NY TIMES EXPOSES TRUMP AS LIFETIME GRIFTER!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/opinions/trump-family-lies-expose-fraud-dantonio/index.html

Author Michael D’Antonio writes on CNN:

Michael D’Antonio is author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” (St. Martin’s Press). The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)Remember how then-candidate Donald Trump talked about how the “system is rigged”? He really knew what he was talking about.

In breathtaking detail and with exacting precision, The New York Times has confirmed that for much of his life, though he claimed to be a brilliant businessman, Trump was benefiting from a rigged system, which his family manipulated to transfer enormous wealth from his father to him.

This truth, long suspected by those who have peered into Trump’s finances, included questionable and potentially fraudulent practices that were used so the Trump clan could avoid paying the kind of taxes ordinary people pay every day.

Donald Trump and the Ministry of Truth

Trump’s lawyer vehemently denies the allegations against his client, telling the Times they are “100% false, and highly defamatory.”

And yet, the Times story is quite persuasive. According to the Times, by age 3, Trump was receiving $200,000 per year in today’s dollars from his father’s operations. By 8, he was a millionaire. And his wealth only grew from there.p

Talk about rigged.

Overall, the picture the Times paints comports with much that could be surmised about the family over the years. By the 1960s, his father, Fred, was one of the wealthiest men in New York. His financial prowess backed his son’s first big project, a hotel renovation at Grand Central Terminal, and his signature Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Although the back story about the hotel project and Trump Tower were well established, the facts assembled by the Times show Donald Trump used deception, not just in carrying out those projects, but throughout the course of his career.

The Times notes he profited from his father’s largess to the tune of more than $400 million. Much of this money was given to him though business entities, trusts and employment schemes that permitted him to accept multiple salaries at the same time.

The President who cried wolf

This manipulation included schemes that made Trump into his father’s employee, landlord, property manager and lender. One example, according to the Times, was Fred Trump’s development of Beach Haven Apartments. After building the sprawling complex with federal loans, he made his children the landlords — creating a stream of income that grew over decades.

But Beach Haven was just one of scores of schemes that Fred Trump devised, and his son was complicit in. In one key passage of the Times report, the authors explain that Fred and his wife, Mary, paid a little more than $52 million in taxes on payments of $1 billion given to their children. Under the law, though, they should have paid 55% tax on gifts — a figure that $52 million doesn’t even come close to.

The evidence the Times explored as this financial X-ray was assembled included more than 100,000 pages of documents. The data gleaned from these papers, some of which came from tax returns, show how nearly 300 streams of revenues, including receipts from coin laundries in apartment buildings, were funneled to the man who would eventually become president.

How to prepare for ex-President Trump

All the evidence gathered by the Times conflicts directly with the message Trump has long promoted. From his early days in Manhattan, when he marketed himself as a young tycoon, Trump insisted he had succeeded on the basis of his own ingenuity, creativity and grit.

This myth is the chief takeaway from his famous best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal,” and it was the backdrop for the development of his TV show “The Apprentice.” In the opening montage for the program, he falsely declared he was “the largest real estate developer in New York, by far.” Real estate insiders, of course, knew this claim was rubbish.

Not surprisingly, much of Trump’s rhetoric was seen as hyperbole in the service of a public image that was playful and ridiculous. However, once his business acumen became one of the pillars of his presidential campaign, it became fair game for intense examination. Trump has impeded the process by refusing to honor the tradition of releasing his tax returns. However, with impressive legwork and number-crunching, the Times has made the picture much less opaque.

Follow CNN Opinion

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

Yup! No real surprise to most of us.

PWS

10-03-18

NIGHT MOVES: Immigrant Kids Rousted From Their Beds & Taken To The “New American Kiddie Gulag!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html

Caitlin Dickerson reports for the NY Times:

Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City

Image
Migrant children at a detention facility in Tornillo, Tex.CreditCreditMike Blake/Reuters

By Caitlin Dickerson

Sept. 30, 2018

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.

To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.

The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.

“It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.

Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.

“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”

But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.

The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.

The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.

Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.

At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.

The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.

The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.

Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.

Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.

The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.

“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.

“This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”

The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.

Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.

Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.

“Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.

Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.

The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.

Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.

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

If you don’t want to turn back the clock to 1939, get out the vote to remove this scofflaw, White Nationalist, racist Administration from power before it’s too late!

PWS

09-30-18

HON. JEFFREY CHASE & OTHERS: No Matter What The FBI Reports, Judge BKavs Has Already Shown That He Is An Angry, Belligerent, Political Partisan Unfit To Serve On High Court!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/9/28/kavanaugh-and-judicial-impartiality

Sep 28 Kavanaugh and Judicial Impartiality

The standard to keep in mind regarding the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice is found in 28 U.S.C. section 455(a): “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Let’s set aside for now the fact that as drafted, the statute seems to apply only to men (did Congress really not envision women judges?). Comments have been made recently about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh being “innocent until proven guilty.” That’s actually the standard for a defendant in a criminal trial. Because we as a society recognize how terrible it would be to send an innocent person to jail, possibly for many years, our legal system has established a standard that is willing to allow many who are guilty of crimes to go free, because we find that result preferable to ruining the life of an innocent person through wrongful conviction. Therefore, where the evidence establishes, for example, an 85 percent likelihood that the defendant committed the crime, a finding of not guilty is warranted, as the remaining 15% constitutes “reasonable doubt.” Of course, wrongful convictions still happen in practice, but nevertheless, the theory behind a presumption of innocence and a standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal proceedings remains a noble one.

Not being allowed to serve as a Supreme Court justice is a far, far cry from being convicted of a crime and sent to prison. Realize that there are only nine people in the whole country who are Supreme Court justices. Many who have never been appointed to the Supreme Court have nevertheless gone on to lead happy, productive lives; some have amassed significant wealth, others have even held positions of trust and respect in society.

In choosing a Supreme Court justice, the ideal candidate is not someone who hasn’t been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of some horrible act. Rather, it’s someone whose impartiality is beyond questioning. This is because in a democracy, faith in our judicial institutions is paramount. Society will abide by judicial outcomes that they disagree with if they believe that the “wrong” result was made by impartial jurists who were genuinely trying to get it right. Abiding by unpopular judicial decisions is the key to democracy. It is what prevents angry mobs from taking justice into their own hands. In the words of Balzac, “to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.”

