"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
“I went through dozens of reports, scores of articles, on the discussion of this migration bill, and the reporters talked to zero migrants and zero migrant rights groups.”
In recent weeks, longtime media analyst Adam Johnson has been looking through scores of articles and analyzing Democrats’ rhetoric to see how the border was being framed. One of the texts he looked at was the emergency national security supplemental bill that emerged for a vote on the Senate floor. This bipartisan border bill had been at the negotiation table for months, and it included provisions for military aid for Ukraine and Israel. The bill was ultimately voted down, after Donald Trump rejected it and the Republican Party followed suit. In our conversation, Johnson talks about his deep dive into the coverage surrounding the deal, and he speculates on what that means in this election year: that Democrats have entered new political terrain around the border and immigration enforcement. This interview is based on articles Johnson wrote for The Real News (“Media ‘Border Deal’ Coverage Erases Actual Human Stakes”) and The Nation (“The Democrats’ Hard-Right Turn on Immigration Is a Disaster In Every Way”), both places that he contributes to regularly. He also wrote “Top 10 Media Euphemisms for Violent Bipartisan Anti-immigrant Policies,” at his Substack, The Column. Johnson cohosts the popular podcast Citations Needed, where they discussed the border on their February 21 edition. Johnson’s media analysis spans back nearly a decade, much of it for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Adam Johnson
Let’s start with the “border deal.” In The Real News you write that it dehumanizes migrants. Can you tell us a little bit about what the border deal is, and some key points about the coverage?
It’s a Republican border deal by framing and admission. Senators Chris Murphy, Tina Smith, and Mark Warner have framed it as a Republican border deal. Almost entirely. It is a 90 to 95 percent Republican deal in nature. They’ve repeatedly said that Republicans demanded XYZ and they gave them XYZ. This is how they’re framing it, because otherwise the hypocrisy gotcha doesn’t really work.
Can you clarify what you mean by “hypocrisy gotcha”?
If it’s not an overwhelming Republican bill, then the idea that they’re abandoning their won bill in service of Trump—which has been their primary gotcha—doesn’t make sense.
But let’s look at the substance of what the bill is.
Among other things, it has $8 billion in emergency funding for ICE, which more than doubles ICE’s enforcement budget. Do you remember “abolish ICE,” back five years ago or so?
It includes $3 billion in increased detention, a mechanism to shut down the border, and $7 billion to Customs and Border Protection, including the continuation of Trump’s wall. And so this is both objectively and how the Democrats describe a far-right Republican bill. That’s the appeal of it.
And the clever idea behind this is that a typical triangulation, that is, if you take a right-wing policy and adopt it as your own, you therefore take away that issue a little quicker come election time. It is for those who view politics as merely a game to be won rather than a moral terrain to advance the greatest good of all people. If you were to take this logic to its extreme, Democrats could also support an abortion ban or decertify the 2020 election. I mean, where does it end? President Biden could get that face-off surgery and become Trump himself.
. . . .
All this is laundered through euphemism, which I wrote about on my Substack and in The Real News, where I talk about the various ways in which the human costs are obscured. According to the International Organization for Migration, the U.S.-Mexico border is the deadliest land crossing in the world. And so if you double the enforcement, and triple the broader security apparatus, bring in more surveillance drones, more weapons, invariably more people will die. There is a real human cost to this type of militarization.
. . . .
Keep in mind, too, that Biden in 2020 mobilized a lot of the immigration activists who opposed Trump’s policies. He rode that wave to pick up a lot of young votes, a lot of progressive voters, a lot of people who are sympathetic to or adjacent to immigrant communities. And this cruel policy shift has really moved them to the right. In the days after Democrats embrace this hard-right bill, Trump began to double down on things like internment camps, shipping off immigrants, because he has to differentiate himself from the Democrats, at least rhetorically.
We’re gonna have this fortress America mentality. No one wants to deal with any of the underlying issues. And we have to deal with global inequality. No one wants to deal with climate change. That’s too egg heady and academic and difficult. We’re just going to do what we always do, which is cops and cages. And cops and cages are the solution to every social ill, whether it’s homelessness, crime, or whatever. That’s the order of the day. The bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans both want it. The worst place for a vulnerable group to be is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus.
