"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism — Why are the Biden Administration and some Dem pols embracing this guy when it comes to asylum seekers — primarily individuals of color, merely seeking to exercise their legal rights and to be treated fairly and with human dignity?
Border Lines has published one of the best analyses of the Title 42 charade and its ongoing impact on our Government’s cruel, lawless, and misguided border policies. Given the cosmic impact of bad border policies, they have made it available “outside the paywall.”
Ultimately, Title 42 has ended, but the asylum restrictionist approach that it was the apex of has clearly not. For now, there’s no return to normal Title 8 processing — which, as regular readers of our historical analyses know, has never been impartial or apolitical, but at least provided some semblance of access and cursory due process. Title 42 is dead. Long live Title 42.
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This version of the transit ban is also, like its predecessor, under acute legal jeopardy. The ACLU has already sued to stop it, and some legal analysts are predicting that, given the precedents and legalities involved here, the administration’s efforts to make it compliant — including the very limited exceptions — won’t be enough. The CBP One exception is, after all, just another version of metering, another policy that was struck down. If there’s an injunction or even a final ruling and the transit ban goes down, then what? There’s at least some likelihood that word will spread and the surge of arrivals that was expected in the immediate aftermath of Title 42 will actually materialize then. How does the administration respond? Does it rush to enact an overlapping asylum restriction, as the Trump administration so often did? It’s hard to say.
A federal judge in Florida recently issued a restraining order blocking a Biden policy that would have allowed the administration to issue parole to some arriving families and instruct them to check in with ICE instead of placing them directly in removal proceedings, removing another option to control the immigration court backlog and avoid detaining families. It seems relatively unlikely that the administration will be happy to accept a defeat of its asylum restrictions that will then force it back into the uncomfortable position of detaining more families. In the meantime, market analysis site Seeking Alpha has upgraded the stock of private detention conglomerate GEO Group to “strong buy” in anticipation of strong profits from growth in detentions, not to mention GEO’s piece of all sorts of surveillance technologies used in the administration’s alternatives to detention programs.
In the meantime, an eight-year-old girl died yesterday in Border Patrol custody after having what is vaguely described as a “medical episode.” The machine churns on.
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Read the complete article at the link.
There’s lots of of “disturbing stuff” here. But, perhaps the worst and most discouraging is the role of the Biden Administration and some Dem pols in aiding, abetting, and even encouraging this 21st Century version of Jim Crow.
The poor and superficial reporting of the “mainstream media” — which performed like an adjunct Fox News — also has had life-threatening consequences. Inaccurately and cynically treating the Title 42 farce as “the norm,” and the return to applying some semblance of the rule of law (the Refugee Act has been in effect for more than four decades) as some type of radical “change” also has contributed mightily to the human tragedy and carnage at the border. Highly irresponsible!
The anti-woke crusade is rooted in fear and ignorance, a mnemonic placeholder for the bigoted things most people wouldn’t dare say aloud. Black Americans have been using the term “woke” since the 1940s to describe a state of awareness toward racist policies and worldviews that negatively impact the Black community. However, many White people now use the term as a derogative slur, a cowardly way of spilling the beans while denying any beans were spilled.
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Saying you are anti-woke is a way of admitting you are anti-Black without feeling the backlash many outspoken racists receive. Likewise, anti-woke crusaders are promoting anti-democratic policies by controlling what topics schools and businesses can read and discuss without getting labeled a fascist for circumventing the First Amendment of the Constitution. America was founded by White men interested in securing their rights while denying that same access to Black people, women, and racial and ethnic minority groups. We don’t have to worship the founding fathers blindly, nor should any American. It seems many conservatives are afraid of saying the quiet part out loud, of admitting that their crusade on “woke” is really an attempt to diminish the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement, of framing progress as regressive. Americans should challenge more conservatives to define “woke” on their own terms because the more descriptions they provide, the more we can see through the smoke and mirrors.
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Those with Medium access can read the complete article at the link.
Here’s one of my favorite comments on this article, from Walter Rhein: “When people say they are ‘anti-woke,’ I interrupt them and say ‘You mean ‘anti-black.’ They become enraged and act like they’re the victims (like racists always do).”
Cowardly insurrectionist racist oppressors and chronic liars bogusly claiming they are “victims,” perhaps of “the biggest witch hunt on history?” Sound familiar?
