Tag: LA Times

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INCREDIBLE INCOMPETENCE OVERSHADOWS EVERYTHING: DHS Is Nowhere Close To Filling EXISTING Border Patrol Vacancies — What Would They Do With More?

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Molly O’Toole reports for the LA Times:

POLITICS
Trump ordered 15,000 new border and immigration officers — but got thousands of vacancies instead
By MOLLY O’TOOLE JAN 27, 2019 | 3:00 AM | WASHINGTON
A U.S. Border Patrol agent looks along the Rio Grande for people trying to enter the United States illegally. (Larry W. Smith / EPA/Shutterstock)
Two years after President Trump signed orders to hire 15,000 new border agents and immigration officers, the administration has spent tens of millions of dollars in the effort — but has thousands more vacancies than when it began.
In a sign of the difficulties, Customs and Border Protection allocated $60.7 million to Accenture Federal Services, a management consulting firm, as part of a $297-million contract to recruit, vet and hire 7,500 border officers over five years, but the company has produced only 33 new hires so far.
The president’s promised hiring surge steadily lost ground even as he publicly hammered away at the need for stiffer border security, warned of a looming migrant invasion and shut down parts of the government for five weeks over his demands for $5.7 billion from Congress for a border wall.
The Border Patrol gained a total of 120 agents in 2018, the first net gain in five years.
But the agency has come nowhere close to adding more than 2,700 agents annually, the rate that Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, has said is necessary to meet Trump’s mandated 26,370 border agents by the end of 2021.
“The hiring surge has not begun,” the inspector general’s office at the Department of Homeland Security concluded last November.
“We have had ongoing difficulties with regards to hiring levels to meet our operational needs,” a Homeland Security official told The Times on Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. He described the Border Patrol’s gain last year as a “a huge improvement.”
Border security agencies long have faced challenges with recruitment and retention of front-line federal law enforcement — in particular Border Patrol agents — much less swiftly hiring 15,000 more.
In March 2017, McAleenan said Customs and Border Protection normally loses about 1,380 agents a year as agents retire, quit for better-paying jobs or move. Just filling that hole each year has strained resources.
Beyond that, given historically low illegal immigration on the southern border, even the Homeland Security inspector general has questioned the need for the surge.
But administration officials argue an immigration system designed for single, adult Mexican men has become woefully outdated.
“The number of families and children we are apprehending at the border is at record-breaking levels,” another Homeland Security official said. “It’s having a dramatic impact on Border Patrol’s border security mission.”
Since 2015, CBP officers have been required to work overtime and sent on temporary assignments to “critically understaffed” points on the southwest border, Tony Reardon, president of the union representing about 30,000 CBP officers, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday.
After fighting for years for higher pay, staff and a better hiring process, Reardon said the agency needs to hire more officers for the 328 ports of entry.
“All of this contributes to a stronger border,” he said.
On Jan. 25, 2017, five days after Trump was inaugurated, he signed executive orders to hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, vowing to beef up border security and crack down on illegal immigration.
“Today the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said as he signed the orders.
Today, Customs and Border Protection — the Border Patrol’s parent agency — has more than 3,000 job vacancies, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
That’s about 2,000 more than when Trump signed the orders, according to a Government Accountability Office report on CBP’s hiring challenges.
Border Patrol staffing remains below the 21,360 agents mandated by Congress in 2016, which is itself 5,000 less than Trump’s order, according to the latest available data.
The CBP contract with Accenture, awarded in November 2017, has drawn special scrutiny for its high cost and limited results.
CBP officials told the House Homeland Security Committee in November that only 33 new officers had been hired. Under the terms of the contract, the company is paid about $40,000 for each one.
An entry-level Border Patrol agent is paid $52,583 a year.
In December, the Homeland Security inspector general’s office said Accenture and CBP were “nowhere near” filling the president’s hiring order.
It warned that if problems in the “hastily approved” contract are not addressed, CBP risks “wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.”
CBP subsequently scaled back the Accenture contract from $297 million to $83 million and issued a partial stop-work order. Officials said the agency will decide in March whether to cancel the rest of the contract.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the problem-plagued contract “reinforces my doubts” about CBP leadership.
“CBP cannot simply farm out its hiring and spend hundreds of millions without addressing systemic problems at the agency,” Thompson said.
Deirdre Blackwood, Accenture’s spokeswoman, told The Times, “We remain focused on fulfilling our client’s expectations under our contract.”
The first Homeland Security offical defended the contract. “You’ve got to be willing to innovate and try things. … In no way, shape or form was there fraud, waste or abuse.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement canceled a solicitation for a hiring contract with a similar pay structure to Accenture’s last May, citing delays in its hiring timeline and limited funding from Congress.
ICE said at the time it would restart the contracting process by the end of 2018 to help it meet Trump’s hiring order. It has yet to do so.
Homeland Security officials declined to say how much has been spent or how many people have been hired since Trump’s executive orders, saying the partial government shutdown prevented them from accessing the data.
The hiring surge foundered from the start.
In July 2017, six months after Trump signed his executive orders, the Homeland Security inspector general’s office said the agencies were facing “significant challenges” and could not justify the hiring surge.
Officials could not “provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional 15,000 additional agents and officers they were directed to hire,” the inspector general’s office wrote.
On Friday, Trump signed a bill to reopen the government until Feb. 15, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Tens of thousands of Border Patrol agents and CBP officers, among others, worked without pay.
Experts warned that previous attempts at a hiring surge led to greater corruption, a perennial problem for law enforcement on the border.
Drug cartels and other criminal groups target Border Patrol agents, offering bribes or even sexual favors to allow migrants, drugs and other contraband to cross the border.
To help fight corruption, the Border Patrol set strict vetting requirements, but those measures have slowed the hiring process.
Border Patrol applicants must pass cognitive, fitness and medical exams. They also must provide financial disclosure, undergo drug tests and pass a law enforcement background check and a polygraph test.
ICE doesn’t require the lie detector test, pays its agents more and places most of them in cities, not at isolated posts along the border.
Supporters of the CBP requirements call them necessary safeguards to prevent the scandals of past hiring surges. Critics view them as an impediment to putting more boots on the border.
CBP’s rigorous hiring requirements, including the polygraph test, were put in place by Congress in 2010 after the agency had doubled in size and Border Patrol notched an increase in corruption and a spate of deadly incidents.
The FBI still leads 22 border corruption task forces and working groups nationwide.
In recent years, some lawmakers tried to help CBP get rid of the polygraph test. In 2017, the agency got the green light to waive the requirement for certain military veterans and began to test a version that improved pass rates.
Partly as a result, CBP has increased hiring of “frontline personnel” by nearly 15% and increased its applicant pool by 40% in the last three years, according to a Homeland Security 2019 budget document.
The agency has also cut the time it takes to hire from roughly 400 days to about 270 days. The government’s goal for hiring is 80 days, but CBP has said that’s not feasible.
Part of the problem stems from the Trump administration’s funding disputes with Congress over border security.
“We have to hire to the money that we’re appropriated, at the end of the day,” the first Homeland Security official said.
After Trump signed his executive orders in 2017, ICE requested $830 million to hire about 3,000 new officers and build capacity to ultimately bring on 10,000, according to a Government and Accountability Office report.
Instead, Congress last year gave ICE $15.7 million for 65 new agents plus 70 attorneys and support staff.
Over the past two years, ICE has brought on 1,325 investigators and deportation officers, according to the agency. The agency typically loses nearly 800 law enforcement officers each year, so it has not kept pace and remains far behind the president’s order.
For its part, CBP requested $330 million to hire 1,250 Border Patrol agents and build capacity to ultimately hire 5,000, according to the GAO report.
Congress gave CBP about $65 million in 2017 to improve hiring practices and to offer incentives for agents to transfer to understaffed sites. In 2018, it provided $20 million more than the agency sought for recruitment and retention.
“CBP faced high attrition rates even before the Trump administration made it a polarizing organization,” said Thompson, the House Homeland Security chairman.

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The Trump Administration clearly is the “Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight!” So why would you give them more bullets with which to shoot themselves in the foot? They have also been totally unaccountable for how money is spent and what results they produce.

Let’s not forget that Trump’s original 15,000 number was totally bogus — made up out of thin air and actually questioned by the DHS Inspector General, given that border apprehensions had dropped significantly even before Trump took office.

And, the current “surge” is equally bogus. It’s not “illegal entrants.” No, it’s primarily family units seeking to legally apply for asylum who line up patiently at ports of entry or immediately turn themselves in to the nearest Border Patrol Agent.

So why does this humanitarian situation that has nothing to do with real law enforcement or the smuggling of drugs or contraband require a wall or more Border Patrol Agents? The answer is simple: It doesn’t! That’s particularly true because neither the wall nor the additional agents will arrive in time to have any effect whatsoever on the flow of legal asylum seekers? How gullible and misinformed can the American public be?

Even if they got the money, these clowns probably couldn’t get the wall built within the next decade. And, everyone forgets that walls don’t maintain themselves. The more they build, the more they will need to maintain and replace. Cartels and smugglers must be laughing their tails off at how Trump’s inane White Nationalist fixation on a largely cosmetic symbol is actually helping them and taking attention away from real law enforcement priorities.

 

PWS

01-26-19

 

Related posts:

  1. UNHOLY BEDFELLOWS: Trump’s Cruelty Combines With 9th Cir.’s Complicity To Abuse & Kill U.S. Asylum Seekers In Mexico
  2. AS U.S. COURTS FAIL, DARTH VADER TAKES OVER ASYLUM OFFICE – Use Of CBP Agents As “Asylum Officers” Over Objection Flies In Face Of Statute & Shows Administration’s Utter Contempt For Cowardly ARTICLE IIIs Afraid To Stand Up For The Rule Of Law & For The Rights Of Vulnerable Asylum Seekers! — “They’re not trained and geared toward refugee protection, any more than I’m trained to go look for tracks in the desert and chase people.”
  3. FORMER BORDER AGENT DECRIES “CULTURE OF DEHUMANIZATION” — “What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy. “
  4. TRUMP’S “OFFER” MIGHT WELL BE A STUNT – BUT, IT’S ALSO AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE DEMS TO STEP UP, SAVE LIVES, AND GOVERN RESPONSIBLY – They Should Make A Counterproposal – Here’s The “SMARTS Act Of 2019!”

TRUMP’S “OFFER” MIGHT WELL BE A STUNT – BUT, IT’S ALSO AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE DEMS TO STEP UP, SAVE LIVES, AND GOVERN RESPONSIBLY – They Should Make A Counterproposal – Here’s The “SMARTS Act Of 2019!”

There are opposing “schools of thought” on Trump’s latest immigration statement. For example, the LA Times says it another “Trump stunt to shift blame” that the Dems should resist.  https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-shutdown-daca-20190119-story.html

Makes sense.

 

On the other hand, the Washington Post says that notwithstanding Trump’s annoying tactics, it’s an opportunity to reopen the Government and save the Dreamers that the Dems should pursue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/make-a-deal-to-help-the-real-people-behind-the-rhetoric/2019/01/19/f5b18866-1c17-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html?utm_term=.5b08d589dfa9

Also makes sense.

 

I understand the Dems reluctance to enable Trump’s “hostage taking” strategy. But, I doubt they can solve that with Trump and the GOP controlling two of the three political arms of Government.

