Tag: Jeff Sessions

ETHICS FREE ZONE – DHS AND DOJ OFFICIALS & THEIR LAWYERS SIT AROUND DISCUSSING HOW BEST TO VIOLATE LAWS AND SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS — “‘Credible fear’ was created over 20 years ago to be the standard for those arriving and not deemed admissible. It was designed to be a low bar, as those at the border have just arrived, are often scared of government officials, are sometimes traumatized, usually don’t yet have legal counsel, and have very limited ability to gather evidence,” [Retired Immigration Judge] Chase told BuzzFeed News. “Imposing a higher standard for political purposes would be contrary to our treaty obligation to not return genuine refugees.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/trump-asylum-mexico-waiting-disagree

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News, quoting extensively from “Our Gang” Leader Hon. Jeffrey Chase:

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security and Justice Department officials are feuding over a controversial plan that would force asylum-seekers at the southwestern border to remain in Mexico until their cases are decided, according to sources close the administration.

Department of Justice officials have been pushing for asylum-seekers at the border to be immediately returned to Mexico as they arrive at the border, instead of first undergoing screening for fear of persecution or torture if they are not allowed in.

Department of Homeland Security officials want asylum-seekers screened for persecution, torture, and fear before being immediately returned to Mexico, to ensure that there are no serious concerns for their safety in Mexico.

The dispute highlights the fact that key details regarding the plan are still up in the air.

A Justice Department official said there was no dispute over the screening process but that the matter was under consideration between both agencies. The official said the discussion between the two US departments were “a normal part of the process.” DHS declined to comment.

Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge, said the dispute goes to the very heart of asylum law, which grants foreigners who otherwise would not be admissible the right to enter the country if they can show that they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they are returned to the country they came from.

“‘Credible fear’ was created over 20 years ago to be the standard for those arriving and not deemed admissible. It was designed to be a low bar, as those at the border have just arrived, are often scared of government officials, are sometimes traumatized, usually don’t yet have legal counsel, and have very limited ability to gather evidence,” Chase told BuzzFeed News. “Imposing a higher standard for political purposes would be contrary to our treaty obligation to not return genuine refugees.”

BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month that the administration had been considering such a plan and that discussions with Mexico had been ongoing. The Washington Post reported last week that a deal had been agreed upon with Mexico and that asylum-seekers would remain in that country while their cases were being adjudicated. But that story was later denied by Mexican officials, and the status of any talks is uncertain. A new administration takes office in Mexico on Saturday.

The proposal was first focused on individuals who come to a port of entry to request asylum but has since been extended to include those apprehended between border crossings as well, sources said.

The discussions appear to be a renewed effort to implement a directive first raised in an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in the early days of his administration in 2017. The Mexican government publicly rejected that plan, and the Trump administration made no effort to implement the president’s instructions.

In the executive order, Trump had directed the Department of Homeland Security Secretary to pursue the option. In a memo written by then-DHS chief John Kelly, officials were told to return individuals at the border “to the extent appropriate and reasonably practicable.” Kelly cited a statute that states that certain individuals can be sent back to the contiguous country they arrived from.

Advocates have said that implementation of such a measure would put families and migrants in danger and would be quickly challenged in court.

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Well said, Jeffrey! There was a day, obviously in the past, when DOJ lawyers were concerned with assuring compliance with the law and applicable court decisions, rather than thinking of various ways to “push the envelope” by engaging in facially illegal, and certainly immoral, conduct. Hopefully, such evasion of both their oaths of office and ethical standards will be considered by future employers in the private sector.

The irony here is that with a different Administration in place, cooperation among the U.S., Mexico, and the UNHCR in ways that strengthened the Mexican asylum system, improved conditions for refugees and asylees in Mexico, encouraged regular refugee processing by both countries in or near the Northern Triangle, improved reception and processing for those at the U.S. border, and most important, constructively addressed the problems in the Northern Triangle forcing folks to flee would be a win-win-win-win for all involved.

The flow of refugees from the Northern Triangle is primarily a humanitarian, not a law enforcement situation.  Among other things, a humanitarian approach would promote advantages of applying in Mexico and reasons why it could be a rational choice for some asylum seekers; it would eschew illegal threats, cynically and intentionally created inhumane, even life-threatening, conditions, and improper sanctions to “deter” individuals from asserting their legal rights to apply for asylum in the U.S. under both our law and international law. Sadly, all of the latter are exactly what the Trump Administration is engaged in at present, with the assistance of their ethically-challenged Government “legal” team.

PWS

12-01-18

Related posts:

  1. IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!
  2. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

US DISTRICT JUDGE TIGAR STUFFS ADMINISTRATION SCOFFLAWS’ STAY REQUEST!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/politics/asylum-injunction-ruling-immigration/index.html

Ariane de Vogue and Geneva Sands, report for CNN:

Washington (CNN)A federal judge in California on Friday left in place a nationwide injunction that blocks the President’s asylum restrictions from going into effect.

Judge Jon S. Tigar of the US District Court for the Northern District of California said the government had not shown that the President’s policy “is a lawful exercise of Executive Branch authority.”
Lawyers for the Department of Justice had asked Tigar to lift his temporary restraining order — issued November 19 — while the appeals process plays out.
But Tigar refused to do so, holding that the government had failed to convince him that asylum seekers with legitimate claims would not suffer “significant harms” due to the new policy.
RELATED: Trump rails against 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in wake of asylum ruling
The move comes after President Donald Trump lashed out last week at Tigar, and said he would ultimately prevail in the case before the Supreme Court.
Earlier this month, Trump signed a proclamation that would have prevented most migrants who crossed the southern border illegally from seeking asylum.
The American Civil Liberties Union immediately sued the administration on behalf of asylum assistance groups in California. Within 10 days of the President’s proclamation, Tigar granted the ACLU’s request for a temporary restraining order. The policy has since been in legal limbo.
“We are pleased the district court continues to recognize the harm that will occur if this illegal policy goes into effect,” ACLU lead attorney Lee Gelernt said in a statement Friday.
Asked for comment, the Justice Department referred CNN to a statement issued by Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Katie Waldman and Justice Department spokesman Steven Stafford after the temporary restraining order was issued, which says in part: “Our asylum system is broken, and it is being abused by tens of thousands of meritless claims every year. As the Supreme Court affirmed this summer, Congress has given the President broad authority to limit or even stop the entry of aliens into this country.”
When he issued his order on November 19, Tigar said the Trump administration policy barring asylum for immigrants who enter outside legal checkpoints “irreconcilably conflicts” with immigration law and the “expressed intent of Congress.”
“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” Tigar wrote, adding that asylum seekers would be put at “increased risk of violence and other harms at the border” if the administration’s rule is allowed to go into effect.
On behalf of the administration, Department of Justice attorneys had argued that the court’s injunction “directly undermines the President’s determination that an immediate temporary suspension of entry between ports of entry is necessary to address the ongoing and increasing crisis facing our immigration system.”

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The statements issued by the DOJ and DHS claiming that there are “tens of thousands of meritless asylum applications” are misleading, at best. While it is true that more asylum applications are denied than are granted, (a stark reversal of the situation only a few years ago), that by no means makes them “meritless” or means that the individuals didn’t have a right to have their cases fairly adjudicated under our laws.

Indeed, the latest TRAC statistics showing a continuously declining asylum grant rate under Trump, notwithstanding worsening conditions in the Northern Triangle and in most other asylum sending countries, strongly suggests that it is the Government’s bias and blatant politicization of the Immigration Court system that is the real abuse here.

http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/539/

Clearly, Session’s perversion of the law and facts in Matter of A-B- in an effort to deny protection to one of the most clearly persecuted groups in the world — women who are victims of gender based persecution in the forms of domestic violence — is a prime example of the type of improper racist-inspired political meddling that has been allowed to take place. It has destroyed the remaining integrity of the Immigration Court system, as well as endangered the lives of many deserving refugees in need of protection to which they are legally entitled but are being denied for improper reasons. When history eventually sorts out this sordid episode, the racist officials and the “go along to get along” judges and other government officials will be clearly identified for what they are.

The idea that the U.S. Government, which has purposely created a bogus “emergency” at the Southern Border with the political stunt of sending troops rather than Asylum Officers and Judges, is preposterous! While the poor asylum seekers face a genuine danger intentionally and cynically created by Trump and his White Nationalists, they pose no real threat to the U.S. Fortunately, Judge Tigar saw through the Administration’s contemptuous threats and disingenuous arguments to the contrary.

PWS

111-30-18

 

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”

TRUMP’S CRUEL, RACIST, ILLEGAL, COWARDLY, & INHUMANE TREATMENT OF MIGRANTS SHOULD HAVE ALL DECENT AMERICANS HANGING THEIR HEADS IN SHAME! — “Our responses need to be couched in compassion for our fellow human beings, rather than in political calculations based on the presumed intentions of a racist voting bloc.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-tear-gassing-of-migrants-is-the-next-step-in-a-cruel-dehumanization-campaign/

Sonali Kolhatkar reports for TRUTHdig:

The Trump administration’s use of tear gas at the U.S. border with Mexico over the weekend has rightfully generated outrage. Just as the photo of a 2-year-old Honduran girl crying at the border this summer became a symbol for Donald Trump’s family separation policy, a photo of a terrified mother dragging her screaming twin daughters away from tear gas fired by the U.S. Border Patrol last weekend embodies the latest Trumpian act of cruelty toward desperate refugees. Maria Lila Meza Castro and her five children had made the long and arduous journey from Honduras to the U.S. border with the refugee caravan only to find herself shut out by Trump’s troops and fleeing toxic fumes.