The far right’s war of hate directed against the “other” started with the White Nationalist war on immigrants. It’s called “Dred Scottification” of the other. Yet, the mainstream media downplays the real message and “normalizes” these vile attacks on our democracy. They “whitewash” the dangerous message of hate being promoted by DeSantis, Abbott, and their ilk.
Ron DeSantis Dave Grandlund PoliticalCartoons.com Republished under license Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are “campaigning” on an agenda of racism, hate, and White Supremacist grievance not seen since the late Gov. George Wallace. Yet, mainstream media has largely “normalized” that which would have been unacceptable and unthinkable only a few years ago!
Even the Biden Administration fails to “connect the dots” between the White Nationalist restrictionist war on asylum seekers of color they have adopted from Trump and Miller and the extremist right’s attack on Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, LGBTQ, women, teachers,Jews, Muslims, health care professionals, journalists, and everyone else “White Supremacist nation” perceives as a threat to their kakistocracy. In that way, this Dem Administration becomes part of problem, not the solution.
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice, Supreme Court, March 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
“Congress is entitled to set the conditions for an alien’s lawful entry into this country and that, as a result, an alien at the threshold of initial entry cannot claim any greater rights under the due process clause.”
Justice Samuel Alito, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. ___ (2020)
Dred Scott (circa 1857) Public Realm — Black asylum seekers and other migrants aren’t celebrating the continuing disgraceful “Dred Scottification of the other” in Mayorkas’s “New American Gulag” and Garland’s “Miller Lite” Immigration “Courts” that aren’t “courts” at all!
Yacouba, a political activist in Ivory Coast, knew if he didn’t immediately flee his home country, he wouldn’t survive.
After being threatened, attacked and tortured by people sympathetic to those in power, Yacouba fled his country in 2018. He went to Brazil for a few years, then made a perilous trek through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras and Mexico before finally arriving in the United States.
The journey was one of the two most challenging periods of his life. The second was being detained as a Black immigrant in the U.S.
As the nation celebrates Juneteenth — a day commemorating the emancipation of African Americans who had been enslaved in the United States — as a federal holiday for the first time, Black Americans and immigrants are fighting to dismantle institutional racism, including within the immigration system. Black immigrants are disproportionately detained, receive higher bond costs, and say they face racist treatment within detention centers.
Recognizing and celebrating the emancipation of slaves is vital, activists say ― but continuing to take down systemic racism needs to come with it.
“From an immigration perspective, Black immigrants face disproportionate levels of detention and exclusion,” Diana Konate, policy director at the advocacy group African Communities Together, said Thursday on a press call. “These can be life-threatening, as Black immigrants often get deported back to unsafe and dangerous conditions. While we celebrate the victories, we keep in mind that a lot of work remains.”
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Read the rest of Rowaida’s article at the link.
Every day that Garland, Monaco, Gupta, and Clarke drag their collective feet on ending “Dred Scottification,” racial bias, and xenophobia at EOIR diminishes their credibility on all racial and social justice issues. To date, Garland has appointed zero (O) progressive judges at EOIR, has only scratched the surface of the White Nationalist bias in decision-making in the Immigration Courts, and has failed to re-establish due process and the rule of law for Blacks and other migrants of color at the border.
Justice Alito and his colleagues in the majority disgracefully basically “dressed up” the core of Dred Scott dehumanization and bias in “21st century faux constitutional gobbledygook and intentional, disingenuous fictionalization!” Make no mistake: asylum seekers applying at our borders with their lives and humanity at stake are “persons” subject to our jurisdiction and are entitled to full Constitutional due process and statutory rights that are being denied to them every day, currently by the Biden Administration.
While Alito & Co. are wrong, DEAD WRONG in all too many cases, nothing in their dishonest and misguided “jurisprudence” prevents Garland from providing due process to individuals, regardless of status, in Immigration Court and to ending the racism and dehumanization underneath both the mess at EOIR and the cowardly abdication of duty by the Supremes’ majority in Thuraissigiam! In human rights, you either solve the problem or become part of it. And, experts, journalists, and historians are making a permanent record of the actions of the Supremes and the Biden Administration when democracy and racial justice are under stress!