. . . .
Many Border Chronicle readers are interested in shifting the narrative. But how do you shift the narrative? Is it just too entrenched?
Some members of Congress have pushed back on this. But I think they’ve been pretty quiet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed back in an interview, but I don’t think she’s really tweeted about it. Once you have this “we have to defeat Trump in 2024 above all else,” then everybody shuts up and goes along with it.
And I think that’s absolutely wrong. I think now is the time to stand up to this demagoguery. Adopting a Republican bill is not the solution. And, hopefully, if enough people stand up to this, then it can become politically costly for Democrats to continue doing this.
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Read the full report at the link.
The worst place for a vulnerable group to be is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus.
These days, on immigration issues the term “bipartisan consensus” is actually a euphemism for “Dem giveaway of others’ rights to GOP nativists.” And, of course, even after the giveaway, the GOP shows absolutely no interest is such one-sided “bipartisanship” because Der Fuhrer tells them they must vote it down.
Yet, the disingenuous media and pundits keep misusing the term “bipartisanship” as if it had real meaning! And, although holding power in two of the three political branches, while the GOP struggles mightily to cling to its narrow margin in one, Biden and the Dems “wimp out” time after time on immigration, human rights, and racial justice.
The GOP proudly advertises that it has no values beyond whatever Trump wants on any particular day.
By contrast, Dems claim to have values. But a campaign being run against those professed values and their own core voters suggests that they too have become a “transactional party of no enduring values.”
Does America really need two political parties that stand for nothing beyond gratuitous cruelty to others and getting elected?
“Go along to get along.” Unhappily, that’s what today’s Dems appear to stand for.
Frankly, that has been at the heart of many of the problems at EOIR, particularly in Dem Administrations that were afraid of taking the bold and sometimes controversial actions necessary to change culture, institutionalize due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices. Current AG Merrick Garland is a classic example of this failed Dem model. As a result, EOIR is a dramatically dysfunctional and unjust agency.
Will the Democratic Party keep mindlessly following in EOIR’s footsteps? What’s it going to take for the next generation of Democrats to halt the slide into moral vapidity and political irrelevance?
May 8, 2023—The Atlantic’s staff writer Caitlin Dickerson has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for the September 2022 cover story, “‘We Need to Take Away Children,’” an exhaustive investigation that exposed the secret history of the Trump administration’s policy to intentionally separate migrant children from their parents; the incompetence that led the government to lose track of many children; and the intention among former officials to separate families again if Trump is reelected. Her reporting, one of the longest articles in The Atlantic’s history, laid out in painstaking detail one of the darkest chapters in recent U.S. history, exposing not only how the policy came into being and who was responsible for it, but also how all of its worst outcomes were anticipated and ignored. The investigation was edited by national editor Scott Stossel.
. . . .
In awarding Dickerson journalism’s top honor, the Pulitzer Board cited: “A deeply reported and compelling accounting of the Trump administration policy that forcefully separated migrant children from their parents resulting in abuses that have persisted under the current administration.”
The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote to staff: “This is a wonderful moment for everyone, but particularly for Caitlin, Liz, and Xochitl. There is much to say about their talents, and the talents of their editors. This is also a very proud moment for all of you who worked on these stories. Caitlin’s piece, one of the longest and most complicated stories The Atlantic has published across its 166-year history, required the unflagging work of a good portion of our comparatively small staff—from the copy-editing and fact-checking teams to our artists and designers and lawyers. Our ambitions outmatch our size, but I’m proud to say that our team rises to every challenge.”
Dickerson’s investigation exposed that U.S. officials misled Congress, the public, and the press, and minimized the policy’s implications to obscure what they were doing; that separating migrant children from their parents was not a side effect of the policy, but its intent; that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated; that instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep families apart longer; and that the architects of the legislation will likely seek to reinstate it, should they get the opportunity. Over 18 months, Dickerson conducted more than 150 interviews––including the first extensive on-the-record interviews on this subject with Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly, and others intimately involved in the policy and its consequences at every level of government––and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over only after a multiyear lawsuit.
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Read the complete article at the link.
