Immigration Detention – Page 95 – immigrationcourtside.com

SCOFFLAWS THWARTED: U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE EMMET G. SULLIVAN EXPOSES SESSIONS’ S OUTRAGEOUSLY ILLEGAL WHITE NATIONALIST ATTACK ON U.S. ASYLUM LAW — MATTER OF A-B- EXCEEDED SCOFFLAW A.G.’S AUTHORITY — Grace v. Whitaker

Grace v. Sessions, U.S.D.C. D.D.C., 12-19-18, Hon. Emmet G. Sullivan, Published

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MY STATEMENT ON GRACE V. WHITAKER:

As a former United States Immigration Judge, Chair of the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals, and Acting General Counsel and Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy INS” involved in developing the Refugee Act of 1980, I am deeply gratified by the decision of U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan today in Grace v. Whitaker. Judge Sullivan strongly supports the rule of law and the generous humanitarian protections and procedural rights afforded by Congress to vulnerable asylum seekers against a lawless and unjustified attack by former Attorney General Sessions in Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (AG 2018) and the largely erroneous Policy Memorandum incorporating that decision issued by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”).

Among the most important holdings, Judge Sullivan:

Reaffirmed the duty of the Executive Branch to comply with the rule of law as enacted by Congress to protect individuals fleeing persecution;
Reaffirmed the generous humanitarian intent of the asylum provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980;
Recognized the generous “well-founded fear” (10% chance) standard for asylum as enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca;
Reaffirmed the “extraordinarily low” bar for applicants in “credible fear” interviews before DHS Asylum Officers: “to prevail at a credible fear interview, the alien need only show a ‘significant possibility’ of a one in ten chance of persecution, i.e., a fraction of ten percent;”
Found that Congress intended that the term “particular social group” must be interpreted generously in accordance with the United Nations’ guidance;
Rejected Sessions’s unlawful attempt to generally preclude domestic violence and gang-related claims from qualifying for asylum;
Reaffirmed the necessity of case-by-case determinations of credible fear and asylum;
Rejected Session’s unlawful attempt to engraft a “condoned or completely helpless” requirement on the interpretation of when a foreign government is “unwilling or unable” to protect an individual from persecution by a private party;
Reaffirmed Congress’s unambiguous understanding that persecution means “harm or suffering . . . inflicted either by the government of a country or by persons or an organization that the government was unable or unwilling to control;”
Rejected DHS’s misinterpretation of the “circularity requirement” in the Policy Memorandum;
Rejected the Department of Justice’s disingenuous argument that Article III Courts must “defer” to administrative interpretations of Article III Court decisions;
Rejected the Policy Memorandum’s illegal requirement that an asylum applicant (usually unrepresented) “delineate” the scope of a particular social group at the credible fear interview;
Emphatically rejected the Policy Memorandum’s attempt to elevate administrative precedents over the conflicting decisions of U.S. Courts of Appeals.

Judge Sullivan’s cogent decision dramatically highlights the problems with an U.S. Immigration Court system that is controlled by political officials, like former Attorney General Sessions, who are not fair and impartial judicial officials and whose actions may be (and in Sessions’s case definitely were) driven by political philosophies and enforcement objectives inconsistent with judicial responsibilities to insure that non-citizens are fairly considered for and when appropriate granted the important, often life-saving, protections conferred by law and guaranteed by due process. A clearly biased political official like Jeff Sessions should ethically never been permitted to act in a quasi-judicial capacity.

As a result of Sessions’s anti-immigrant bias, unlawful actions, and gross mismanagement of the Immigration Courts, innocent lives have been endangered and one of our largest American court systems has been driven to the precipice with an uncontrolled (yet unnecessary) backlog of over 1.1 million cases and crippling quality control issues. When it finally plunges over, it will take a large chunk of our American justice system and the Constitutional protections we all rely upon with it!

Congress must create an independent Article I United States Immigration Court to ensure that the immigration and refugee laws enacted by Congress are applied to individuals in a fair, efficient, and impartial manner.

Many, many thanks to the ACLU and all of the other wonderful pro bono lawyers who stood up for the rule of law and the rights of the most vulnerable among us against the intentionally illegal actions and unethical behavior of this Administration.

PWS

12-19-18

TRAC: ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO “JACK” U.S. IMMIGRATION COURT BACKLOG – 809,000 ACTUALLY PENDING, 330,000 CLOSED CASES “IN LINE” TO BE ARTIFICIALLY ADDED – Adverse Effects Of Sessions’s Xenophobic Views & Gross Mismanagement Continue To Impede Due Process Even After His Departure! — Across The Board Failure, Even On “Priority Detained” Cases!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEGreetings. The Immigration Court backlog continues to rise. As of November 30, 2018, the number of pending cases on the court’s active docket grew to 809,041 cases. This is almost a fifty percent increase compared to the 542,411 cases pending at the end of January 2017 when President Trump took office. This figure does not include the additional 330,211 previously completed cases that EOIR placed back on the “pending” rolls that have not yet been put onto the active docket.The state of Maryland continues to lead the pack with the highest rate of increase in pending cases since the beginning of FY 2017 — up by 107 percent. In absolute terms, California has the largest Immigration Court backlog – 146,826 cases waiting decision – up by 54 percent. These results are based upon proceeding-by-proceeding internal Immigration Court records obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse UniversityJust in the last two months, the Immigration Court active backlog has grown by over 40 thousand cases. Particularly high growth rates of 10 percent or higher were experienced at nine Immigration Courts. The two courts with the highest rate of growth in their backlog were two courts at ICE detention facilities. The Eloy Immigration Court in Arizona saw its backlog increase by 144 percent, while the Conroe Immigration Court (Houston SPC) in Texas had an increase of 62 percent. These increases occurred even though the court assigns the highest priority to hearing detained cases.

For the full report go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/542/

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s active backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through November 2018. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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More judges, more backlog, due to “gonzo” enforcement, politicization, cratering morale, and just plain old mismanagement. When will Congress and/or the Article IIIs step in and put this dying system out of its misery before the DOJ politicos can do any more damage?

Sessions launched a three-point attack on already inadequate Due Process in U.S. Immigration Court by:

Removing Immigration Judges’ last vestiges of authority to independently manage their dockets;
Severely limiting judicial discretion, thereby effectively reducing Immigration Judges to the status of DHS adjudicators; and
Attacking the well-established rights of asylum seekers, particularly those from the Northern Triangle.

The result has been chaos in the courts. Even more wildly inconsistent decisions from Immigration Judges, cases that should have been “slam dunk” asylum grants, stipulated grants by ICE, or not in Immigration Court in the first place now occupying docket space and being “fully litigated,” thereby tying up more judicial time. Meanwhile judges are being subjected to sophomoric “production quotas,” which were almost universally opposed by everyone working in the system, and forced over scheduling. “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” has gone into full gear. Not surprisingly, there are more appeals, more remands from the Article III Courts, and grossly unfair and disparate treatment of those who are detained and or unrepresented. It’s basically the “worst of all worlds.” All of this is continuing under Whitaker.

I hope that at least the House Committees will look into how political mismanagement is wasting the taxpayers’ money and mocking due process, with no rational solution in sight! There needs to be some accountability for this grotesque fraud, waste, and abuse engineered by this Administration!

PWS

12-18-18

FORMER BORDER AGENT DECRIES “CULTURE OF DEHUMANIZATION” — “What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy. “

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=260e391c-8096-4f5b-8c8a-51ca0171aa2d

Former USBP Agent Francisco Cantu writes in the LA Times:

Ever since the U.S. Border Patrol admitted that Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl seeking asylum with her father, had died in their custody, government officials have been trying to deflect blame for her death.

What is clear so far, according to news reports, is that Jakelin and her father turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents on Dec. 7 along with 163 other migrants in the New Mexico desert. According to a Department of Homeland Security incident report, they were screened at a remote substation and found to be in good condition. DHS cannot confirm whether Jakelin consumed food or water at the facility, but eight hours later, she became “feverish and vomiting” on a transport bus headed for the Lordsburg Border Patrol station. She was met by Border Patrol emergency medical technicians who twice revived her, recorded her temperature at 105.9 degrees and called for a helicopter to El Paso’s Providence Children’s Hospital, where she died about 27 hours later.

The U.S. government claims Jakelin had journeyed for days through the desert without food and water and was beyond help before she was taken into custody. However, her father says he saw to it that she was eating and drinking. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics says her death was without doubt preventable. But Department of Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen blames the victim in this “heartwrenching” story: “This family,” she said on Friday, “chose to cross illegally.”

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman insisted to the Washington Post that “Border Patrol agents took every possible step to save the child’s life under the most trying of circumstances.” That may well be technically true. But even if individual Lordsburg agents rushed to save Jakelin’s life, it won’t erase another truth: The institutional culture of the Border Patrol regularly dismisses even the most basic needs of detained migrants.

In early 2009, when I arrived at my first Border Patrol duty station in Arizona, I was assigned to a training unit and placed under the supervision of senior agents selected to coach newcomers like me. When I read about Jakelin’s death, I couldn’t help but recall the night our training unit first apprehended a group of migrants.

My memories from this night are not precise. I remember the group of migrants was small, maybe eight to 10 people, all of them adult males. We picked them up in the open desert not far from the area’s lone highway, and I can no longer recall how long they had been walking or how many days they might have been without food or water.