You don’t have to look very far to “connect the dots” between Alito’s dismissive attitude toward the human rights of Asians and other asylum seekers of color and the increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans and unfair policing of African Americans. Once courts and government officials endorse “dehumanization of the other based largely on ethnicity” the “protections” and “distinctions” of citizenship tend to also vanish. If the lives of migrants of color can be declared worthless, what difference does citizenship mean for those of the same ethnic heritage that Alito deems below humanity? Obviously, the Trump kakistocracy’s attack on migrants of color was just a “place holder” for their attack on the rights of all persons of color in America!
How can Garland’s DOJ demand racial justice in state law enforcement while operating America’s most notorious “Jim Crow Court System?”
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism — He still “rules the roost” at Garland’s EOIR!
It’s time for all civil rights and civil liberties organizations to join forces in demanding an end to bias and “Dred Scottification of the other” in Garland’s disgracefully dysfunctional Immigration “Courts.” Not rocket science!🚀 Just human decency, common sense, available (yet ignored) progressive expertise, and Con Law 101!
The Republican Party’s biggest problem is that too many people of color are exercising their right to vote. The party’s solution is a massive push for voter suppression that would make old-time Jim Crow segregationists proud.
The Conservative Political Action Conference circus last week in Orlando showed how bankrupt the GOP is — at least when it comes to ideas, principles and integrity. Some might argue that the party, in buying into the lie that last year’s election was somehow stolen, is simply delusional. I disagree. I think Republican leaders know exactly what they’re doing.
The GOP may have lost the White House and the Senate, but it remains strong in most state capitols. So far this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans in 33 states “have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 bills to restrict voting access.” The thrust of virtually all these measures is to make it more difficult for African Americans and other minorities to vote.
These efforts at disenfranchisement are more numerous, and more discriminatory, in several of the swing states President Biden carried narrowly: Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. That should come as no surprise. GOP officials who had the temerity to follow the law and count the November vote honestly, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have been all but excommunicated by their state Republican Party organizations.
In Georgia — where not only did Donald Trump lose to Biden by 11,779 votes, but also two incumbent GOP senators were defeated by Democratic challengers — Republicans are using their control of the statehouse to try to eliminate all early voting on Sundays. That would put an end to “Souls to the Polls,” a popular Sunday get-out-the-vote initiative in which Black churches help parishioners get to polling places and cast their ballots.
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Read Eugene’s full op-ed at the link.
After a Presidential election that they lost by a substantial majority of votes, the GOP has decided that the solution isn’t to improve on their party’s unpopular messages of shame, blame, intolerance, ignorance, and White privilege. Nor have they chosen to abandon their corrupt and divisive leader. No, the answer, according to the GOP, is to reduce the size of the electorate to keep the will of the majority from prevailing.
There is not a whit of evidence about widespread voter fraud or any credible reason to believe that the results don’t represent the will of the majority of American voters. Nevertheless, the GOP has introduced slews of bills at the state level to make it more difficult for African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities to vote. Just like the White southern aristocracy after the Civil War, the modern GOP fears that true democratic majority rule will deprive them of their minority power and privilege.
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism
Well, you’ve heard it all before on Courtside. The Voting Rights Act is the cornerstone of modern American democracy. The forces of anti-democracy, including the GOP and their Supremes’ majority, intend to undo it in the name of White Supremacy.
The overt suppression of African-American voting rights that ended Reconstruction ushered in more than four decades of gross violations of the 13th 14th, and 15th Amendments. We should remember that the White-dominated Federal Government and the Federal Courts basically took a cowardly pass on the rights of our African American fellow citizens for generations.
Eric Lutz summed it up in his recent article on Vanity Fair:
Biden is reluctant to end that filibuster. But at a certain point, failing to do so means failing to reckon with the the severity of the threat to democracy—and the particular peril the GOP’s attacks pose to the rights of Black Americans and other minorities. “The argument that preserving the filibuster is necessary because it’s an important tool in our Democracy falls apart when it’s clearer with every passing day that we won’t have a Democracy without Congress passing voting rights legislation,” the former Obama aide David Plouffe remarked Monday. Republicans are mounting a concerted, relentless attack on democracy. To defend against it, Democrats’ response must be proportional. And that means confronting the reality that Trump leaving office didn’t extinguish his Big Lie, but made it more powerful.