A primary reason Republicans are so anxious to “plow through” (as Mitch McConnell, using the rapiest terminology imaginable, unfortunately phrased it) the nomination of Kavanaugh is because of how he might rule on abortion rights, an issue of great importance to the party’s base. Nearly all of the Republican Senators seem to believe that as long as Kavanaugh has not been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of attempted rape, then he is fully qualified to serve as the deciding vote in taking away a right that has been constitutionally guaranteed to women for the past 45 years.

However, the three Republican Senators who at the last second requested an FBI investigation into the charges against Kavanaugh may have realized that their colleagues were not applying the correct standard. Abortion rights involve a woman’s right to control her own body. Yesterday, the country heard very detailed and articulate testimony from a highly credible and courageous witness. What she described involved her being deprived of the right to control her own body, by a male who physically pinned her down, covered her mouth when she tried to scream for help, and tried to forcibly remove her clothing against her will. Her violator then added insult to injury by laughing at her in a way that still haunts her to this day. The credible witness stated that she was 100 percent certain that the male who violated her rights in this despicable way was Kavanaugh.

The evidence goes directly to the question of the candidate’s view of a woman’s right to control her own body. The question that Senators should be considering is how much public trust there will be in the impartiality of a decision that involves such right in light of the past actions of the justice casting the potential deciding vote.

Senators who will nevertheless vote for Kavanaugh will say that in spite of the testimony, they cannot be sure of his guilt. Or they may state that they are strongly convinced of his innocence. Regardless, many people might reasonably question Kavanaugh’s impartiality based on the evidence they have heard. (And remember, there have been two other women leveling similar accusations as well). Even those who believe him innocent should at this point realize that in light of public perception, the appearance of impropriety should disqualify Kavanaugh from consideration.

Should those Senators deciding the issue ignore the above, we will all likely live with the consequences for decades to come. Although it would not undo the damage, let us hope the public will respond quickly and decisively in voting the offenders out of office in November.

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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

Others agree with Jeffrey:

Here’s what the NY Times Editorial board had to say:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/opinion/why-brett-kavanaugh-wasnt-believable.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable

And why Christine Blasey Ford was.

Sept. 27, 2018

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.

Pool photo by Saul Loeb

What a study in contrasts: Where Christine Blasey Ford was calm and dignified, Brett Kavanaugh was volatile and belligerent; where she was eager to respond fully to every questioner, and kept worrying whether she was being “helpful” enough, he was openly contemptuous of several senators; most important, where she was credible and unshakable at every point in her testimony, he was at some points evasive, and some of his answers strained credulity.

Indeed, Dr. Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was devastating.

With the eyes of the nation on her, Dr. Blasey recounted an appalling trauma. When she was 15 years old, she said, she was sexually assaulted by Judge Kavanaugh, then a 17-year-old student at a nearby high school and now President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Her description of the attack, which she said occurred in a suburban Maryland home on a summer night in 1982, was gut-wrenchingly specific. She said Judge Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, both of whom she described as very drunk, locked her in a second-floor room of a private home. She said Kavanaugh jumped on top of her, groped her, tried to remove her clothes and put his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. She said she feared he might accidentally kill her.

“The uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense,” she said, was her strongest memory.

Judge Kavanaugh, when it was his turn, was not laughing. He was yelling. He spent more than half an hour raging against Senate Democrats and the “Left” for “totally and permanently” destroying his name, his career, his family, his life. He called his confirmation process a “national disgrace.”

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” Judge Kavanaugh said, sounding like someone who suddenly doubted his confirmation to the Supreme Court — an outcome that seemed preordained only a couple of weeks ago.

Pool photo by Erin Schaff

Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.

We share the sorrow of every sensible American who feels stricken at the partisan spectacle playing out in Washington. Judge Kavanaugh was doubtless — and lamentably — correct in predicting that after this confirmation fight, however it ends, the bitterness is only likely to grow. As he put it in his testimony, “What goes around, comes around,” in the partisan vortex that has been intensifying in Washington for decades now. His open contempt for the Democrats on the committee also raised further questions about his own fair-mindedness, and it served as a reminder of his decades as a Republican warrior who would take no prisoners.

Go beyond the headlines and behind the curtain with Frank Bruni’s candid reflections on politics, culture, higher education and more every week.

Judge Kavanaugh’s biggest problem was not his demeanor but his credibility, which has been called in question on multiple issues for more than a decade, and has been an issue again throughout his Supreme Court confirmation process.

On Thursday, he gave misleading answers to questions about seemingly small matters — sharpening doubts about his honesty about far more significant ones. He gave coy answers when pressed about what was clearly a sexual innuendo in his high-school yearbook. He insisted over and over that others Dr. Blasey named as attending the gathering had “said it didn’t happen,” when in fact at least two of them have said only that they don’t recall it — and one of them told a reporter that she believes Dr. Blasey.

Judge Kavanaugh clumsily dodged a number of times when senators asked him about his drinking habits. When Senator Amy Klobuchar gently pressed him about whether he’d ever blacked out from drinking, he at first wouldn’t reply directly. “I don’t know, have you?” he replied — a condescending and dismissive response to the legitimate exercise of a senator’s duty of advise and consent. (Later, after a break in the hearing, he apologized.)

Judge Kavanaugh gave categorical denials a number of times, including, at other points, that he’d ever blacked out from too much drinking. Given numerous reports now of his heavy drinking in college, such a blanket denial is hard to believe.

In contrast, Dr. Blasey bolstered her credibility not only by describing in harrowing detail what she did remember, but by being honest about what she didn’t — like the exact date of the gathering, or the address of the house where it occurred. As she pointed out, the precise details of a trauma get burned into the brain and stay there long after less relevant details fade away.

She was also honest about her ambivalence in coming forward. “I am terrified,” she told the senators in her opening remarks. And then there’s the fact that she gains nothing by coming forward. She is in hiding now with her family in the face of death threats.

Perhaps the most maddening part of Thursday’s hearing was the cowardice of the committee’s 11 Republicans, all of them men, and none of them, apparently, capable of asking Dr. Blasey a single question. They farmed that task out to a sex-crimes prosecutor named Rachel Mitchell, who tried unsuccessfully in five-minute increments to poke holes in Dr. Blasey’s story.

Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield. Doubtless seeking to ape President’s Trump style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr. Blasey.