 

Indeed, a better idea would be for Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell to get together “when the smoke clears” and see what they can do jointly to take back and fix the bipartisan Congressional budget process and protect it from overreach by Executives of both parties.  For two of the major legislative “gurus” of our age in the twilight of their careers, that would be a great “bipartisan legacy.”

 

But, for the time being, folks are suffering, and lives are in danger: Government employees, those that depend on Government, asylum applicants, Dreamers, TPSers, those in Immigration Court, and the families of all of the foregoing. So, I think the Dems should make a “robust” counterproposal that gives Trump at least part of his “Wall,” but also includes other important reforms and improvements that will diminish the impact of border migration issues in the future. Most important, almost everything in this proposal would save or improve some human lives and benefit America in the short and long run.

 

So, here’s my outline of the “SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019”

 

SECURITY, MIGRATION ASSISTANCE RENEWAL, & TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ACT (“SMARTS ACT”) OF 2019

 

  • Federal Employees
    • Restart the Government
    • Retroactive pay raise

 

  • Enhanced Border Security
    • Fund half of “Trump’s Wall”
    • Triple the number of USCIS Asylum Officers
    • Double the number of U.S. Immigration Judges and Court Staff
    • Additional Port of Entry (“POE”) Inspectors
    • Improvements in POE infrastructure, technology, and technology between POEs
    • Additional Intelligence, Anti-Smuggling, and Undercover Agents for DHS
    • Anything else in the Senate Bill that both parties agree upon

 

  • Humanitarian Assistance
    • Road to citizenship for a Dreamers & TPSers
    • Prohibit family separation
    • Funding for alternatives to detention
    • Grants to NGOs for assisting arriving asylum applicants with temporary housing and resettlement issues
    • Require re-establishment of U.S. Refugee Program in the Northern Triangle

 

  • Asylum Process
    • Require Asylum Offices to consider in the first instance all asylum applications including those generated by the “credible fear” process as well as all so-called “defensive applications”

 

  • Immigration Court Improvements
    • Grants and requirements that DHS & EOIR work with NGOs and the private bar with a goal of achieving 100% representation of asylum applicants
    • Money to expand and encourage the training and certification of more non-attorneys as “accredited representatives” to represent asylum seekers pro bono before the Asylum Offices and the Immigration Courts on behalf of approved NGOs
    • Vacate Matter of A-B-and reinstate Matter of A-R-C-G-as the rule for domestic violence asylum applications
    • Vacate Matter of Castro-Tumand reinstate Matter of Avetisyan to allow Immigration Judges to control dockets by administratively closing certain “low priority” cases
    • Eliminate Attorney General’s authority to interfere in Immigration Court proceedings through “certification”
    • Re-establish weighing of interests of both parties consistent with Due Process as the standard for Immigration Court continuances
    • Bar AG & EOIR Director from promulgating substantive or procedural rules for Immigration Courts — grant authority to BIA to promulgate procedural rules for Immigration Courts
    • Authorize Immigration Courts to consider all Constitutional issues in proceedings
    • Authorize DHS to appeal rulings of the BIA to Circuit Courts of Appeal
    • Require EOIR to implement the statutory contempt authority of Immigration Judges, applicable equally to all parties before the courts, within 180 days
    • Bar “performance quotas” and “performance work plans” for Immigration Judges and BIA Members
    • Authorize the Immigration Court to set bonds in all cases coming within their jurisdiction
    • Fund and require EOIR to implement a nationwide electronic filing system within one year
    • Eliminate the annual 4,000 numerical cap on grants of “cancellation of removal” based on “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
    • Require the Asylum Office to adjudicate cancellation of removal applications with renewal in Immigration Court for those denied
    • Require EOIR to establish a credible, transparent judicial discipline and continued tenure system within one year that must include: opportunity for participation by the complainant (whether Government or private) and the Immigration Judge; representation permitted for both parties; peer input; public input; DHS input; referral to an impartial decision maker for final decision; a transparent and consistent system of sanctions incorporating principles of rehabilitation and progressive discipline; appeal rights to the MSPB

 

  • International Cooperation
    • Fund and require efforts to work with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to improve asylum systems and encourage asylum seekers to exercise options besides the U.S.
    • Fund efforts to improve conditions and the rule of law in the Northern Triangle

 

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No, it wouldn’t solve all problems overnight. But, everything beyond “Trump’s Wall” would make a substantial improvement over our current situation that would benefit enforcement, border security, human rights, Due Process, humanitarian assistance, and America. Not a bad “deal” in my view!

 

PWS

01-20-19

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  2. 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! 
  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. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

SYSTEMIC FAILURE: Tanking Immigration Court & Asylum Adjudications Mock Due Process! — Disgraceful Lack Of Professional Integrity & Simple Human Decency Have Become Hallmarks!

https://www.courthousenews.com/uncle-max-made-it-past-the-border-patrol/

Robert Kahn, Editor of Courthouse News writes:

My Uncle Max made it past the Border Patrol and became a doctor in the United States — a chest specialist. He wasn’t really my uncle. He was a med student who fled the Nazis in 1936 — before the United States started turning away Jewish refugees — and ended up living in Chicago with my grandparents.

I don’t know how Uncle Max found his way to my Oma and Opa, and I suppose I’ll never know. All of them are dead. I heard the story from Uncle Max in 1973, after I graduated from college and had a nagging cough.

I had no money for a doctor. I was working for the Post Office in Portland, Oregon, and playing baritone sax in a funk band.

“Call your Uncle Max,” my Mom told me from Chicago.

“Who’s Uncle Max?” I said.

Uncle Max examined me, suggested I cut down on the weed, and told me his story.

He was a medical student in Germany — fairly advanced, as he already had the tools of his trade. He lived with his parents. They were Jewish.

One day, some Nazi gentlemen knocked on their door, or barged in, ransacked the place, and found Max’s little black bag. In it they found a syringe and some hypodermic needles.

“Aha! A morphinist!” one said. They left, but said they’d be back.

Uncle Max’s parents — I do not know their names — told him he had to leave the country immediately. And he did — the next day, I believe.

This was two years before Kristallnacht — Nov. 9-10, 1938 — when the war on the Jews had become official policy. Four years after Kristallnacht, with the big war on, FDR turned away boatloads full of Jews fleeing the Third Reich. FDR called them a threat to national security.

Max’s entire family was murdered by the Nazis. In Auschwitz, I believe. But what does it matter where they died? We know who killed them, and why, and to some extent, how it could have been prevented.

How Max hooked up with my Oma and Opa, as I’ve said, I do not know. I suppose through some Jewish relief organization.

Uncle Max, a refugee, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944, though he did not have to, as he was 35 years old. He married in 1950 and he and his wife raised three children, two girls and a boy.

Now, here is an interesting thing. This is not the first time I’ve written this column. The first time was 30 years ago, give or take. I was city editor of The Brownsville Herald, in Texas, and the Reagan administration was rounding up and imprisoning tens of thousands of refugees from government death squads in Central America — women, children and babies — for the despicable crime of trying to escape from war.

The Herald hired me because I’d written a few news articles about the work I’d done as a paralegal in U.S. immigration prisons, helping attorneys represent victims of rape, torture and war. I’d also covered the privatization of our immigration prisons, in which our federal government hired private, money-seeking Republican campaign contributors — I mean, corporations — and gave them the power to strip-search children, mothers and babies.

The privatization of immigration prisons gives private corporations — above all, Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, which changed its name to CoreCivic in 2016, because the CCA logo had become so thoroughly soaked in the blood of children; and GEO Group, CoreCivic’s main competitor; and dozens of well-intentioned but benighted church-affiliated groups that imprison refugee children to save the federal government the bother and expense — as I was saying, all these private prisons give the U.S. government a way to sidestep responsibility for the war crimes it is committing, and has been committing for decades — surely since 1985, when my 3-year-old client was strip-searched in CCA’s Laredo prison because her Salvadoran mother made the outrageous demand to speak to a pro bono attorney.

This is all true.

Do you like it?

I can’t see how you could.

What is going on today, under the Trump administration, is far worse.

I know what you’re thinking: What could be worse than strip-searching children?

Killing them.

I am tired, my friends. I worked for virtually nothing in U.S. immigration prisons to try to save Central Americans’ lives under the Reagan administration. I’m not going back to the prisons. But hundreds of other human rights workers are doing it.

They are doing — dare I say it? — God’s work, and doing it under obnoxious and intrusive government surveillance. Most of them are doing it for free, or for far less than minimum wage.

I would like to list the names of a few of them here — pro bono legal organizations, human rights groups — who are doing what our government should be doing, and failed to do, in the 1940s and 1980s, and is failing to do today. But times being what they are, I fear this might do them more harm than good.

We should support them. Most of them are tax-exempt nonprofits.

(Courthouse News editor Robert Kahn’s book, “Other People’s Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade,” (1996) was the first history of U.S. immigration prisons.)

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https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-2-enter-the-fray-here-are-just-a-few-of-the-ways-our-1546013604-htmlstory

Scott Martelle writes in the LA Times:

Two court actions a continent apart are driving home — yet again — the point that the U.S. asylum system neither lives up to basic standards of human decency and due process nor, it seems, to the promises of the Constitution.

In New York on Thursday, a federal district court judge slammed the government for failing to even offer a bond hearing to a man it had detained for 34 months after he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum because of threats he’d received in his native Ivory Coast over his political affiliations.

Is that sufficient grounds for granting asylum? Good question, and we have both laws and a court system to guide the answer. Was it necessary for the government to detain Adou Kouadio, 43, while his application worked its way through the system?

No one knows because the government has not been forced to answer two basic questions: Does Kouadio pose a flight risk? And does he pose a danger to public safety? Both those fundamental questions determining whether an asylum-seeker or other migrant will remain incarcerated get addressed in a bond hearing.

Which the government has not granted. For 34 months.

U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein on Thursday ordered a bond hearing be held within 14 days, a ruling legal experts said was both a rebuke to federal detention policies and a recognition that fundamental rights of due process extend to migrants.

“Petitioner has a clean record, never having been arrested or convicted,” Hellerstein wrote. “There is little risk of flight, since he seeks asylum within the United States, and little risk of danger to the community, judging from his lack of a prior criminal history. Yet, Petitioner has suffered 34 months of detention without an opportunity for a bond hearing while waiting for a final decision on his petition for asylum.”

The judge noted that the government had an interest in weighing due process rights against the national interest but that it had failed to make the case that Kouadio posed a particular threat.

“This nation prides itself on its humanity and openness with which it treats those who seek refuge at its gates,” Hellerstein wrote. “By contrast, the autocracies of the world have been marked by harsh regimes of exclusion and detention. Our notions of due process nourish the former spirit and brace us against the latter. The statutory framework governing those who seek refuge, and its provisions for detention, cannot be extended to deny all right to bail.”

Meanwhile, here on the West Coast, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Riverside to protect another right of migrants. The suit accuses the federal government and some of the organizations it relies on for detaining people facing deportation — private prison operator Geo Group and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department — of making it nearly impossible for migrants to consult lawyers, which they have a right to do.

Geo Group operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department operates the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange and the James A. Musick Facility near Irvine; all three facilities house migrants at ICE’s behest.

According to the complaint (which you really ought to read), three men seeking asylum have been unable to use telephones to find or consult with attorneys under bizarre systems in which the phones hang up automatically at the sound of an automated response, detained migrants are forced to make their calls within hearing of others (undermining fundamental attorney-client privilege), and detainees often don’t gain access to phones until after normal business hours.