It’s essential that the majority of us unite against the attempt of the corrupt GOP to restore the horrors of White Supremacy and Jim Crow. And, make no mistake — the attack on asylum seekers and migrants of color is an integral part of the White Nationalist program to kneecap American democracy. Under Trump, that effort culminated in the Capitol insurrection.
As the death of civil rights icon Vernon Jordon this week reminds us, those of us who believe in democracy must unite to fight the right and protect the right of all Americans to vote and the rights of immigrants to be treated as “persons” under the law.
Another day, another extreme cruelty: according to a report in the New York Times, the Trump administration has deported almost 1,000 migrant children and teens during the past two months of the covid-19 pandemic, sending them out of the United States alone and at times putting them on a flight without even telling their family members. Stephen Miller, who is unfortunately still alive, must be thrilled.
Trump’s latest tactic in the service of slashing immigration is, as the New York Times points out, a complete 180 from past policy:
The deportations represent an extraordinary shift in policy that has been unfolding in recent weeks on the southwestern border, under which safeguards that have for decades been granted to migrant children by both Democratic and Republican administrations appear to have been abandoned.
Historically, young migrants who showed up at the border without adult guardians were provided with shelter, education, medical care and a lengthy administrative process that allowed them to make a case for staying in the United States. Those who were eventually deported were sent home only after arrangements had been made to assure they had a safe place to return to.
But now, not even children who are already in the United States with pending asylum cases are safe from deportation. As the Times reported, in addition to the more than 900 children and teens who were deported in March and April shortly after arriving at the border, 60 young people who were already being held in government shelters were also abruptly sent out of the United States, at times “rousted from their beds in the middle of the night.”
According to the Times, even young children have been put on flights by themselves. Take the case of Sandra Rodríguez and her 10-year-old son Gerson, whom she sent across the southern border with the expectation that once Gerson arrived in the United States, he would be able to eventually live with Rodríguez’s brother in Houston. But instead, shortly after entering the U.S., Gerson was sent to Honduras alone.
This incredibly callous treatment of young migrants as well as their families is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to erase any vestige of due process at the border with Mexico. Citing the pandemic, immigration officials have used provisions in the 1944 Public Health Act as justification to essentially close the United States to all asylum seekers who cross the border. The impact has been severe: In an almost two-month period from mid-March to May, only two people seeking protection on humanitarian grounds at the border were allowed to stay within the United States.
“What is happening at the border right now is a tragedy. We are abandoning our legal commitment to provide asylum to people whose lives are in danger in other countries,” Kari Hong, an immigration attorney and Boston College law school professor, told the Washington Post. “By invoking these emergency orders, the Trump administration is simply doing what it’s wanted to do all along, which is to end asylum law in its entirety,” she said.
While Trump administration officials have justified their likely illegal use of emergency orders in the name of public health, the fact that officials have also deported children and teens who were already in the care of the federal government sure indicates that something else is going on here. I wonder what that could be.
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Who would have thought that America would become a nation of child abusers and that Federal Courts would be so feckless and complicit in the face of such clear abuses? Three years of concerted failure, led by John Roberts and the Supremes, to give meaning to Due Process and Equal Protection in the face of the “New Jim Crow” have emboldened the regime’s White Nationalist, anti-American abusers while kneecapping democratic and constitutional institutions.
Then, there’s the extreme, wanton cruelty and dehumanization inflicted on the mostly vulnerable among us that has come to symbolize our nation in the Age of Trump. Like all the other abuses by the regime, it’s been “normalized” by feckless legislators and judges: “Another day, another extreme cruelty!” ☠️⚰️🤮🏴☠️
Somewhere down there in the fires of the underworld, Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous “Dred Scott Decision” must be feeling totally vindicated by Roberts and his gang!
Is this really how we want to be remembered by future generations? If not, vote ‘em out this November!
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American RacismStephen Miller & Count Olaf Evil Twins, Notorious Child AbusersCaitlin Dickerson National Immigration Reporter NY TimesMichael D. Shear White House Reporter NY Times
Caitlin Dickerson and Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:
From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.
The question was, which disease?
Mr. Miller pushed for invoking the president’s broad public health powers in 2019, when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu.