Pressed over and over by Democratic senators, Judge Kavanaugh never could come up with a clear answer for why he wouldn’t also want a fair, neutral F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against him — the kind of investigation the agency routinely performs, and that Dr. Blasey has called for. At one point, though, he acknowledged that it was common sense to put some questions to other potential witnesses besides him.

When Senator Patrick Leahy asked whether the judge was the inspiration for a hard-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in a memoir about teenage alcoholism by Mr. Judge, Judge Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”

Asking Mr. Judge would be a great idea. Unfortunately he’s hiding out in a Delaware beach town and Senate Republicans are refusing to subpoena him.

Why? Mr. Judge is the key witness in Dr. Blasey’s allegation. He has said he has no recollection of the party or of any assault. But he hasn’t faced live questioning to test his own memory and credibility. And Dr. Blasey is far from alone in describing Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge as heavy drinkers; several of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates have said the same.

None of these people have been called to testify before the Senate. President Trump has refused to call on the F.B.I. to look into the multiple allegations that have been leveled against the judge in the past two weeks. Instead the Republican majority on the committee has scheduled a vote for Friday morning.

There is no reason the committee needs to hold this vote before the F.B.I. can do a proper investigation, and Mr. Judge and possibly other witnesses can be called to testify under oath. The Senate, and the American people, need to know the truth, or as close an approximation as possible, before deciding whether Judge Kavanaugh should get a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court. If the committee will not make a more serious effort, the only choice for senators seeking to protect the credibility of the Supreme Court will be to vote no.

\

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

Emily Bazelon of the NY Times Sunday Magazine wasn’t convinced by BKavs either:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/opinion/kavanaugh-blasey-ford-investigation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Senate’s Failure to Seek the Truth

It is impossible to justify the lack of a neutral investigation into the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Sept. 28, 2018

By Emily Bazelon

Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Twice as a reporter, I’ve interviewed women who have accused men of sexual assault and the men they accused. In both cases, the women looked me in the eye and told me about how they’d been raped, and then the men looked me in the eye and told me they’d never raped anyone. All four people spoke with force and emotion. In the moment, I wanted to believe each one. It’s uncomfortable to imagine that someone who seems wholly sincere is not. It’s confusing — it seems unfeeling — to turn away from someone who makes a vehement claim of truth.

If you watched Thursday’s hearing, in particular Christine Blasey Ford’s opening statement and Brett Kavanaugh’s, maybe you know what I mean. So then what? As a reporter, I looked for corroborating evidence as a means of assessing each person’s veracity. What else could I find out, and how did their accounts stack up against that? This is how investigators do their work. They find out as much as they can about the surrounding circumstances. Then it’s up to judges to weigh the facts and decide which account is most credible.

Judge Kavanaugh didn’t sound as if he was thinking like a judge. His partisan attack on Democrats wasn’t judicial, in any sense of the word. His approach to evidence wasn’t either.

The difficulty for holding Judge Kavanaugh accountable for what Dr. Blasey says was her assault is the lack of a certain kind of corroboration for her account. The other people she has named who were at the small gathering where she says the assault took place don’t remember such a gathering. Two of them are Judge Kavanaugh’s high school friends. One of them is Dr. Blasey’s friend.

But there’s no reason any of them would have remembered such a gathering. She says it was a spur-of-the-moment get-together, after swimming and before a party to come. And it took place 36 years ago. The gathering she describes is also consistent with one of Judge Kavanaugh’s calendar entries about drinking with his friends.

We also have more than Dr. Blasey’s word. Years ago, she talked about this assault, and named Judge Kavanaugh, with her husband and her therapist, and at a later time, she told a few close friends. They back her up on this. One memorable detail from her testimony has the ring of truth, in its specificity: Her assault came up in couples therapy with her husband because the traumatic memory triggered anxiety and claustrophobia, and that made her insist on adding a second front door to her house, to his understandable confusion. This is not the kind of fact a person makes up.

Dr. Blasey was firm about closing a door that would allow us to reconcile her accusation and Judge Kavanaugh’s denial. She is not mixed up about the identity of her assailant, she said. She is “100 percent certain” it was Judge Kavanaugh. The comfortable path for the judge’s supporters — believe she was assaulted, disbelieve he committed the assault — is gone. Her certainty was a pillar of the testimony she put the full weight of herself behind — her professional identity, her character, the careful consideration and precision about facts that was evident as she spoke.

Judge Kavanaugh refused to open another door that would allow the public, and the Senate, to reconcile these accounts of accusation and denial. He ruled out the possibility that he could not remember assaulting Dr. Blasey because he blacked out or was otherwise incapacitated by drinking. He was just as adamant about categorically denying the other sexual misconduct he has been accused of by two other women.

Judge Kavanaugh also didn’t much back off his denials of being a hard drinker or an aggressive drunk. This is his big weakness, stacked against other facts that have been gathered. Several classmates from his college days at Yale paint an entirely different picture of him as a drinker than the innocent one he offered of being a person who “likes beer.” So do his own yearbook entries and speeches. If you’re a judge who believes in strictly reading a text for its plain meaning, as Judge Kavanaugh says he is, his dismissals and wispy explanations aren’t persuasive.

If you’re thinking like a judge aiming to discover the truth, it’s also hard (impossible?) to justify the lack of a neutral investigation and the absence of other witnesses, beginning with Mark Judge, the friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, whom Dr. Blasey says saw and participated in the assault, but not ending with him.

The task of a judge or a Supreme Court justice is to seek the truth. The most important qualities for the job are probity and veracity. Nobody was on trial at the Senate Judiciary Committee. But only one person — Judge Kavanaugh — was asking to be elevated to the highest court in the land.

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

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the magazine and the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. She is also a best-selling author and a co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, a popular podcast.

@emilybazelon • Facebook

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

Meanwhile, over at Slate, Will Saletan wasn’t buying BKavs performance either:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/kavanaugh-lied-senate-judiciary-committee.html

POLITICS

Kavanaugh Lied to the Judiciary Committee—Repeatedly

Thursday’s hearing didn’t prove whether Kavanaugh assaulted Ford. But we do know the Supreme Court nominee wasn’t honest in his testimony.

By WILLIAM SALETAN

SEPT 28, 201810:44 AM

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Jim Bourg/AFP/Getty Images

On Thursday, after listening to testimony from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, several Republican senators said they would vote to confirm the nominee because it’s impossible to determine which witness—Ford or Kavanaugh—is telling the truth. Actually, it’s easy. We don’t know for certain whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford. But we do know that Kavanaugh lied repeatedly in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here are some of his lies.