But where many of us see desperate refugees, Trump and his backers see invading hordes. The optics of the violence inflicted on people across the border has had a different effect, depending upon one’s politics. Liberal-minded Americans felt horror and rage at seeing parents and their children choke from the tear gas, while rabid nativists like Fox News’ Tomi Lahren reveled in the severity of Trump’s actions. Lahren tweeted, “Watching the USA FINALLY defend our borders was the HIGHLIGHT of my Thanksgiving weekend.”

The media attention at the border is part of Trump’s plan to highlight to his base just how well he is protecting the U.S. from an invasion of brown people determined to enter the nation. His goal is to dehumanize and demonize.

But thanks to his repeated focus on the border, we are now seeing in graphic detail the dynamics of our immigration enforcement machinery through the camera lenses of journalists and the social media feeds of activists. The photographer who captured the images of Castro and her children running away from tear-gas fumes would likely not have been present at the scene had Trump simply ignored the refugee crisis on his Twitter feed and at his political rallies. Most of us are not aware that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has routinely used tear gas at the U.S.-Mexico border, including under President Barack Obama. CBP responded to Newsweek’s request for information with details about how “its personnel have been using tear gas, or 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile (CS), since 2010, deploying the substance a total of 126 times since fiscal year 2012.” The rate of tear-gas use has spiked under Trump, however. CBP also told the media outlet that it “routinely uses” pepper spray. Trump’s strategy to focus on the refugees as a midterm election campaign issue has backfired and inadvertently exposed the federal government’s cruelty toward immigrants.

Trump has tried hard to spin the weekend incident in his favor. On three occasions on Monday alone, the president dug in his heels about news from the border. During a rally in Mississippi for Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump read a statement that said, “We will not tolerate any form of assault or attack upon our border agents … or any attempt to destroy federal property … or bring chaos and violence to American soil.” Later, speaking to reporters, Trump defended the use of tear gas, saying that Border Patrol forces “were being rushed by some very tough people,” repeating the claim that agents were acting in self-defense against violent invaders. At a roundtable the same day, Trump went as far as accusing people of being “grabbers,” saying people “grab a child because they think they’re going to have a certain status.” The claim is so ludicrous that had it come out of the mouth of any other president before Trump, it would have caused tremendous controversy.

Whether Trump’s base is buying his spin is arguable. After the president hammered on the “migrant caravan” issue for weeks before the midterm elections, going as far as deploying thousands of military troops and barbed wire along the border, Democrats won a large number of seats in the House and flipped an embarrassingly large number of red seats to blue. It might be that the anti-immigrant fearmongering has hit a wall.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is doing its usual job of casting itself as Republican-lite on immigration. Instead of distancing himself from Trump’s widely denounced cruelty, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has decided his party will indeed support the president’s xenophobic plan for a border wall—just not to the extent Trump wants. Rather than the $5 billion in funding that Trump is demanding, Schumer has offered to support a $1.6 billion appropriation—not exactly the type of bold thinking demanded by a blue-wave mandate. Schumer appears to be channeling the same sort of centrist appeasement of right-wing values that makes his party so unpopular.

Perhaps the Democratic leader was taking the advice of New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman, who penned a sanctimonious screed calling on Democrats “to be the adults” and assure the public “that they’re committed to securing our borders.” Friedman also flippantly referred to undocumented immigrants by  using the favored right-wing slur of “illegals.” Conservative outlets loved his proposal to build a “high wall with a big gate.”

Schumer and Friedman’s thinking reflects what former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said to The Guardian a week ago when she suggested that in order for European leaders to curb the right-wing populist wave across their continent, they must show that they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.” She added, “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration, because that is what lit the flame.” Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the paper, responded to the interview, saying aptly, “[T]he former presidential candidate illustrated how a certain brand of centrist politician has no rebuke or response to the far right other than to mimic their tactics.”

Politicians are presenting the public with a set of opposing ideas that they say characterizes the current debate on immigration: “open borders” versus “zero tolerance.” But that is a red herring. It does not address the fact that Central Americans who are fleeing violence in countries like Honduras (which the U.S. has had a hand in destabilizing) are seeking asylum. Asylum seekers have clear and tangible rights under both U.S. and international law. The Trump administration’s year-long effort to change existing asylum laws is a testament to this hard fact. Trump and his colleagues are trying to change the rules of the game because as the rules currently stand, refugees have a right to make a case for asylum within the U.S. (not Mexico).

The thousands of human beings currently camped out in Tijuana in desperate conditions, at the end of a long and arduous journey, are real people. Period. Their humanity should be the starting point of our conversations about immigration and asylum. As this journalist writing for Teen Vogue has done in her profile of seven young people traveling in the caravan, we need to see the faces and hear the stories of migrants’ lives before taking the word of our political leaders. Our responses need to be couched in compassion for our fellow human beings, rather than in political calculations based on the presumed intentions of a racist voting bloc.

Sonali Kolhatkar
Columnist
Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network,
IN THIS ARTICLE:
COMMENTS
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Immigration is about humanity, human rights, the rule of law (asylum applicants are exercising rights guaranteed by our statutes and international law as well as a fair determination process guaranteed by our Constitution) and whether we really believe in our Constitution’s guarantee of Due Process for everyone in the U.S.
PWS
11-30-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICY: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE!” — Also, ICE Intentionally Falsifies Court Hearing Dates — Where Is The Accountability?
  2. WHITE NATIONALIST ADMINISTRATION’S NEXT TARGET FOR ABUSE: LEGAL IMMIGRANTS! — PLUS, SESSIONS’S CONTINUING “DECONSTRUCTION” OF DUE PROCESS AND JUSTICE IN THE U.S. IMMIGRATION COURTS!
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. THE ROUNDTABLE IN ACTION: HON. ILYCE SHUGALL DELIVERS POWERFUL STATEMENT IN THE LA TIMES ON WHY SHE COULD NO LONGER SERVE AS A JUDGE IN OUR OBSCENELY DISTORTED AND UNFAIR U.S. IMMIGRATON COURT SYSTEM – “But nothing prepared me for the unprecedented, unfair and unworkable policies the Trump administration imposed on the courts and the immigration process.”

HERE’S WHAT THE DISHONEST SCOFFLAW OFFICIALS IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Many Who Escape From The Northern Triangle Are, In Fact, Refugees — When They Are Given Access To Competent Counsel & Fair Hearings Before Fair & Impartial Judges, They Often Succeed In Getting Protection! – Here’s Another “Real Life” Example!

“New Due Process Army” stalwart, Professor Alberto Benitez of the George Washington Law Immigration Clinic, reports:

Friends,
Please join me in congratulating Immigration Clinic student-attorney Megan Elman, and her clients, R-G, his wife, J, and their two kids, ages 10 and 5 respectively, R and L, from El Salvador.  This afternoon, after a two and a half-hour hearing, IJ Cynthia S. Torg granted the clients’ asylum application.
R-G was a maritime police officer, and because of that status, he and his family were threatened with death by mara gang members.  During an outing at the beach, the family had a gun pointed at them while being threatened. One of the maras told R-G that his order was only to tell him to move away, but he wished he had been given the order to kill him, because he would have preferred to cut off R-G’s head and hang it from  a tree.  Afterward, R and J tried to file a complaint with their local police, but were advised by the police not to bother and instead flee the country.  That night, unknown, masked, armed men appeared outside their house.  Eventually the men left, but the family decided to flee to the USA.
Congratulations also to Sarah DeLong, Jonathan Bialosky,  Solangel González, and Sam Xinyuan Li, who previously worked on this case. 
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Alberto Manuel Benitez
Professor of Clinical Law
Director, Immigration Clinic
The George Washington University Law School
650 20th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052
(202) 994-7463
(202) 994-4946 fax
abenitez@law.gwu.edu
THE WORLD IS YOURS…
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Contrary to what the Trump Administration and EOIR Management would have you believe, these types of cases are neither unique nor extraordinary in their factual setting. I encountered lots of “slam dunk” Northern Triangle asylum, withholding, and/or CAT cases at the Arlington Immigration Court.
What is unusual is that these individuals; 1) got access to the hearing process, 2) had access to competent pro bono counsel, 3) had sufficient time in a non-detained setting to gather evidence in support of their applications, 4) were given sufficient time to fully present their cases in court, 5) didn’t have to wait many years for their final hearing, and 6) and perhaps most significantly, were fortunate enough to have a fair, impartial, and scholarly Immigration Judge like Judge Cynthia S. Torg, to decide their cases. I’d also infer from this description that the DHS Assistant Chief Counsel played a constructive role in critically, yet fairly and professionally, developing the facts so that the Immigration Judge could make an immediate decision and appeal could be waived.
Imagine how this case might have come out had it occurred in Atlanta, Charlotte, or El Paso where the Immigration Judges are notorious for prejudging asylum cases against the applicants and merely providing the “trappings of due process.” Or, if these individuals had been forced to “represent” themselves in a godforsaken so-called “detention court” unprepared, traumatized, and within a short time after arrival. Or, if the Immigration Judge had insisted on truncating the process to complete her “quota” of four cases per day. Or, if under the Trump regime, they had never been given access to the Immigration Court hearing process in the first place. Or, if the Assistant Chief Counsel had appealed to the BIA where delays are common and panels vary widely as to their commitment to a fair, impartial, and overall generous view of asylum law in accordance with their own (often cited, not always followed) precedent in Matter of Mogharrabi! Or, if after the fact, a political hack like Jeff Sessions had arbitrarily and unethically intervened to deny relief to satisfy his White Nationalist restrictionist “agenda.”
The truth is that many, perhaps the majority, of the Northern Triangle asylum cases could be efficiently and promptly granted by the USCIS Asylum Office. With the “reinstatement” of A-R-C-G- (recognizing domestic violence) and some positive precedents (when’s he last time you saw one of those from the BIA on asylum?) covering recurring situations such as this one, many more Northern Triangle asylum cases could be granted by stipulation of counsel following short hearings before the Immigration Judges.
On the flip side, in a fairer system, it would be easier for everyone to recognize situations that didn’t merit protection under the law after fair hearings. My experience in Arlington was that when I listened carefully and issued a clear and reasoned explanation of why protection could not be granted, the applicants often (not always) would waive appeal and accept my order as final. Actual, as opposed to cosmetic, fairness helps both sides to accept the decisions below.
That’s precisely what the biased Jeff Sessions has “disempowered” in this now inherently unfair court system. A system run by political officials in the Trump Administration (or any other Administration for that matter) can never be perceived as fair.
Issuance and enforcement of more positive precedents by the BIA (without the current political interference by the DOJ) would also lead to greater uniformity, as judges in places like Atlanta, Charlotte, El Paso, Stewart, etc., would be required to follow the asylum laws and apply them in the generous manner required by the Supreme Court in Cardoza-Fonseca, rather than acting on their enforcement biases against asylum seekers and trying to “lead the league” in producing rote unfair removal orders to the delight of the DOJ politicos.
If restructured into an independent court system with Due Process as the one and only goal and a merit selection system for judges going forward, the Immigration Courts have the potential to make justice with efficiency the norm, rather than the exception. But, that’s not going to happen in the current  politically compromised and incompetently administered structure of EOIR within DOJ.
America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution demands it! 
PWS
11-28-18