Many congrats and thanks Caitlin! Unfortunately, the message still doesn’t seem to have gotten through to politicos and policy-makers of both parties who continue to promote, tout, and sometimes employ illegal, immoral, and ineffective measures directed at migrant children and families!
Most important — no accountability for the perpetrators! Indeed, if the GOP gets power again they plan to repeat their crimes! And the Dems aren’t that much better — happily touting policies that can have the same effect, whether intended or not.
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner write on Substack:
A hallmark of great journalism is that it shines a bright light on information that is in the public’s interest but that powerful forces and actors desperately want to remain hidden.
A perfect example of this came today with a blockbuster investigative report from ProPublica about serious ethical questions concerning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In a thorough examination of Thomas’s two-decade relationship with billionaire and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski detail a series of trips gifted to Thomas and his wife, Ginni, that on the open market would likely have totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars.
None of these were disclosed by Thomas, who likes to portray himself as a man of simple tastes. The report notes that in a recent documentary about his life, Thomas stated, “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it.” Let’s just say that none of the trips Thomas took with Crow on his yacht and to his private resort in the Adirondacks resembled a Walmart parking lot.
It is fitting that this news would drop a day after we wrote about the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The reporting on Thomas shows the utter hypocrisy of those on the political right claiming that progressive judges are the ones undermining faith in our judicial system.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts likes to intone on how much he cares for the integrity of the court. But under his watch, the court’s standing with the public has dropped precipitously. And he need look no further than his ideological counterparts in the court’s right-wing majority.
The damage to the court’s reputation has been manifest in a series of rulings that have made a mockery of the ideas of judicial restraint and precedent. These have overturned Roe v. Wade, emboldened unrestricted gun rights, and undermined our representative government through gerrymandered elections. And that’s just the beginning.
Then there is the personal conduct of the justices, of which Thomas, a hero to the right, is a particularly egregious example. Here he is hobnobbing with rich, powerful interests and not letting anyone know. There he was refusing to recuse himself from a case involving the January 6 insurrection even though his own wife was implicated. It is clear he feels he has no need to defend his actions to anyone. He is completely unaccountable and flaunts it.
Senate Democrats today called for an ethics code for the Supreme Court. But color us skeptical that anything will change anytime soon.
This is a time of great tension in the function (or perhaps more aptly, the dysfunction) of our democracy. It feels as if we have been walking a high wire for years. But the tension still increases. In just the last few days, we have seen a state legislator in North Carolina who had run as a solid Democrat switch parties, giving Republicans a supermajority. In Tennessee, Republicans in the state’s House expelled two Democratic representatives who had joined students in protesting inaction on gun violence. And this on top of what we saw in Wisconsin.
There is also the backdrop of the former president facing numerous strands of legal peril.
There has always been an element of hardball in politics. There have always been public officials who skirted or crossed the lines of ethics and the law. There have always been judges who had dubious connections. Democracy is always precarious.
But there is a sense that now the danger is building. Voters are angry. The will of the majority is being undermined on issues like abortion and gun safety. Power is being accrued for its own sake and not to address the needs of the people.
These are times when we need a fearless press to explain where there is peril and where there is promise around the ability of our nation to regain its footing and thrive. Kudos to ProPublica for its contribution to the health of American democracy.
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For the last several weeks, the so-called “mainstream media” has been providing “wall to wall” coverage of a “non-event” that eventually “morphed” into yet another tawdry episode in the tawdry life of America’s most visible anti-democracy fascist! They worked hard to give “equal (or greater) time” to a unified disingenuous effort by this guy’s supporters to portray him as “the victim!” In perhaps a new “modern journalistic low” they willingly provided a platform for dangerous wacko conspiracy theorist “MTG” to spew forth her vile “sicko-fascist” rantings — with little pushback and no fact checking!
Fortunately, as pointed out by Rather and Kirschner, somebody, in this case Pro Publica, was out there doing serious investigative journalism while their “mainstream” colleagues indulged their fantasies!
For more on the GOP’s concerted, nationwide assault on democracy and fundamental values, read historian Heather Cox Richardson, here:
The Boston Globe has tappedTal Kopan as deputy bureau chief in its D.C. bureau. Currently, she is a Washington correspondent at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Before that, Kopan served as a political reporter at CNN. She worked as a breaking news reporter and cybersecurity policy reporter at Politico. She was a web producer and contributing writer at Politico Pro and also reported for C-SPAN.