When vast caravans of migrants surged toward the border in 2018, Mr. Miller looked for evidence that they carried illnesses. He asked for updates on American communities that received migrants to see if new disease was spreading there.
In 2018, dozens of migrants became seriously ill in federal custody, and two under the age of 10 died within three weeks of each other. While many viewed the incidents as resulting from negligence on the part of the border authorities, Mr. Miller instead argued that they supported his argument that President Trump should use his public health powers to justify sealing the borders.
On some occasions, Mr. Miller and the president, who also embraced these ideas, were talked down by cabinet secretaries and lawyers who argued that the public health situation at the time did not provide sufficient legal basis for such a proclamation.
That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.
Within days of the confirmation of the first case in the United States, the White House shut American land borders to nonessential travel, closing the door to almost all migrants, including children and teenagers who arrived at the border with no parent or other adult guardian. Other international travel restrictions were introduced, as well as a pause on green card processing at American consular offices, which Mr. Miller told conservative allies in a recent private phone call was only the first step in a broader plan to restrict legal immigration.
But what has been billed by the White House as an urgent response to the coronavirus pandemic was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Mr. Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy, three former officials who were involved in the earlier deliberations said.
One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a “wish list” of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.
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He had come up with the proposals, the official said, by poring through not just existing immigration laws, but the entire federal code to look for provisions that would allow the president to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.
Administration officials have repeatedly said the latest measures are needed to prevent new cases of infection from entering the country.
“This is a public health order that we’re operating under right now,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters earlier this month. “This is not about immigration. What’s transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health.”
The White House declined to comment on the matter, but a senior administration official confirmed details of the past discussions.
The architect of the president’s assault on immigration and one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers inside the White House, Mr. Miller has relentlessly pushed for tough restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, including policies that sought to separate families crossing the southwest border, force migrants seeking asylum to wait in squalid camps in Mexico and deny green cards to poor immigrants.
Mr. Miller argues that reducing immigration will protect jobs for American workers and keep communities safe from criminals. But critics accuse him of targeting nonwhite immigrants, pointing in part to leaked emails from his time before entering the White House in which he cited white nationalist websites and magazines and promoted theories popular with white nationalist groups.
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Read the full article at the link.
As America suffers, immigrants, both legal and “undocumented,” are on the front lines of those “essential workers” risking their lives to keep us healthy, safe, fed, and clothed.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazi Miller remains “on the dole” — publicly funded for putting out a steady stream of discredited and xenophobic actions designed to exploit, dehumanize, and demean many of the most courageous and necessary among us.
Can it get any more vile and disgusting?
Nearly 55 years after the end of WWII, Trump & Miller are reviving many aspects of the racist ideology and actions that we supposedly fought to end forever. Raises the question of who really won the war.
Always the opportunists, Trump and Miller now see the crisis that their “malicious incompetence” helped to aggravate as a chance to target both “Optional Practical Training” (“OPT”) for foreign students and Chinese students, one of the largest groups of those studying in the U.S. You can read about it in this article by Stuart Anderson in Forbes.https://apple.news/ADkCNTe_gTje__BlQ8c-8pg
Stuart Anderson Executive Director National Foundation for American Policy
OPT unquestionably benefits our country as well as the students, many of whom remain and become important parts of our society. The targeting of Chinese students certainly fits with the far right’s Anti-Asian movement that has helped spike a notable increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans during the pandemic. Could the revival of the Chinese Exclusion Act be far beyond on the Trump/Miller Jim Crow agenda?
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
When critics reach for analogies to describe Donald Trump — or look for examples of democratic deterioration — they tend to look abroad. They point to Russia under Vladimir Putin, Hungary under Viktor Orban, or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump, in this view, is a type — an authoritarian strongman. But it’s a foreign type, and his corrupt administration is seen as alien to the American experience.
This is a little too generous to the United States. It’s not just that we have had moments of authoritarian government — as well as presidents, like John Adams or Woodrow Wilson, with autocratic impulses — but that an entire region of the country was once governed by an actual authoritarian regime. That regime was Jim Crow, a system defined by a one-party rule and violent repression of racial minorities.
The reason this matters is straightforward. Look beyond America’s borders for possible authoritarian futures and you might miss important points of continuity with our own past. Which is to say that if authoritarian government is in our future, there’s no reason to think it won’t look like something we’ve already built, versus something we’ve imported.