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  3. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  4. HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!

JRUBE @ WASHPOST: Trump’s Racist & Intentionally Illegal Immigration Enforcement Policies Have Been A Failure & A Gross Abuse of Government Authority & Taxpayer Resources — It’s High Time For Some Real Accountability!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/11/27/congressional-oversight-should-start-with-a-policy-fiasco-like-this-one/

Rubin writes in WashPost:

Trump administration scandals surely must be examined by the new Democratic-controlled House, which intends to take its constitutional obligations seriously, in contrast with the GOP House majority. But congressional oversight should be about more than scandals: Equally important is to probe the policy disasters (as numerous as the ethical lapses), both to hold the executive branch accountable and to help formulate appropriate legislation. The border situation is a prime example.

The Post reports:

A day after U.S. agents fired tear gas to repel migrants breaking through the border fence in Southern California, Homeland Security officials defended the use of force and their decision to close the country’s busiest port of entry, saying they expect additional confrontations and shutdowns.

Facing dismal conditions in Mexico and long waits for the chance to request asylum in the United States, thousands of Central American migrants are becoming more agitated, and officials see no quick resolution to the tensions that erupted Sunday. …

On Monday, critics of the Trump administration denounced border agents’ use of force on groups that included families with children, but U.S. officials praised what they called “quick and effective action” against crowds of stone-slinging young men who pried open the border fence at multiple locations to squeeze through.

Like the family separation debacle, this is a crisis of the Trump administration’s own making. Sending the military (with threats to use force on civilians), threatening to “close the border” and attempting to issue a blanket denial of asylum (halted by the courts) have all created a sense of panic:

The migrants who participated in Sunday’s border rush were a minority among the 5,000 or so Central Americans who have arrived in caravan groups to Tijuana in recent weeks hoping to enter the United States. Critics of the administration’s hard-line response have insisted that members of the caravan groups would exercise their legal right to seek asylum at U.S. border crossings. But with more than 4,000 people on a wait list to approach the border crossing, and U.S. immigration authorities insisting that they have the capacity to process just 60 to 100 asylum seekers per day, frustration has been welling at the camp where migrants are sleeping in tents and enduring long lines for food.

Instead of sending troops and making unconstitutional threats, the Trump administration should be dispatching an army of judges to consider the asylum applications — and working with Central American governments to address the conditions that force their citizens to flee.

Rather than accept responsibility for their own bad decision-making, the Trump administration falsely accuses the Obama administration of practicing the same inhumane family separation policy. (The Post’s fact checkers find: “It’s not the first time [President] Trump tries to minimize the scope of his family separations at the border by claiming that President Barack Obama had the same policy. This claim and its variations have been roundly debunked. We gave them Four Pinocchios in June. … There is simply no comparison between Trump’s family separation policy and the border enforcement actions taken by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.”)

‘We come in peace’: Central American migrants’ uncertain future

A full congressional investigation is essential to answer the most basic questions:

  • Who issued the zero-tolerance policy, and who approved it?
  • What discussion/consideration of the ensuing family separations was undertaken?
  • What basis is there for the administration’s assertions that there are “Middle Eastern” people and criminals in the caravan? (“It has almost nothing but supposition to show the public. Many of the caravan members are women and children fleeing violence in their home countries or seeking economic opportunity in the United States. They hardly fit Trump’s description of ‘very tough people’ rushing the border.”)
  • Where are the “stone-cold criminals” Trump keeps claiming are part of the caravan, and why wouldn’t they be rejected through the normal asylum evaluation process?
  • Against whom did U.S. agents lob tear gas?

Aside from debunking a host of false claims by the Trump administration and anti-immigrant zealots, the hearings ideally should produce legislation that at a bare minimum permanently bans family separations, allocates funds for border security and for immigration judges (even Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, supports that), gives protection to the dreamers and supports aid to Central American countries from which migrants are fleeing.

In short, Congress needs to do its job, instead of acting as a cheerleader for Trump’s racist, hysterical rhetoric.

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I’ve been saying this for a long time!  There has been no accountability for anything under the GOP. including unwarranted deficits, high-level corruption (starting with the White House and the Trump family), and total waste of taxpayer money.

And, it’s not too late to hold corrupt White Nationalist scofflaw Jeff Sessions accountable for his gross abuses of his office, of our Constitution, and his crimes against humanity. How about some accountability for the evil racist anti-American subversive Stephen Miller? Also, don’t forget airhead sycophant Nielsen and her DHS underlings who mindlessly mouth Trump lies by blaming the Federal Courts, Democrats, and, most despicably, the victims for the messes that their own cruel incompetence and mockery of the rule of law has created!

PWS

11-28-18

Related posts:

  1. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  2. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories
  3. GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!
  4. TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION “POLICIES” ARE BASED ON RACISM, CRUELTY, LIES, & KNOWINGLY FALSE NARRATIVES — THE GOP HAS SOMETIMES ENCOURAGED, & OTHER TIMES ENABLED, THESE OUTRAGES AGAINST HUMANITY & THE RULE OF LAW — Now Some Accountability For These Despicable Actions Are On the Horizon!

TAL @ SF CHRONICLE: Trump’s Scofflaw Attack On Local Jurisdictions Is Not Only Terrible Law Enforcement, But Also Is A Stupid & Risky Litigation Strategy!

https://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Trump-gambled-big-on-sanctuary-cities-Could-he-13425437.php

Trump gambled big on sanctuary cities. Could he lose big?

Tal Kopan

 

WASHINGTON — On July 1, 2015, a single gunshot rang out on San Francisco’s Pier 14, fatally wounding 32-year-old Kate Steinle. By July 3, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was tweeting about it.

 

An undocumented immigrant and five-time deportee who had been released from San Francisco jail was charged with her murder, though he was acquitted two years later. By the time he went on trial, the incident had become a rallying cry for conservatives in general and Trump in particular. He took action just days into his presidency to block federal funds to sanctuary cities, a catch-all term that describes jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

 

And then Trump’s administration began to lose — repeatedly — in court.

 

Now, experts say that by continuing to press the issue, the administration’s strategy could backfire — possibly jeopardizing the cooperation that federal authorities now receive from many local governments and preventing Congress from even passing legislation on the topic.

Related Stories

 

Trump’s first legal setback came in response to the executive order he issued to block any federal funding to sanctuary cities, when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in April 2017 that he could not broadly withhold money to force cooperation with immigration agents.

 

Trump, via then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then tried to impose more targeted punishment, making law-enforcement grant money conditional on cities’ cooperation with immigration enforcement. Courts in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco again blocked his efforts. The Justice Department also sued California to try to pre-empt its state sanctuary law. A federal judge in Sacramento blocked that as well.

 

But it’s not just the grants that are at stake — the administration is at risk of losing the one law on which it has hung all its efforts.

 

The key development came in May in an unrelated case, when the Supreme Court ruled that a federal law prohibiting states from legalizing sports gambling was unconstitutional. The justices said the law illegally “commandeers” states to follow federal policy and intrudes on their lawmaking authority.

 

The decision had major ramifications for sanctuary cities litigation.

 

The Trump administration’s anti-sanctuary campaign is based on a piece of immigration law commonly referred to by its code number, 1373. That law prohibits state and local governments from restricting information about an immigrant’s status from federal officials.

 

Former President Barack Obama’s administration made some law enforcement grant money conditional on compliance with 1373. The Trump administration seized on that and sought to expand the interpretation of what was required of cities and states.

 

The law, government lawyers argued, covered more than just a person’s immigration status. They said it also required local governments to share the date immigrants would be released from custody, so federal agents could pick them up. The law became the underpinning of the government’s lawsuit over California’s sanctuary legislation.

 

However, lower courts following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the gambling case have applied it to 1373-related lawsuits — and have found that the immigration law also violates local governments’ rights.