Kopan has a B.A. from the University of Chicago.
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Many congrats to Tal — one of the best in the business, with strong “immigration roots!”
No institution welcomes scrutiny. Maintaining internal cohesion and operational focus demands informational boundaries against the rest of the world. This wish deserves respect, but not automatic submission, especially when matters of vast public consequence are at stake.
That’s why news media take it as a duty to ignore organizational secrecy rules — except when disclosure would cause unwarranted harm — and insist that public awareness must outweigh institutional convenience. A document leaked from most any federal agency that upended longstanding policy would unquestionably be legitimate news, even if it was preliminary, even if exposure would gum up a cozy internal process, even if the leak broke agency rules.
But not when it comes to the Supreme Court.
Of all our governmental institutions, it is unique in the awe and deference with which our news media, for all their endless claims to seek truth aggressively, treat it.
To be sure, secrecy has a place in the judicial system. Grand juries, for example, are prosecutorial contrivances where untested evidence is presented and people suspected of wrongdoing have weak adversarial protections. Damaging the innocent by publicizing unrebutted claims is a strong possibility. Secrecy makes sense.
But the issue here is altogether different. The leak was of a 98-page draft opinion with 118 footnotes, not a filched personal email or the secondhand account of an overheard chat. It was deeply researched and carefully composed and was distributed internally nearly three months ago, and it signals a major change in an explosive area of public policy. Publishing it doesn’t endanger national security and puts no innocent lives at risk.
So should the Supreme Court, virtually alone among core public institutions, be entitled to say, “We’ll show it to you when we’re ready for you to see it?”
At best, that exceptionalist claim rests on a carefully nurtured myth of the court as a scholarly sanctuary in which big questions of public purpose are engaged through reflection, historical inquiry and quiet, reasoned debate, a process of ripening that must take place behind the sealed doors of an intellectual greenhouse.
That fiction lost credibility a long time ago, at least for anybody who was paying attention in the year 2000 when the court, with the flimsiest of pretexts, awarded the presidency to the candidate with fewer votes but of the same party as its majority.
Indeed, what standards of accountability govern the court? Its members serve life terms free from disciplinary oversight. To get aboard, nominees routinely lie before Congress — about their personal behavior and their judicial philosophy — rendering the Senate’s authority to approve candidates meaningless. Serving justices are not held to any discernible standard of independence. Their right to rule on matters in which close family have personal stakes, or on which they have clear prior leanings, is completely unregulated.
And then there’s the recent sharp increase in furtive rulings reached off-season without full briefing or oral argument — known as the shadow docket — which has further narrowed the window of public visibility. Last summer the court issued 11 such rulings, up from three in 2016, in a slapdash and opaque workaround beloved of the conservative majority that produces jurisprudence that “every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend,” as dissenting liberal Justice Elena Kagan said.
Perhaps the Roe leak will inaugurate a new era for the court. Maybe there will be more impertinent reporting that exposes the reasoning, bargaining, trade-offs and personal dynamics that drive constitutional lawmaking at the highest levels. Rather than something to be dreaded, such transparency would leave us all better informed and more fully empowered to play the role the system prescribes for us — to shape our collective future.
Edward Wasserman is professor of journalism and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
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Read Wasserman’s full article at the link.
He says, “No institution welcomes scrutiny.” Very true. Any leader or group of leaders who claim the contrary are probably lying.
Scrutiny sometimes brings accountability. And, as our system deteriorates before our eyes, that’s something that has become rare in today’s politics and public life.
Zay Nockton “Norty” Smith 1949-2020 Lawrence University ’70 Noted American Journalist, Writer, Card Player
We met in the fall of 1966 at “historic” Brokaw Hall, then the freshmen men’s residence, at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. “Norty” was a “regular” at the card tables in the lounge.