Also, mail is slow to get delivered and sometimes arrives opened and damaged, further hindering the detainees’ ability to present their cases, the lawsuit charges.

These are no minor things. Hanging in the balance is the ability not only to get proper legal advice, but also to collect the sorts of documents often required to support an asylum claim. Detainees have missed court deadlines because of slow mails and inability to gather their documents from far-flung sources.

And I should note this isn’t a Trump thing. ICE officials, and their contracted detention overseers, have been acting in such manners for years. One of the plaintiffs, Jason Nsinano of Namibia, was initially detained under the Obama administration, as was Kouadio, the man for whom the New York judge ordered a bond hearing.

Though that hearing might not do much good. Shortly after his detention, ICE determined that Nsinano posed neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety and set bond at $10,000 — an amount that Nsinano doesn’t have.

So Nsinano has been incarcerated for more than three years not because he has been charged with a crime, nor because he poses a flight risk or danger to society, but because he sought asylum and didn’t have the foresight to bring $10,000 with him.

That’s outrageous.

 

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Yup! Our treatment of asylum seekers and other migrants is outrageous! What’s even more outrageous are the legislators and Administration politicos who perpetuate this broken and corrupt system when fixing it should be legal and moral imperatives. And it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the failed, corrupt, “killer” strategies being pursued now. We could get lots of much needed Due Process for less than $5 billion!

PWS

12-30-18

Related posts:

  1. 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”
  2. 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! 
  3. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  4. 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!

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

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

Former USBP Agent Francisco Cantu writes in the LA Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

12-18-18

 

 

Related posts:

  1. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  2. TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!
  3. COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“
  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”

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

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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.”

“NOT SO FAST!” — CONFUSION AS USUAL IN THE AGE OF TRUMP: LA Times, HuffPost Report That Mexico Denies Reaching Immigration Pact With U.S.! – Incoming Oversight Chair Cummings (D-MD) Opposes Trump’s Border Policies – “That’s The Law!”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=4f1306b6-386f-4594-85ce-f14cbc1126b4

By Cecilia Sanchez and Patrick J. McDonnell

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s incoming leadership is denying a published report that it had agreed to a Trump administration proposal requiring asylum seekers arriving at the southwest border to wait in Mexico as U.S. authorities consider their claims for safe haven.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Washington had won the support of the government of Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — who takes office on Dec. 1 — for a plan mandating that asylum seekers at the border remain in Mexico as their claims move through the U.S. immigration system.

The Trump administration has long sought such an accord with Mexico as a means of resolving what it has termed a “crisis” of an escalating number of Central American asylum applicants — and limited detention space in which to hold them on U.S. territory as their petitions are considered.

Critics on both sides of the border have long assailed the notion of Mexico serving as a way station or detention grounds for Central Americans and others applying for asylum in the United States.

The administration of Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, rejected a similar Trump administration proposal last year.

But the Post quoted Olga Sanchez Cordero, Mexico’s interior minister-designate, as saying Mexico’s new government had accepted the policy as a “short-term solution” to the issue of Central American migration — which has been dramatized in recent weeks as thousands of U.S.-bound Central Americans have made their way north through Mexico in caravans.

Later Saturday, however, she denied that Mexico had agreed to host people seeking U.S. asylum as their cases awaited judgment.

“There is no agreement of any sort between the future Mexican federal government and the U.S.,” the incoming interior minister said in a statement.

Moreover, she said Mexico’s new government had rejected any deal in which Mexico would be considered “a safe third country” for U.S. asylum applicants.

In a Twitter message on Saturday, President Trump reiterated threats to close the southern border — threats that have alarmed many in Mexico, since cross-border trade is a mainstay of the Mexican economy.

In his tweet, Trump also said migrants would not be allowed into the United States “until their claims are individually approved in court.”

Others, he said, would “stay in Mexico,” he added, without elaboration.

The Twitter message did not specify whether Washington had reached any kind of agreement with Mexico on the matter.

Only a small minority of Central American applicants are ultimately granted political asylum in the United States, but the decision-making progress can take months or years — during which time many are released and gain footholds in the United States.

Trump has vowed to end what he calls the “catch and release” system. “Our very strong policy is Catch and Detain,” he tweeted Saturday. “No ‘Releasing’ into the U.S.”

The White House has also pushed an alternative “safe third country” approach in talks with Mexican officials. Under such a plan, Central Americans seeking asylum would generally have to file for protection in Mexico, not in the United States.

The proposal is a variant of the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” plan, under which asylum seekers would wait in Mexico until their cases were adjudicated in the United States.

With a “safe third country” designation, the United States would consider Mexico a secure nation for receiving asylum applicants. In practice, that would bar most asylum seekers who entered Mexico from filing asylum claims in the United States. The United States already has such an understanding with Canada.

But immigrant advocates have long opposed such a designation for Mexico for a number of reasons — principal among them the country’s widespread and rising violence, which often targets Central American migrants. Mexico cannot be considered safe for asylum seekers, many argue.

Critics also say Mexico’s system for processing refugee requests is already overwhelmed and ill-prepared to handle a huge new influx.

In her statement, Mexico’s incoming interior secretary echoed the vows of leftist President-elect Lopez Obrador to protect the human rights of caravan travelers and other Central American migrants while providing them with food, healthcare and shelter. Lopez Obrador has also vowed to help Central Americans acquire work papers if they opt to remain in Mexico.

More than 6,000 caravan members, mostly Hondurans, have arrived this month in the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali, posing a humanitarian, logistical and political challenge for the two cities on the border. The migrants say they are fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands.

Tijuana’s mayor declared a “humanitarian crisis” Friday as the border city sought additional federal and state aid to help house the migrants, most of whom are crowded into a sports complex a block from the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

Tijuana officials anticipate that as many as 10,000 Central American migrants could eventually converge on the city and be stuck there for months as they seek to file asylum claims in the United States, a time-consuming process. U.S. officials at the San Ysidro crossing generally accept no more than 100 asylum applications a day.

Special correspondent Sanchez reported from Mexico City and Times staff writer McDonnell from Washington.

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

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mexico-asylum-migrant-deal-trump_us_5bfa5d83e4b0eb6d930f3155

Dominique Mosbergen reports for HuffPost:

President Donald Trump suggested on Saturday that asylum seekers would be allowed to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed through the U.S. immigration system — but Mexico’s incoming government has denied making any such deal.

“There is no agreement of any sort between the incoming Mexican government and the U.S. government,” future Interior Minister Olga Sanchez told Reuters on Saturday, contradicting Trump and an earlier Washington Post report that said a deal ― albeit an informal one ― had been struck between the two governments.

The Post had quoted Sanchez as saying the administration of Mexico’s President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will take office on Dec. 1, had “for now” agreed to the so-called “Remain in Mexico” plan.

Sanchez was quoted by the paper as saying that Mexico would allow asylum seekers to stay in the country as a “short-term solution.”

Following the publication of the Post’s report, however, Sanchez back-pedaled on those remarks. She told Reuters that Obrador’s administration was “in talks” with the U.S., but stressed officials who weren’t yet in office couldn’t formally make any agreements.

Seven-year-old Honduran migrant Genesis Belen Mejia Flores waves an American flag at two U.S. border control helicopters flyi

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Seven-year-old Honduran migrant Genesis Belen Mejia Flores waves an American flag at two U.S. border control helicopters flying overhead near a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico.

Reuters reported that Sanchez “did not explicitly rule out” that Mexico could allow Central American caravan migrants ― thousands of whom have arrived in Tijuana, just south of California ― to wait in the country while their claims are processed in the U.S.

Sanchez did, however, say that plans for Mexico to assume “safe third country” status had been “ruled out.” Under a “safe third” agreement, the U.S. could force migrants to seek asylum in Mexico.

Trump said in a pair of Saturday evening tweets that migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border “will not be allowed into the United States until their claims are individually approved in court.”

“No ‘Releasing’ into the U.S. … All will stay in Mexico,” the president wrote.

His tweets were interpreted as possible confirmation of the posible deal between the U.S. and Obrador’s administration.

Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum declared a humanitarian crisis last week as approximately 5,000 Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty arrived in the city ― to the chagrin of many locals.

Gastélum said on Friday that he’d asked the United Nations for aid to help with the influx of asylum seekers.

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

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-cummings-it-s-law-let-asylum-seekers-across-border-n939806

 

By Leigh Ann Caldwell for NBC News

WASHINGTON — The incoming chairman of a key oversight committee in the House of Representatives said Sunday that any attempt by President Donald Trump to keep migrants from claiming asylum in the U.S. would be unlawful.

“That’s not the law,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said in an exclusive interview on “Meet the Press,” indicating that Congress will act if the president moves ahead with that policy. “They should be allowed to come in, seek asylum, that’s the law.”

President Donald Trump has said he’s reached a deal with the government of Mexico to keep migrants traveling in large caravans from Central America in Mexico until their court date to plead asylum. But a spokesman for incoming Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said talk of such a deal is premature and U.S. officials told NBC News that the details are still being worked out.

Cummings said he supports the law as it stands. “I think we have a system that has worked for a long time. This president’s come in, wants to change it, that’s up to him. But now the Congress has got to stand up and hopefully they will,” Cummings said.

Family detention at the border and the separation of children from their parents after crossing the border was already on Cummings’ list of potential investigations as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when Democrats take control of Congress in January.

Cummings has a list of 64 subpoenas it is ready to send to the Trump administration on a variety of issues ranging from immigration to voting rights act, drug prices and the opioid epidemic.

“I think the American people have said that they want checks and balances,” Cummings said. “And subpoenas, by the way, that may involve, say, private industries like the pharmaceutical companies” over “these skyrocketing drug prices.”

Full Cummings Interview: ‘We have to hit the ground flying’

NOV. 25, 201808:09

When asked about the priorities he is setting for areas of investigation, Cummings said he will focus on issues that “go to the very heart of our democracy and protecting that democracy.”

Cummings also said Sunday that his committee will “probably” look into Trump’s financial ties, especially to Saudi Arabia, and if it violates the emoluments clause, which is aimed at preventing a president from profiting on the office.

Cummings said he wanted to determine “whether the president is acting in his best interest or those of the American people,” adding, “I think this would be appropriate and there are other committees that will be looking at this too.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also criticized Trump over his support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite reports that a CIA assessment concluded that the Saudi ruler ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Lee said that Trump’s assessment is “inconsistent” with the intelligence he’s seen. “Intelligence I’ve seen suggests this was ordered by the crown prince,” he said.

Lee says that Khashoggi’s murder and Trump’s response provides “an opportunity” for Congress to weigh in to the U.S.-backed Saudi role in Yemen that has created a worsening humanitarian disaster.

“I think Congress has to take some ownership of U.S. foreign policy, especially as it relates to our intervention in this war,” Less said. “Our unconstitutional fighting of a civil war in Yemen that has never been declared by the U.S. Congress as a problem. And that’s on us.”

****************************************************
I agree with Congressman Cummings.  Indeed, I’ve been saying for some time now that the law is well-designed to deal with the flow of asylum applicants to the Southern Border. This Administration has simply chosen not to make it work, in many ways. The result is a self-created crisis. I’m looking forward to some real oversight of the intentionally created immigration mess in the coming year, including holding some of those responsible for creating it accountable!
PWS
11-25-18

Related posts:

  1. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  2. TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!
  3. 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!
  4. 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! 