 

A federal judge in Philadelphia ruled in June that not only were the immigration-related conditions on grants unconstitutional, so was 1373 itself. A federal judge in Chicago followed suit in July. In October, U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco agreed, ruling in favor of San Francisco and striking down 1373.

 

If the administration leaves those cases where they are, the effects will be relatively minimal. Each of those lower court rulings applies only to the cities that sued the Trump administration — they would not become nationally binding precedent unless federal lawyers appeal the decisions to higher courts and lose.

 

“If I were them, I would not want this at the Supreme Court, and would just leave it, leave these decisions as they are and just let the rest of the country continue to think that 1373 is constitutional,” said Bill Hing, professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco.

 

Some issues in the cases have been heard on appeal, but those were decided before the Supreme Court’s gambling ruling. The Justice Department has filed a pending appeal in the Chicago case, looking not to overturn the judge’s decision but to seek a ruling that it and the administration’s other courtroom defeats should apply only to the individual cities and not nationwide.

 

Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and contributor to the conservative legal group the Federalist Society, argues that winning on the issue of limiting nationwide rulings would be worth it, even if the administration jeopardizes 1373 in the process. He argues that appellate courts can decide these cases without needing to weigh in on 1373, which he called a “useless statute.”

 

“If that statute’s declared unconstitutional, then so what?” Blackman said. “The government often enacts policies that they know have a greater than average chance of failing, but if it advances the agenda of the executive branch, it’s worth taking the chance.”

 

Hing, though, called that strategy risky in light of the high court’s gambling decision. If the Trump administration keeps losing, he said, cities that cooperate now with federal immigration authorities could be sued by sanctuary advocates with legal precedent on their side.

 

Justice Department spokesman Steven Stafford said it was “absurd” to argue that sanctuary jurisdictions should receive federal law enforcement funding. The agency, he says, wants local authorities to “stop actively obstructing federal law enforcement.”

 

That position “is not only allowed by the Constitution, it is demanded by the Constitution,” Stafford said. “The Supreme Court’s decision in (the gambling case) has no bearing on the federal government’s ability to place conditions on funding.”

 

Immigration attorney Leon Fresco, who served in the Justice Department under Obama, said the Trump administration may have never believed it would prevail on sanctuary cities, but pursued the case to win a political talking point and potentially spur congressional action. But he warned that if courts make clear it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to force state and local governments to cooperate with immigration agents, it could give congressional Democrats cover for not acting.

 

“They’re making it easier for Democrats to say, ‘It’s not I’m not for solving this issue, it’s that we legally can’t,’ ” Fresco said. “The more (Trump officials) tease this out and make it true, the more likely they are to lose not just the legal issue, but the political issue.”

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Bottom line: The Trump Administration essentially is abusing the Federal Courts with largely frivolous litigation to score political points with its base.  Seems like fraud, waste, and abuse, as well as unethical behavior on the part of DOJ attorneys.

PWS

11-28-18

 

Related posts:

  1. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  2. TAL @ SF CHRON: 9TH CIR. STICKS A FORK IN CORE OF “GONZO APOCALYPTO” SESSIONS’S CHILD ABUSE PROGRAM — Many Of DOJ’s Wasteful “Criminal” Prosecutions Of Harmless Asylum Seekers Were Illegal — Conservative Icon Judge Jay Bybee Becoming A Key Judicial Voice For The Rule Of Law Against Trump & Co’s Executive Abuses!
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. JAMELLE BOUIE @ SLATE: TRUMP, SESSIONS, MILLER & THE GOP RESTRICTIONISTS HAVE PUT GOOD OL’ 1920S RACISM AT THE FOREFRONT OF THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA! –“What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful? . . . That is not what a good nation should do, and we need to get away from it.” — J. “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Attorney General of the United States of America & Unapologetic White Nationalist With A Long History Of Racism!

GENDER-BASED PERSECUTION IN THE FORM OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE KILLED 87,000 WOMEN LAST YEAR, & UNDOUBTEDLY MAIMED, DISABLED, TORTURED, & DISFIGURED MANY MORE – Jeff Sessions Misrepresented Facts & Manipulated Law To Deny Protection To Victims & Potential Vctims In Matter of A-B- — Dead Women Can’t “Get In (The Non-Existent) Line,” Gonzo! – It’s A “Pandemic” Aided, Abetted, & Encouraged By Corrupt Officials Like Sessions

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/domestic-violence-most-common-killer-of-women-united-nations_us_5bfbf61ee4b0eb6d931142ac

Alanna Vagianos reports for HuffPost:

The most dangerous place for women is in their own homes, a new report from the United Nations concludes.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released the “Global Study on Homicide: Gender-related Killing of Women and Girls” on Sunday to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The report analyzed the violence perpetrated against women worldwide in 2017, looking at intimate partner violence and family-related killings such as dowry- and honor-related murders.

Last year, 87,000 women were murdered around the world, and more than half (50,000 or 58 percent) were killed by partners or family members. Over a third (30,000) of those intentionally killed last year were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. This means that, globally, six women are killed every hour by someone they know.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described violence against women as a “global pandemic” in a Sunday statement marking the international day of recognition.

“It is a moral affront to all women and girls, a mark of shame on all our societies and a major obstacle to inclusive, equitable and sustainable development,” he said. “At its core, violence against women and girls is the manifestation of a profound lack of respect ― a failure by men to recognize the inherent equality and dignity of women. It is an issue of fundamental human rights.”

The U.N. report also highlighted that women are much more likely to die from domestic violence than men are. According to the study, 82 percent of intimate partner homicide victims are women and 18 percent are men.

“While the vast majority of homicide victims are men, women continue to pay the highest price as a result of gender inequality, discrimination and negative stereotypes. They are also the most likely to be killed by intimate partners and family,” UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov said.

The study suggested that violence against women has increased in the last five years, drawing on data from 2012 in which 48,000 (47 percent) of female homicides were perpetrated by intimate partners or family members.

Geographically, Asia had the most female homicides (20,000) perpetrated by intimate partners or family members in 2017, followed by Africa (19,000), North and South America (8,000), Europe (3,000) and Oceania (300). The U.N. does point out that because the intimate partner and family-related homicide rate is 3.1 per 10,000 female population, Africa is actually the continent where women are at the greatest risk of being murdered by a partner or family member.

Head over to the U.N. study to read more. 

HuffPost’s “Her Stories” newsletter brings you even more reporting from around the world on the important issues affecting women. Sign up for it here.

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Sessions is already America’s most notorious unpunished child abuser! Now, he can add “aiding and abetting domestic violence” and “voluntary manslaughter” to the many human rights and civil rights violations and transgressions of the teachings of Jesus Christ for which he will someday have to answer to his Maker (even if he has the undeserved good fortune to escape “earthly accountability” for his actions).

Meanwhile, advocates should be using the factual information in this report and other expert opinions on the “pandemic” to overcome the fabricated factual and legal basis for Matter of A-B- and the bogus arguments manufactured by restrictionists..

The real “particular social group” staring everyone in the face is “women in X country.” It’s largely immutable and certainly “fundamental to identity,” particularized, and socially distinct. It clearly has a strong nexus to the grotesque forms of harm inflicted on women throughout our world. And, there is an ever-growing body of expert information publicly available to establish that, totally contrary to Sessions’s bad-faith distortion of the record in A-B-, many countries of the world are unwilling, unable, or both unwilling and unable to offer a reasonable level of protection to women facing gender-based persecution in the form of DV. 

Sessions has unwittingly set the wheels of positive change in motion! It’s time to force judges at all levels, legislators, and government officials to recognize the reality of gender-based persecution in today’s world and that it is one of the major forms of persecution clearly covered by the U.N. Convention.

Forget about the bogus “floodgates” argument.  The U.N. Convention came directly out of World War II and was intended to insure that the Holocaust and the “Red Terror” did not happen again.  The definition would clearly have covered most of the pre-War European Jewish population and tens of millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of individuals stuck behind the Iron Curtin. If the numbers are large, then it’s up to the signatory countries to come together, pool resources, and think of constructive ways of addressing the problems that generate refugee flows, not just inventing creative ways of avoiding their legal and moral responsibilities.

Don’t repeat 1939! Due Process Forever! Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight for human rights, human values, and human decency against the selfish forces of darkness and dishonesty who have gained control of too many countries in the Western World (including, sadly, our own)!

PWS

11-27-18

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

“OUR GANG” IN ACTION: 9th CIR. REMANDS JENNINGS V. RODRIGUEZ, KEEPS INJUNCTION IN EFFECT, HINTS THAT ADMINISTRATION SCOFFLAWS COULD BE IN FOR ANOTHER BIG LOSS! – Will We See The End Of Indefinite Mandatory Immigration Detention & A Resurgence Of The Fifth Amendment?

http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2018/11/19/13-56706.pdf

“Our Gang” of Retired U.S. Immigration Judges continues to play a key role in defending Due Process and advancing the cause of justice in America!  Here’s what one of our leaders, Judge Jeffrey Chase, had to say about the latest case decided in accordance with the arguments made in our Amicus Brief:

Hi all:  I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  It seems just before the holiday, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision in Rodriguez v. Marin (the remand of the Jennings case from the Supreme Court concerning indefinite detention).  20 of us were amici on a brief filed with the 9th Cir. drafted by a team at Wilmer Hale headed by Adriel Cepeda-Derieux.

The Supreme Court remanded for consideration of the constitutional question, which the district court, on remand, will consider in the first instance.  The following language by the Circuit Court from its decision is heartening:

Like the Supreme Court, we do not vacate the permanent injunction pending the consideration of these vital constitutional issues. We have grave doubts that any statute that allows for arbitrary prolonged detention without any process is constitutional or that those who founded our democracy precisely to protect against the government’s arbitrary deprivation of liberty would have thought so. Arbitrary civil detention is not a feature of our American government.