What I do remember with certainty is what happened at the processing center. The men had noticed that I spoke fluent Spanish and asked me for water. I went to a nearby storeroom, grabbed a case of bottled water, and was about to walk through the door to the processing room when one of my training agents blocked the way.

What are you doing? she asked me. I told her I was bringing water to the group we brought in. They’ll be fine, she said, come join us in the computer room. But they asked for water, I said, gesturing at the door. It wouldn’t have taken more than a second for me to drop off the water.

Her face and tone changed. Leave it, she ordered, “They’ll live.”

As strange as it may sound, I don’t remember if I obeyed her or what I ended up doing with the water, but I never forgot the message I was given that night: Don’t dare be soft.

Senior agents like her lamented the end of the “old patrol” when migrants weren’t so “coddled” and agents could get away with “tuning up” detainees who got out of line. Callousness toward migrants is evident even in the language agents use to refer to them: “aliens,” “illegals,” “bodies” or “toncs” (a term with disputed origins, which some say means “temporarily out of native country,” though others say it alludes to the sound of a Maglite hitting a migrant’s skull).

As agents-in-training, we were taught to carry ourselves as hardened law enforcers and to treat migrants as lawbreakers. We were told to regard migrant requests with suspicion — if they asked for something or complained, they were likely trying to take advantage of us. We were meant to offer our captives the bare minimum and pass them on like a hot potato — field agents passed migrants to transport agents, who passed them to processing agents, who passed them to bus contractors, who passed them to sector headquarters, where they would be immediately deported or thrust into the immigration detention system.

After more than a year of working as a field agent, I signed up for emergency medical technician training. When I was called to help, agents usually described a migrant’s situation with dismissal and annoyance: This one keeps complaining about blisters, this one claims she needs medication, this one won’t shut up about seeing a doctor. Migrants, the thinking went, always bore responsibility for their own misfortune — an attitude echoed in Nielsen’s insistence last week that Jakelin’s family “chose to cross illegally.”

There will be an investigation into Jakelin’s death, but in broad terms its causes are clear enough: heedlessness, a lack of compassion, poor accountability at the border. Since January 2010, San Diego’s Southern Border Communities Coalition has cataloged at least 81 deaths at the hands of U.S. border agents, and since 2000, more than 6,000 have died as a result of “deterrence” policies that force migrants to cross in remote and dangerous areas, like the one Jakelin and her father passed through.

What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy. It will not be enough to conduct an audit of the Lordsburg Border Patrol station and shuffle its hierarchy, or to increase the ranks of Border Patrol EMTs and give them pediatric training. We must demand, instead, that the entire culture of cruelty that underlies our border enforcement system be remade.

Francisco Cantú was as an agent for the U.S. Border Patrol from 2008-12. He is the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.”

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I represented the Border Patrol for a number of years at the “Legacy INS” when I was the Deputy General Counsel and Acting General Counsel. Among other things, I taught Search and Seizure Law at the Border Patrol Academy and visited a number of Border Patrol Stations. I rode along on patrol, flew in helicopters, walked the border at night, even went off the tower on a zip line during one basic training session at Ft. Polk.

Overall, I enjoyed working with the agents. I thought they were dedicated and hard-working, doing a largely thankless job for which they received insufficient salary and credit, and overall doing it well. I learned from hearing their stories and questions based on “law in action.”

One of the things that the late INS General Counsel “Iron Mike” Inman and I achieved was starting a “Sector Counsel” program in some of the busier sectors so that the agents could get some “on site” legal advice and assistance dealing with U.S. Attorneys and Federal Courts.

That’s not to say that there were no “bad moments.” I did notice an overall “lost battalion” mentality, particularly among some of the older supervisors. Their attitude toward me and my colleagues in the Legal Program probably fluctuated with how much trouble they were in and how much they needed our help to bail them out.

I remember one particularly tense moment visiting a station where some of the officers were under investigation for Civil Rights violations. I accepted their offer of a cup of coffee. When the agent left the room to get it, my friend and then Western Regional Counsel the late Bill Odencrantz whispered: “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you, Schmidt.”

I also recognized that patterns of behavior were probably different when “visitors from headquarters” were there. Undoubtedly, we saw and heard what they wanted us to see and hear when we were riding in the patrol cars, flying in helicopters, or looking through surplus Vietnam era “infrared night scopes” at the folks crossing the border. And, I do remember hearing the second of the two definitions offered by Cantu for the term “toncs.” I think it actually came up in connection with one of the internal investigations in which I was involved.

As I judge, I tended to view the Forms I-213, “Reports of Deportable Alien,” from CBP with “healthy skepticism,” knowing the pressures and conditions under which they were prepared. I also observed over time that many of them said the same things in the same words, much like the “canned paragraphs” that my colleague the late Judge Lauri Steven Filppu used to rail against during my time at the BIA.

As with ICE, in the future there needs to be better professional leadership and training at CBP, as well as a more focused mission. “Culture change” is critical to an effective, cost-efficient, humane, and professional immigration enforcement strategy. However, my experience is that such “culture change,” while not impossible, is a “hard nut to crack,” even under the best of circumstances.

It won’t be achieved simply by “messages from on high.” And, it certainly isn’t going to come under a leader who constantly sends racially charged xenophobic messages and encourages false narratives, dehumanization, and White Nationalism.

PWS

12-18-18

DHS & SOME OTHERS ANXIOUS TO BLAME FATHER FOR 7-YR.-OLD GIRL’S TRAGIC DEATH AT BORDER — Brianna Rennix & Nathan Robinson Are Having None Of It!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/17/dont-blame-jakelin-caals-death-father-us-policies?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Brianna Rennix & Nathan Robinson write in The Guardian:

There are still unknown facts about the death of Jakelin Caal, the seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died in the custody of US border patrol. Jakelin became seriously ill while being bussed to a detention center located about 90 miles from the New Mexican desert where she and her father were picked up. US officials have blamed Jakelin’s father, insisting that Jakelin had not had food or water for days when she arrived and that Jakelin’s father signed a form asserting she was healthy when she arrived.

Jakelin’s father has insisted that this is false – that his daughter had been eating and drinking, that they hadn’t undertaken the kind of long desert crossing portrayed in the press, and that the form the US cites was in English, a language he does not speak.

Why did a little Guatemalan girl die after crossing the US border?

We do know that Jakelin did not receive treatment for 90 minutes after she began showing symptoms. In the coming days, more information about Jakelin’s death may emerge that will allow us to determine what US officials knew, whether they reacted quickly or not, and whether the medical care she received was adequate.

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But these questions are almost secondary, because US responsibility for the suffering of migrant children is already very clear. When asked about Jakelin, a White House spokesman replied: “Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country? No.” This attempt to shift blame on to desperate parents ignores critical facts.

First, border patrol, aware that the desert is more difficult to monitor, deliberately seeks to make the desert crossing more deadly for migrants. They have been repeatedly caught destroying stashes of water left in the desert by humanitarian groups, and an investigation by No More Deaths concluded that this was “not the deviant behavior of a few rogue border patrol agents, [but] a systemic feature of enforcement practices in the borderlands”.

An ex-border patrol agent has written about how he once gave water to a four-year-old boy after he found a family lost in the desert. A fellow officer arriving on the scene then kicked the jug out of the child’s hands, saying, “There’s no amnesty here.”

Second, it’s impossible to look at migration without its context. Caal was an indigenous Mayan who came from severe poverty in the village of Raxruhá. It’s worth remembering that the United States has been a direct cause of the conditions of indigenous Guatemalans over the last half century. Many Americans have forgotten the 1954 coup in which the US overthrew the country’s reformist government, leading to decades of US-backed authoritarian rule. They have also forgotten this country’s role in providing financial and military support for a genocidal government that massacred Guatemala’s indigenous population by the tens of thousands during that country’s civil war. Contemporary conditions in Guatemala are in significant part our responsibility.

The US has actually made it more likely that immigrants will choose to brave the desert, by closing down other options

The United States has actually made it more likely that immigrants will choose to brave the desert, by closing down other options. During the overland journey from Central America to Mexico, many people are beaten, robbed, kidnapped and sexually assaulted on the journey, by everyone from cartel members to Mexican immigration police. It is, indeed, a dangerous journey to bring a child on, but there are often few other options even for those who wish to legally seek asylum.

The US has imposed massive carrier fees on airlines who allow people to board without visas, even if they are doing so for the purpose of entering the asylum process. And the Trump administration, for all that it performatively wrings its hands over the welfare of children, has also systematically cancelled the few existing programs that allowed a small number of endangered minors to come to the United States to seek asylum without needing to make the perilous trip through Mexico.

Men crossing with their children, as Jakelin’s father did, face a particularly difficult set of options. There are not dedicated facilities to detain dads together with their kids, and separations of fathers from children happened under both Obama and Trump. Last year, a father hanged himself in his cell after his child was ripped from his arms.

It’s difficult for migrants to obtain reliable information about their options, because the government, for political reasons, publicly denies that it continues to “catch and release” migrants at the border, or that it is continuing to separate families. (In reality, both practices are happening regularly.) Migrants rely on word-of-mouth intelligence, or the questionable say-so of coyotes, to understand what will happen to them when they cross the border. A dad who wanted to avoid any chance of being separated from his child might be advised to cross at a remote location where border patrol was less likely to catch them.