LA TIMES: ONE OF THE “MOST REAL” AMERICANS RESPONDS TO TRUMP’S MESSAGE OF HATE AND RACISM: “Trump’s rhetoric has people expressing hatred toward Americans like me, whose ancestors have been here for generations, and now he preaches against migrants who want to come here now. Perhaps Trump should learn more about the customs of his family’s adopted homeland so he can become a leader rather than a divider of people.”

From the LA Times Editorial Section for Nov. 3, 2018:

Re “Who’s really an American?” editorial, Oct. 31

Questions over who ought to be considered American are complicated for those who do not look white. Ethnically and culturally, I am numerous things, which is a huge bonus because it helps me understand others. Because I have a significant amount of indigenous American heritage, I can honestly state that some of my people have been in North America for thousands of years.

However, within the last year, I have been told to go back where I came from. Since I don’t speak Spanish, being dumped in Mexico, presumably where these people want me to go, would be a challenge. Regardless, not one of my ancestors arrived here any later than the early 1800s.

On the other hand, President Trump’s mother, both of his paternal grandparents and two of his wives were not born in the United States. Trump’s present wife, who is our first lady, speaks English well enough to hold a casual conversation. In other words, the president’s family is a family of immigrants, and they have been welcomed here.

However, Trump’s rhetoric has people expressing hatred toward Americans like me, whose ancestors have been here for generations, and now he preaches against migrants who want to come here now. Perhaps Trump should learn more about the customs of his family’s adopted homeland so he can become a leader rather than a divider of people.

Marcella Hill, Los Angeles

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Pretty much says it all about Trump’s lack of character, morality, and qualifications to serve as President.

Regime change can start on next Tuesday! Get out the vote! Take our “country of immigrants” back from the White Nationalists (who, ironically, also are immigrants themselves, notwithstanding their ingratitude, lack of decency, and lack of any sense of REAL history — not the White Nationalist version peddled by Trump, Sessions, Miller, Bannon, Kobach, Steve King, etc.).

PWS

11-03-18

 

Related posts:

  1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  2. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  3. COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!
  4. 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!

MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: Trump Administration Already Violating Law By Turning Away Asylum Applicants At Ports Of Entry: “Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-immigrants-asylum-20181031-story.html

Molly reports in the LA Times:

Migrants arriving at the U.S. border to seek asylum are routinely subjected to tactics that immigration rights advocates say are designed to drive them away in violation of their rights under federal law.

The tactics include forcing them to wait at the border indefinitely or sending them back into Mexico to join a backlogged list maintained by Mexican immigration officials.

The Trump administration says such measures are necessary because it is not equipped to deal with a large increase in the number of asylum seekers, many of them from Central America. Last year, U.S. immigration courts handled 120,000 asylum requests, a fourfold increase since 2013.

But immigrant advocates contend the government is violating the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, which says any foreigner who reaches the U.S. has the right to apply for asylum.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is violating the law and turning away asylum seekers on Texas bridges,” said Shaw Drake, an El Paso-based attorney with the Texas ACLU’s Border Rights Center.

He said forcing immigrants to join a long waiting list is tantamount to turning them away.

“To turn them away with some amorphous instructions is illegal,” he said.

The issue is likely to come to a head when a caravan of several thousand Central Americans now heading north through Mexico arrives at the U.S. border. Many are expected to claim asylum, which they can do based on fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.

Trump, who has vowed to close the border, said in an interview Monday with conservative TV and radio host Laura Ingraham that the U.S. would allow migrants to file asylum claims but that they would be forced to live in “tent cities” while they await court rulings, a process that can take years.

“We’re not going to build structures and spend all of this, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Trump said. “We’re going to have tents. They’re going to be very nice and they’re going to wait and if they don’t get asylum, they get out… They don’t usually get asylum.”

Edgar Hernandez Gonzalez, right, his daughter Sherly and girlfriend Sofia Alvarez Favela wait to request asylum on the Santa Fe International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said he and his family were being threatened and were fleeing crime in Juarez.
Edgar Hernandez Gonzalez, right, his daughter Sherly and girlfriend Sofia Alvarez Favela wait to request asylum on the Santa Fe International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said he and his family were being threatened and were fleeing crime in Juarez. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Last week, after 20 immigrants from Cuba, Honduras, Mexico and Russia arrived at the border bridge in El Paso, U.S. officers stationed in the middle of the bridge — the “limit line” — told them to wait. And so they did, some for days in the cold and rain. Others stayed at a nearby shelter.

“We’ll wait and see, night and day, because I don’t have anywhere to go,” said Alexander Narzilloev, 35, who was with his wife and sons, ages 3 and 6.

Narzilloev ran a construction supply business in Moscow but fled after he was extorted by local mafia and received death threats, including one from a man who called and said he knew where Narzilloev’s son attended kindergarten, he Narzilloev said.

The family had originally gone to the crossing in Calexico, Calif., where officers told them they didn’t have space. After waiting a week and spending what remained of their $8,000 savings on a hotel, Narzilloev and his family caught a bus to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in hopes of entering El Paso.

“I heard in the news Trump said close all the borders. Has it happened yet?” he said. “That’s supposed to be for illegals. We are legal.”

Last week, several House Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen requesting a briefing on why and how asylum seekers were being turned away. Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, issued a statement calling for “fair and orderly processing of asylum seekers.”

“Any attempts to deny these families and individuals their right to seek asylum are wrong,” he said.

The Trump administration has tried a variety of approaches to deter people from trying to reach the United States — most controversially a “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging every adult migrant who crosses the border illegally, separating parents from their children.

The policy resulted in 2,654 children being separated and widespread outrage before Trump canceled it in June.

The administration still wants to detain families indefinitely and has been battling immigrant advocates in hopes of overturning a federal judge’s 1997 order that requires children be held for no longer than 20 days. Federal prosecutors have also fought to narrow the definition of political asylum.

But the government has been flummoxed by what Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, calls the “asylum gap”: the inability to stop people from making false claims for asylum and living legally in the U.S. for years while their cases proceed.

Immigrant advocates say the new tactics at the border are aimed at discouraging asylum claims. The ACLU of Texas noted Tuesday that Customs and Border Protection, the largest federal law enforcement agency, with a staff and budget doubled in the last 20 years, processed 1.1 million fewer people at the southern border last year than it did in 2000.

Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.

Cuban migrant Yunier Reyes, 35, waits with other migrants from Honduras and Mexico.
Cuban migrant Yunier Reyes, 35, waits with other migrants from Honduras and Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In El Paso, customs officers have told immigrants to return in a few hours, or simply “later.” The San Ysidro crossing in San Diego has been using a process called “metering,” in which asylum seekers have had to make appointments through Mexican immigration officials.

In a federal class-action lawsuit filed last year that’s still pending, Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado and other advocacy groups argued on behalf of more than a dozen immigrants that the policy violates international law and the right to due process.

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently reported that the practice of metering may have increased illegal border crossings.

During a visit to San Ysidro last week, McAleenan praised metering and said it’s likely to expand to other crossings if there’s a “significant increase in arrivals” in coming weeks.

He said the process didn’t amount to turning away immigrants because “they can stay in line if they want.”

“If somebody arrives and they have a claim, we are providing access,” he said, adding that some officers have been investigated, disciplined and retrained after turning away asylum seekers.

Other allegations were unsubstantiated, he said.

Edith Tapia, a policy research analyst with the Hope Border Institute, center, talks with a Mexican couple and their children who hope to request asylum in the U.S. at the foot of an international Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Edith Tapia, a policy research analyst with the Hope Border Institute, center, talks with a Mexican couple and their children who hope to request asylum in the U.S. at the foot of an international Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Workers from the nonprofit Hope Border Institute visit El Paso bridges to document cases of asylum seekers being turned away. On Oct. 24, they found Pedro Morales, 21, and girlfriend Janet Macola, 19.

The two said they fled Cuba after authorities halted their attempt to open a beauty salon and threatened to throw Morales in jail. Now they were seeking asylum.

So was a family of four from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. They said that their area had become a ghost town, controlled by a mayor in league with organized crime, and that they were too scared to be quoted by name.

The Cuban couple and the Mexican family approached U.S. officers at the center of the bridge and were told the same thing: “It’s full right now.”

The asylum seekers lingered on the bridge.

“What can we do?” the Mexican mother said.

Out of money and options, they would wait.

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The Trump Administration is squandering $50 million of your money to send troops to the US border for no tactical reasons whatsoever. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-migrant-caravan-border-troops-1194215

And this is just for starters — the first few months.  The total tab is likely to be multiples of $50 million.

The troops are prohibited by law from enforcing US immigration and criminal laws. As one critic of the previous, much smaller, deployment stunt indicated, the soldiers were basically used to “shovel horse manure” out of the Border Patrol’s stalls!https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/392582-national-guard-soldiers-trump-sent-to-border-are-shoveling-manure

It’s all a ridiculous political stunt that Secretary Mattis has shamefully gone along with. Talk about someone forgetting his oath — allowing the US Military to be used as a “political prop” for “White Nationalist Nation.” Presumably historians and biographers will remember “Mad Dog’s” dereliction  of duty at a critical point in our country’s existence.

The real point is that for much less money than Trump is wasting on his “military stunt” he could place enough USCIS Asylum Officers at or near ports of entry on the Mexican border to promptly, professionally, and humanely process applicants in accordance with our laws. That would also encourage and reward individuals for appearing for orderly processing and security screening at the proper places, rather than entering the country surreptitiously. It would also reduce the strain on the Border Patrol by reducing incentives for illegal crossings of asylum seekers between ports of entry.

But, this isn’t about sensible or lawful border and asylum policy. It’s about a White Nationalist demagogue putting on a “show” for his “base.”

PWS

10-31-18

 

 

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. NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSER JEFF SESSIONS ALSO TARGETED REFUGEE WOMEN & GIRLS FOR DEATH, RAPE, TORTURE, & OTHER MAYHEM — HIS EVIL PLANS HIT A ROADBLOCK: THE LAW! — Read The Latest Commentary From Hon. Jeffrey S.Chase On Challenges To Sessions’s Effort To Pervert The Law — Matter of A-B- In Light Of Grace v. Whitaker!
  3. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  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.”

LA TIMES TAKES STAND AGAINST INHUMANE, UNNECESSARY, AND EXPENSIVE CIVIL IMMIGRATION DETENTION — “A National Embarrassment”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-detention-immigrants-ice-20181027-story.html

The United States has the dubious honor of maintaining the world’s largest immigration detention system. Other countries may house more refugees and temporarily displaced persons, but we lock up the most people whose right to stay in the country is in dispute. Tens of thousands of people a day are held until they’re deported or granted permission to stay by an immigration judge (or at least released on bond or into a sponsor’s custody pending a further hearing).

It is a shameful aspect of U.S. immigration enforcement that the government denies liberty to so many people who have neither been accused nor convicted of a crime. To be sure, every nation has a right to control its borders and determine who gets to come in, for what reasons, and through what legal mechanism. We don’t believe that the U.S. should maintain open borders, but the government’s historic reliance on detention as a tool for dealing with people accused of arriving or staying here illegally is needlessly expensive, grossly inhumane and unjust to people exercising their legal right to seek asylum

While the current administration has embraced and expanded the practice, this is not a creation of President Trump. Such detentions date to the Immigration Act of 1882, and current detention policies are rooted in the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act. More recently, Cuban and Haitian migrants arriving by boat in the 1970s and ’80s were placed in detention centers, in part to deter their countrymen from similarly setting off to sea on rickety boats. Congress eventually mandated detention for migrants convicted of certain crimes that made them ineligible for admission.