Americans don’t usually think of Jim Crow as a kind of authoritarianism, or of the Jim Crow South as a collection of authoritarian states. To the extent that there is one, the general view is that the Jim Crow South was a democracy, albeit racist and exclusionary. People voted in elections, politicians exchanged power and institutions like the press had a prominent place in public life.
There’s a strong case to be made that this is wrong. “To earn the moniker,” argues the political scientist Robert Mickey in “Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972,” “democracies must feature free and fair elections, the safeguarding of rights necessary to sustain such elections — such as freedoms of assembly, association, and speech — and a state apparatus sufficiently responsive to election winners and autonomous from social and economic forces that these elections are meaningful.”
By that standard, the Jim Crow South was not democratic. But does that make it authoritarian? A look at the creation of Jim Crow can help us answer the question.
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Jim Crow did not emerge immediately after the Compromise of 1877 — in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in return for the presidency — and the end of Reconstruction. It arose, instead, as a response to a unique set of political and economic conditions in the 1890s.
By the start of the decade, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued in his influential 1955 book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” opposition to “extreme racism” had relaxed to the point of permissiveness. External restraining forces — “Northern liberal opinion in the press, the courts, and the government” — were more concerned with reconciling the nation than securing Southern democracy. And within the South, conservative political and business elites had abandoned restraint in the face of a radical challenge from an agrarian mass movement.
Mickey notes how the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party “clashed with state and national Democratic parties on major economic issues, including debt relief for farmers and the regulation of business.” What’s more, “A Colored Farmers’ Alliance grew rapidly as well, and held out the possibility of biracial coalition-building.” This possibility became a reality in states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, where Populists joined with a majority-black southern Republican Party to support common lists of candidates in “fusion” agreements against an explicitly elitist and white supremacist Democratic Party. Populists and Republicans won their greatest victories in that era in North Carolina, where they captured the state legislature and governor’s mansion, as well as local and county offices.
Democrats, among them large landowners and “New South” industrialists, responded with violence. Democratic paramilitary organizations — called “Red Shirts” — attacked Populist and Republican voters, suppressing the vote throughout the state. In Republican-controlled Wilmington, N.C., writes Mickey, “Democratic notables launched a wave of violence and killings of Republicans and their supporters, black and white, to take back the state’s largest city; hundreds fled for good.”
This basic pattern repeated itself throughout the South for the next decade. Working through the Democratic Party, conservative elites “repressed Populists, seized control of the state apparatus, and effectively ended credible partisan competition.” They rewrote state constitutions to end the vote for blacks as well as substantially restrict it for most whites. They gerrymandered states to secure the political power of large landowners, converted local elective offices into appointed positions controlled at the state level, “and further insulated state judiciaries from popular input.” This could have been stopped, but the North was tired of sectional conflict, and the courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the Democrats.
The southern Democratic Party didn’t just control all offices and effectively staff the state bureaucracy. It was gatekeeper to all political participation. An aspiring politician could not run for office, much less win and participate in government, without having it behind him. “What is the state?” asked one prominent lawyer during Louisiana’s 1898 Jim Crow constitutional convention, aptly capturing the dynamic at work, “It is the Democratic Party.” Statehood was conflated with party, writes Mickey, “and party disloyalty with state treason.”
Southern conservatives beat back Populism and biracial democracy to build a one-party state and ensure cheap labor, low taxes, white supremacy and a starkly unequal distribution of wealth. It took two decades of disruption — the Great Depression, the Great Migration and the Second World War — to even make change possible, and then another decade of fierce struggle to bring democracy back to the South.
It’s not that we can’t learn from the experiences of other countries, but that our past offers an especially powerful point of comparison. Many of the same elements are in play, from the potent influence of a reactionary business elite to a major political party convinced of its singular legitimacy. A party that has already weakened our democracy to protect its power, and which shows every sign of going further should the need arise. A party that stands beside a lawless president, shielding him from accountability while he makes the government an extension of his personal will.
I’m not saying a new Jim Crow is on the near horizon (or the far one, for that matter). But if we look at the actions of the political party and president now in power, if we think of how they would behave with even more control over the levers of the state, then we might be on a path that ends in something that is familiar from our past — authoritarian government with a democratic facade.
