fact that the position is in the political front office, and not in the career section that enforces antidiscrimination laws for education, suggests that this person will be carrying out an agenda aimed at undermining diversity in higher education without needing to say it,” Ms. Gupta said.
The civil rights division has been a recurring culture-war battleground as it passed between Democratic and Republican administrations.”
Wow! Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse by political officials at the DOJ! Oh, GAO, where art thou when the country needs you? Assuming that any minorities can still vote by the time Sessions and Trump get through — a big if — they might want to consider turning out for candidates who will support the “original intent” of Civil Rights laws, rather than perverting them to further entrench the White (Largely Male) GOP Establishment.