ICE spends nearly $3 billion a year on immigration detention.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 greatly expanded the immigration detention system through contracts with local jails and state and privately run prisons. In fact, most of the 39,000 people incarcerated on any given day in the U.S. for immigration reasons — more than 350,000 pass through the system each year — are held in prison-like conditions in more than 200 locations around the country.

Some local governments have expanded their jails so they can house, for a daily fee, migrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants detained. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has granted $360 million in low-interest loans since 1996 to help rural communities build jails often larger than they need, so local officials can use detainees and the federal fee payments they bring to cover operating expenses, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.

ICE spends nearly $3 billion a year on immigration detention, according to the Government Accountability Office. About two-thirds of that goes to private prison corporations to operate detention centers and to local jails to reimburse them for housing detainees. Through those efforts the government has expanded an incarceration industry costing an exorbitant amount of tax dollars to deny freedom of movement of people who, in the vast majority of cases, pose no threat to us.

And notably, at least 77% of migrants facing deportation proceedings show up for their hearings, according to reports. Rates are highest among those who find legal help or receive support from community groups, which suggests there are better methods for handling thisthan detention.

There may, of course, be valid reasons for detaining some migrants, such as newly arrived asylum-seekers whose identities have yet to be verified, people facing imminent court-ordered deportation who the government has reason to fear might disappear, or violent felons who pose a realistic threat to public safety.

One of the largest contributors to no-shows is the government’s failure to keep current contact information for migrants during proceedings that can stretch out for years. One approach would be to match migrants to community service groups or sponsors to better keep track of the individuals and ensure they appear for court hearings; sadly, Trump killedan experimental Obama program that did just that.

This administration has chosen instead to double down on detention, and now it reportedly is considering reviving a version of the vile family separations. If family separation and detention worked as a deterrent, the president wouldn’t be tweeting so furiously these days about the current caravan of Central American migrants moving northward through Mexico. Detention-as-deterrence is not only an inhumane approach, it’s a failed one.

The government can neither detain nor deport its way out of this problem. It must find a better way. The fact that it has failed to do so for so long, regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House, is an embarrassment.

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

Doubling down on the worst, most ineffective, wasteful, and expensive policies.  That’s the mantra of the Trump Administration on immigration. What if our Government spent the same amount of time, money, personnel, and effort on solving problems, rather than intentionally and cynically aggravating them?

PWS

10-27-18

 

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: INSIDE JEFF SESSIONS’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” – WHERE INHUMANE CONDITIONS, ABUSE OF DETAINEES, HARM TO PREGNANT WOMEN, OVERWHELMED STAFF, LACK OF PROFESSIONALISM, & EVEN DETAINEE DEATHS ARE THE NORM — “We’re putting out fires, just like we were doing before,” said a worker who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “But it’s gone from bad to worse to worst. We cannot take care of these inmates.”
  2. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories
  3. 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!
  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?” 

LA TO GET MORE US IMMIGRATION JUDGES: But, Head Of Judges’ Association Says Throwing Bodies At Broken, Politicized, Demoralized Court System Won’t Solve The Due Process Crisis!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=8c9f4727-d315-41f8-bab7-12cef47a2f5d

Andrea Castillo reports for the LA Times:

Amid huge backlog, L.A. will get more immigration judges

Head of national jurist group says they’re ‘being used … as a political tool.’

By Andrea Castillo

Los Angeles has the nation’s second-largest immigration court backlog, with 29 judges handling 72,000 pending cases.

That’s including four judges who started within the last few months. An additional 10 were expected to be sworn in this week, according to Judge Ashley Tabaddor, who leads the National Assn. of Immigration Judges.

But she says that won’t fix the problem.

“We’re just transparently being used as an extension of the executive branch’s law-enforcement policies, and as a political tool,” she said.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions welcomed 44 new judges earlier this month, addressing them at a kickoff for their training with the Executive Office for Immigration Review. He said the administration’s goal is to double the number of judges active when President Trump took office.

“As you take on this critically important role, I hope that you will be imaginative and inventive in order to manage a high-volume caseload,” Sessions told them. “I do not apologize for expecting you to perform, at a high level, efficiently and effectively.”

There are 351 judges in about 60 courts around the country — up from 273 judges in 2016. These judges manage a backlog of nearly 750,000 cases,a figure that has grown from a low of less than 125,000 in 1999. Last year, Sessions introduced a “streamlined hiring plan” that cut the hiring timefor immigration judge candidates by more than half.

The EOIR has the funding for 484 judges by the end of the year, spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said.

Tabaddor said the impending quotas and production deadlines, which take effect next month, have caused severe anxiety among judges. Justice Department directives that were announced in April outlined a quota system tied to performance evaluations under which judges will be expected to complete 700 cases a year to receive a “satisfactory” rating.

Hiring more judges won’t be enough to alleviate the pressure they’re all under, Tabaddor said.

“It’s pitting the judges’ livelihood against their oath of office, which is to be impartial decision-makers,” she said, calling it an “assembly-line formula.”

Tabaddor said there also isn’t enough space for new judges, so some might not start right away. She described the downtown L.A. offices as cramped, with law clerks sharing offices or cubicles. And she said additional support staff members have yet to be hired.

andrea.castillo@latimes.com

Twitter: @andreamcastillo

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

Yup! As long as the Immigration Courts are under DOJ, and particularly under the rule of “Gonzo Apocalypto,” it will be an exercise in “throwing good money after bad.”  As I’ve said before (perhaps in the LA Times?), what Sessions is doing is like “taking an assembly line that is producing defective cars and making it run faster so that it will produce even more defective cars.” More or less the definition of insanity, or at least “fraud, waste, and abuse” of Government resources. But, accountability went out the window as soon as Trump took over and the GOP controlled both the Executive and Congress.

For a glimpse of what Immigration Court will look like under the new “Gonzo Quotas,” check out this great video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbNcQlzV-4

We need regime change!

PWS

09-26-18

 

Related posts:

  1. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  2. GONZO’S WORLD: HE FIDDLES AS ROME BURNS! — Threats To Judges, Xenophobia, Racism, Cutting Corners, Dissing Respondents & Their Lawyers, Bogus Numbers, Aimlessly Adding Bodies Fail To Stem Tide Of Backlogged Cases In An Obviously Broken System — When Will Congress &/Or The Article IIIs Do Their Jobs By Restoring Due Process, Impartiality, & Competent, Apolitical Court Management To This Sorry Caricature Of A Court System?
  3. 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.”
  4. THE TRUTH IS OUT, THANKS TO MICHELLE MENDEZ @ CLINIC: Practice Pointers on Matter of Castillo-Perez & “Takeaways” From FOIA Trove On In Absentias!

HERE’S WHAT A RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION POLICY LOOKS LIKE, AS TRUMP ATTACKS LEGAL IMMIGRATION! — “[C]ultivating xenophobia, as President Trump has done from the beginning of his campaign, and then trading on that fear to drum up votes, does not create much of a foundation for rational dialogue.”

As usual, CNN’s Tal Kopan and her colleague Tami Luhby give us one of the best summaries of what’s happening:

\

How Trump’s new definition of ‘public charge’ will affect immigrants

By Tami Luhby and Tal Kopan, CNN

The Trump administration is seeking to give itself broad latitude to reject immigrants from the US if they have too little income and education, which could effectively impose a merit-based immigration system without an act of Congress.

The change is put forth in a proposed regulation, which would dramatically reshape how the government defines an immigrant likely to be dependent on the government.

President Donald Trump has long touted what he calls a merit-based system of immigration, backing a legislative proposal that would have heavily favored English-speaking, highly educated and high-earning immigrants over lower-skilled and lower-income applicants.

Quietly announced Saturday night, the proposed regulation could give the administration the authority to reshape the population of US immigrants in that direction without legislation.

The rule would mean many green card and visa applicants could be turned down if they have low incomes or little education because they’d be deemed more likely to need government assistance — such as Medicaid or food stamps — in the future.

The proposal applies to those looking to come to the US and those already here looking to extend their stay. And even if immigrants decide not to use public benefits they may be eligible for, the government could, under the proposed rule, still decide they are likely to do so “at any time in the future” and thus reject them from the US.

The administration says the proposed revamp of the so-called public charge rule is designed to ensure immigrants can support themselves financially.

“This proposed rule will implement a law passed by Congress intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Saturday.

But immigration advocates say it goes far beyond what Congress intended and will discriminate against those from poorer countries, keep families apart and prompt legal residents to forgo needed public aid, which could also impact their US citizen children.

They also say it will penalize even hard-working immigrants who only need a small bit of temporary assistance from the government.

“(The proposed rule) would radically reshape our legal immigration system, putting the wealthy at the front of the line, ahead of hardworking families who have waited years to reunite,” a coalition of more than 1,100 community advocacy groups wrote in a statement this week. “No longer would the US be a beacon for the world’s dreamers and strivers. Instead, America’s doors would be open only to the highest bidder.”

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/politics/immigration-public-benefits/index.html

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Meanwhile, editorials in the NY Times and the LA Times blasted the Administration’s latest anti-immigrant actions:

The NY Times says:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/opinion/editorials/immigrants-welfare-benefits-trump-administration.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20180925&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=2&nlid=79213886emc%3Dedit_ty_20180925&ref=headline&te=1

An Unhealthy Plan to Drive Out Immigrants

Denying green cards or visas to those on Medicaid or food stamps will only cost the United States more later.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

The Department of Homeland Security, headed by Kirstjen Nielsen, has proposed a new rule that would deny green cards or visas to immigrants here legally who have used public assistance.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Trump administration has taken another step in its program to use fear and cruelty to drive out legal, as well as illegal, immigrants.

On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule that would enable it to deny green cards and visas to immigrants here legally who have used public health and nutrition assistance, including Medicaid and food stamps.

The United States already denies green cards and visas to applicants likely to become “public charges.” But that designation has generally referred only to a narrow set of people who need cash assistance or long-term institutionalization.

The new rules would also offer some exemptions — participation in the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program would be excluded, for example, as would refugees and asylum seekers and minors with Special Immigrant Juvenile status, meaning they had been abused or neglected.

But it’s not clear that those exemptions would provide sufficient protection. The Kaiser Family Foundation has indicated that fear of being denied residency would most likely cause immigrants to withdraw from both the targeted and the exempted programs. As Politico has reported, even when the current proposal was just a rumor, immigrants began withdrawing from these programs in droves. What’s more, not everyone who should be able to seek asylum or obtain special juvenile status is able to do so.

The Department of Human Services estimates that as many as 382,000 people would be affected by the new rule each year. There is no estimate yet on how many of them would be deemed to be public charges, but that number is likely to be far higher than under the current rules.

Which, of course, is the point. In an announcement on Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said that she expected the rule to “promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”

That rationale is both callous and foolish: Scaring vulnerable populations off public assistance is likely to cost much more in the long run, in part because neglecting preventive health care and basic medical problems makes patients only more expensive to treat down the road. What’s more, Kaiser estimates that more than eight million children who are citizens but have at least one noncitizen parent will be caught in the cross hairs.