Later, we became friends and “brothers” at the notorious “Sig Ep House,” then located behind the red door at 726 East John Street. That’s right across from Russell Sage Hall, then a women’s dorm. That’s also where our brother “Dick the Stick” once ran a “borrowed” Bobcat from a local construction project up the Sage steps, leaving a deep gash on one of the columns supporting the portico. I remember our kids were impressed when I showed them the then-still-existing mark decades later during an LU reunion (this would have been our “50th,” but we’ve had to “go virtual, at least for now). Something about “For it’s not for knowledge that we’ve come to college, but to raise Hell while we’re here . . . .”
All that nonsense aside, there was plenty of learning and knowledge gathering going on beneath our juvenile stupidity and hijinks. Among the things that marked Norty as one of the “characters”who stays with you for life: humor, satire, and writing. The man could write, boy could he write. Even in those days he stood out as someone who “had the talent” in the world of a small liberal arts college where writing was a “big deal” and many folks did it well.
For awhile, Norty published his own “underground newspaper,” the Bourgeois Pig, sort of an early forerunner of The Onion. I probably didn’t fully appreciate the true brilliance of “The Pig” at the time. But, I like to think that “a little Pig” still lives on at “Courtside.” If my suppressed ambition was to someday become a “gonzo journalist,” Norty actually lived his dream. He became a real journalist, and a great and famous one at that. Up until his death, his blog writings and Facebook postings would bring a chuckle to my wife Cathy who also was “one of our gang” at Lawrence.
Eventually, Norty and I along with the rest of our “happy brotherhood” — Mink, Biff, Bear, Stick, Liv, SJS, Crummy Andy, B.I., Flip the Owl, Rufus, Joe Don, Hatchell, SK, Herbie, Ma Fowls, Ski, Scottie and a host of other characters — all resided together, if not always in harmony, at “The Ep House.” There was a 24-hour “Shoss” (a/k/a “Sheepshead”) game going in the card room, which, not surprisingly, usually involved Norty. Seems to me that he finished even further “down” the semester-long “owes” tab posted on the wall than I did. But, I could be wrong about that. I’ll readily concede that he played more often and with more skill and strategy than I did.
After a stint in grad school in Iowa City, Norty settled in Chicago where he became a “big time” reporter for the Sun Times. His most famous caper, for which he received national, and perhaps international, attention was the “Norty the Bartender” sting operation in the late 1970s. It’s detailed in all its glory, along with some wonderful “period” photos, in the extensive and beautifully written Sun Times obit by Mark Brown, linked below. But, as Mark points out, there was much more to Norty’s life, career, and his writing than that one blockbuster.
Amazingly, our “band of bros,” or at least the survivors, eventually grew up and became (somewhat) respectable, accomplished, distinguished, and productive members of society: doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, executives, journalists, judges, writers, government officials, military officers, businessmen, authors, horsemen, etc. Like many of us, Norty married, and he and his wife Susy had two terrific sons, Bryant, and Zachary of whom he was exceedingly proud. Indeed, Norty’s family was kind and caring enough to keep all of “the gang” posted on his condition and how we could still share with him right up until the end.
Over the years, I sporadically kept in touch with Norty and the rest of the “Chicago branch of the gang.” I recollect that as my travels as a government, and then private, lawyer sometimes took me to Chicago, I occasionally was able to meet up with Norty, Ski, Bear and the others for a beer or two at some local watering hole.
We also had some more full-fledged “mini-reunions” in Chicago. One that Cathy and I attended around 2001 hosted by Ski and his wife involved Norty riding in the back cargo area of the station wagon as we headed to a White Sox game. Another, was hosted by “Bear & Betsy” for the Wisconsin-Northwestern football game in Evanston in November2016. Following the inevitable Badger victory, we all repaired back to Bear and Betsy’s for a great dinner and a massive “Shoss” game with Norty in attendance. Bear “strictly enforced” the “no politics rule” — something that had been added, apparently out of necessity born out of experience, since our days in the old Ep card room.
Sadly, that was the “last hurrah” for that particular configuration of our band. The last time I spoke with Norty by phone was in July 2017. The voice message said “Wick, call me ASAP.” When I did, Norty said “Sit down, you’re not going to like this.” I remember momentarily thinking that he was about to blast me for some egregious grammatical or factual error (or both) on Courtside, or to ask me for advice for a friend on some hopeless immigration case.