1. “It’s been investigated.” The White House has ignored multiple requests from Democratic senators to authorize FBI interviews with the alleged witnesses in the case. In particular, there has been no FBI or Judiciary Committee interview with Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s accused accomplice in the alleged assault. In fact, Judge has fled to a hideout in Delaware to avoid being called to testify.

During the hearing, several Democratic senators pleaded with Kavanaugh to call for FBI interviews so that the truth could be resolved. Kavanaugh refused. When Sen. Chris Coons pointed out that the FBI had needed only a few days to complete interviews in the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill case, Kavanaugh said even that was too much, because the Judiciary Committee had already examined his case. “It’s been investigated,” he told Coons.

No honest judge would say that. None of the alleged witnesses, other than Ford and Kavanaugh, has been interviewed. Instead, the alleged witnesses have issued short statementsof nonrecollection and have asked not to testify. The committee’s Republican majority, eager to brush the case aside, has accepted these statements and has refused to ask further questions. In his testimony, Kavanaugh falsely claimed that FBI interviews would add nothing. Agents would “just go and do what you’re doing,” he told the senators.

Kavanaugh claimed that a vague statement of nonrecollection from Judge’s lawyer was sufficient “testimony.” He dismissed calls for Judge to appear before the committee, arguing that his own testimony was adequate. But Kavanaugh also mocked the committee’s Democrats, who lack the power of subpoena, by telling them to go talk to Judge. When Sen. Patrick Leahy asked whether Bart O’Kavanaugh, a drunken character in Judge’s book, was meant to represent Brett Kavanaugh, the nominee passed the buck to his testimony-evading friend: “You’d have to ask him.”

2. “All four witnesses say it didn’t happen.” Each time senators pleaded for an FBI review or a more thorough investigation by the committee, Kavanaugh replied that it wasn’t necessary, since all the people Ford claimed had been at the gathering where the alleged assault occurred had rejected her story. Eight times, Kavanaugh claimed that the witnesses “said it didn’t happen.” Three times, he said the witnesses “refuted” Ford’s story. Four times, Kavanaugh claimed that “Dr. Ford’s longtime friend,” Leland Keyser, had affirmed that the gathering never occurred.

That’s a lie. Keyser has stated that she doesn’t recall the gathering—she was never told about the attack, and she was supposedly downstairs while it allegedly occurred upstairs—but that she believes Ford’s story. That isn’t corroboration, but it isn’t refutation or denial, either. During the hearing, Sen. Cory Booker pointed this out to Kavanaugh, reminding him that in an interview with the Washington Post, Keyser “said she believes Dr. Ford.” Kavanaugh ignored Booker’s correction. Ninety seconds later, the nominee defiantly repeated: “The witnesses who were there say it didn’t happen.”

3. “I know exactly what happened that night.”Kavanaugh made several false or widely contradicted statements about his use of alcohol. This is significant because Judge has admitted to drunken blackouts, which raises the possibility that Judge and Kavanaugh don’t remember what they did to Ford. During the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked about Kavanaugh’s participation in a night of drunken revelry at Yale Law School. Kavanaugh assured Blumenthal, “I know exactly what happened the whole night.” Later, Booker asked Kavanaugh whether he had “never had gaps in memories, never had any losses whatsoever, never had foggy recollection about what happened” while drinking. Kavanaugh affirmed that he had never experienced such symptoms: “That’s what I said.”

These statements contradict reports from several people who knew Kavanaugh. Liz Swisher, a friend from Yale, says she saw Kavanaugh drink a lot, stumble, and slur his words. “It’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess,” she told the Washington Post. And in a speech four years ago, Kavanaugh described himself and a former classmate “piecing things together” to figure out that they’d “had more than a few beers” before an alcohol-soaked banquet at Yale Law School.

4. “I’m in Colorado.” As evidence that the charges against him were ludicrous, Kavanaugh told the committee that he had been falsely accused of committing an assault more than 1,500 miles away. He claimed that according to his accusers, “I’m in Colorado, you know, I’m sighted all over the place.” But a transcript of Kavanaugh’s Sept. 25 interview with Judiciary Committee staffers shows no claim of an offense in Colorado. The transcript says that according to a woman from Colorado, “at least four witnesses” saw Kavanaugh shove a woman “up against the wall very aggressively and sexually” in 1998. But Kavanaugh was specifically told during the interview that the scene of the alleged incident was in D.C., where he was living at the time.

Kavanaugh also told other whoppers. He claimed that his beer consumption in high school was legal because the drinking age in Maryland was 18. In reality, by the time he was 18, the drinking age was 21. He claimed that his high school yearbook reference to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” referred in part to his difficulty in holding down “spicy food.” He claimed that the entry’s jokes about two sporting events he and his high school buddies had watched—“Who won that game, anyway?”—had nothing to do with booze. And he defended his refusal to take a polygraph test on the grounds that such tests aren’t admissible in federal courts—neglecting to mention that he had endorsed their use in hiring and law enforcement.

Maybe Kavanaugh is an honest man in other contexts. Maybe he’s a good husband, a loving dad, and an inspiring coach. And maybe there’s no way to be certain that he assaulted Ford. But one thing is certain: He lied repeatedly to the Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Some of his lies, about the testimony of witnesses and the integrity of investigations, go to the heart of our system of justice. Any senator who votes to put this man on the Supreme Court is saying that such lies don’t matter.

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

Also at Slate, Yascha Mounk predicts lasting damage to our Republic if BKavs is confirmed:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-consequences-democracy-partisanship.html

THE GOOD FIGHT

The Kavanaugh Stakes Just Got Higher

To confirm him now would be dangerous to the survival of our democratic institutions.

By YASCHA MOUNK

SEPT 28, 20184:54 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Drew Angerer/Getty Images and Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images.

At this moment of feverishly intense partisanship, it takes a great deal of courage to tiptoe away from your own tribe. Sen. Jeff Flake has not yet announced that he is willing to part for good; in the end, he may yet betray his professed principles and cast his vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. And yet, we should not underestimate how much strength it took for him to demand an investigation into Christine Blasey Ford’s serious allegations of sexual assault and delay the judge’s confirmation by at least a week. For now, he has proved to be one of the few people in the Senate—and perhaps one of the few in the whole country—who have insisted on taking Ford’s allegations seriously even though he actually shares most of Kavanaugh’s judicial views.