The Trump administration, however, is betting that a very public effort to crack down on immigrants, whether they’re here legally or not, will motivate its political base in time for the midterm elections. It’s just one more part of a package that has so far included an effort to detain indefinitely minors who have crossed the border and another to cap the number of refugees at its lowest level ever. It’s the border wall, without the wall.

There’s a real debate to be had over the criteria to decide who can stay in this country and who must go. What is the right way to manage family migration? Or evaluate asylum claims? Or weigh American labor needs against the skills of prospective visa holders? But cultivating xenophobia, as President Trump has done from the beginning of his campaign, and then trading on that fear to drum up votes, does not create much of a foundation for rational dialogue.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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Here’s what the LA Times had to say:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=b270b5ea-1b78-4f77-86a2-3aa238bcde0b

The ‘public charge’ pretext
In an effort to make it more difficult for legal immigrants to live and work in the United States, the Trump administration proposed new rules over the weekend giving officials the right to withhold green cards from applicants who take advantage of a wide range of government programs to which they are legally entitled, including food and housing aid.
And for prospective immigrants who apply for visas from overseas, government officials would have broad power to reject people whom they believe might someday in the future tap government programs for financial support. That change, experts say, will reduce the overall flow of immigration and skew it toward people seeking to emigrate from more advanced countries.
These are unnecessarily strict and hard-hearted rules aimed at solving a problem that social scientists say doesn’t exist.
The government has for decades rejected visa requests and green card applications from people who are likely to become “public charges,” defined since 1999 as “ primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.” That has usually been interpreted, reasonably, to mean people who rely on cash support or people who would require institutional care. Furthermore, the Clinton-era welfare reforms already put major aid programs out of reach for most legal immigrants until they’ve been here for five years; undocumented immigrants are barred from nearly all public support.
Now, however, the administration wants to consider a legal immigrant a “public charge” if he or she receives government benefits exceeding $1,821 (15% of the federal poverty guidelines) over 12 months. The net effect, advocates for immigrants argue, will be a self-purging of people living and working here legally from the rolls of Medicaid, food subsidies and housing support, among other programs.
The government estimates that the new regulations would negatively affect 382,000 people, but advocates say that is likely an undercount. And the rules would keep people from coming to the country who economists say are vital for the nation’s economic growth . President Trump’s xenophobic view of the world stands in sharp contradiction not only to American values, but to its history. We are a country of immigrants or their descendants, and as a maturing society we will rely more and more on immigration for growth. Research shows that even those who start out in low-wage jobs, and thus are likely to get some financial help from the government, often learn skills that move them into higher income brackets and help the overall economy .
These proposed regulations would force immigrants in low-paying jobs to reject help to which they are legally entitled — and which could speed them along the path to financial security — or to jeopardize their ability to remain here. That’s a cruel Solomon’s choice.

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The “Trump GOP” has clearly abandoned the pretense that they are only against illegal immigration. By attacking refugees and other legal immigrants they are making it clear that immigrants no longer are welcome in our “Nation of Immigrants.” Sounds pretty stupid, not to mention unrealistic. But, that’s the essence of “Trumpism.”

PWS

09-25-18

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  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. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”

HISTORY: THOSE OF US WHO CAME OF AGE IN THE 1960’S THOUGHT THAT OUR COUNTRY HAD LONG AGO MOVED BEYOND THE HATEFUL, DIVISIVE, RACIST MESSAGE OF GEORGE WALLACE — We Didn’t Anticipate The 21st Century GOP & Their White Nationalist Wallace Revival! — “Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-carter-stekler-wallace-racial-language-20180923-story.html

Dan Carter and Paul Stekler write in the LA Times:

George Wallace stoked the fire of racial division that Trump carried all the way to the White House
Then Alabama Gov. George Wallace, wearing suit at left, is shown on June 11, 1963, standing at the door of Foster Auditorium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., as he tries to block the admission of two black students to the then- all-white University of Alabama. (Calvin Hannah / Associated Press)

In late September 1968, presidential election polls showed that third-party candidate George Wallace’s campaign was surging. With the support of a quarter of white voters, Wallace was within single digits of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s dominance in Southern states threatened to prevent any candidate from securing an electoral college majority, throwing the November election into the House of Representatives.

His was an extraordinary rise. In his inaugural speech as Alabama governor just five years earlier, Wallace had promised “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He then gained national attention by personally standing in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block the admission of two black students.

By 1968, he seldom used explicitly racist language, but instead demanded “law and order” and railed against “crime,” “drugs,” “welfare mothers,” “forced busing” and “big city thugs.” He created the racially encoded language that still haunt our politics.

So when President Trump whips up rallies with his thinly veiled racist attacks on brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims and unpatriotic blacks, it is not a new development. The racial divide has been a political tool for those willing to use it for 50 years. As former President Obama pointed out in his Sept. 7 speech, “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”

In 1968, the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement and the ’60s urban riots drew voters to Wallace. But others took note — particularly Richard Nixon’s campaign advisor Kevin Phillips, who, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” saw the potential of a major partisan realignment. Over the next six years, President Nixon adapted a more subtle version of the Wallace message, appealing to what he called “the silent majority.” In the years that followed, white voters in the once solidly Democratic South became the bedrock of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party’s Southern Strategy initially focused on shifting voters with a segregationist bent to the party, but it proved adaptable to other whites uneasy with the increasing role of minorities in American life and politics. These appeals resurfaced many times over the years, most memorably in the infamous Willie Horton ad during George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, but also in the symbolism of Ronald Reagan’s decision to make his first 1980 campaign appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With the election of Obama and a growing awareness that whites will eventually be a minority in America, the ground for such appeals has stayed quite fertile.

When Trump descended from Trump Tower in 2015, he immediately set himself apart from the gaggle of GOP presidential contenders by replacing the coy racial language of his predecessors with an unfiltered bullhorn. He has railed against prominent black leaders and athletes, talked about brown-skinned immigrants as murderers and rapists, and insisted dark-skinned Muslims constitute such a threat that we need to ban travel from entire countries.

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

Wallace’s bid for the presidency faltered in its final weeks, but a very small shift of voters in four states would have deadlocked the race. Wallace poured gasoline on the fire of racial division first, but Trump managed to carry that flame all the way into the White House. Who would have predicted that 50 years after the 1968 election, polls would show that more than half of Americans think their president is a racist?

Many factors have contributed to today’s tribalistic politics, but race remains the bedrock of that division. Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.

Historian Dan Carter, author of the George Wallace biography “The Politics of Rage,” and University of Texas filmmaker Paul Stekler collaborated on the PBS documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”

 

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Folks like Trump, Sessions. Miller, Bannon, and the GOP enablers, are not “Making American Great Again.” No, they’re bringing back one of the darkest chapters in our post-WW II history: “Making America Racist Again.”

“Just Say No” to the Trump White Nationalists!

PWS

09-23-18

 

Related posts:

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  2. CHARLES M. BLOW @ NYT: TIME TO START CALLING IT WHAT IT IS:  “It is time for us to simply call a thing a thing: White supremacy is the biggest racial problem this country faces, and has faced. It is almost always the cause of unrest around race. It has been used to slaughter and destroy, to oppress and imprison. It manifests in every segment of American life.”
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SCOFFLAW SESSIONS SLAMMED AGAIN BY FEDERAL JUDGE! — WHITE NATIONALIST OBSESSION WITH PUNISHING “SANCTUARY CITIES” UNLAWFUL AS WELL AS STUPID — “For a federal officer charged with upholding the law, Jeff Sessions seems to need an awful lot of reminding of what the law says. It’s time he took the lessons he’s getting from federal courts to heart.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-sessions-sanctuary-20180917-story.html

Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Michael Hiltzik reports for the LA Times:

Another judge slaps down Jeff Sessions for trying to punish ‘sanctuary’ cities like L.A.

By
SEP 17, 2018 | 2:55 PM
Another judge slaps down Jeff Sessions for trying to punish 'sanctuary' cities like L.A.
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions just can’t win in his attempts to punish local communities for “sanctuary” laws. (Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions must be getting tired of so much winning in his campaign to punish cities and states with the temerity to challenge his attempted crackdown on immigration.

In the latest episode, U.S. Judge Manuel L. Real of Los Angeles enjoined him from withholding more than $1 million in federal law enforcement assistance funding from L.A. because the city declared itself a “sanctuary” community. Real ruled that Sessions was way out of line in attempting to add conditions to a federal grant program designed to be based strictly on a community’s population and crime rates.

Real’s injunction tracks a nationwide injunction issued in April by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. In that case, brought by the city of Chicago, the appellate panel ruled 2-1 that Sessions’ actions “evince … a disturbing disregard for the separation of powers” principle enshrined in the Constitution.

The Attorney General repeatedly characterizes the issue as whether localities can be allowed to thwart federal law enforcement. That is a red herring.

7TH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS
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“The power of the purse does not belong to the Executive Branch,” the majority reminded Sessions. “It rests in the Legislative Branch,” which in this case didn’t delegate to Sessions the authority to impose conditions on the law enforcement grants.

Several federal courts have slapped down Sessions’ efforts to bludgeon local communities into doing the federal government’s dirty work of immigration enforcement, so it’s proper to take a quick look at Sessions’ viewpoint.

Sessions started throwing conniptions about sanctuary communities in March 2017, a couple of months after President Trump issued an executive order calling for federal funds to be withheld from communities that he said were out to thwart immigration agents. “Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States,” Trump asserted.

  • COLUMN
Here’s what Atty. Gen. Sessions got wrong about the law in his attack on sanctuary cities
MAR 28, 2017 | 3:00 PM

Trump’s order recognized that the law might constrain how the Department of Justice might act, so Sessions attempted to gin up a legal rationale. He asserted that jurisdictions across the nation were actively violating federal immigration laws, pumping undocumented immigrants back onto the streets even after their convictions for serious crimes. Sessions has cited two provisions of federal law, “Section 1373” and immigration detainers.

The first, enacted in 1996 under Bill Clinton, prohibits anyone from interfering with the exchange of information with federal authorities about the immigration status of any person. The law says merely that once local officials have that information, they can’t be stopped from trading it to the feds. Nothing in the law, however, requires local officials to collect information about the immigration status of anyone they have in custody in the first place.

“Detainers” are requests by immigration officials that local police hold immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and suspected or accused of a serious crime for 48 hours, or until the immigration authorities can decide if they want to take further action themselves. The Congressional Research Service found in 2015 that local policies vary widely about when to honor detainers, with many honoring those for people held for serious felonies but not for suspects in minor misdemeanor cases. Some require commitments from the federal government to cover the cost of detention or even the locality’s legal liability. Demanding compliance with all detainers, some experts say, raises the possibility of federal commandeering of local resources for federal purposes, which happens to be unconstitutional.

Since Sessions began griping about sanctuary laws — many of which were enacted decades before Trump became president — federal judges have recognized consistently that localities have a legitimate interest in creating a trustful relationship between the police and the communities they serve. In communities with large populations of immigrants, that relationship can be easily destroyed if the cops become viewed as immigration agents. Residents will be reluctant to report crimes, much less help police find wrongdoers or testify against them. The result is more dangerous, not safer, communities.

  • COLUMN
A punitive Trump proposal stokes panic among immigrants — even before it’s official
AUG 24, 2018 | 9:40 AM

In July, for example, Federal Judge John Mendez of Sacramento rejected the administration’s attempt to block three sanctuary laws enacted by the state Legislature in 2017. Mendez found that for the most part the laws fell squarely within the state’s authority to manage its own law enforcement resources and keep them from being “commandeered” by the federal government for its own purposes.