Finally, while Jakelin Caal fell ill on a bus and not in a DHS holding facility, it’s worth mentioning that conditions in DHS custody are truly terrible. A child died earlier this year shortly after leaving the South Texas Family Residential Center, where hundreds of women and children – including pregnant women and people with serious health conditions – are confined in close quarters, more than an hour’s drive from any hospital that can provide specialist care. At border holding cells, adults and children are regularly forced to sleep on hard concrete floors, drink contaminated water, sit in their own filth, and endure physical and psychological abuse from border guards. The very facility where Jakelin was held had previously been cited for contaminated water.

Jakelin Caal’s case shows the disturbing human reality of Central American migration. But far beyond her tragic death, US policies and practices continue to contribute to the pain and misery of tens of thousands of desperate families.

Brianna Rennix is an immigration lawyer and an editor at Current Affairs. Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs

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Worth thinking about.

PWS

12-17-18

ELIZABETH BRUENIG @ WASHPOST: Advice For Dems in 2020: Don’t Count Out The Possibility Of Standing Up For Values As Part Of A Winning Strategy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-advice-to-progressives-dont-back-down/2018/12/14/b6e0bacc-ffbf-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html?utm_term=.5aa9cb81d603

Elizabeth writes:

A reductive, but not incorrect view of the Democratic debacle in the 2016 elections holds that when President Trump took office, centrists lost the present and leftists lost the future. In 2020, Democrats will have a new opportunity to either reach backward for the Obama era, or to lay the foundation for a bolder, progressive future. Deciding which goal to pursue will likely become the chief party fault line as the 2020 primaries approach. My advice to progressives: Don’t back down.

For the party’s center-leaning establishment, a return to the Obama era makes sense. Centrists were happy then — thrilled to witness the passage of health-care reform that did something but not too much (so long, public option !), comfortable with what one might gently label a muscular foreign policy , pleased with the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, though it came at the expense of homeowners in foreclosure while coddling Wall Street . All in all, things seemed stable and sustainable. Only tweaks and patches lay ahead.

But then, history — presumed dead by those who believed, with socialism extinguished, the future held nothing but increasing gains for liberal democracy — happened again. The 2016 election witnessed a swell of populist disenchantment with the status quo and concluded with the election of Trump. With Trump came a queasy uncertainty that still characterizes politics to this day,leaving old norms dissolved and common sense unequal to its task.

So much of centrist-Democrat fantasizing about 2020 already seems aimed at repeating a golden past. Consider the groundswell of interest in Beto O’Rourke, the Texas congressman who narrowly lost his recent Senate race against Sen. Ted Cruz. For Democrats excited about O’Rourke, his primary draw is his similarity to Barack Obama — both in form and content. O’Rourke has held conversations with the former president about a possible run, to build on a belief that O’Rourke, as my colleague Matt Viser described it, is “capable of the same kind of inspirational campaign that caught fire in the 2008 presidential election.”

O’Rourke’s politics also fall into the same ambiguously centrist zone as Obama’s. “Like Mr. Obama as he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. O’Rourke can be difficult to place on an ideological spectrum, allowing supporters to project their own politics onto a messaging palette of national unity and common ground,” a recent New York Times report observed . Meanwhile, other candidates straight from Obama’s orbit — such as former vice president Joe Biden and former housing secretary Julián Castro — are also eyeing the nomination, with appeals to unity and centrist perspectives.

When not absorbed in hopes of re-creating the Obama era, Democrats mainly seem intent on beating Trump, with little comment or insight, at least so far, on what they will do with power once they have it. (After I questioned in my last column whether O’Rourke has demonstrated serious commitment to progressive values, some readers responded by arguing they’re glad he hasn’t — that Democrats need to run an Obama-style centrist to win back conservatives who might otherwise favor Trump. “A too-progressive Democratic nominee in 2020,” one reader wrote, “would be a gift to President Trump.”) Likewise, at a recent event in New York, former FBI director James B. Comey implored Democrats to put aside their political projects in favor of an all-consuming focus on simply beating Trump . “I understand the Democrats have important debates now over who their candidate should be,” Comey said, “but they have to win. They have to win.”

Presidential elections provide an opportunity for parties to identify and rally around their principles — and even to radically reshape them. If all the Democrats can manage is to hark back to the past and focus on winning for its own sake, they’re missing an opportunity to lay out a blueprint for the future. I don’t think that putting forth progressive priorities is incompatible with beating Trump; in fact, I think that having a clear and persuasive vision of what a better America can look like is likely to be more attractive to voters than promising them something vaguely like the past. One of the political lessons of recent years is that history is never over. The future is waiting, if we want to build it.

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Certainly the Obama Administration was “golden” by comparison with the current corrupt, White Nationalist regime that has made overt racism and hate front and center. However, despite some good things like DACA, stateside processing, and a late stab at wider use of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”), Obama was fairly disappointing from an immigration standpoint.

Under Obama, there was lots of ambiguity and misdirected enforcement, substantial overuse of detention (particularly substandard private detention), and the forerunner of the Trump Administration’s failed “border deterrence” strategy. Obama folks didn’t seek and glory in the cruelty and dehumanization the way that this Administration does. But, in human terms, the results often were similar for the individuals concerned: split families, indefinite detention, kids in jails, a failing U.S. Immigration Court system, and only a smattering of real “immigration pros” in key positions where they too often were not ” driving the train” or being taken seriously.

Can an immigration system based on the reality that immigration is good and necessary for our country, a professionally run independent U.S. Immigration Court dedicated to Due Process with efficiency, a more robust acceptance of refugees, a secure border, cooperation with the international community in solving problems, and treating those who can’t be accepted fairly, humanely, and respectfully be part of winning political strategy?

PWS

12-17-18

WASHPOST: Mexico Has A Great Idea For Addressing The Humanitarian Crisis In The Northern Triangle – Trump Should Invest!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mexico-has-a-plan-to-reduce-the-migrant-flow-from-central-america-trump-should-embrace-it/2018/12/16/eed846de-ffd8-11e8-ad40-cdfd0e0dd65a_story.html

The Post Editorial Board writes:

ON FRIDAY, after a 7-year-old girl died in Border Patrol custody, a White House spokesman called on Congress to “disincentivize” Central American migrants from undertaking the perilous northward trek to the United States. In fact, there is just such a plan in the works, one already presented to President Trump, that has the makings of an effective long-term strategy for reducing the migrant flow, as well as tensions at the border. Mr. Trump would be wise to embrace it.

The plan is the brainchild of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was sworn into office Dec. 1. He has proposed what amounts to a Marshall Plan for Central America — $30 billion over five years in job-creating economic development assistance. The details remain unknown, but the idea is eminently sensible: Along with insecurity and gang violence, the major driver of migration from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala is a massive opportunity deficit.

Mr. López Obrador outlined his vision to Mr. Trump on the phone recently and solicited U.S. participation. No word yet from the White House on the president’s response. However, incensed by the convoys of Central American migrants that made their way to the southern border this fall, he has specifically threatened to close down the border and sever existing aid to Central America, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. And his usual instinct on foreign aid is: Why should we?

As it happens, there’s a compelling answer to that question, which the president himself has thrust into a spotlight by pushing to have Central American asylum seekers remain in Mexico while their cases work their way through U.S. courts. If Mr. Trump signs on to Mr. López Obrador’s vision for reviving Central America with an ambitious aid plan — one that would also serve U.S. interest as a means to “disincentivize” migration — that could be just the sweetener Mr. López Obrador needs to go along with Mr. Trump’s asylum plan.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, or at least a constructive alliance, between a pair of populist presidents who happen to be ideological opposites but whose goals on Central American migration should be aligned. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has his own reasons to discourage migrants who, in the case of the thousands who have reached Tijuana with the caravans, have become an increasingly unpopular local irritant. And even before the caravans, those who traversed Mexico were a magnet for exploitation and crime at the hands of human traffickers and other predators.

Hundreds of miles of existing barriers at the border haven’t stopped the flow of migrants, and neither will Mr. Trump’s wall, if it is ever built. The most effective long-term way to tackle the migrant problem is to do so at the source, in Central America. Mr. López Obrador is on the right track in grasping that. Mr. Trump would do well to join him, and strike a deal that would advance both leaders’ agendas.

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Attacking the problem at its source seems to be a win-win for everyone, including migrants, most of whom probably would prefer to stay if their native countries if they could live in relative safety, support their families, and see a future for their kids. Pretty much what all of us want. They could probably get some help and support from the UNHCR, which also strongly favors resolving humanitarian refugee situations near the area they originally arose.

PWS

12-17-18

JRUBE @WASHPOST: “Horrifying indifference to children’s lives”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/16/horrifying-indifference-childrens-lives/

Rubin writes:

The Post reported this week:

A 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Thursday. . . .

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m. Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in.

More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s statement in response to reports of the child’s death was a moral and legal disgrace:

Traveling north through Mexico illegally in an attempt to reach the United States, is extremely dangerous. Drug cartels, human smugglers and the elements pose deadly risks to anyone who seeks to cross our border illegally. Border Patrol always takes care of individuals in their custody and does everything in their power to keep people safe. Every year the Border Patrol saves hundreds of people who are overcome by the elements between our ports of entry. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts and the best efforts of the medical team treating the child, we were unable to stop this tragedy from occurring.

“Once again, we are begging parents to not put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally. Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.”