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“[T]he courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the [Jim Crow] Democrats.”
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In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.
— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)
How soon we forget!
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Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants. There is nothing “fair and balanced” about the court’s double standard that favors the government over everyone else. And, as Sotomayor implies, this flagrant bias creates the disturbing impression that the Trump administration has a majority of the court in its pocket.
More than two-thirds of the migrants fleeing Central America’s northern triangle countries – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – experienced the murder, disappearance or kidnapping of a relative before their departure, according to a new study by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
The MSF study said 42.5% of interviewees reported the violent death of a relative over the previous two years, while 16.2% had a relative forcibly disappeared and 9.2% had a loved one kidnapped.
The study – based on interviews with migrants and refugees at MSF medical facilities in Central America and Mexico – once again showed the despair driving migrants to abandon some the hemisphere’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Central America’s rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
“We’re speaking of human beings, not numbers,” Sergio Martín, MSF general coordinator in Mexico, said at the study’s presentation on Tuesday. “In many cases, it’s clear that migration is the only possible way out. Staying put is not an option.”
In 45.8% of the interviews, migrants said that “exposure to violent situations” was a key reason for leaving their home country. Of those fleeing due to violence, 36.4% had become internally displaced in their countries of origin, but were eventually forced to flee.
The research was published at a time when the US border is becoming increasingly difficult to reach.
Mexico has been launched a crackdown against people trying to cross its southern frontier and deployed its newly created national guard to dismantle large groups of migrants, while the Trump administration has made the asylum process practically impossible for most applicants.
US officials are returning asylum seekers to dangerous Mexican border cities – where MSF has found many are kidnapped and preyed upon by drug cartels – under scheme known as migrant protection protocols to await their court cases. Some migrants are now being flown to Guatemala to apply for asylum in the impoverished Central American country.
Remain in Mexico: 80% of migrants in Trump policy are victims of violence
“The aggressive migration policies adopted by the US and Mexico mean that more and more people are trapped in a vicious circle,” the MSF report stated. “Patients describe an increase in the predatory violence perpetuated by criminal organisations operating along the migrant route.”
Meanwhile, violence against migrants transit Mexico is escalating, the study found: 39.2% of interviewees were assaulted in the country, while 27.3% were threatened or extorted – with the actual figures likely higher than the official statistics as victims tend not to report crimes committed against them.
Nearly 6% of migrants reported witnessing a death during their time in Mexico, according to MSF. In 17.9% of those cases, it was a murder.
Members of MSF teams have themselves witnessed kidnappings outside migrant shelters.
“The physical obstacles to entering the United States are taken for granted. But what surprises [migrants] … is the violence that they experience in Mexico,” the report said.
“Coming from a country where violence is endemic, they decide to make the journey because they have no other option.”
Violence is just of a range of factors driving migration, and motives vary from region to region and country to country.
A 2019 survey from Creative Associates International found violence was the main driver of migration for 38% of Salvadorans, 18% of Hondurans and 14% of Guatemalans. In Guatemala – the main source of migrants detained at the US border with Mexico – 71% of respondents cited “economic concerns” as their main motive.
Fleeing a hell the US helped create: why Central Americans journey north
Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a driver of migration – especially from areas in Central America’s “Dry Corridor” – as is political corruption.
“Over the last 20 years in Honduras, the poverty rate hasn’t fallen beneath 60%,” said Father Germán Calix, Honduras director of the Catholic Church’s charitable arm Caritas.
“The lack of policies and actions in favor of the poor has been such that people have lost confidence that this situation can ever be reversed from Honduras.”
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As folks die, are raped, kidnapped, extorted, and abused, as a result of DHS’s policies, Acting CBP Commish Mark Morgan touts how effective massive violations of legal, constitutional, and human rights are at deterring refugees seeking legal protection.
WASHINGTON — The number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border declined for the eighth month in a row in January, but Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday that in recent weeks the number of average daily apprehensions has risen.
In four of the past five years, apprehensions have begun to increase in February, according to CBP statistics. Morgan said he thinks there might be a spring surge in migrants from Mexico motivated in part by the country’s stagnant economy. The recent uptick is occurring despite tough limitations on asylum opportunities and more aggressive deportation policies.