For the sake of our country, all of us should now hope that the FBI manages to uncover conclusive evidence that either supports or dispels Ford’s accusations. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. So the big risk we now face is that the same hell we have lived through for the past 48 hours will be repeated in even more farcical form next week. And that is why it’s very important to use this time to reflect seriously on how judicious people—and perhaps especially senators like Flake who profess to be conscientious conservatives—should vote if they have not made up their mind about the allegations.

It is painfully obvious that most Republican senators will vote to confirm Kavanaugh if the allegations against him are anything short of iron-clad; indeed, one shocking poll suggests that a majority of Republicans voters, and nearly half of evangelicals, would support his confirmation even if they did believe that he is guilty. It is also obvious that most Democrats will vote against his confirmation even in the unlikely case that the FBI should somehow manage to disprove Ford’s allegations; indeed, Kavanaugh’s extreme views on executive power provide a strong reason for any defender of liberal democracy to oppose his nomination. And yet, I think that one very important consideration has largely been overlooked.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Kavanaugh is an innocent man. If that’s the case, the raw anger he displayed during Thursday’s confirmation hearing is certainly understandable. While we might wish for a public figure to keep his poise even when his reputation is being impugned, it is perfectly human to lose your countenance under such circumstances.

But even under that charitable interpretation, Kavanaugh’s performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee makes him eminently unfit to sit on the highest court of the land.

A justice on the Supreme Court has to rule on a whole host of issues that are of huge partisan significance: If he is confirmed, he will have to settle substantive questions of public policy—from abortion rights to the health care mandate—on which Democrats and Republicans have hugely differing preferences. Just as importantly, he will also help to set the parameters that are supposed to ensure that Democrats and Republicans can appeal for the votes of their fellow citizens on fair terms.

But how can somebody who has accused Democrats of a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” be seen as impartial when he rules on a gerrymandering case that could deliver a huge advantage to Republicans? How can somebody who describes serious allegations of sexual assault as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” be expected to give both sides a fair hearing if the outcome of a presidential election should once again be litigated in front of the Supreme Court? And how can somebody who denounces the “frenzy on the left” to derail his nomination be trusted to ensure that the left’s most vocal enemy, Donald Trump, does not overstep the bounds of his constitutional authority?

Because of Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings on the confirmation of Merrick Garland during the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the current composition of the Supreme Court is already tainted. Now, the confirmation of as nakedly partisan a jurist as Kavanaugh would go a long way toward destroying whatever remains of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. And this would not only tank the trust Americans have in the last branch of government that has, according to polls, consistently been more popular than secondhand car salesmen; it also significantly raises the likelihood that Democrats will engage in yet another round of tit for tat.

Precisely because partisans need to be able to trust that courts can enforce the rules for fair political competition between them and their adversaries, attempts by a political party to change the ideological makeup of the judiciary are extremely dangerous to the survival of democratic institutions. That’s why (direct or indirect) court-packing schemes have been key elements of the authoritarian takeovers in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. And it’s also why the current governments in Poland and Hungary are playing constitutional hardball to ensure that judges they appoint command a majority on the most important courts in their respective countries.

There can therefore be little doubt that any attempt by Democrats to pack the Supreme Court, for example, by expanding its size, would be another step in a tit-for-tat spiral at whose end autocracy awaits. And yet, recent events will make it very hard for those voices within the Democratic Party that recognize this danger to prevail. If one side is so willing to abuse precedent and decency to, as Kavanaugh might put it, screw the libs, it becomes very difficult for the other side not to reciprocate in kind.

This is why Kavanaugh’s confirmation would not just be a disaster in itself; it would also be a strong reason to become even more pessimistic about the future of American politics. The GOP and Trump are now more fully aligned than ever. Our country’s partisan divide is deeper than it has been in living memory. The mutual hatred and incomprehension is more acute than it has been in decades. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, it’s very, very difficult to envisage what path could possibly lead us out of this nightmare.

Jeff Flake has acted with much more courage and decency than most liberals care to admit. But the responsibility that now rests on his—and Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s and Sen. Susan Collins’—shoulders is even greater than he might realize.

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

Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate is also no BKavs fan:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-hearing-fear-a-justice-brett-kavanaugh.html

JURISPRUDENCE

Fear a Justice Brett Kavanaugh

As his confirmation steamrolls ahead, Americans should be terrified.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

SEPT 28, 201812:16 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images and Gabriella Demczuk-Pool/Getty Images.

When Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh was over, it wasn’t quite clear what had hit those of us who’d been sitting in the room. The hearing room in Dirksen is tiny, and while the slammed binder and the escalating shouting of the nominee might have looked pretty dramatic on TV, inside the chamber, the effect was that of an out-of-control house party. Too loud, too scary, too close, too real. Like being locked inside something terrible with the music cranked up.

Anita Hill once told me that, in 1991, Clarence Thomas had race and she had only gender. But now, in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh had rage and Christine Blasey Ford had only gender. With the Senate Judiciary Committee moving on Friday to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate without any further inquiry around Blasey Ford’s damning and plainly credible testimony that Kavanaugh had gleefully and drunkenly sexually assaulted her at a 1982 house party as his buddy Mark Judge watched, it appears as though his rage alone will have been enough to earn him life tenure on the highest court in the land.

The dynamic of Thursday’s hearing was consistent: He had fury, and contempt, and seething threats that the republic would pay if he were thwarted. She had to functionally lie back and try not to infuriate anyone, as Republicans cowered behind the female prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, they had brought on to interrogate her. That was until it was Kavanaugh’s turn to speak, when they quickly jettisoned that paper-thin pretense of investigative “independence” and joined Kavanaugh to form a chorus of angry shouting men. They towered silently over Mitchell for the first half of the hearing, then summarily ignored her when she wasn’t offering questions fast or furious enough to protect their nominee.

At least Anita Hill was insulted, demeaned, and discredited to her face. Ford was patronized, thanked, and told that she was very, very credible. Over and over she was told she’d been given a “safe space” to tell her story; as if a safe space substitutes for reasoned process and investigation. She was given a safe space and then dismissed as though she were some character in a very sad French movie that had been very affecting indeed but had nothing to do with the great man and his destiny. After presenting an undeniable narrative—and one the nobody ever really attempted to specifically refute—she was told that her credibility didn’t count for anything because a man was bellowing and injured, that whatever had happened to her was not as important as his pain. And Senate Republicans—having tucked Mitchell back into her naughty chair—were delighted to bellow and yelp of horrid injuries they too had sustained alongside their guy.