Stay tuned!  Attached is a link to the full decision, and a PDF copy of our amicus brief.  Best, Jeff

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Great language from the Ninth Circuit. Sadly, however, unconstitutional conduct and mockery of the rule of law, particularly in connection with immigration matters is a mainstay of this “Scofflaw Administration.” (I will note that the Obama Administration took the same “thumb your nose at our Constitution” position as Trump has in this long-running case.)
Trump and his DOJ lawyers like to advertise that they consider the Supremes “bought and paid for” and that they fully expect the GOP-appointed majority to “take a dive” every time the Administration wants to bend the law or operate in a “Constitution free” zone. As an indication of their total contempt for the judicial process and their belief that the “own” a majority of the Supremes, they have taken the almost unprecedented step in a number of key cases of trying to “short-circuit” the normal judicial process in the lower Federal Courts by going straight to the Supremes with the pleas for intervention.
But, in this case, they are likely to be out of luck.  The case has already been to the Supremes and they quite pointedly “punted” it back to the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court. As the Ninth Circuit notes in its remand opinion, the Fifth Amendment constitutional issue is straightforward and was fully briefed by the parties before the Supremes. But, it’s obvious that the Supremes wanted no part of it at that time.
So, it’s highly unlikely that the Supremes will intervene before the case works its way back up through the District Court and the Ninth Circuit, a process that will take months, if not years. Meanwhile, the injunction against indefinite detention without bond hearings remains in effect within the Ninth Circuit, which generates the largest number of immigration cases.
If Chief Justice Roberts really wants to demonstrate judicial independence and fair and impartial justice within the Third Branch this is his chance (along with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, who both would do well to put some distance between themselves and Trump) to show it in actions, not just rhetoric!
He squandered his opportunity in the “Travel Ban” case. If nothing else, he can now see that rather than respectfully considering his “warning shots,” Trump has specifically ignored them and treated the Chief Justice with the same utter contempt as he treats the spineless lackeys who surround his presidency.
But, the good thing about “judging,” at any level, is that you often get a chance to redeem yourself for past mistakes. Whether Roberts has the judicial integrity and leadership skills to pull it off, remains to be seen.
This also should be a “warning shot” to the DOJ that former AG Sessions’s vile plan (which he left unfinished when Trump unceremoniously axed him) to undo bond for asylum applicants who pass credible fear, on the basis of a clearly bogus and contrived reading of the Supreme’s Jennings v. Rodriguez remand, is likely to be found unconstitutional and therefore “DOA” in the Ninth Circuit. 
PWS
11-27-18

Related posts:

  1. CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

WILLA FREJ @ HUFFPOST: Trump’s Blatant Lies About Family Separation Just Keep Flowing!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-child-separation-obama_us_5bfbb980e4b0eb6d93105dd6

President Donald Trump falsely claimed that his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border was the “exact same” as the one implemented during the Obama administration.

In complaining about a “60 Minutes” segment that aired Sunday, Trump tried to deflect criticism of his “zero tolerance” immigration policy by arguing that former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush also separated immigrant families.

“I tried to keep them together but the problem is, when you do that, vast numbers of additional people storm the Border,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “So with Obama seperation [sic] is fine, but with Trump it’s not.”

. . . .

Obama deported a record number of immigrants during his time in office which earned him the nickname of “deporter-in-chief.” Prioritizing the removal of people with criminal histories, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 2.7 million people between fiscal years 2009 and 2016.

The administration worked to quickly detain and deport migrants for several months in 2014, in response to a surge in migrant arrivals. Yet children who had come into the country with their parents didn’t get separated from them, and if families got deported, they were deported together.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that the Flores agreement ― a 1997 federal court decision requiring children to remain in custody for as little time as possible ― also applied to both accompanied and unaccompanied children. They could only be held in detention for a maximum of 20 days.

But Trump administration has gone far beyond his predecessor, separating almost 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in the spring. Many were held in caged detention centers and exposed to severe health consequences. Trump has also tried to withdraw from the Flores settlement and put forth new rules to replace it, which could lead to children being detained indefinitely.

As for deportations, the Trump administration opted to prosecute every single migrant who crossed the border illegally, expanding the Obama-era strategy of focusing on criminals.

The notion that Trump is merely carrying out Obama’s legacy is “preposterous,” Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School, told NBC News. “There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent.”

“The agencies were surfacing every possible idea,” a top Obama domestic policy advisor, Cecilia Muñoz, told The New York Times. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

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Read Willa’s full article, including Trump’s revolting tweets, at the link.

Separate ‘em, jail ‘em, abuse ‘em, gas ‘em! What’s not to like about an unhinged authoritarian with a neo-Fascist program, a propaganda machine masquerading as “news,” and a bunch of mindless supporters who cheer as he and his band of cowards pick on kids and the downtrodden?

Every day is a new “Reichstag Fire” – a fake, manufactured “crisis” and a call to blame and eradicate the “usual suspects.” Some day there will be hell to pay for America’s abandoning human values and allowing Trump to represent our Government! We should all be ashamed of what our country is doing in the name of fake “border security.”

We are diminishing ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!

PWS

11-26-18

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  2. “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” MORPHS INTO CONTEMPT FOR COURT AS ADMINISTRATION TELLS COURT & SEPARATED FAMILIES “GO POUND SAND” — They Just Don’t Care About Humanity!
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. 🤮NO PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TOWARD MEN (WOMEN, OR ESPECIALLY CHILDREN) FROM REGIME OF “BAD SANTAS” 🦹🏿‍♂️🎅🏻— Illegally Separated Families Continue To Suffer Irreparable Trauma, 😰 Volunteer Groups 😇🗽⚖️ Left To Pick Up Pieces — A Reminder That Defeated Regime Has Mocked, Disparaged, & Trashed Christ’s Values & Assaulted Humanity Over Four Christmases!🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️👎🏻

INSIDE EOIR: LA TIMES: Former EOIR Attorney Reveals Truth Of Sessions’s Ugly, Corrupt, Mean-Spirited, Attack On Judicial Independence & The Totally Demoralizing Effect On Judges & Other Dedicated Civil Servants – No Wonder This “Captive Court System” Is A Dysfunctional Mess Being Crushed Under An Artificially Created “Sessions Legacy Backlog” of 1.1 Million+ Cases With Neither Sane Management Nor Any End In Sight!

https://apple.news/AnkcqK5ITQ76IwHCZq2FnBw

I resigned from the Department of Justice because of Trump’s campaign against immigration judges

Gianfranco De Girolamo November 26, 2018, 3:05 AM

One of the proudest days of my life was Dec. 16, 2015, when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

I shed tears of joy as I swore allegiance to the United States at the Los Angeles Convention Center, along with more than 3,000 other new Americans. I was celebrating a country that had welcomed me with open arms, treated me as one of its own and opened doors I hadn’t known existed. Just a few years before, in the remote village in southern Italy where I grew up, this would have been unimaginable.

Another of my proudest moments came just a year later, when I was awarded a coveted position in the U.S. Department of Justice. This happened in late November 2016, a few weeks after President Trump was elected.

Like many, I harbored reservations about Trump. But I did not waver in my enthusiasm for the job. In law school, l had learned about the role of civil servants as nonpolitical government employees who work across administrations — faithfully, loyally and diligently serving the United States under both Republicans and Democrats.

I was designated an attorney-advisor and assigned to the Los Angeles immigration court. There, I assisted immigration judges with legal research, weighed in on the strengths and weaknesses of parties’ arguments and often wrote the first drafts of judges’ opinions.

Soon enough, however, the work changed. In March 2018, James McHenry, the Justice Department official who oversees the immigration courts as head of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, announced a mandate imposing individual quotas on all the judges. Each judge would be required to decide 700 cases per year, he said.

With these new quotas, which went into effect on Oct. 1, immigration judges must now decide between three and four cases a day — while also reviewing dozens of motions daily and keeping up with all their administrative duties — or their jobs will be at risk.

The announcement of the quotas in March was the first in a series of demoralizing attacks on immigration judges this year. In May, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, since fired by Trump, personally issued a decision that placed limits on the ability of immigration judges to use a practice known as administrative closure, which allows judges to put cases on indefinite hold, and which, in immigration cases, can be a tool for delaying deportation orders.

The Justice Department enforced the decision in July by stripping an immigration judge in Philadelphia of his authority in scores of cases for continuing to use administrative closure.

All this was in addition to a barrage of disparaging comments made directly by the president. In June, Trump tweeted that there is no reason to provide judges to immigrants. He also rejected calls to hire more immigration judges, saying that “we have to have a real border, not judges” and asking rhetorically, “Who are these people?”

The demoralizing effect on immigration judges was palpable. Morale was at an all-time low. I was new to civil service, but these judges, some of whom have served continuously since the Reagan administration, made clear that this was an unprecedented attack on the justice system.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion »

I’ve long admired the independence and legitimacy that the judiciary enjoys in the United States, so I found the attacks on judges deeply disturbing and troubling. They reminded me of Trump’s Italian alter-ego, Silvio Berlusconi, who spent most of his tenure as Italy’s prime minister fighting off lawsuits by delegitimizing and attacking the judiciary, calling it “a cancer of democracy” and accusing judges of being communist.

I voiced my concerns to my supervisors and directly to Director McHenry in a letter. Seeing no opportunity to make a positive difference and unwilling to continue to lend credence to this compromised system, I submitted my resignation in July, explaining my reasons in a letter.