For starters, the federal government is responsible for the health and welfare of anyone it detains — whether it is a criminal in a prison, a child in its foster-care system or families detained at the border. Regardless of what the children’s parents did or did not do, the United States has an obligation to the children the moment it detains them. Not to give food and water, or to check the health of those it has in custody, is inexcusable. Blaming the parents as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did (“This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally”) reflects her legal and moral obtuseness. In our care, the child’s welfare became our responsibility.

“This tragedy represents the worst possible outcome when people, including children, are held in inhumane conditions,” the ACLU’s Border Rights Center said in a statement. “Lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP have exacerbated policies that lead to migrant deaths.” The ACLU continued, “In 2017, migrant deaths increased even as the number of border crossings dramatically decreased. When the Trump administration pushes for the militarization of the border, including more border wall construction, they are driving people fleeing violence into the deadliest desert regions.” The statement pointed out that the incident wasn’t reported for a week. “We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” the statement concluded.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a progressive pro-immigration group, also responded. Sharry pointed out that a “tragic and preventable death of an innocent seven-year old girl should not be seen as a mistake made in an otherwise humane system, but rather a deliberately cruel and dehumanizing system that has produced yet another death.” His statement asserted that CBP’s holding facilities are characterized by “freezing temperatures, no beds, lights left on, no showers, not enough toilets or toilet paper, filthy conditions, horrible smell, inedible food and not enough clean water to drink, and [are] run by insulting and abusive agents.” The system the administration has set up is seemingly designed to inflict the maximum amount of suffering in a failed attempt to deter migrants:

[The] strategy has many components: tell those who want asylum to request it at ports of entry while making it nearly impossible to request asylum at ports of entry; prosecute those who present themselves to Border Patrol agents between ports of entry for “illegal entry;” separate families in numbers large (now halted by a federal judge) and small (under the flimsy pretext of protecting children from “criminal family members”); detain as long as possible those who seek asylum; lock up minors who arrive unaccompanied minors and scare away their U.S.-residing parents and relatives who want to sponsor them by threatening to arrest and detain those who come forward; and gut asylum standards by unilaterally changing the bases for deciding cases, pressuring trained Asylum Officers to reduce their high rates of deeming Central Americans as having a credible fear of return, and bullying Immigration Judges to deny cases when finally adjudicated.

Now if a pregnant migrant asserts her right to seek an abortion, this administration will go to any lengths to protect the life of the unborn child; for the already-born minors (and adults) in its custody, however, the administration cannot be bothered to ensure humane and safe conditions.

Under the Republican-majority House and Senate, rigorous oversight of the Department of Homeland Security and legislation to try to ameliorate these conditions were all but impossible. With a Democratic-majority House, this will no longer be the case. The House Judiciary Committee will be headed by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) in the new Congress. He left no doubt as to his intention to get to the bottom of the tragedy and the conditions that allowed this to occur:

On Friday, Nadler and Democrats who will head House Judiciary subcommittees sent a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security requesting the IG “initiate an investigation into this incident, as well as CBP policies or practices that may have contributed to the child’s death [and] CBP’s failure to timely notify Congress of this incident.” The letter told the IG, “It is hard to overstate our frustration with the fact that we learned of this incident through media reports one week after the incident occurred. It is clear that CBP failed to follow the reporting requirements laid out in last year’s omnibus appropriations bill until after the news of this death was already public.”

With adequate border security and staffing, a sufficient number of immigration judges deployed to handle the caseload, reversal of the administration’s deliberately cruel policies, and effective diplomacy with and provision of assistance to the countries from which these people are fleeing for their lives, the current, intolerable situation should improve.

It’s a cruel irony that Trump has portrayed refugees as a threat to Americans. In fact, the reverse is true.

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

Rubin is right. Part of this Administration’s cruel scheme here is to deflect attention from the real threat to our national security and Constitution presented by Trump and his corrupt, scofflaw gang. And, in the long disgraceful tradition of cowards, bullies, and authoritarians, he does so by attacking the most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves, playing on racism and nationalist jingoism.

That’s why the New Due Process Army is such an important force for protecting the human and legal rights of migrants, and by so doing, protecting the rights of all Americans against Executive abuse!

PWS

12-17=18

NATION’S SHAME: ADMINISTRATION’S POLICY OF CRUELTY TOWARD CHILDREN WILL HAUNT US FOR MANY YEARS: “What the Trump administration does is force Americans to fight for things that should be uncontroversial, common-sense humanitarian principles; we now spend so much time reacting to a new set of atrocities that there is no energy left for anything else.”

https://apple.news/A9OIp3x0DQLqC27X2vxP05A

Jay Willis writes in GQ:

This fall, after national outrage over the Trump White House’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy forced it to begrudgingly wind down the practice of separating families at the border, administration officials began looking for a new method of implementing xenophobia as official government policy. They found it, apparently, by recruiting volunteers to serve as temporary guardians of unaccompanied minors—and then, if volunteers’ background checks indicated that they were undocumented, detaining those people and preparing them for deportation.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 170 individuals who offered to open up their homes—again, to children, many of whom were in federal custody because of the aforementioned separation policy, and who were otherwise forced to live in tent camps and converted warehouses until their immigration status could be resolved—have been arrested over the past few months for their displays of kindness. Of that group, 109 had no criminal record whatsoever.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported the death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who, along with her father and a larger group of immigrants, turned herself in to Border Patrol agents in a remote area of New Mexico last week. More than eight hours later, she began having seizures; first responders found that she had a fever of 105.7 degrees and hadn’t had food or water in days. She went into cardiac arrest and died of shock and dehydration shortly thereafter.

The agency’s response, which is laden with all the meaningless corporate bromides typically deployed to convey the appearance of sincerity, is more or less “tough shit”:

I suppose the events of this year should have dispelled the notion that when it comes to immigration, anyone associated with this regime would be inclined to momentarily suspend their prejudices to do a kind and decent thing. Yet somehow, the disgracefulness of DHS’s sting operation is still astonishing. The purpose of releasing kids to “qualified adults” is to make life better for innocent children, victims of a broken system in which they have no voice; literally the only relevant question is Will this person provide a safe place for them to live? But the administration cannot stop itself, this time preying on the basic human instinct to care for children, all in the service of rounding up a few more brown people.

The Chronicle notes that the number of children in custody has increased over the past few months—a trend observers blame on the spike in these background-check arrests. This means that despite the official end of the family-separation policy, more kids are being held in overcrowded jails, because their captors have cut off the power of otherwise willing caretakers to do anything about it. If you are lucky and don’t die in Border Patrol custody, a different set of government policies ensures that you’re still going to languish there for the foreseeable future.

There are bills on Capitol Hill that would bar DHS from doing this sort of thing. In the Senate, nine Democrats have signed on to the Families Not Facilities Act, first introduced in November, while in the House, 39 Democrats and two Republicans—both of whom just lost their re-election bids—are co-sponsors of an analogue. “Right now, unaccompanied children are being held in detention facilities or living in tent cities due in part to potential sponsors’ fear of retribution from ICE,” said California senator Kamala Harris in November. “This is an unacceptable obstacle to getting these children into a safe home, and we must fix it.”

The power of bigotry lies in the persistence of those who implement it—in their willingness to commit to it at all times, no matter the circumstances, no matter how dangerous or unconscionable, so as to never invite uncomfortable questions about why bigotry is acceptable in the first place. Death becomes just a risk that prisoners choose to assume, and volunteer caregivers open themselves up to the possibility of becoming prisoners as well.

What the Trump administration does is force Americans to fight for things that should be uncontroversial, common-sense humanitarian principles; we now spend so much time reacting to a new set of atrocities that there is no energy left for anything else. It is a policymaking war of attrition, and its goal is less to change people’s minds than it is to wear them out.

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

Yup. Well said!

There is only one “right side of history” on this one. Sure it’s exhausting and frustrating to spend energy that should be spent on improving the system for everyone instead resisting gross violations of legal, Constitutional, and human rights engineered by a White Nationalist regime. But, that’s what the New Due Process Army, “Our Gang,” and many others on the right side of history are all about!

PWS

12-16-18

TAL @ SFCHRON: N. Cal. Immigration Arrests Lag National Stats – No Obvious Explanation – Increases Come Almost Exclusively From Non-Criminals – No Obvious Benefit To Anyone Except Restrictionist Pols!

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Are-sanctuary-laws-driving-down-immigration-13467855.php

Are sanctuary laws driving down immigration arrests in Northern California?

Tal Kopan Dec. 14, 2018

WASHINGTON —Immigration arrests fell in Northern California in the past year even as arrests nationally rose 11 percent, a trend that may be linked to tightening sanctuary laws that limit local cooperation with U.S. deportation agents.

But while fewer people in the region were arrested overall, arrests of noncriminal immigrants went up, according to data released Friday, reflecting Trump administration policies that anyone in the country without documentation is a target for enforcement.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that oversees Northern California was one of only a handful nationally to see fewer arrests in the 2018 fiscal year — which ended Sept. 30 — than in 2017. The 14 percent drop in arrests was the steepest decline in the country.

The office, based in San Francisco, was also the only one in the country to post fewer arrests in 2018 than fiscal 2016, the last under President Barack Obama.

Under President Trump, arrests of undocumented immigrants, especially noncriminal ones, have been steadily climbing, as he has made immigration enforcement and border security his central pitches to voters.