Of course, the purported wrong was the process. Again, the villain of the piece was Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had kept Ford’s July letter outlining one of Kavanaugh’s alleged crimes in confidence at her request until eventually forwarding it to the FBI for inquiry earlier this month. Don’t be fooled, though: Feinstein would have been screamed at just as furiously had she come forward weeks or months earlier with Ford’s report, and another pretext for dismissing Ford and her witnesses would have been concocted.

As GOP rage gathered steam, we were told that this needed to be treated as a criminal proceeding—innocent until proven guilty—and the Republicans contended that there was no evidence of criminal conduct. But, of course there was evidence: compelling firsthand testimony and numerous supporting accounts. And of course, they refused to subpoena the key witness to the event, opting instead for the “we take his word for it” route of investigation by registered letter. The “hearing,” as expected, had been staged as a puppet show of “credibility.” And absent witnesses, or evidence, or any mechanism for fact finding, both sides could be called credible and Brett Kavanaugh could still be confirmed. On Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake—perhaps the Senate’s greatest profile in cowardice masquerading as courage—said that he would cast the key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination out of the committee. Despite the lack of anything resembling a meaningful investigation, which Ford and the other women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual violence have repeatedly requested, and the judge has repeatedly declined to request, it now appears Kavanaugh will be confirmed. His fate rests in the hands of Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Joe Manchin.* Given her mind-bending bravery and likely folk-hero status, one hopes that Ford will not now come to believe that her decision was made in vain. But it was impossible on Friday morning not to think of her own description of her reluctance to come forward out of fear that she would “just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway.”

Ultimately, he had rage and she had gender, and a “job interview” was recast as though it would result in a lifelong criminal conviction with a death sentence on the line for the man in the dock. Calling no witnesses and accepting no supporting testimony were a perfect way to ensure that he would be innocent of all charges. She had gender. They were sorry for her loss.

Brett Kavanaugh is never going to understand that women don’t sort themselves into those upon which he bestows his munificence (clerks, girls in plaid skirts) and those he can shout at, and bully, like Feinstein and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Feminism doesn’t mean you get to pick which women you patronize and which you can insult. Brett Kavanaugh is also unlikely to understand that justice doesn’t mean demanding your lifetime appointment because it’s your time.

Put aside whether any sane litigant can have any confidence in the justice system after the man who will be the decisive vote on the court made it manifestly clear that he believes half the country, and the media, and liberal dark money were all in on a conspiracy to take him out. Because of the Clintons. This wasn’t ultimately a hearing about whether Kavanaugh deserved to be elevated to the high court. It was a blind partisan tantrum in which he dragged the judicial branch down to a place of ugliness and rancor from which it will not soon recover.

Others have detailed the incomplete answers, the fact that he wasn’t questioned correctly about his calendar, the ways in which his claims that he had been exonerated by other witnesses were absolutely distorted, and the laughable claims about his well-documented and widely known drinking and his “sensitive stomach.” While Ford offered exacting answers, Kavanaugh repeated half-truths and conspiracy theories and sneered and slammed through a fog of rage. It was a perfect contrast not just to Ford’s conduct, but to that of Merrick Garland, who never said a word when the seat to which he was entitled was yanked away.

There were two distinct moods in the Kavanaugh hearing: Ford evoked undistilled sadness and vulnerability; Kavanaugh evoked raw fear that if he were ever crossed, he would lose control. Do. Not. Make. Him. Angry. is the new judicial temperament. It is the perfect metaphorical springboard to the highest court in the land, where he will say he’s calling balls and strikes while he froths with contempt at those he believes coordinated against him: Be very afraid. This is what we will call “justice” now.

Correction, Sept. 28, 2018: Due to an editing error, this post originally misstated that Collins, Murkowski, and Manchin were said to be voting in a bloc with Flake.

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

Think that a Justice BKavs won’t be a threat to the Constitution, precedent, Due Process, abortion, and women’s rights? Check out my earlier post from “Courtside” on how BKavs “swallowed the whistle” on a clear constitutional violation by the Administration directed at a vulnerable migrant girl. http://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/10/24/goin-down-again-dc-cir-rejects-trump-administrations-position-orders-usg-to-permit-undocumented-teens-abortion/

At the time, I surmised (quite correctly in retrospect) that BKavs’s willingness to distort the law was motivated to some extent by his desire to burnish his reactionary credentials for the Supreme Court appointment for which he was groomed by the GOP right wing and to which he and his supporters have always believed he is entitled. Nothing comes through from BKavs and the GOP Senators supporting him more than an arrogant sense that he is absolutely entitled to this appointment.

So, how do I come down on the BKavs mess? Well, I suspect that the results of the FBI investigation will be inconclusive. That being the case, the GOP will confirm him and he will become Justice Kavanaugh.

That being said, I thought that his emotional partisan attack on Democratic Senators, his overt rudeness to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and his unsupported “conspiracy theory” re the Clintons showed that he is exactly what his critics have been saying all along: an injudicious and disingenuous partisan.

No matter what really happened with Ford, he is “damaged goods” who can’t credibly serve on the Supremes. A decent person would withdraw at this point for the good of the country.

Certainly, Trump can find a reactionary GOP female judge with no personal baggage to carry the flag. He was actually pretty stupid to nominate BKavs in the first place rather than a female vetted by the Heritage Foundation whom the Dems couldn’t have touched.

I assume that Senator L. Graham is auditioning for Gonzo’s job after the midterms. He seems to forgotten what he and his GOP buddies did to Judge Merrick Garland — a very decent person and good jurist who never even got a chance to be heard at all. The GOP just decided that “advice and consent” meant “stonewall if you don’t like the President.” And as a moderate and polite “center left” jurist, Judge Garland certainly would have been a more appropriate pick for the Supremes than BKavs! But, power is power, and the GOP has it right now — the Dems don’t.

Nothing is likely to stop Judge’s Kavanaugh’s elevation at this point. But, as Jeffrey suggests, getting to the ballot box could make BKavs the last such appointment for some time.