This was not how I wanted to end my career in government. I had hoped to serve this country for the long haul. But I couldn’t stand by, or be complicit in, a mean-spirited and unscrupulous campaign to undermine the everyday work of the Justice Department and the judges who serve in our immigration courts — a campaign that hurts many of my fellow immigrants in the process.

Gianfranco De Girolamo was an attorney at the Department of Justice from 2017 to 2018.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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

Thanks for speaking out Gianfranco! I published an earlier, at that time “anonymous,” letter from Gianfranco at the time of his resignation. I’m sure there are many others at EOIR who feel the same way.  But, they are “gagged” by the DOJ — threatened with job loss if they “tell the truth” about the ongoing legal farce and parody of justice within our Immigration Courts.

It’s a “closed system” at war with the public it serves, the dedicated attorneys who represent migrants, the essential NGOs who are propping up what’s left of justice in this system, and the very civil servants who are supposed to be carrying out the courts’ mission. What a horrible way to “(not) run the railroad.”

Someday, historians will dig out the whole truth about the “Sessions Era” at the DOJ and his perversion of justice in the U.S. Immigration Courts. I’m sure it will be even worse than we can imagine. But, for now, thanks to Gianfranco for shedding at least some light on one of the darkest and most dysfunctional corners of our Government!

PWS

11-16-18

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  4. THE ROUNDTABLE IN ACTION: HON. ILYCE SHUGALL DELIVERS POWERFUL STATEMENT IN THE LA TIMES ON WHY SHE COULD NO LONGER SERVE AS A JUDGE IN OUR OBSCENELY DISTORTED AND UNFAIR U.S. IMMIGRATON COURT SYSTEM – “But nothing prepared me for the unprecedented, unfair and unworkable policies the Trump administration imposed on the courts and the immigration process.”

SESSIONS’S TOXIC WHITE NATIONALIST LEGACY OF BIAS AND MISMANAGEMENT CONTINUES TO HAUNT U.S. IMMIGRATION COURTS – Inappropriate “Certifications” & Skewed Precedents Denied Asylum To Legitimate Refugees While Improperly Limiting Authority of Immigration Judges To Control & Manage Their Dockets – “Gonzo” Actions Diverted Attention & Resources From Pursuing Long-Overdue Improvements In Delivery of Due Process!

https://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Jeff-Sessions-unfinished-legacy-of-reversing-13420329.php

Bob Egelko reports for the SF Chronicle:

In 21 months as the nation’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions affected no area of public policy more than immigration, from his “zero tolerance” orders to arrest and prosecute all unauthorized border crossers to establishing new rules speeding up deportations and limiting legal challenges.

But with his dismissal by President Trump the day after the Nov. 6 election, one part of Sessions’ immigration agenda remained unfinished: his reconsideration, and often reversal, of pro-immigrant rulings by the immigration courts, particularly on the rights of migrants seeking political asylum in the United States.

Because immigration courts are a branch of the Justice Department, the attorney general has the authority to review and overturn their rulings. Sessions used that authority at an unprecedented pace, reversing decisions that had allowed immigration judges to delay or postpone hearings to give immigrants time to apply for legal status, and eliminating grounds for asylum that were commonly invoked by migrants from Central America.

In October, he announced plans to reconsider a ruling that, if repealed, would keep thousands of asylum-seekers locked up even after they convinced hearing officers that they had a case for fearing persecution in their homeland.

A 2005 ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals allowed immigrants seeking asylum to be freed on bond after an immigration officer ruled that they have a “credible fear” of persecution if deported. They remain free until the immigration courts decide whether their fear of persecution is “well founded,” entitling them to asylum, a work permit and legal residence. If not, they can be deported.

That determination sometimes takes a year or longer. Immigration rights advocates and legal commentators say tens of thousands of asylum-seekers would be locked up for that period if the attorney general overturned the 2005 decision.

“It’s a dramatic change in policy … part of a pattern of efforts to implement the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy” that Sessions declared in April for unauthorized border-crossing, said Kevin Johnson, UC Davis law school dean and an immigration law expert.

This was “Sessions, on his own initiative, trying to rewrite immigration law,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge, former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals and publisher of the ImmigrationCourtside blog.

Now the decision will be left to Sessions’ successor. Or maybe not.

, , , ,

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

Go to the above link to read the rest of the story.

Sessions’s biased jurisprudence and his intentional mismanagement resulted in a largely artificial “backlog” of 1.1 million cases and a group of demoralized judges who are treated as assembly line workers on a deportation conveyor belt. This preventable disaster is a major contributor to the bogus crisis on the Southern Border.

Sessions admittedly built on and intentionally aggravated pre-existing problems left by the Bush II and Obama Administrations. Nearly two decades of abuse and misuse of the U.S. Immigration Court System by the DOJ for political aims often unrelated to due process and fairness won’t be resolved “overnight.”

But competent court administration combined with a return to an exclusive focus on delivering full due process with maximum achievable efficiency would certainly make an immediate difference and put the Immigration Courts back on track to fulfilling their noble (now abandoned) vision of “being the world’s best tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” No rational observer would say that these courts are moving in that direction under Trump and his toadies at the DOJ and DHS.

PWS

11-26-18

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: THIS IS WHY HE STAYS: UNDERNEATH ALL THE “TRUMP NOISE” SESSIONS IS METHODICALLY ERADICATING DUE PROCESS, PERVERTING THE LAW, & TURNING ONE OF THE LARGEST FEDERAL COURT SYSTEMS INTO A “KILLING FLOOR” TARGETING OUR MOST VULNERABLE & DESERVING REFUGEES! — “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”
  2. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

BUZZFEED NEWS: Two Years Of Trump’s Bad Immigration Policies Predictably Culminate In Border Gassings!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/trump-blame-crisis-border-asylum

Adolfo Flores, Hamed Aleaziz, & Karla Zabludovsky for BuzzFeed News:

TIJUANA, Mexico — For Trump administration officials, an unprecedented confrontation at the US-Mexico border on Sunday invited an assessment that their policies have only exacerbated the problems of an overwhelmed immigration system whose court backlog has grown larger since Trump’s inauguration 22 months ago.

León Rodriguez, who headed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency from 2014 to 2016, didn’t want to comment on the events on the ground, but said what happened at the border seemed to be “a foreseeable result of the US policy of placing every conceivable obstacle in the way of orderly legal migration and of not having a policy that [recognizes] the desperate circumstances driving migration.”

Mexican officials shared that negative assessment. Héctor Gandini, who will take over as spokesperson for Mexico’s Interior Ministry when Mexico swears in a new president on Saturday, said that the US use of tear gas on migrants attempting to cross illegally into the country was “not correct. We don’t want them to hound migrants.”

“You have to respect migrants’ human rights,” Gandini added.

For Josué Rosales, one of the migrants who took part in the ill-fated march to the border, what began as a journey of hope had turned into one of despair, one that promised weeks of more nights inside the tent he’s now sharing with his girlfriend on the grounds of the Benito Juarez stadium, where the caravan has been camped for days. He said he’s not ready to give up.

“I’m waiting to see if Trump comes to some type of agreement that allows us to cross,” Rosales said. “If he says no we’ll figure out another way to cross.”

The Trump administration faces a situation its best efforts have failed to control.

Administration officials have imposed a number of policies to discourage migrants from seeking to enter the United States. Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions personally rewrote key immigration court decisions to eliminate domestic violence and fear of gang violence as reasons for asylum to be granted. The administration imposed a controversial family separation policy that was intended to discourage parents from crossing the border with their children. Trump dispatched 5,800 US active-duty soldiers to the border in a show of force that many critics also claim was a blatant political ploy ahead of the midterm elections earlier this month.

Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuter

And yet border apprehensions are at the highest level yet of the Trump administration (though still at historically low levels), family detentions are at record levels, and the number of people granted asylum actually rose in the fiscal year that just ended, to the highest level in two decades.

In Tijuana, where the number of would-be asylum seekers is growing by the day, immigration attorneys and advocates describe a bottleneck system that makes asylum seekers wait weeks before they can seek to enter the US for refuge. That’s created an enormous backlog.

And the situation promises only to get worse as more people seeking to reach the US arrive in Baja California, the Mexican state that abuts California. Mexico’s interior ministry said there are 8,247 people now in Mexico who are traveling as part of so-called caravans from Central America. The vast majority of migrants — 7,417 — are in the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana. The other 424 are in a Mexico City shelter, 253 are in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and another 153 are making their way north on their own. It’s unclear how many of them will ask for asylum.

Caring for the migrants is costing about $27,000 daily — money Tijuana’s mayor says the city does not have.

Sunday’s march to the border was intended to be peaceful, but it devolved into a frantic rush toward the border fence after the group, which numbered about 500, according to the Mexican interior ministry, was blocked from reaching the San Ysidro port of entry by a line of Mexican federal police.

Then after being blocked on the street in front of the Chaparral border crossing by metal barriers and another line of federal police with shields, a group walked to a train border crossing a few minutes away.

Several members of the group told BuzzFeed News they wanted to negotiate some type of agreement with the Trump administration that would let them enter the United States. Others said they hoped to be able to cross into the US as a group.

Instead, US border officers met them with tear gas and pepper balls, according to a statement from Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for border law enforcement.

CBP said its officers deployed the tear gas and pepper balls after some members of the group threw objects, including rocks, at agents while others tried to enter the United States illegally, some through a gap in the metal barrier along the railroad tracks.

Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters

But not all immigration officers were willing to defend the US actions. One US asylum officer, who could not talk about policy publicly, said the confrontation likely was the result of the US’s inability or unwillingness to process asylum claims at the border daily. The officer said USCIS recently had told staff to be on standby to be sent to San Diego to help hear asylum claims.

“I’m just glad nothing worse happened,” the officer said. “I think it’s illegal that they closed the border. We cannot decide when we can close the border if there’s no state of emergency. For a couple dozen asylum seekers? That was not an emergency that should justify closing the border. I’m just relieved it wasn’t worse.”

Another government official, who works on the issue but does not make policy, blamed the Trump administration for the tensions at the border.

“Trump has broken the law by not having people at the border processed for months and months and creating a bottleneck there,” the official said. “Tear gassing children because maybe they’ll get into the US? Heaven forbid.”

Mexican authorities late Sunday were contemplating what to do next. In a press release, the interior ministry said Mexican police had retaken control of the area leading to the San Ysidro port of entry and that Mexican troops would not be deployed “despite the magnitude of the situation.”

A government official who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to reporters told BuzzFeed News that 30 migrants had breached the border and were promptly detained by CBP. The National Migration Institute said that it planned to deport as many as 500 others who attempted to cross into the US illegally but were unsuccessful. Since the first caravan entered Mexico on October 19, 11,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have been deported.

The escalation at the border comes at a complicated time — the country’s embattled president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will conclude his mandate in less than a week.

BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that the Trump administration was attempting to broker a deal that would force people to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were processed. The Washington Post reported that incoming Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s transition team had agreed to this plan, but that report was disputed by the same officials it cited; they pointed out that López Obrador’s government would not take office for several more days. “There is no agreement of any sort between the future government of Mexico and the US government,” said a press release from López Obrador’s transition team.

Immigration promises to be a major challenge for López Obrador, who has pledged to give work permits and offer jobs to Central American migrants in Mexico. Detentions and deportations of migrants have increased steadily since 2014, when the government launched the Southern Border Program, shortly after a large wave of unaccompanied minors surged across the US-Mexico border.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Sunday’s events were much different from the results of a spring caravan that arrived in Tijuana in late April with hundreds of asylum seekers. The group camped out on the grounds of the Chaparral border crossing for days after being turned away by CBP agents because the port of entry was at capacity. Over several days, small groups of asylum seekers were allowed into the US to make their claim, 93% of whom passed what’s known as a credible fear interview, a crucial first step in the asylum application process.

But that caravan was much smaller, at most 1,500 at its start in southern Mexico, than the thousands now waiting in Tijuana, and its members had been vetted by the NGO that led it, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, to weed out those whose asylum claims were likely to be found without merit by the time it reached the border. In the end, only 228 people sought asylum in a process that took just five days. Separately, other members of the caravan asked for asylum before and after those five days, putting the total number of asylum seekers at 401.

This time around, asylum seekers have been told they would likely have to wait weeks in Tijuana before they could ask the US for refuge because of a backlog at the border. The current expected wait to begin the process is now up to six weeks.

Delay at the border for requesting asylum is nothing new, but it’s been getting worse under Trump. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found recently that US immigration authorities’ inability to handle the number of people seeking asylum at ports of entry had forced migrants to cross illegally. But there’s little sign that US officials are planning to take steps to improve the wait times.

And the likelihood is great that those who must wait in Tijuana will find only that their frustration will grow in the coming months.

“It’s difficult because we came as one peaceful caravan and now we’re just waiting here without any results,” Rosales, the march participant, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re sitting in the sun, thirsty, hungry, with no resolution to our situation.”

************************************************
The Trump Administration created this artificial mess. The solution is hardly “rocket science:”
  • More USCIS Asylum Officers;
  • More pro bono private attorneys;
  • More U.S. Immigration Judges and staff;
  • Restoring authority to Immigration Judges to work with both parties before their courts to close and remove hundreds of thousands of “low priority” cases from the courts’ dockets, thus freeing up judicial time to work on asylum cases of more recent arrivals;
  • Restoring precedents that would allow refugees with documented cases of persecution on the basis for domestic violence and family relationships to be expeditiously granted, thus freeing up docket space for other types of cases.

No chance that the Trump Administration will do this voluntarily. But, there might be an opening for House Democrats to condition further immigration enforcement funding on improvements in the foregoing areas and an end to the Trump-created “border backups.”

PWS

11-26-18

 

Related posts:

  1. IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!
  2. BUZZFEED NEWS: “Our Gang” Leader Judge Jeffrey Chase Blasts Nielsen’s Latest Disingenuous Attack On Legal Asylum Seekers — “Outrageous Move”
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

NO, IT’S NOT “OBAMA JUDGES IN THE 9TH CIRCUIT” – Federal Judges Across The Spectrum & Throughout The Country Are Handing Scofflaw Prez A Record Number Of Well-Earned Defeats!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/22/trump-judicial-fantasy-what-chief-justice-roberts-could-have-told-him-didnt/

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

Late Monday, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco blocked the Trump administration from denying asylum to migrants who crossed the southern border illegally, saying the president violated a “clear command” from Congress to allow them to apply. Trump’s reaction was to add “Obama” judges, specifically those sitting on the 9th Circuit out West, to his list of those responsible for what he calls the nation’s “open borders.”

“This was an Obama judge,” the president said. “And I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen like this anymore. Everybody that wants to sue the United States, they file their case in — almost — they file their case in the 9th Circuit. And it means an automatic loss no matter what you do, no matter how good your case is.” He strung out the theme on Thanksgiving, demonizing the judges who, he tweeted, will be responsible for “bedlam, chaos, injury and death” for not letting law enforcement do their jobs.

His attack on Judge Jon S. Tigar, who issued the temporary order on asylum, was sufficient to arouse Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Trump clashes with conservative chief justice over judiciary

Chief Justice John Roberts pointedly defended the independence of the federal judiciary on Nov. 21 after President Trump criticized the courts. (Reuters)

As unusual as Roberts’s comments were, he could have said so much more, like maybe, you’ve got to be kidding, Mr. President, if you think your judicial problems are confined to “Obama” judges in a single circuit.

He could have noted that the number of rulings against his administration’s actions now stands somewhere in the range of about 40 to 50, according to a rough estimate by The Washington Post. Norman Siegel, writing at Law.com in January, counted 37 “major” losses, and that was in January, before numerous other rulings that thwarted Trump administration decisions.

And he could have observed that all of this is a bit of a surprise. All presidents lose cases. But a losing streak of this magnitude for a president is a new phenomenon.

Despite the endless decades of rhetoric about “judicial activism,” judges at the district court level are generally a timid lot when it comes to confronting presidents. Historically, they are inclined to do what former federal judge Nancy Gertner calls “duck, avoid and evade.”

“Now,” she wrote in the April issue of NYU Law Review, “I am not so certain. . . . Perhaps ‘judging in a time of Trump’ ” is different, she wrote. “It is one thing to ‘duck, avoid and evade’ when you believe that official actors are acting more or less within constitutional bounds. It is another to do so when you are concerned about real abuse of power.”

An abuse of power was what Tigar found: “Whatever the scope of the President’s authority,” he wrote, “he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.” Trump did not discuss Tigar’s actual findings.

The biggest defeats have included four decisions blocking the president’s travel ban before the Supreme Court finally upheld its third iteration; his attempt to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, blocked by at least four courts; and the proposed ban on transgender people in the military, stopped in its tracks by no fewer than four judges, with two of the rulings upheld by appeals courts. Judges in Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as California, temporarily stopped Trump’s “sanctuary cities” crackdown.

Trump calls court ‘totally out of control’

President Trump slammed the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit Nov. 22, telling reporters it was “very unfair to law enforcement.” (The Washington Post)

A total of five rulings, by judges in Oregon, New York and the District of Columbia, among other places, enjoined the administration from cutting off funds to teen pregnancy prevention programs that failed to preach abstinence to the satisfaction of the Department of Health and Human Services.

This doesn’t count environmental rulings, like the Nov. 8 one halting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline issued by a judge in Montana. Judge Brian Morris was indeed appointed by President Barack Obama, though he clerked for the most conservative chief justice in modern history, William H. Rehnquist.

Roberts could have noted that those defeats have come at the hands of judges appointed not just by Democratic presidents but by Republicans dating all the way back to Ronald Reagan.

It was U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw, for example, a California jurist appointed by President George W. Bush, who ripped the administration repeatedly for its family separation debacle.

[The Trump administration’s crazy losing streak in the courts: No, Jeff Sessions, it’s not about the judges]

And how could Trump forget that it was his own appointee, Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who slapped down the effort to ban CNN’s Jim Acosta from the White House.

Many of these judges do indeed sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (which covers a vast swath of territory of nine states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska and Idaho — and Guam and Northern Marianas, and is a traditional target for conservatives).

But as noted, rulings thwarting Trump have also come from judges sitting in New York, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan and beyond.

While there’s no scientific way of comparing judicial rhetoric, Republican appointees outside the 9th Circuit have actually seemed more inclined than others to lecture the president about the Constitution.

One of the toughest dressings-down came from a decision blocking Trump’s “sanctuary cities” crackdown written by Judge Ilana Rovner, appointed by President George H.W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, based in Chicago. In a decision joined by a Gerald Ford appointee and a Reagan appointee upholding a lower-court ruling by a Reagan appointee, she lit into the Trump administration for assuming powers to withhold money not granted to it by Congress to punish states and cities that didn’t go along with efforts to round up those in the country illegally.

Her message to Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, translated, was basically, who do you think you are?