But, no, it was much, much worse. Norty called to tell me that our dear friend and brother Russ “Biff Stoney” Birkos had died suddenly. I sat next to Biff at the last football game, and had rushed to his aid when he was viciously “taken out” by a knee-high metal post in the stadium parking lot. Biff’s first reaction had been: “You’re a lawyer, Wick, can we sue? If not, what good are you?” Typical “brotherhood banter.”
I never spoke with Norty again after Biff’s death, although we continued to keep in touch through our e-mail group.
So, now, yet another of us is gone. Norty, has taken his wit, wisdom, and penetrating human insights on to a “higher audience.” “It’s life,” of course. And, it was expected. But, as I have found at other times, that doesn’t make it any easier. I know how much Susy, Bryant, and Zachary miss him. We all do. A life well-lived and elegantly recounted in every way.
Farewell, Norty. And, thanks for the memories and for everything else, including wiping out my final “Shoss debt!”
The Los Angeles Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for art critic Christopher Knight’s watchdog coverage of plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and reporter Molly O’Toole’s audio story about U.S. asylum officers’ discontent with President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
The prizes were awarded Monday in the criticism and audio reporting categories. O’Toole and The Times shared the audio prize with journalists from “This American Life” and Vice.
. . . .
The Pulitzer judges cited O’Toole and Vice freelancer Emily Green for “The Out Crowd,” broadcast on NPR’s “This American Life,” for “revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy.”
O’Toole, 33, had covered immigration and border security for a decade and decided to look closely at a new policy targeting asylum seekers, not just people who had illegally crossed the border.
She found veteran asylum officers deeply troubled by directives that in effect forced them to push many Mexican and Central American immigrants back to deadly violence in their home countries.
“The officers felt very strongly about refugee asylum and the idea of the U.S. as a safe haven,” she said. “Now they were taking part in a policy that they felt was wrong, morally and legally. But they had few choices, either continue being part of this administration or quit and lose their career.”
Audio reporting is a new Pulitzer category in 2020.
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Read Joe’s full report at the link.
Congrats and thanks to Molly, Emily, and the folks at “This American Life” for all they do!👍
They are making a permanent record of the disgusting Human Rights abuses ☠️ and lawlessness of the Trump regime for posterity, even as the Supremes and Congress gutlessly look the other way 👎!
“As he awaits his fate in a remote Texas jail, Mr. Gutierrez, 54, remains convinced of the peril he faces if deported to his native country. “My life depends on this [appeal],” he said by telephone in a news conference organized Monday by the National Press Club. “I’m terrified to set foot in Mexico.”
The judge who denied asylum in the case, Robert S. Hough, pointed to an absence of documentary and testimonial corroboration of Mr. Gutierrez’s claim. The woman who relayed word of the alleged death threat did not come forward; neither did Mr. Gutierrez’s former boss at the newspaper for which he worked in Chihuahua. Much of Mr. Gutierrez’s case comes down to his word.
Nonetheless, the judge’s cut-and-dried application of the law fails to take into account conditions in Mexico generally and the peril faced there by journalists in particular. It’s not surprising that Mr. Gutierrez cannot recover copies of his articles, written more than a decade ago for a regional newspaper. Nor is it unusual that witnesses are reluctant to come forward, given the fear with which many Mexicans regard the security forces.
As a U.N. report published this month concluded, citing the deaths, disappearances and attacks on dozens of journalists tallied by Mexico’s Human Rights Commission, “The data . . . presents a picture for the situation of journalists in Mexico that cannot be described as other than catastrophic.” Against that background, it seems cavalier to dismiss the threat Mr. Gutierrez faces should he be deported to Mexico. He should be granted asylum.”
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Read the complete Editorial at the link.
Unfortunately, a “cut and dried application of the law” without proper regard to the facts or reality is a disturbingly accurate snapshot of what all too often happens daily in our Immigration Courts, a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the US Department of Justice and part of the “Trump Conglomerate” (formerly known as the US Government).
Our failing US Immigration Court system and its aggravation by AG “Gonzo Apocalypto’s” oft-expressed hostility to immigrants, asylum, the rule of law (except his 1950s “Jim Crow” views on the law and how it should be a tool for injustice and advancing White Nationalism), lawyers, Latinos, Mexicans, and the press has become an almost daily topic for major editorial boards. At least someone (other than me) is watching and documenting as this mockery of American justice unfolds before us.