Best,

PWS

09-30-18

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

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

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.

Sept. 24, 2018

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).

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Sept. 9, 2018

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

Aug. 4, 2018

Opinion | The Editorial Board

The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children

Aug. 30, 2018

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).

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

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.

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

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

YES, HE’S TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED FOR THE OFFICE — (THAT’S SOMETHING THAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW, EVEN BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION) — BUT HAVING A SELF-PROCLAIMED GROUP OF “GENUINE CONSERVATIVES” RUN THE COUNTRY BEHIND HIS BACK ISN’T THE ANSWER!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

By now, I assume everyone has read the explosive “Anonymous NY Times Op-Ed” (linked above) that confirmed 1) what everyone already knew about Trump’s total incompetence for office, and 2) the widely rumored but heretofore not previously confirmed existence of an organized “resistance” to Trump within his own senior staff. While many will take heart from the latter, count me out.

What a bad dream! So, now, as a result of the gutless GOP and their supporters, we have the unelected, self-proclaimed “real conservatives” unilaterally deciding which Trump programs are “worthy” — like tax breaks for the rich or eliminating environmental protections — and which are “unworthy” — like, presumably starting a gratuitous nuclear war or handing the country over to Putin.

Is this really an acceptable solution to this GOP/White Nationalist created problem?

What about taking our country back at the ballot box from the anti-American Trump base? What about “outing” these self-proclaimed “saviors” and confronting the GOP with the need to initiate some “removal proceedings” against Trump?

What these “internal resisters” really are doing is putting their own egos over the good of the country. They need to resign, tell what they know, and demand action to remove Trump immediately.

Time to vote every Republican out of office.

Yes, Trump’s removal would result in the ascension of

“Mike the Terrible” Pence to the office of President. Under normal circumstances that would be an unparalleled national disaster in its own right. But, obviously, these aren’t normal times.

Some actually are speculating that “Mikie” is the “Deep Bloat” here. Seems unlikely given his record of sycophancy; on the other hand, he’s the one guy Trump can’t fire. And, stranger things have happened — like Trump being inflicted on us in the first place.

In the meantime, join the New Due Process Army and fight Trumpist White Nationalism in all of its insidious forms.

PWS

09-05-18

MICHELLE COTTLE @ NY TIMES: “RACIST JOE” GOES DOWN – ARIZONA GOP EMPHATICALLY SAYS NO TO ONE OF THE MOST GROTESQUELY DISGUSTING INDIVIDUALS EVER TO HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE! — “For nearly a quarter-century, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was a disgrace to law enforcement, a sadist masquerading as a public servant.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/opinion/sheriff-joe-arpaio-congress.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ty_20180829&nl=opinion-today&nlid=79213886edit_ty_20180829&ref=headline&te=1

Michelle Cottle writes in the NY Times:

Let us pause for a moment to mark the loss of a fierce and tireless public servant: Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who so robustly devoted himself to terrorizing immigrants that he was eventually convicted of contempt of court and would have lived out his twilight years with a well-deserved criminal record if President Trump, a staunch admirer of Mr. Arpaio’s bare-knuckle approach to law enforcement, had not granted him a pardon.

To clarify, Mr. Arpaio the man has not passed. As of Tuesday, he was still very much alive and kicking, the proto-Trumpian embodiment of fearmongering ethnonationalism. Mr. Arpaio’s dream of returning to elective office, however, has been dealt what is most likely a fatal blow by his loss in Arizona’s Republican primary for the Senate. Cast aside and left to wallow in the knowledge that his moment has passed, he has a fitting end to the public life of a true American villain.

This defeat came as a surprise to no one. In the closing weeks of the race, his campaign had begun melting down. His staff was in chaos, and polls showed him trailing both Representative Martha McSally, Tuesday’s victor, and Kelli Ward, an anti-immigration firebrand also courting the right wing of the party.

As “America’s toughest sheriff,” as Mr. Arpaio liked to call himself, prepares to ride off into the sunset, it bears recalling that he was so much more than a run-of-the-mill immigrant basher. His 24-year reign of terrorwas medieval in its brutality. In addition to conducting racial profiling on a mass scale and terrorizing immigrant neighborhoods with gratuitous raids and traffic stops and detentions, he oversaw a jail where mistreatment of inmates was the stuff of legend. Abuses ranged from the humiliating to the lethal. He brought back chain gangs. He forced prisoners to wear pink underwear. He set up an outdoor “tent city,” which he once referred to as a “concentration camp,” to hold the overflow of prisoners. Inmates were beaten, fed rancid food, denied medical care (this included pregnant women) and, in at least one case, left battered on the floor to die.

At the same time, Mr. Arpaio’s department could not be bothered to uphold the laws in which it had little interest. From 2005 through 2007, the sheriff and his deputies failed to properly investigate, or in some cases to investigate at all, more than 400 sex-crime cases, including those involving the rape of young children.

Mr. Arpaio embraced the racist birther movement more energetically than most, starting an investigation aimed at exposing President Barack Obama’s American birth certificate as a forgery. The inquiry ran five years, with Mr. Arpaio announcing his “troubling” findings in December of 2016, just weeks after having been voted out of office. Even many of his own constituents, it seemed, had grown weary of the sheriff’s excesses. No matter, as of early this year, Mr. Arpaio was still claiming to have proved “100 percent” that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate had been faked — to be clear, he has not — and suggesting he would revive the issue if elected to the Senate.

It was no secret that Mr. Arpaio’s methods often crossed the line into the not-so-legal. In 2011, a federal district judge ordered the sheriff to end his practice of stopping and detaining people on no other grounds than suspecting them of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Arpaio declined to oblige, secure in the rightness of his own judgment. The legal battle dragged on until last summer, when he was found guilty of criminal contempt of court for blatantly thumbing his nose at the law.

Such unwillingness to bow to an uppity judiciary surely impressed Mr. Trump, who sees his own judgment as superior to any moral or legal precept. In this way, Mr. Arpaio was arguably the perfect pick to be the very first person pardoned by this president. The two men are brothers in arms, fighting the good fight against the invading hordes of immigrants — and their liberal enablers, of course. And if that requires dismissing the Constitution and destroying the rule of law, so be it. What true patriot would object to a few tent cities or human rights violations when the American way of life is in mortal peril?