Nothing in the sanctuary laws “actively obstructs” federal officials, Mendez found; they only required state officials not to participate in federal immigration enforcement, except on their own terms. “Standing aside,” he wrote, “does not equate to standing in the way.”

Sessions hasn’t had any more success in trying to block federal funds for sanctuary cities. That’s the subject of the appeals court and Los Angeles cases. Both pertain to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, a federal program enacted in 2005 and named after a New York police officer slain while guarding an immigrant who had agreed to testify against drug dealers.

Congress established a strict formula for the Byrne funds, requiring that 50% be disbursed each year to states in amounts proportionate to their population and crime levels, with the remaining 50% tied to states’ proportions of violent crime. The city and county of Los Angeles, which were to receive a combined $1.9 million in the current fiscal year, planned to use the money for anti-gang programs, among other things.

  • COLUMN
In sanctuary ruling, a federal judge schools Atty. Gen. Sessions on the law
JUL 06, 2018 | 11:05 AM

Before making the disbursements, however, the DOJ said that applicants would have to certify their compliance with Section 1373 and agree to other forms of cooperation with immigration officials.

The appeals court in Chicago thought little of the DOJ’s arguments. “The Attorney General repeatedly characterizes the issue as whether localities can be allowed to thwart federal law enforcement,” the majority observed. “That is a red herring.” They ridiculed Sessions for being “incredulous that localities receiving federal funds can complain about conditions attached to the distribution of those funds.” But that was just too bad, they concluded: He simply doesn’t have the authority to attach any conditions to the program, other than those dictated by the formula.

Judge Real came to the same conclusion. Sessions’ policy faced Los Angeles with “an impossible choice: Either it must certify compliance with unconstitutional and unlawful directives that impinge on the City’s sovereignty, damage community trust, and harm public safety, or it will lose congressionally authorized Byrne JAG funding.” Real wasn’t inclined to force the city to make that choice.

For a federal officer charged with upholding the law, Jeff Sessions seems to need an awful lot of reminding of what the law says. It’s time he took the lessons he’s getting from federal courts to heart.

Michael Hiltzik
CONTACT
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik writes a daily blog appearing on latimes.com. His business column appears in print every Sunday, and occasionally on other days. As a member of the Los Angeles Times staff, he has been a financial and technology writer and a foreign correspondent. He is the author of six books, including “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age” and “The New Deal: A Modern History.” Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.

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Once upon a time, many years ago, I worked at a U.S. Department of Justice that functioned like “America’s law firm.” Every adverse decision was carefully studied by the agency, the litigator, and the Solicitor General’s Office. When the reviewing  court appeared to have “the better view of the law,” or when the agency position was repeatedly rejected and there was no “Circuit split,” the rules, regulations, BIA interpretations, and even the statute sometimes were changed to adopt the Federal Courts’ “better-reasoned view of the law.”

Indeed, while serving in the Legacy INS General Counsel’s Office under then General Counsel Sam Bernsen, I remember drafting successfully enacted legislation (known as the “INS Efficiency Act”) that actually adopted into law some Federal Court decisions that had reversed INS and also tried to fashion some “legislative compromises” that we thought would pass muster in the Article IIIs. Amazingly, it was enacted into law with only minor modifications to my original draft.

Yup, it wasn’t always popular with the “operating divisions” of the INS. But, it was the job of “us lawyers” to “sell them” on why compliance with legal standards was important. And, indeed, I remember getting the essential support of “upper level management” — at that time the Commissioner, General Leonard Chapman, Jr., and his Deputy Jim Greene, certainly supporters of strong immigration enforcement, for the legislative changes our Office drafted.

In other words, we were trying to make Government work effectively within legal boundaries rather than continuing to bother the Federal Courts with untenable or legally weak positions. Folks committed to “Good Government.” Imagine that!

Nowadays, under Jeff Sessions, the DOJ has abandoned any semblance of good lawyering or legal excellence and has, with a few exceptions (possibly Bob Mueller’s operation and the FBI under Director Chris Wray), been turned into a “White Nationalist propaganda factory.” Today’s hollow semblance of a DOJ consistently presents “jaw dropping” legal positions that are both bad policy and supported by weak to nonexistent legal arguments that sometimes fail to pass the “straight fact test.”

That’s because Jeff Sessions doesn’t operate as a lawyer. No, he’s a “Minister of Propaganda” who spreads racially-driven bogus views, false narratives, and misleading statistics, then feigns shock and outrage when the “real” Federal Courts consistently “stuff” him and apply the actual law and Constitution. When your legal  positions are not drawn from the law, the Constitution, input from career lawyers, and consultation with experts in the field, but rather taken from “cue cards” prepared by widely discredited White Nationalist restrictionist groups, the results are bound to be ugly.

The only surprising thing is that such a stunningly biased and unqualified individuals as Jeff Sessions has been given the opportunity to destroy the integrity of the U.S. Department of Justice and to make it a subservient tool of his attack on American values and our entire justice system. Sen. Liz Warren tried to tell ’em. But they wouldn’t listen. Now, Jeff Sessions is dragging all of America down in the muck with him.

PWS

09-18-18

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  2. 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!
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WASHPOST, NYT, & LA TIMES EDITORIAL BOARDS “CALL OUT” TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S STUPID AND CRUEL CHILD ABUSE PROPOSAL! — “There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/first-they-separated-families-now-theyre-incarcerating-children/2018/09/07/affedb90-b21b-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html?utm_term=.90ac0917a68e

The Post’s View Opinion

First they separated families. Now they’re incarcerating children.


Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Washington on Wednesday. (Cliff Owen/AP)
By Editorial Board

September 7

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ripped more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents’ arms with no plan or procedures for reuniting them, resulting in some 500 children remaining effectively orphaned even today, five months after the fact. Now it proposes a new policy for jailing migrant children indefinitely, one that ensures they “are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”

That assurance, along with its rich irony, is offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has proposed the policy in a brazen attempt to escape the strictures of a two-decade-old court settlement forbidding the long-term incarceration of minors who cross the border seeking asylum in the United States.

Ms. Nielsen, who was instrumental in executing the zero-compassion policy that traumatized so many toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens this spring and summer, now would have Americans believe her department recognizes children as particularly vulnerable human beings, deserving of dignity and respect. How will that dignity and respect be meted out when those children are confined, along with their parents, in long-term detention facilities that the administration now proposes to build?

Ms. Nielsen, along with immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, are convinced that so-called catch-and-release policies are largely to blame for the flow of families across the southern border. Among the factors contributing to those policies is the 1997 court agreement known as Flores, which arose from abundant evidence that migrant children had been harmed by long-term detention, and forbade it.

The reality is that Flores has been in effect for more than 20 years, during which migrant flows have dipped and surged. When the Trump administration tried, just a few months ago, to amend the Flores agreement to permit long-term detention of families, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee rejected its argument that the agreement was to blame for a recent surge in border crossings. “Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge wrote.

The administration’s proposal sets up a new court fight, one that will test Homeland Security’s risible insistence that the new policy would “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores agreement while freeing the government to get tougher on migrants. The “basic purpose” of Flores was to protect children from harm; confining them defeats that mandate.

It is legitimate to take concrete steps to ensure that migrant families appear in immigration court when ordered to do so. Ankle bracelet monitors, bail and other means of achieving that have been effective, and their use can be expanded. What’s less effective, and at odds with American values, is the administration’s abiding faith in punitive measures where children are concerned. There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/opinion/editorials/dont-let-migrant-kids-rot.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

Opinion

Don’t Let Migrant Kids Rot

If the Trump administration gets its way, the government will be able to detain the children indefinitely.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Image
Undocumented immigrants at a bus station in McAllen, Tex.CreditCreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

For all the human brain’s mysteries, its development is quite well understood. Early childhood and adolescence are crucial times of unparalleled neural growth. Just as trust and stability can enhance that growth, fear and trauma can impede it. Institutionalization, in particular, can have profound and deleterious effects, triggering a range of developmental delays and psychiatric disorders from which recovery can be difficult, if not impossible.

In light of that knowledge, the Trump administration’s latest move against immigrant children is especially troubling. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations that would allow the government to detain migrant children indefinitely. Officials are now prohibited from detaining such minors for more than 20 days by an agreement known as the Flores settlement, which has been in place since 1997. The new rules would end that settlement and would likely open the door to an expansion of detention centers across the country.

D.H.S. says that by eliminating Flores, officials will deter illegal immigration, reasoning that undocumented adults will be less likely to enter the country to begin with if they know they can’t avoid long-term detention simply by having a child in tow. Immigration activists say the proposed rule’s true aims are both simpler and more diabolical than that: “They want to strip away every last protection for detained immigrant children,” says Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Even with Flores in place, those protections have proved thin. Youth migrant shelters — there are roughly 100 such facilities housing more than 10,000 minors across the country — have been cited for a long list of abuses, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, blatant medical neglect, the forcible injection of antipsychotic medications, the unlawful restraint of children in distress and harsh rules that prohibit even siblings from hugging one another. The shelters in question, several of which are facing lawsuits, are part of a network that has received billions of federal dollars in the past four years alone. That money has continued to pour in even as abuse allegations have multiplied.

Related
For more on detained migrant children
Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers

Opinion | The Editorial Board
The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children

The administration bears unique responsibility for these violations, in no small part because its disastrous and short-lived separation policy has wreaked havoc on a system that was already rife with problems. Shame alone should have federal officials working hard to undo the damage of that policy and to prevent further harm to the children under their charge, never mind that it’s the right thing to do under any number of international agreements and norms.

But their latest plan is more likely to exacerbate existing problems than to resolve them. The proposed regulations would eliminate the standing requirement that detention centers submit to state inspections and would narrow the scope of relatives to whom children can be released to only parents and legal guardians — no aunts, uncles or other extended family members. It would also trigger a proliferation of new facilities: The administration projects that Immigration and Customs Enforcement-run family detention would increase from 3,000 beds to 12,000. The number of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors may also grow.

The proposals will be open to public comment for the next 60 days before they can be finalized. Readers who wish to register their concern can do so on the Federal Register’s website.

After that period, the issue is almost certainly headed to court. Observers say the same judge who has ruled against past attempts to undermine Flores is likely to thwart this attempt as well.

Which paints a stark reality for what’s motivating this move and what it ultimately means: The administration surely knows what a long shot this proposal is, but it will undoubtedly excite President Trump’s political base as the midterm elections approach. So while the administration plays politics, the well-being of thousands of children who came to America seeking protection and safety will be put at risk — today and, developmentally, for the rest of their lives.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=6656cffa-1bec-452b-a9de-dbba54a04ac1

From the LA Times Editorial Board:

It’s wrong to jail children

The Trump administration wants no limits on how long it can detain migrant kids and their parents.

Of all the appalling things the Trump administration has done, the cruelest has to be arresting and detaining asylum seekers, and separating them from their children. Seeking to deter desperate families from entering the United States by detaining parents for weeks or months apart from their children is so hard-hearted it shocks the conscience. The cruelty has been compounded by ineptitude, as hundreds of migrant children have been stranded in the United States without their parents, who have been deported.