Overall, ICE arrested nearly 160,000 immigrants last fiscal year, 34 percent of whom had no criminal convictions. That was an 11 percent increase in arrests overall, but was almost entirely driven by the surge in arrests of noncriminal immigrants. Arrests of those with a criminal conviction slightly trailed the year before.

The story was similar for deportations, which were up overall nationally but dipped slightly in Northern California.

Trump and his deputies have declared that no undocumented immigrant is exempt from the government’s grasp, a change from a policy adopted late in President Obama’s administration that focused ICE’s efforts and finite resources primarily on criminals.

The administration has focused particular ire toward sanctuary cities and has clashed repeatedly with Bay Area and California officials over their policies. The administration sued unsuccessfully to try to block California’s sanctuary law from going into effect after Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in late 2017, and engaged in a heated back-and-forth with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf this year after she issued a preemptive public warning about a planned immigration sweep in the region.

It’s difficult to know why San Francisco lagged behind the rest of the country in arrests, but sanctuary laws could be a factor, especially those that limit cooperation between local jails and ICE officers who want to pick up undocumented inmates. ICE officials did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.

The data varied substantially by region. The San Diego sector saw among the biggest increases in arrests in the past year, up 32 percent overall with noncriminals representing more than half of those arrested, a jump that could be related to surges of migrants arriving at the border there.

The Los Angeles office, however, was more in line with San Francisco. There, ICE made 7 percent fewer arrests in fiscal 2018, though the agency also arrested a slightly higher number of noncriminal immigrants.

Former Obama administration ICE Director John Sandweg said regions rarely see varying numbers due to conscious decisions.

“It certainly isn’t, and almost never is a, ‘Hey guys, let’s do more or less in this area of responsibility.’ That’s just not the way it works,” Sandweg said.

His best guess to explain the discrepancy in Northern California was the limitation on ICE’s access to jails. Having to arrest more immigrants in the community takes more time and resources than the “efficient” handover of an immigrant in a jail, he said.

That could also explain why more noncriminal immigrants got caught up in the crosshairs, he added.

“This is an unintended consequence of sanctuary policies that I’m not sure is always thought through,” Sandweg said. “If you say no to picking up people in jail, there are going to be some dangerous people we feel compelled to get, so when you do that, you’re not just exposing those dangerous people to ICE but their family, their friends, their neighbors.”

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan

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Other possible explanations for the pattern of non-criminal arrests in Northern California:

Retaliation for “Sanctuary Cities” laws and for suits finding Sessions’s “Anti-Sanctuary Crusade” illegal;
Need to meet “arrest quotas” for annual bonuses (just like U.S. Immigration Judges, except they are ineligible for bonuses — but the Director and other “Managers” in Falls Church can pocket some extra cash by revving up removals to please the DOJ politicos).

I also wouldn’t put too much store on the so-called “criminal arrest” numbers put out by DHS either. DHS tends to jack up numbers by concentrating on relatively minor offenders rather than hunting down the real “bad guys” which tends to produce lower numbers.

Indeed, in the Federal bureaucracy the “quantity” that produces budget increases is almost always in tension with “quality” which is harder to quantify and certainly harder for Congressional staff to comprehend and “sell” and for individual legislators to take credit. For example, Session’s wasteful program of prosecuting first time border jumpers for misdemeanors probably produced lots of bogus “criminal removals” and perhaps some “criminal arrests” without actually accomplishing anything useful. Indeed most evidence suggests that while wasting time on Sessions’s “racist follies,” Federal prosecutors actually reduced investigation and prosecution of real crimes (e.g. serious felonies) in Federal Courts. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2018/08/as-zero-tolerance-cases-skyrocket-other-prosecutions-slow/

Indeed, I surmise that an objective study of DHS’s civil, non-criminal enforcement activities would actually show little if any net benefit from leaving U.S. families without one or both parents, taking productive workers out of their jobs, and spreading fear and distrust of local police in ethnic communities. Just how that benefits anyone in the U.S. except Trump and his White Nationalist cronies isn’t apparent to me.

We also should throw in all of the legal time and court time wasted by the DOJ and other Federal prosecutors in tying up the Federal Courts with semi-frivolous litigation to advance their often illegal White Nationalist agenda. If those resources were instead dedicated to getting individuals in Immigration Court represented and improving the quality of Due Process and independence in Immigration Court, we’d be on the way to solving at least one phase of the immigration mess created largely by Congress and the last three Administrations.

For the last two years, DHS Enforcement has been operating largely without any rational enforcement objectives or professional supervision in a Department where management failure, fraud, waste, and abuse are endemic. Some meaningful oversight by the House and some requirement for rational planning, prudent use of taxpayers’ money, and accountability would be most welcome.

PWS

12-15-18

THE FURTHER EXPLOITS OF “OUR GANG” – 5th Circuit Grants Oral Argument In Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B- (requiring asylum applicants to clearly delineate the PSG before the IJ)!

“Hot off the wire” from “Our Gang” of Retired Immigration Judges’ Leader Judge Jeffrey Chase:

Good morning, all: The Fifth Circuit has granted oral argument for the week of February 4 in Canterero-Lagos v. Whitaker the appeal of the BIA’s decision Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B- (requiring asylum applicants to clearly delineate the PSG before the IJ). Our group filed an amicus brief in that case (there was a second amicus brief on behalf of legal service providers). Lead counsel emphasized the importance of the amicus briefs in convincing the Circuit court to grant oral argument, which OIL opposed, arguing that the case was not of particular interest and that W-Y-C- did not constitute a change in existing law.

Best, Jeff

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Thanks Jeff for passing this along! And special thanks to all of our retired colleagues who make this effort so special and effective and to the amazingly talented and dedicated pro bono advocates who help us be “heard in court.”

Even from our angle, we can see that “great representation makes a difference.” If it makes that much of a difference to retired Immigration Judges trying to be “heard,” just imagine what a difference it makes to those actually appearing in U.S. Immigration Court to literally “plead for their lives!”

That’s why this Administration’s “strategy” of using waiting lists, illegal orders, inhumane detention, family separation, expedited removal, skewed credible fear interviews, and so-called “review before an Immigration Judge” where counsel, even if present, isn’t even allow to speak, to prevent competent representation and fair presentation of claims is such an outrageous abuse of Due Process!

We are still in the early stages of fully exposing the jaw-dropping extent of these abuses to Article III Judges, Congress, and the public! And, we (and our successors and allies in the NDPA) won’t rest until the U.S. Government is finally forced to live up to its cynically abandoned promise of making U.S. Immigration Courts “the world’s best tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all!”

No wonder that Trump and his White Nationalist cronies are so scared of “gangs like ours!”

PWS

12-14-18

SCOFFLAW WATCH: FEDERAL JUDGE IN SEATTLE CLEARS WAY FOR DUE PROCESS CLAIM AGAINST ADMINISTRATION’S MISTREATMENT OF DETAINED ASYLUM SEEKERS!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/judge-declines-to-dismiss-challenge-to-us-asylum-delays/2018/12/12/3526a89c-fe3f-11e8-a17e-162b712e8fc2_story.html

Gene Johnson reports for AP in the WashPost:

SEATTLE — Immigrant rights activists can continue to challenge what they describe as unlawful U.S. government delays in asylum cases, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman in Seattle dismissed some arguments raised by the lawsuit in a ruling Tuesday, but she said the activists can pursue their claim that the delays violate the due process rights of detained asylum seekers across the country. The government sought to dismiss the case.

The Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed the lawsuit in June against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said through a spokeswoman Wednesday that it does not comment on pending litigation.

According to the complaint, migrants seeking asylum after entering the U.S. illegally have had to wait weeks or months for their initial asylum interviews, at which an immigration officer determines whether they have a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country. After that, there have been long delays in getting bond hearings, which determine whether an asylum seeker will be released from custody as the case proceeds.

They’re doing what they can to keep people locked up for prolonged periods and block asylum seekers from moving forward with their claims,” Northwest Immigrant Rights Project legal director Matt Adams said Wednesday. “What we’ve seen firsthand is many asylum seekers give up after they’ve been locked up for weeks or months without ever getting a bond hearing,” and opt to be deported rather than exercise their legal right to seek asylum.

The group initially filed the lawsuit in response to the administration’s family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying the delays had kept mothers detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, from being reunited with their children in immigration custody across the country. Those plaintiffs have since been released, but the lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of thousands of asylum seekers.

The complaint asks the judge to order the government to make credible fear determinations within 10 days and to conduct bond hearings within seven days of an asylum seeker’s request for one.

The government argued that such deadlines are not required by law and that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction to impose them. In its motion to dismiss, the Justice Department argued that because the detainees have only just arrived in the U.S. without being granted admission, they “lack a constitutional right to demand expedited procedures for such hearings.”

Pechman disagreed, saying that because the detainees had crossed into the U.S. they were entitled to greater constitutional protections than the government claimed.

“Simply put, are they ‘excludable aliens’ with little or no due process rights, or are they aliens who are in the country illegally, but nevertheless in the country such that their presence entitles them to certain constitutional protections?” she wrote. “Plaintiffs have adequately plead that they were within the borders of this country without permission when detained, and thus enjoy inherent constitutional due process protections.”

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Despite all of their disingenuous whining about being required to follow the law by mere judges, and Trump’s successful effort to fill the Federal Courts with right-wing jurists, there will be plenty more well deserved defeats for this lawless Administration.