Morgan noted that the majority of people crossing the border are now individual adults from Mexico, and said that the Trump administration was having success in dissuading Central American families from coming north.
Total apprehensions at the border were lower in January than in recent months, but during the month daily apprehensions began increasing. U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 29,200 individuals crossing at the Southwest border between ports of entry during January, CBP said Tuesday morning, a decrease from the 32,858 people apprehended in December and 33,511 in November.
Morgan touted the agency’s January successes, including the discovery of the longest cross-border tunnel used for smuggling in history and the seizure of more than 50,000 pounds of drugs on the Southwest border.
“We continue to see positive results because of the steps taken by the Trump Administration to control the border and uphold the rule of law,” said Morgan. “We’ve seen eight straight months of decline, but as we see from the seizure of the longest-ever tunnel between the U.S. and Mexico and significant drug seizures, much work remains.”
Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have decreased, said Morgan. He hailed the administration’s success in reducing numbers of apprehensions from these three countries, crediting security agreements with their governments. He noted that CBP has been promoting the message that if citizens from those countries come to the U.S., “They will be promptly removed and returned.”
The Trump administration has long sought to deter migrants, many of whom were Central American families, from making the journey to the U.S. southern border. Some of the administration’s policies at the border have stoked outrage over the treatment of migrants, such as the 2018 family separation policy that removed children as young as a few months old from their parents and kept them in separate detention facilities.
Last year, the administration implemented a policy to send many asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases play out. It recently began sending some asylum-seekers to Guatemala.
Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have said such policies violate migrants’ rights and further endanger them by making them wait in dangerous border towns or in one of the most violent countries in the world, which lacks a robust asylum system. A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this month highlighted the potentially deadly risks to Salvadorans in particular — many of whom are fleeing gang violence — when they are sent to wait in Mexico or deported to El Salvador.
Morgan was also asked about the detention of Iranian Americans on the Northern border in Washington state after the U.S. killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January. CBP denied there was any directive to agents in a tweet, but a memo surfaced weeks later showing the CBP Seattle Field Office had told much of the Northern border to conduct additional screenings of anyone with ties to Iran or Lebanon. He noted that while there was no national directive, the Seattle Field Office got “overzealous” in screening Iranian-Americans and headquarters immediately corrected the action.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who represents Seattle, said, “It’s deeply disturbing that it took my inquiries, a leaked memo and press reports for CBP to finally acknowledge that it inappropriately targeted Iranian Americans at the Washington State-Canada border.”
“We need to know how far-reaching the order was, who it came from and why it took so long for CBP to come clean.”
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The dead can’t speak. Those illegally deported to torture, rape, extortion, abuse, and exploitation often don’t want to.
In an era where the “truly courageous heroes of public service” are punished by Trump while his GOP sycophants cheer, Morgan is a shining example of the very worst and most disgraceful characteristics of those who falsely claim to be serving our national interests!
Obviously, in the age of extreme regime unaccountability, Congressional fecklessness, and Article III Judicial complicity, folks like Morgan literally can “get with murder.” How grotesque, and arrogantly immoral to tout the deadly results of dehumanization and degradation of some of the most vulnerable and needy human beings!
Also worth noting that until hard evidence to the contrary emerged, under Morgan CBP initially lied about detentions of U.S. citizens of Iranian descent at the border.All of this flagrant dishonesty, racism, and impunity was originally enabled and encouraged by the “head in the sand” approach to the regime’s dishonesty and gross violations of the Constitution in the “Travel Ban Cases” by the Supremes led by the “J.R. Five.” Remember that the next time J.R. fecklessly and disingenuously pontificates on the “loss of civility” in legal discourse. What about the loss of human lives due to your complicit performance, J.R.?
A note to future historians:Don’t forget the role played by Morgan and other regime toadies in what properly will be viewed as intentional “crimes against humanity” and attendant cover-ups and minimization of intentionally inflicted human misery and unnecessary suffering. And, certainly J.R. and his other GOP judicial enablers should be “outed” and held accountable for their role in destroying our democratic institutions, encouraging evil, and promoting injustice and dehumanization. They are enablers and knowing participants in “America’s Jim Crow Revival!”
Due Process Forever; Crimes Against Humanity & Toady Bureaucrats & Judges Never!