In particular, too many U.S. Immigration Judges are tone-deaf to Mexican asylum claims, not wanting to be accused of “opening the floodgates” ( a concept that is nowhere to be found in the actual law) and knowing that “Gonzo” wants lots of “quick removals” rather than asylum grants. Additionally, the only administrative check on the Immigration Judges’ authority is a weak Appeals Board that never “calls out” overly restrictive Immigration Judges by name and seldom publishes precedents granting asylum. Truly, a prescription for a “Due Process Disaster!”
Judge Hough seems to have forgotten that under the law:
”Corroborating evidence” can only be required if it is “reasonably available;”
Testimony may be corroborated by country condition information describing the same abuses that the applicant claims;
The standard for granting asylum is a generous “well-founded fear” or “reasonable likelihood” of future harm which can be “significantly less than probable — as little as a 10% chance can suffice;
Asylum applicants are supposed to be given the “benefit of the doubt” in recognition of the evidentiary challenges of providing proof of persecution and the difficulties of relating traumatic events in the past.
It remain to be seen whether the Board of Immigration Appeals, EOIR’s “Appellate Court,” will correct Judge Hough’s life-threatening errors and, further, issue a strong precedent on asylum for foreign journalists (traditionally one of the most vulnerable and persecuted groups) to prevent further miscarriages of Justice such as this. Such a precedent would also discourage the DHS from continuing to abuse our system by pushing for removal (and needless detention) in cases such as this where a grant of asylum at the DHS Asylum Office or at the hearing following the testimony would be the correct result.
Or, will the next major editorial describe and decry Mr. Gutierrez’s death in Mexico!
In a well-functioning justice system, this case should have been a “Short-docket, No-brainer Grant.” But, Gonzo Apocalypto seeks to use the US Immigration Courts as an extension of DHS enforcement rather than, as they were intended, as Courts guaranteeing fairness, Due Process, and equal justice for all! We need change. Lots of it!
[NOTE: For those interested, Judge Hough apparently has not decided enough asylum cases on the merits in El Paso to be listed on the statistical profile of asylum outcomes maintained by TRAC Immigration.]
“In Donald Trump’s America, the mere act of reporting news unflattering to the president is held up as evidence of bias. Journalists are slandered as “enemies of the people.”
Facts that contradict Trump’s version of reality are dismissed as “fake news.” Reporters and their news organizations are “pathetic,” “very dishonest,” “failing,” and even, in one memorable turn of phrase, “a pile of garbage.”
Trump is, of course, not the first American president to whine about the news media or try to influence coverage. President George W. Bush saw the press as elitist and “slick.” President Obama’s press operation tried to exclude Fox News reporters from interviews, blocked many officials from talking to journalists and, most troubling, prosecuted more national security whistle-blowers and leakers than all previous presidents combined.
But Trump being Trump, he has escalated the traditionally adversarial relationship in demagogic and potentially dangerous ways.
Most presidents, irritated as they may have been, have continued to acknowledge — at least publicly — that an independent press plays an essential role in American democracy. They’ve recognized that while no news organization is perfect, honest reporting holds leaders and institutions accountable; that’s why a free press was singled out for protection in the 1st Amendment and why outspoken, unfettered journalism is considered a hallmark of a free country.
Trump doesn’t seem to buy it. On his very first day in office, he called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
Since then he has regularly condemned legitimate reporting as “fake news.” His administration has blocked mainstream news organizations, including The Times, from briefings and his secretary of State chose to travel to Asia without taking the press corps, breaking a longtime tradition.
This may seem like bizarre behavior from a man who consumes the news in print and on television so voraciously and who is in many ways a product of the media. He comes from reality TV, from talk radio with Howard Stern, from the gossip pages of the New York City tabloids, for whose columnists he was both a regular subject and a regular source.
But Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.
It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.
But it’s an effective strategy. Such attacks are politically expedient at a moment when trust in the news media is as low as it’s ever been, according to Gallup. And they’re especially resonant with Trump’s supporters, many of whom see journalists as part of the swamp that needs to be drained.”