Even the most conservative jurists tend to have a concept of the Constitution, the law, and fairness. Trump and his minions, including particularly his stooges at the DOJ, have little concern for law of any type except when it happens to advance their political agenda. It’s just a political game for them, driven by an anti-American, racist, White Nationalist agenda. That’s not likely to be a successful long-range litigation strategy with judges across the philosophical spectrum.

Many judges are going to require the Administration to comply with Due Process, as is happening here. Significantly, Judge Pechman gave short shrift to the DOJ’s argument that individuals detained at or near the border have no Due Process rights.

PWS

12-13-18

GONZOISM LIVES: Whitaker Delivers “Gonzo Apocalypto Like” Racially Tinged Xenophobic Rant On Immigration Enforcement, Including Bogus Stats and False Narratives — Targets U.S. Courts For Upholding Constitution & Rule Of Law Against White Nationalist Assault!

https://apple.news/ALcj5KtVpQ-6BYe6egb-ipw

R.G. Ratcliffe reports for Texas Monthly:

The word had come down from the U.S. Department of Justice last summer: people who enter the country without authorization are to be referred to as “illegal aliens,” not “undocumented immigrants.” So when Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was in Austin Tuesday to give a pep talk to the U.S. attorneys there, and he referred to these immigrants ten times as “illegal aliens,” and once resorted to a slang term that is sometimes considered racist as he described Austin as a Top 20 city, with “over 100,000 illegals” living in the area.

Immigrant advocates for years have tried to dissuade people from using terms like “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” because a person cannot of themselves be illegal. A person can commit an illegal act, such as entering the country without authorization or in violation of the law. Terms such as these, advocates say, dehumanize immigrants. The Associated Press in 2013 removed the term “illegal alien” from proper usage for journalists for this very reason.

But the Department of Justice memo says that since the word “undocumented” does not appear in the U.S. Code, attorneys and public information officers should refer to people who enter the country illegally as “illegal aliens.” In the most literal sense, this may be true, but it also advances the Trump Administration’s efforts to portray all immigrants who enter the country illegally as part of a force of darkness.

“More important than the financial cost we pay is the cost we pay in American lives. Massive illegal immigration makes all of us less safe,” Whitaker told the attorneys.

“We know that the vast majority of the cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and fentanyl that are killing record numbers of Americans was not made in this country. It came over the Southern border. We also know that vicious gangs like MS-13 recruit new members from the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who cross our border illegally every year. The result is that Americans die every year because we do not have a secure Southern border.” He did not mention that MS-13 got its start on the streets of Los Angeles.

Whitaker pointed to the case of Juan Lopez in Austin. Lopez last month was sentenced to 49 years in prison for raping a family friend as the woman’s child watched. Lopez had been deported after serving a sentence for homicide and then re-entered the country illegally. “It is a crushing failure to secure our border and just one example of where we can do better.”

Without giving exact details, Whitaker said the U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended more than 50,000 people in the past two months who have crossed the U.S. border illegally from Mexico, including 23,000 people in family units. “That’s the size of a small city every single month.” He said the estimated 11 million people living in the United States illegally is equal to the population of Georgia.

Whitaker repeatedly emphasized the prosecution of people who enter the country illegally, but he never mentioned President Trump’s push for a border wall. He did, however, criticize federal courts that have blocked Trump’s efforts to block immigration.

Whitaker took no questions from the news media gathered for the event. It was one-way messaging. Journalists did not have a chance to ask about the wall or whether Whitaker thought the millions of people already living in the country illegally should be deported. We didn’t get a chance to ask whether immigration reform laws would ameliorate the situation. There were no questions about reports that he is under consideration to serve as the president’s chief of staff, or the status of a Department of Justice investigation into whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke used his office for personal gain.

Whitaker’s time in office is short. Former Attorney General William Barr has been nominated by Trump to replace former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But while he holds the office, Whitaker should know a news conference without questions is just a dog and pony show that depends on media complicity.

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Here’s the “full text” of Whitaker’s Speech: https://t.co/KeNU8OQXJd

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Whitaker continues to spread the false narratives attempting to connect migrants with increased crime and drug trafficking; there is no such documented connection;
Whitaker also tries to connect migrants with gang activities; but, it’s much more likely that an asylum applicant from the Northern Triangle will be fleeing from gangs than a member of one;
Whitaker ignores the U.S.’s own role in both creating the gang problem in the Northern Triangle (it actually was “deported” from Los Angeles, as noted by Ratcliffe) and following questionable strategies to combat gangs in both the U.S. and the Northern Triangle;
The vast, vast majority of the 11 million or so undocumented individuals in the U.S. are not criminals; at worst, they are just seeking safety and a better life for themselves and their families, very understandable human tendencies; even assuming that they ultimately don’t belong here, why intentionally demean and dehumanize them by using the racially tinged term “illegal alien” and “illegals,” rather than treating them with the respect and humanity due all human beings;
The comparison between the “State of Georgia” and the number of undocumented individuals is directly out of one of Sessions’s inflammatory speeches to EOIR; the real point is that undocumented individuals are like our “51st state” — they contribute much to our economy and society (just ask those who worked for Trump) and ask for relatively little — Trump and the GOP have routinely and disgracefully exploited their labor and contributions while denying their fundamental humanity;
Well over one million of the undocumented population are actually here with legal permission: mainly through DACA and TPS; while the Administration would like to terminate those programs, they have not yet been able to do so; consequently, the individuals are not here “illegally” — they can’t be removed until their current status is terminated.
Whitaker mis-states the asylum approval rate: it’s actually 35% for 2018, not “a five-year average of 20%” as Whitaker falsely claims (since the 35% was a “recent low” the real five-year average per TRAC is much higher, well in excess of 40% — indeed up until FY 2016, asylum approvals actually exceeded denials, until the Trump Administration started interfering with the system); for the Northern Triangle it’s 23%, 20%, and 18% for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras respectively, multiples of Whitaker’s false claim of 9%; and the “allowed to remain in the U.S.” for asylum applicants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras whose cases were decided by Immigration Judges during FY 2018 were 31%, 25%, and 24% respectively);
More important, except for the restrictionist right, nobody familiar with our asylum system doubts that the approval rate for the Northern Triangle would be much higher, perhaps twice as high or more, if individuals were 1) given reasonable access to lawyers; 2) time to gather evidence and prepare their cases; and 3) had their claims adjudicated by a fair, impartial, apolitical, independent judges, well-trained in asylum law, and committed to the generous principles established by the Supremes in Cardoza-Fonseca (not today’s politicized and captive EOIR);
Many of those denied asylum, whether properly or not, clearly face harm or death upon return — but, Whitaker doesn’t admit that we’re really knowingly returning individuals to possible death;
Actually the Federal Courts are the ones upholding the “rule of law” against the efforts of biased, unqualified, political hacks like Whitaker who are committed to carrying out a racist, White Nationalist agenda that mocks our Constitution and our national values.
As noted by Ratcliffe, Whitaker lacked the guts to take questions; not really surprising for someone so committed to various false and misleading narratives.

The appointment of Whitaker as Acting AG is every bit as much of a national disgrace as the tenure of White Nationalist Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. That Trump’s next AG Bill Barr called Sessions “outstanding” does not bode well for the rule of law, or the legal rights and human dignity of people of color and other vulnerable groups who are the most in need of those protections.

Fortunately, the New Due Process Army is in the field and “ready for action” against the further abuses planned by Whitaker and Barr.

PWS

12-12-18

UPI ANALYSIS OF LATEST EOIR ASYLUM STATS ACTUALLY SHOWS THAT MANY FROM NORTHERN TRIANGLE (PARTICULARLY EL SALVADOR) HAVE VALID CLAIMS FOR PROTECTION, BUT SESSIONS’S POLITICAL ACTIONS AND CONTROL OVER U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES ARTIFICIALLY FORCED THE GRANT RATE DOWN! – It’s Time For An Independent “Article I” U.S. Immigration Court & A Level, Apolitical Playing Field For Asylum Applicants!

https://apple.news/AHg-L3Cy-SEG6Gi9SR1rk_w

Patrick Timmons reports for UPI:

Asylum denials jump; immigration judges’ discretion attacked

MEXICO CITY, Dec. 10 (UPI) — New data about the number of asylum applications granted by the United States this year show how the Trump administration has dramatically narrowed asylum granted to people fleeing persecution in their home countries — though significantly more Central Americans have been admitted over the past decade.

“Asylum acceptance rates are at a 20-year low, and the recent TRAC data confirms that,” said Sarah Pierce, policy analyst for the non-partisan and independent Migration Policy Institute, referring to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

For fiscal 2018, TRAC’s statistics show immigration judges denied 65 percent of asylum claims — up from 42 percent in 2017. There were 42,224 asylum cases decided in 2018, an 89 percent increase over the total number of cases decided in 2016.

Due to a backlog in the immigration system, some asylum seekers have been able to live in the United States for three years to five years while their claims are adjudicated, a situation the administration has tried to address by changing some rules and practices.

“This administration is trying to address people who are trying to take advantage of the system. But unfortunately this administration’s approach tends to punish asylum seekers rather than just specifically looking at those individuals who are taking advantage of the system,” Pierce said.

The administration’s broad approach to all asylum seekers has had the effect of narrowing asylum by increasing immigration judges’ workloads by setting quotas, ending discretionary decision making and rewriting immigration rules to deny relief to asylum seekers fleeing domestic and gang violence.