Thankfully, the administration’s callousness has been held in check by a court order left over from President Clinton’s second term. The 1997 settlement agreement in Flores vs. Reno requires, among other things, that children facing deportation be held in detention for no more than 20 days, and in the least restrictive environment possible. Courts later extended the agreement to include families with minors in detention centers. (The government has been sued at least five times for allegedly violating the order.)

Now the Trump administration wants to scrap the agreement entirely by instituting even more draconian regulations that would allow it to detain families with minors as long as it may take to resolve their deportation cases. That’s beyond the pale.

Migrant children seeking permission to remain in the U.S. should not be detained regardless of whether they have a parent to accompany them in confinement. It’s especially troubling that one of the administration’s stated reasons for doing so is to send a threatening message to other families who might seek asylum in the U.S. from dangerous circumstances in their home countries.

Of course, the government has the right and duty to set immigration laws and enforce them. And we have a system for that, broken as it might be. Current U.S. law allows asylum to be granted to people facing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” If immigration courts rule that applicants don’t meet those requirements, or reject appeals by people seeking permission to stay on humanitarian grounds, the government is entirely within its rights to send them to their home countries. But it should not (and may not, under international agreements) incarcerate them — especially when they are children — unless there is good cause to think the migrants are a flight risk or pose a threat to public safety.

Remember, most of these families arrive seeking official permission to stay, so they have a powerful incentive not to skip their court hearings or break the law: doing so only leads to deportation orders. Advocates argue that most of the aslyum seekers who do miss court dates never received an appearance notice, often because the process takes so long that their addresses change and official records don’t catch up. As for public safety, a raft of studies has found that immigrants, regardless of their status, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

If no-shows truly are the administration’s concern, it inherited a new Family Case Management Program from the Obama administration that matched eligible asylum-seeking families with housing, healthcare, schooling for the children and legal advice to help navigate the immigration court system. Families in that program had a 99% show-rate for court hearings. But Trump killed it last year.

Under the Flores agreement, the government can hold minors only in state-licensed facilities. But states tend not to license facilities for families, which, the government argues, means that it must release the families while the deportation cases continue.

The new regulations would let the federal government do the licensing of facilities, paving the way for a massive expansion of the detention system. The government currently uses three family detention centers with a total of 3,500 beds. They are secured, dormitory-style facilities with shared bathrooms, common areas, play space and rooms for classes. Trump wants to add 15,000 more beds, but that may just be the start; border agents caught 77,674 people migrating as families in 2016 alone.

It is fundamentally inhumane to incarcerate children — with or without their parents — while immigration courts try to figure out what to do with them. Psychiatrists warn of the damage even from short-term detentions, and some of those who have been held for months have shown signs of severe emotional distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. So in its obsessive quest to stop migrants from seeking asylum, the Trump administration is willing to, in essence, commit child abuse. That’s a stain not just on the presidency, but on the nation.

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The White Nationalist Scofflaws are at it again! Even if were effective as a deterrent (which all reliable data and experience show it isn’t), detention for deterrence would still be illegal.

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to uphold our Constitution and true American values against the White Nationalism, racism, cruelty, xenophobia, and lawlessness of Trump, Sessions, and their cronies! Put an end to Sessions’s “New American Gulag” (“NAG”)!

PWS

09-10-18

 

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. NEXT TIME “BIG MAC” LIES ABOUT THE “FLORES SETTLEMENT,” HERE’S JACLYN KELLEY-WIDMER WITH THE TRUTH!
  3. HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE BLOG PRESENTS “THE FLORES EXHIBITS” – Truth, No Matter How Terrible & Disturbing, Is The Best Antidote To Notorious Human Rights Abuser “Big Mac With Lies” & His Truly Despicable Knowingly False Narratives & Immoral Actions! – “At this time when our nation is led by scoundrels, we are in need of heroes.”
  4. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, “PERPS” ON THE LOOSE! — DOJ Internal Report Shows How “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton Conspired To Separate Migrant Kids In Violation Of 5th Amendment — When Will These Criminals Be Charged & Prosecuted Under 18 USC 242? — NY Times Reports!

LA TIMES: SESSIONS PERSECUTES BROWN SKINNED FEMALE REFUGEES — THERE IS NOTHING “EASY” ABOUT BEING AN ABUSED WOMAN OR AN ASYLUM APPLICANT!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=7d04de4c-1e76-4711-9b90-dac191234d79

Jazmine Ulloa reports for the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — Xiomara started dating him when she was 17. He was different then, not yet the man who pushed drugs and ran with a gang. Not the man who she says berated and raped her, who roused her out of bed some mornings only to beat her.

Not the man who choked her with an electrical cord, or put a gun to her head while she screamed, then begged, “Please, please don’t kill me — I love you.”

Fleeing El Salvador with their daughter, then 4, the 23-year-old mother pleaded for help at a port of entry in El Paso on a chilly day in December 2016.

After nearly two years, her petition for asylum remains caught in a backlog of more than 310,000 other claims. But while she has waited for a ruling, her chance of success has plunged.

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in June issued a decision meant to block most victims of domestic abuse and gang violence from winning asylum, saying that “private criminal acts” generally are not grounds to seek refuge in the U.S. Already, that ruling has narrowed the path for legal refuge for tens of thousands of people attempting to flee strife and poverty in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

“You can tell there is something happening,” said longtime immigration attorney Carlos A. Garcia, who in mid-July spoke to more than 70 women in one cell block at a family detention center in Texas. Most had received denials of their claims that they have what the law deems a “credible fear of persecution.”

“More than I’ve ever seen before,” he said.

In North Carolina, where federal immigration agents sparked criticism last month when they arrested two domestic-violence survivors at a courthouse, some immigration judges are refusing to hear any asylum claims based on allegations of domestic abuse. Other immigration judges are asking for more detailed evidence of abuse at the outset of a case, a problem for victims who often leave their homes with few written records.

Under the Refugee Act of 1980, judges can grant asylum, which allows a person to stay in the U.S. legally, only to people escaping persecution based on religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in “a particular social group.”

As drug war violence escalated over the last two decades in Mexico and Central America, fueled by a U.S. demand for drugs and waged by gangs partly grown on American streets, human rights lawyers pushed to have victims of domestic violence or gang crime considered part of such a social group when their governments don’t protect them.

After years of argument, they won a major victory in 2014 when the highest U.S. immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals, ruled in favor of a woman from Guatemala who fled a husband who had beaten and raped her with impunity.

Sessions, in June, used his legal authority over the immigration system to reverse that decision, deciding a case brought by a woman identified in court as A.B.

“Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems — even all serious problems — that people face every day all over the world,” he said, ruling that in most cases asylum should be limited to those who can show they were directly persecuted by the government, not victims of “private violence.”

Immigration advocates reacted with outrage.

Karen Musalo, a co-counsel for A.B. and a professor at the UC Hastings College of Law, called the decision “a return to the dark ages of refugee law,” a move inconsistent with a steadily evolving principle “that women’s rights are human rights.”

Neither the government, nor the police, could help Xiomara in her rural town, where gangs were deeply embedded.

“Are you kidding?” she said, asking to be identified by only her first name out of concern about possible retaliation. “I would go to the police department and wouldn’t come back alive — if I came back at all.”

Within a year of when they started dating, she said, her boyfriend began drinking and doing drugs, making friends with the wrong crowd. He grew meaner, more violent.

One day he put a gun to her head, her asylum claim says. On another evening, on the roof of his home after another fight, she had been weeping in the dark, when she felt a cord tighten around her neck.

“He would have killed me if his family hadn’t appeared,” she said.

Other women offer similar stories.

Candelaria, 49, who also asked that her last name not be used, said she left an abusive husband of 20 years in Honduras after his drinking became more severe. And always the criminal bands of men roamed.

“My children sent me a photo of me in those days, and I look so old, so sad,” said Candelaria, whose asylum case has been pending for four years.

For more than two decades, United Nations officials and human rights lawyers have argued that women victimized by domestic violence in societies where police refuse to help are being persecuted because of their gender and should be treated as refugees entitled to asylum.

But Sessions and other administration officials have a different view, and they have made a broad effort to curb the path to asylum. The number of people entering the U.S. by claiming asylum has risen sharply in recent years, and administration officials have portrayed the process as a “loophole” in the nation’s immigration laws.

In October, Sessions labeled asylum an “easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States” and called on immigration judges to elevate “the threshold standard of proof in credible fear interviews.” In March, he restricted who could be entitled to full hearings. From May to June, federal officials limited asylum seekers from gaining access through ports of entry, with people waiting for weeks at some of the busiest crossings in Southern California.

The government does not keep precise data on how many domestic-violence survivors claim asylum, but figures released last month give a glimpse of the effect that Sessions’ decision has begun to have at one of the earliest stages of the asylum process.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday filed a lawsuit on behalf of 12 parents and children it says were wrongly found not to have a credible fear of return. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Thursday stopped the deportation of a mother and her daughter in the case, threatening to hold Sessions in contempt.

For domestic-abuse survivors waiting for hearings, the uncertainty has been excruciating.

Candelaria wants to go home, but her older children back in Honduras tell her to have hope.

“ ‘You’ve endured enough,’ they tell me,” she said.

Xiomara, now 25, won’t have her asylum hearing for another year.

For months, she scraped by on meager wages, baby-sitting and waiting on tables. She was relieved to find a job at a factory that pays $10 an hour.

The American dream is “one big lie,” she now says.

But at least here, she said, she and her daughter are alive.

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People like Xiomara are wonderful folks, genuine refugees, deserving of protection, who will contribute to our country. As my friend and legal scholar Professor Karen Musalo cogently said, Sessions is leading “a return to the dark ages of refugee law,” a move inconsistent with a steadily evolving principle “that women’s rights are human rights.” But, the “New Due Process Army” (Karen is one of the “Commanding Generals”) isn’t going to let him get away with this outrageous attack on human rights, women’s rights, and human decency.

Due Process Forever, Jeff Sessions Never!

PWS

08-13-18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. THE HUMAN AGONY OF ASYLUM: SPEND 4 MIN. WITH MS. A-B- & HUMAN/WOMEN’S RIGHTS EXPERT PROFESSOR KAREN MUSALO — Beaten, Raped, & Threatened With Death By Her Husband, Hounded Throughout Her Country, Abandoned By El Salvadoran Authorities, She Sought Refuge In The U.S., Winning Her Case At The BIA — Then She Was Targeted For A Vicious Unprovoked Attack By Notorious Scofflaw Immigration Judge Stuart Couch & White Nationalist Xenophobe Jeff Sessions — She’s Still Fighting For Her Life!
  2. MORE ARTICLES FEATURE “GANG OF RETIRED JUDGES’ STATEMENT” RE: SESSIONS’S OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK ON SETTLED PRINCIPLES OF PROTECTION LAW! — Media Exposing Corrupt, Inherently Unfair, Biased “Court” System Where The Prejudiced Prosecutor “Cooks” The Results to His Liking! — Jeff Sessions Degrades The American Legal System & Our National Values Each Day He Remains In Office!
  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. PROFESSOR KAREN MUSALO @ LA TIMES: We Can Restore Legality & Humanity To U.S. Asylum Law — That’s Why The Refugee Protection Act Deserves Everyone’s Support — “The bill lays out a plan to allow women and girls fleeing gender-based violence the opportunity to obtain asylum, and bring our country back in line with its humanitarian commitments. It’s a vision that all members of Congress should be able to get behind, even at a time of bitter partisanship.”