Our role in this case is not to assess the optimal immigration policies for our country. . . . The founders of our country well understood that the concentration of power threatens individual liberty and established a bulwark against such tyranny by creating a separation of powers among the branches of government. If the Executive Branch can determine policy, and then use the power of the purse to mandate compliance with that policy by the state and local governments, all without the authorization or even acquiescense of elected legislators, the check against tyranny is forsaken.

There was one possibly accurate observation in Trump’s comments: He said his losses sometimes seem “automatic.”

Based on the record, that’s not far from the truth.

But Roberts would never say that.

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

Much of what Trump says are outright lies or racist, White Nationalist false narratives. While sadly that has proved to sometimes be a “winning” political strategy  (because of a system that allows minority rule), it’s seldom a good litigating strategy in the 21st Century.

So, it’s hardly surprising that Trump is a “Big Loser” in court. It’s predictably outrageous for Trump to make the bogus claim that the courts are “out of control.” In fact, Trump and his scofflaw Administration are totally out of control, particularly in their often illegal and always immoral immigration policies. Indeed, until next January when the Democrats retake control of the House, the Federal Courts have actually been the only meaningful control on Trump. Perhaps their efforts will be enough to save the country from the greatest existential threat since world War II.  Only time will tell.

PWS

11-23-18

 

 

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. 🤡CLOWN CAPITOL:  J.R. PRESIDES OVER GOP CLOWN SHOW HE HELPED CREATE — Empowering The Koch Bros, Suppressing Minority Votes, Enabling GOP Gerrymandering, Ignoring Invidious Racial & Religious Motives, Turning A Blind Eye To Lies & Pretexts, It All Contributed To The Arrogant Display Of GOP Dishonesty & Impunity Now On Public Display In The Senate! — Plus Bonus Friday Mini-Essay: “Profiles in Fecklessness”
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SCOFFLAWS’ LATEST PLOT AGINST ASYLUM SEEKERS SURE TO CAUSE INTERNATIONAL CHAOS & DRAW NEW LEGAL CHALLENGES – No Wonder These Immoral Cowards Have Such Fear Of Truly Independent Judges (Not To Be Confused With EOIR’s “Captive Judges”)

LEGAL ETHICS HAVE “TANKED” IN THE TRUMP/SESSIONS/WHITAKER DOJ, AS YET ANOTHER (“REAL”) FEDERAL JUDGE REBUKES GOV’S DISINGENUOUS & DILATORY TACTICS! –“Defendants’ motion makes so little sense, even on its own terms, that it is hard to understand as anything but an attempt to avoid a timely decision on the merits altogether!”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/census-citizenship-question-trial-delay_us_5bf48e1fe4b0eb6d93095d61

Sam Levine reports for HuffPost:

A federal judge in New York City strongly rebuked the Trump administration on Tuesday over its repeated attempts to slow down a lawsuit challenging the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman came in response to a request that he halt further proceedings in the trial until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on what evidence he could consider. The Supreme Court had rejected a very similar request to temporarily stop the litigation just weeks ago, the judge noted.

The judge, who sits in the Southern District of New York, did not hold back his frustration in his 7-page opinion, noting that the Department of Justice had submitted 12 separate requests to delay the proceedings since the Labor Day weekend.

“Unless burdening Plaintiffs and the federal courts with make-work is a feature of Defendants’ litigation strategy, as opposed to a bug, it is hard to see the point,” Furman wrote.

All along, the judge has expressed a desire to move the case along quickly, recognizing that any decision he makes is likely to be appealed to higher courts and that the issue needs to be resolved quickly so that the Census Bureau has time to print the census forms.

“Enough is enough,” Furman wrote in his Tuesday ruling.

The lawsuit ― brought by 18 states, the District of Columbia, several cities and a handful of immigrant groups ― argues that the decision to add the citizenship question was motivated by discriminatory intent. They also say the decision should be set aside on the grounds that it was “arbitrary and capricious.”

In this latest effort to stall the proceedings, the Justice Department said that doing so would help conserve judicial resources, an argument the judge dismissed as “galling.”

“If Defendants were truly interested in conserving judicial resources, they could have avoided burdening this Court, the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court with twelve stay applications over the last eleven weeks that, with one narrow exception, have been repeatedly rejected as meritless,” Furman wrote. “Instead, Defendants would have focused their attention on the ultimate issues in this case, where the attention of the parties and the Court now belongs.”

Kelly Laco, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on Furman’s ruling.

The Justice Department appealed this latest motion to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit even before Furman had ruled on it ― a highly unusual move that clearly annoyed the judge, who suggested the department’s conduct in the case was sanctionable.

“Defendants’ motion makes so little sense, even on its own terms, that it is hard to understand as anything but an attempt to avoid a timely decision on the merits altogether,” the judge wrote. “That conclusion is reinforced by the fact that Defendants, once again, appealed to the Second Circuit even before this Court had heard from Plaintiffs, let alone issued this ruling on the motion.”

Furman also noted that the 2nd Circuit had already denied that appeal as “premature.”

Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, who is leading the case for the plaintiffs, praised Furman’s decision.

“We agree with Judge Furman: enough is enough,” Spitalnick said in a statement.

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Seems like it’s past time for the courts and bar associations to impose sanctions on the DOJ attorneys for their widespread unethical behavior and bad faith in conducting  litigation in behalf of this scofflaw Administration!

PWS

11-23-18

 

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING! – TRUMP SCOFFLAWS OUTED AGAIN! – Judge Considers Sanctions Against Administration Officials & Their Lawyers For Lies, Disobeying Court Orders, & Continuous Course Of Unethical Behavior! — “Government Has Acted Ignobly In This Case” — Trumpsters Win “Courtside’s” Coveted Five Turkey Award!

http://www.aclumich.org/article/us-district-court-orders-release-iraqi-detainees

The ACLU reports:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan applauds the decision of U.S. District Judge Mark A. Goldsmith to order the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release all Iraqis within 30 days.

“The law is clear that the Federal Government cannot indefinitely detain foreign nationals while it seeks to repatriate them, when there is no significant likelihood of repatriation in the reasonably foreseeable future,” wrote Judge Goldsmith in a 59-page opinion.

Judge Goldsmith also wrote that he will impose sanctions on the Government for “…failing to comply with court orders, submitting demonstrably false declarations of Government officials, and otherwise violating its litigation obligations—all of which impels this Court to impose sanctions.”

“Today’s decision is about accountability,” said ACLU senior staff attorney Miriam Aukerman. “ICE thought it could get away with lying to a federal judge. ICE thought it could get away with using indefinite detention to coerce Iraqis to accept deportation despite the dangers they face in Iraq. Today, Judge Goldsmith made it clear that ICE is not above the law.”

“It is appalling that ICE lied to the Court, and even more appalling that it did so in order to keep people wrongfully incarcerated,” said University of Michigan law professor Margo Schlanger, a cooperating attorney for the ACLU. “The Court made it absolutely clear that it will not tolerate such misconduct, and that ICE cannot simply lock people up and throw away the key.”

“We are delighted that families who have been separated for so long will finally be reunited,” said Kim Scott, an attorney at Miller Canfield who also represents the detainees. “As a result of today’s order, many of those who were unjustly detained will be home with their families for the holidays.”

Today’s ruling is the latest development in Hamama v. Adducci, a nationwide class action filed in June 2017 on behalf of hundreds of Iraqi nationals, who were arrested throughout the country without warning and threatened with immediate deportation. Many came to the U.S. as children and have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades. They now face persecution, torture, or even death in Iraq because of their religion, ethnicity, or the fact that they are Americanized. Approximately 120 Iraqis remain detained.

Read Judge Goldsmith’s order here.

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Thanks to Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis Immigration Community for passing this along. And, congrats to the ACLU for brightening the Thanksgiving Day of not only these long-abused Iraqi detainees, but also of the substantial number of us who still believe in and cherish real American values — even in the “Dark Ages” of  the Trump Administration!

Great news, and long, long overdue!  Many of us have been calling for some time now for full accountability for Trump officials and their often ethically challenged lawyers who are out to abuse and destroy our precious legal system. There was a time in the not too distant past when U.S.Government lawyers were supposed to be held to a higher standard of promoting fairness, justice, and judicial efficiency. As I used to tell newly hired INS lawyers — “The Government wins when justice prevails — regardless of which party ‘wins’ the case.” That went out the door when Trump and his corrupt cronies like Jeff Sessions stepped in.

Federal Judges finally are losing patience with the types of blatant, “in your face” abuses by the Trump Administration that undoubtedly would have landed private parties and counsel in hot water long ago.  Where’s the justice in a system that imprisons, deports, and otherwise abuses victims while letting the abusers walk free to strike again?

“[T]he Government has acted ignobly in this case, by failing to comply with court orders, submitting demonstrably false declarations of  Government officials, and otherwise violating its litigation obligations—all of which impels this Court to impose sanctions.”  — U.S. District Judge Mark A. Goldsmith

For their shockingly inappropriate and unethical conduct of and in Federal Court litigation, the Trump Administration officials involved in this and many similar abusive cases get “Courtside’s” Thanksgiving “Five Turkey Award.”

 

PWS

11-22-18

🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃

 

Related posts:

  1. SCOFFLAWS OUTED AGAIN: U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP’S ILLEGAL ATTACK ON ASYLUM LAW: ORDERS PROCESSING OF ALL WHO APPLY TO RESUME! — “Whatever the scope of the president’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden!”
  2. “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” MORPHS INTO CONTEMPT FOR COURT AS ADMINISTRATION TELLS COURT & SEPARATED FAMILIES “GO POUND SAND” — They Just Don’t Care About Humanity!
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