Immigration experts told UPI the administration’s changes to how immigration judges work has spiked a general increase in asylum denials.

Northern Triangle

There has been an increased flow of asylum seekers from Central American countries, particularly those from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

And the fact that more of them are getting approved shows they are “sincere humanitarian migrants,” Pierce said.

A new TRAC tool shows Central Americans now fare better than in previous years. Salvadorans receive asylum in rates higher than Guatemalans or Hondurans. In 2004, Salvadorans’ asylum approval rate was 6 percent. In 2018, it rose to 23 percent. Guatemala’s grant rate in 2018 was 18 percent, the lowest of three countries, with Honduras at 20 percent.

Pierce said that changes in immigration law under the Obama administration help account for significant changes in asylum approval rates for people fleeing the Northern Triangle. Immigration judges over the past decade were more accepting of domestic and gang violence as grounds for asylum, with successes helping to develop case law.

The rise in asylum for Salvadorans has to do with direct violent threats, rather than domestic violence, which is a common claim among Guatemalan asylum seekers, or gang violence, common among Hondurans.

“The circumstantial evidence suggests El Salvador tends to have the most direct violent threats,” said Everard Meade said, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

Data comparing the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum seekers’ claims is hard to come by. However, Meade said in 2014 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued its report, “Children on the Run,” about unaccompanied Central American minors highlighting direct violence in El Salvador as a reason for flight. UNHCR interviewed almost 400 children with 66 percent of El Salvadorans reporting flight for threat of direct violence Guatemalans reported 20 percent, Hondurans at 44 percent.

But Central Americans’ asylum approvals might be a blip. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions this year removed domestic violence and gang violence as grounds for asylum in immigration court proceedings.

“These private acts of violence claims are typically the ones we are seeing from the Northern Triangle,” Pierce said, “including El Salvador.”

Discretionary decision-making

The general picture, however, is that more people are failing to win asylum than ever before because the Trump administration has changed how judges work.

“The asylum decisions and denial data for fiscal year 2018 is really about discretionary relief that used to be available under [President Barack] Obama but is not available under [President Donald] Trump anymore,” Meade said.

Prior to Trump-Sessions, immigration judges used to employ a form of discretionary relief called administrative closure. This was a form of temporary protection against deportation that did not grant any permanent immigration status, unlike asylum, which is a pathway to citizenship.

“Immigration judges had people coming before them who had really compelling stories but those stories did not necessarily cleave close enough to the asylum standard to grant them asylum. But the judges really felt they did not want to return them to dangerous situations, either. They also felt they were people who were credible, who had told the truth, and so they were administratively closing their cases,” Meade said.

The practice of administrative closure ended this year with a Sessions memorandum.

“Administrative closure was a widespread practice and that is exactly what explains how the denial rate can go up so dramatically without the grant rate going down. Actually, the grant rate has gone up. In defense of the institutions, the modest increase in the grant rates suggest people have some really good asylum claims,” Meade said.

The situation in El Paso

Carlos Spector, a veteran El Paso immigration lawyer, said that although the asylum rate has increased nationwide, there is little evidence of successful asylum claims in El Paso’s immigration court.

“This year, I have lost some asylum cases that had really compelling claims,” Spector said, adding that 98 percent of his clients are Mexican.

Mexicans generally do not fare well in immigration court. In 2018, 14.5 percent of Mexican asylum seekers received asylum. Part of the reason is that immigration judges were administratively closing cases, protecting from deportation but stopping short of permanent relief.

For 2018, the latest TRAC data reveal El Paso’s immigration judges reviewed 297 cases, granting asylum 47 times. In 2017, they reviewed 148 cases and granted asylum 12 times. These low asylum rates, some of the lowest in the nation, mean El Paso’s immigration judges have a reputation for enforcing law and order, Spector said.

“I’ve been tracking asylum cases of Mexican nationals for the past few years and it is more or less the same rate along the border from San Diego to Brownsville,” Spector said.

“Because we are on the border and these judges are political appointees and these judges do understand the government’s mandate of holding or guarding the border and they take that law enforcement approach,” Spector said, “the denials are much, much higher on the U.S.-Mexico border, and they always have been.”

TRAC compiled asylum approval and denial statistics for fiscal year 2018, the first full year of Trump’s presidency, based on Freedom Of Information Act requests to the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, the agency charged with adjudicating defensive asylum claims in immigration court.

Photoby Ariana Drehsler/UPI : Jose Hernández, 17, styles his hair at El Barretal shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, on Dec. 9, 2018.

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Just as I have been saying all along! The Trump Administration’s claim that low asylum approval rates indicate the system is being “gamed” by applicants is a bogus cover up. Even taken at “face value,” a 20-25% chance of being granted asylum hardly shows a system being “gamed.” At most, it shows that Immigration Judges are applying a much more restrictive standard than Asylum Officers considering “credible fear” claims at the border. Far from being “gaming,” that would be consistent with (although not necessarily required by) an intentionally much more generous standard for getting a fair adjudication in a removal hearing (“passing credible fear”) than for actually achieving relief (“a favorable order from an Immigration Judge after a full merits hearing”).

But, what really appears to be going on here are artificially restrictive, politically inspired “tweaks” to asylum law and procedures specifically intended to disadvantage those in danger from the Northern Triangle. Additionally, inappropriate detention policies are intended to force many more applicants to proceed without lawyers or to abandon appeals — making it like “shooting fish in a barrel” for those Immigration Judges with a predilection to deny relief who are under great pressure to “produce” more final orders of removal. It also appears that a disturbing number of Immigration Judges along the Southern Border view themselves as agents of DHS and Administration enforcement policies, rather than as fair and impartial decision makers committed to giving asylum seekers the “benefit of the doubt” under the law.

This all adds up to what appears to me to be a significant “cover up” of politicized wrong-doing and a mass denial of Due Process orchestrated by the Administration through the Department of Justice.

Why are the Administration, DHS, and DOJ so afraid of giving asylum applicants fair access to lawyers, time to prepare and document their cases, and timely fair hearings before impartial quasi-judicial adjudicators whose sole focus is getting the right substantive result, rather than achieving some type of assembly line enforcement-related “production quotas?”

Why waste time on “gimmicks” — most of which eventually prove to be illegal, ineffective, or both — rather than concentrating on getting to the merits of these cases in a timely manner and “letting the chips fall where they may.”

Surely, among a largely artificially created 1.1 million case “backlog” there are hundreds of thousands of cases that could be “administratively closed” as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion to allow more recently arrived cases to be timely heard without increasing backlogs or creating further wasteful “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.”

Eventually, the “mask will be ripped off” what’s really happening in our U.S. Immigration Court system. When that happens, the results could be ugly and damaging to the reputations of those orchestrating and enabling what certainly appears to be a disgraceful and intentional miscarriage of justice!

PWS

12011-18

TRUMP THROWS TEMPER TANTRUM – THREATENS PARTIAL SHUTDOWN OF USG & ILLEGAL ACTIONS IF CONGRESS WON’T WASTE $5BILLION ON USELESS “WALL STUNT” – WILL ANOTHER OVAL OFFICE MELTDOWN FORESHADOW A “TRUMP SHUTDOWN?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-border-wall-government-shutdown.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Julie Hirshfield Davis and Michael Tackett report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday vowed to block full funding for the government if Democrats refuse to embrace his demand for a border wall, saying he was “proud to shut down the government for border security” in an extraordinarily public altercation with Democratic congressional leaders at the White House.

“If we don’t have border security, we’ll shut down the government — this country needs border security,” Mr. Trump declared in the Oval Office, engaging in a testy back-and-forth with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, even as they repeatedly asked him to keep their negotiating disputes private.

“It’s not bad, Nancy; it’s called transparency,” Mr. Trump snapped after one such interjection by Ms. Pelosi, who appeared to trigger the president’s temper when she raised the prospect of a “Trump shutdown” over what she characterized as an ineffective and wasteful wall.

“The American people recognize that we must keep government open, that a shutdown is not worth anything, and that we should not have a Trump shutdown,” Ms. Pelosi said.

. . . .

Mr. Trump had begun the day appearing to soften his stance somewhat on the wall. In a series of morning tweets, he falsely stated that substantial sections of the “Great Wall” on the southwestern border that he has long championed have already been completed, and he suggested that his administration could continue construction whether Democrats fund it or not.

That would be illegal, but it suggested that he was looking for a way to keep the government funded past Dec. 21, even if Democrats balk at wall funding.

. . . .

“People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built,” Mr. Trump wrote in one of the messages. “If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!”

. . . .

It was not clear what Mr. Trump was referring to. American troops he dispatched to the border on the eve of midterm congressional elections as part of what the president called an effort to head off a migrant “invasion” have put up concertina wire along existing fences and barriers, but the administration has yet to spend much of the $1.3 billion Congress approved for border security last year. Under restrictions put in place by Congress, none of that money could be used to construct a new, concrete wall of the sort the president has said is vital.

The president does not have the legal authority to spend money appropriated for one purpose on another task, such as wall-building.

In a joint statement on Monday night, Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi warned that the country could not afford a “Trump Shutdown.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Julie’s and Mike’s report at the above link.

“Duh,” walls as an effective means of national security went out of vogue about the beginning of the fifth century CE. But, of course, you would have to understand something about history to know how useless walls currently are as a defensive mechanism (as opposed to one for keeping subjugated people “in” like the Berlin Wall). Ironically, some of the same folks who cheered the destruction of the Berlin Wall idiotically cheer for “Trump’s Folly.”

While a wall might kill some more migrants and force smugglers to change routes and raise fees accordingly, in terms of border security it’s a classic case of “good money after bad.” Indeed, the Government would do well to stop treating refugees and other would be migrants as “criminals” to instead concentrate on stopping drug smugglers, human traffickers, terrorists, and fraudsters who actually mean to do our country harm, rather than coming in to pick our crops, make our food, build our houses, care for our sick, elderly, and children etc.

Totally contrary to Trump’s false narrative, most of those arriving at our Southern Border by “caravan” these days are not threats to the U.S. At worst, some are desperate individuals who probably face some real dangers in their home countries but don’t fit our rather arcane, restrictive, and unduly legalistic applications of refugee and asylum laws. The ones who belong should be screened, let in, and assimilated. The ones who don’t, after having a fair opportunity to present their claims for refuge, should be returned in a humane and respectful manner.

Yes, there appears to be a very small number of “bad guys” who have “infiltrated” the caravans, probably as much to prey on the vulnerable migrants as to reach the U.S. The current system appears more than adequate to identify these individuals and block their entry or promptly remove them. And, the system could and would work even better if the Administration separated border security functions from asylum adjudication functions. But, that might not provide “red meat” to a political base.

So, perhaps we can look forward to a “Trump Shutdown” over “Trump’s Folly!”

PWS

“Bottomless Pinocchios” — A Catalog Of The Liar-in-Chief’s Most Repeated Lies — Not Surprisingly, A Number Of Them Involve Immigration!

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/the-false-claims-that-trump-keeps-repeating/2018/12/09/c2859d36-fc0c-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html

Glenn Kessler and Joe Fox report for the Washington Post:

The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we’re calling “Bottomless Pinocchios” – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.

The Trump tax cut was the biggest in history

Trump repeated some version of this claim 123 times

Even before President Trump’s tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of GDP, making it the eighth largest tax cut in 100 years. This continues to be an all-purpose applause line in the president’s rallies. Read more

No, President Trump’s tax cut isn’t the ‘largest ever’

Overstating the size of U.S. trade deficits

Trump repeated some version of this claim 117 times

President Trump frequently overstates the size of trade deficits. But he tips into Four-Pinocchio territory with his repeated use of the word “lost” to describe a trade deficit. (Alternatively, he sometimes says China “made” or “took out” $500 billion.) Countries do not “lose” money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as currencies, economic growth, and savings and investment rates. Read more

Fact-checking Trump’s tough trade talk

The U.S. economy has never been stronger

Trump repeated some version of this claim 99 times

In June 2018, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant. Read more

Is this the ‘best economy ever’?

Inflating our NATO spending

Trump repeated some version of this claim 87 times

During the presidential election, Trump consistently inflated the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Once he became president, his inaccuracy has persisted, but with a twist. He often claims that “billions and billions” of dollars have come into NATO because of his complaints. All that is happening is that members have increased defense spending as a share of their economies — a process that was started before Trump even announced his candidacy. Read more

President Trump’s ongoing misunderstanding of NATO funding

The U.S. has started building the wall

Trump repeated some version of this claim 86 times

President Trump has sought $25 billion to fund his long-promised wall along the southern border. But Congress has not given it to him. There was nearly $1.6 billion included in the appropriations bill he signed early in 2018 for border protection, but the legislative language was specific: None of the funds could be used for Trump’s border wall prototypes. Instead the money was restricted to fencing, and it was generally used for replacement fencing. He also frequently overstates the amount of money he has obtained for the nonexistent wall. Read more

Has construction of Trump’s border wall started?

The U.S. has the loosest immigration laws in the world — thanks to Democrats

Trump repeated some version of this claim 52 times

Trump repeatedly claims that the United States has the loosest immigration laws, but that’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive laws, placing it 25th among developing nations in welcoming immigrants, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The president frequently blames Democrats for the current legal system but that’s wrong, too — much of current immigration policy was decided either under a Republican president or through court cases. Read more

Is there a law that requires families to be separated at the border?

Democrats colluded with Russia during the campaign

Trump repeated some version of this claim 42 times

Throughout the special counsel’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Trump has sought to deflect attention by asserting that the Democrats colluded with Russia. But he has little evidence to make his case, which largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties at the same time was working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court. In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies found that Russian entities hacked Democratic leaders’ email during the campaign. Read more

Did Hillary Clinton collude with the Russians to get ‘dirt’ on Trump to feed it to the FBI?

The border wall will stop drug trafficking

Trump repeated some version of this claim 40 times

In demanding a wall on the southern border, Trump has asserted that it would stop the flow of drugs. But the Drug Enforcement Administration says that most illicit drugs enter the United States through legal ports of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor-trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China. Read more

Will a border wall stop drugs from ‘pouring in?’

U.S. Steel is building many new plants

Trump repeated some version of this claim 37 times

This is one of Trump’s strangest claims. Since he imposed tariffs on steel, the president has repeatedly claimed that U.S. Steel was building new steel plants. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois — one in March and the other in October, for a total of 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs. Read more

The U.S. has spent $6 trillion (or more) on Middle East wars

Trump repeated some version of this claim 36 times

Trump started making a version of this claim shortly after taking office, first claiming $6 trillion but then quickly elevating it to $7 trillion. Trump acts as if the money has been spent, but he is referring to a study that included estimates of future obligations through 2056 for veterans’ care. The study combines data for both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq (2003) and the war in Afghanistan (2001), which is in Central/South Asia, not the Middle East. The cost of the combined wars will probably surpass $7 trillion by 2056, when interest on the debt is considered, almost four decades from now. Read more

Has the U.S. spent $7 trillion in the Middle East?

Thousands of MS-13 members have been removed from the country

Trump repeated some version of this claim 33 times

Within six months of becoming president, the president began claiming that his administration had deported thousands of members of the violent MS-13 gang. There had been a crackdown, but the count is in the hundreds. Then, he expanded the claim to say thousands had been deported or imprisoned. But there is nothing that supports these claims. For most of the country, MS-13 is not a threat; the estimated 10,000 members are concentrated in a few Hispanic communities, primarily around Long Island, Los Angeles and the Washington area. Read more

McCain’s vote was the only thing that blocked repeal of the Affordable Care Act

Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) dramatically refused to advance in the Senate a limited repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has repeatedly used that vote as his all-purpose excuse for the failure to eliminate the health-care law. This oversimplifies the precarious state of Obamacare repeal at the time. The Senate version of full repeal had failed, with nine “no” votes from Republicans. Even if McCain had supported the “skinny” repeal, lawmakers still would have had to negotiate a compromise agreement and passage was not assured. Read more

Robert S. Mueller III is biased because of conflicts of interest

Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times

Trump has often misleadingly claimed the “witch hunt” is tainted because of conflicts of interest, such as an unverified (and denied) dispute over golf fees when Mueller was a member of a Trump golf club. Eleven out of 16 attorneys on Mueller’s team have contributed to Democrats, including Clinton and Obama; 13 are registered Democrats. Under federal law, Mueller is not allowed to consider the political leanings of his staff when hiring them, but he took action against a former team member when texts expressing anti-Trump sentiments were discovered. Read more

Fact Check: Do the political preferences of Mueller’s team risk its independence?

Inflating gains from a 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia

Trump repeated some version of this claim 23 times

Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to the CIA, Mohammed ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The administration, with double-counting, could only document $270 billion in tentative agreements. Separately, Trump inflated the jobs said to be created from the purported investments. Many are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans. Read more

Fact Check: The Trump administration’s tally of $350 billion-plus in deals with Saudi Arabia

About this story

Source: Washington Post reporting. Reporting by Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly, Salvador Rizzo, Michelle Ye Hee Leeand Nicole Lewis. Meg Kelly also contributed to this story.

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More bogus border narratives are unfolding as I’m writing this. Disingenuous CBP officials are manipulating data to tell the Senate that the border is out of control.

What is really happening is that kids and other asylum seekers are basically turning themselves in to be processed and get the hearings to which they are entitled. Why? Because the Trump Administration has purposely slowed down the process at legal Ports of Entry.

Clearly, instead of wasting money on troops and unneeded detention, the Administration should be sending Asylum Officers to the border to complete the screening. Once screened, those with “credible fear” can be matched with lawyers. Represented asylum applicants show up for hearings nearly 100% of the time, thus making prolonged detention unnecessary.

Also, since it now appears that the bulk of the “artificial backlog” in Immigration Court actually was “illegally commenced” though defective notices, those cases could simply be removed from the docket. That would free up U.S. Immmigration Judges to hear asylum cases within a reasonable (6-18 month) time frame.

Where there is a will, there’s a way. Additionally, as I often point out, doing things the right, legal way would likely cost far less than the “publicity stunts” now being conducted by the Administration at the border. But, doing the right thing and making the laws work just isn’t something that Trump and his minions are interested in, as the “Bottomless Pinocchios” related above show!

PWS

12-11-18

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MY STATEMENT ON GRACE V. WHITAKER:

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“Hot off the wire” from “Our Gang” of Retired Immigration Judges’ Leader Judge Jeffrey Chase:

No wonder that Trump and his White Nationalist cronies are so scared of “gangs like ours!”

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Fortunately, the New Due Process Army is in the field and “ready for action” against the further abuses planned by Whitaker and Barr.

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