In announcing the pardon last August, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Arpaio as an “American patriot.” The official statement by the White House gushed: “Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio continued his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration.” To Mr. Trump’s fans, this was another welcome sign of the president’s commitment to keeping them safe from The Other.

Not everyone in the president’s party was pleased. Members of his administration reportedly advised against the pardon as too controversial. It was widely noted that the announcement was made in the hours right before Hurricane Harvey slammed the Gulf Coast, presumably with an eye toward minimizing the negative media coverage of the pardon while journalists were busy reporting on the storm. (For his part, Mr. Trump later claimed that the pardon actually had been timed to take advantage of the higher ratings generated by Harvey watchers.)

Even so, John McCain, the Arizona senator and frequent Trump critic who passed away on Saturday, made his dismay known. “The president has the authority to make this pardon,” he said in a statement, “but doing so at this time undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law, as Mr. Arpaio has shown no remorse for his actions.”

Certainly, Mr. Arpaio showed little sign of remorse on the campaign trail. In a recent interview with The Times, he rambled about all the Mexican rapists and murderers who filled his jails back in the day, and he said the answer to the debate over Dreamers was simple: Deport all 700,000 of them back to their home countries.

The former sheriff also made clear that, despite all the legal drama swirling around the president, his loyalty to Mr. Trump was steadfast. “You can’t support people just because they’re convicted?” he asked rhetorically. “No matter what he’s convicted of, I’m still going to call it a witch hunt, so of course I’ll stand by him.”

Some might consider it ungenerous to celebrate Mr. Arpaio’s electoral failure and continuing slide into irrelevance. But the man has a long and storied history of mistreating people in unfortunate circumstances, so it seems only appropriate to return the favor.

For nearly a quarter-century, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was a disgrace to law enforcement, a sadist masquerading as a public servant. In a just system, we would not see his like again. In the current political climate, it may be enough that Arizona Republicans solidly rejected him.

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

Just remember, this vile dude was the undeserving recipient of a pardon issued by Trump.

PWS

08-31-18

DAVID LEONHARDT @ NYT ON THE MOLLIE TIBBETTS CASE AND RACISM

David Leonhardt

Op-Ed Columnist

The main reason that Mollie Tibbetts’s horrible killing has received so much attention is racism. Tibbetts’s accused murderer is a Mexican immigrant, and large segments of the conservative media, including talk radio and Fox News, like to call attention to crimes committed by people with dark skin. It’s silly to pretend otherwise.

You’ll notice the pattern if you spend any time watching or listening to these media sources. The pattern becomes especially clear when they descend into falsehoods.

Just look at the made-up story that Fox promoted last week about land seizures in South Africa, which led to a false tweet from President Trump about “the large-scale killing of farmers.” Or look at Lou Dobbs’s long history of telling on-air lies about immigrants (despite their comparatively low crime rates). Dobbs, other right-wing hosts and Trump have no such history of making up stories about crimes committed by white people.

I don’t think it’s possible to have an honest conversation about the Tibbetts debate without acknowledging the role that race plays. But I also think that David A. French’s piece in National Review is worth reading, especially for progressives.

French starts the piece by acknowledging the role of racism. That’s not his focus, though. His goal, instead, is to persuade readers that race is not the sole reason that the Tibbetts case resonates with so many people.

“There are reasons why illegal-immigrant crime can carry a poignant punch among people of good will,” French writes. “The murderer wasn’t supposed to be here. I’m reminded of the pain that people feel when, for example, they find out (in different crimes) that the police didn’t follow up on a lead or a prisoner was wrongly released on parole. The feeling is palpable.”

Imagine, for example, that you heard the killer in a mass shooting had been able to purchase a gun illegally, because of a failure in the background-check system. Wouldn’t that heighten your sense of injustice about the crime? For most of us, the answer is yes. “The official failure magnifies the personal injustice,” as French argues.

We live in a society that is supposed to be governed by laws. When they are not followed or enforced, many people are bothered. And they are right to be. Society functions better when its rules mean something.

I’m outraged by the racism that the many immigrants face, by the lies told about them and by the abuses that the Trump administration is committing against them. None of it is defensible, whether the immigrants arrived here legally or illegally.

But once the disaster of the Trump presidency has passed, the United States really should rewrite its immigration laws with the goal of reducing illegal immigration (as Barack Obama and John McCain, among many other politicians, have advocated over the years). Toothless laws undermine people’s faith in their government — and create all kinds of kindling for mistrust and anger.

On the same subject: Tibbetts’s relative, Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, wrote a moving denunciation of racism in a recent Facebook post. And several writers, including Rachael Revesz in The Independent and Amanda Marcotte in Salon, noted that gender is a far more important part of the story than immigration.

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

Good to have Leonhardt back again! He actually presents a fairly sane “center left” view of the world. While he was on vacation, in an attempt to expose us sheltered NYT readers to the “world of the right” one of his “fill-ins” was the shameless Trump apologist Christopher Buskirk. While Leonhardt declared the “great experiment in broadening horizons” a smashing success, I beg to differ.

For about a week, Buskirk regaled us with condescending essays about why everybody in America should get with the program and warm up to the great benefits of having a racist, White Supremacist, xenophobic, chronic liar, ignorant, bullying, authoritarian, immoral, incompetent, climate change denying, crook, who was elected by a minority of voters, as President. The low point was his totally offensive attempt to exploit the Tibbetts tragedy by spewing the exact racist restrictionist nonsense that Leonhardt exposes and critiques.

To be honest, I know what drives Trump voters. While I would welcome them to the side of the “good guys,” and I certainly think that their genuine problems and issues should be addressed under “good government,” I don’t have too much hope that anybody who still supports Trump is “reachable.”

So, the real task isn’t to understand what weird or perverse things go in the minds of Trump’s hard-core “base.” No, it’s to get the majority of folks who don’t support Trump and his vision of a White Nationalist authoritarian kleptocracy to the polls to throw him and his enablers out before it’s too late for all of us (including his tone-deaf supporters — sometimes you have to have folks from themselves, even if they don’t want to be saved). Arrogant, disingenuous, pseudo-intellectuals like Buskirk are part of the problem, not the solution.

Moving on, I think that Mollie Tibbetts was an amazing person with so very much to offer the world. Her death is a horrible tragedy for her family and the rest of us. I deeply admire and am grateful for the way in which her father and the rest of her family have honored her kind, generous, and loving spirit by resisting the attempts of the racist right to make her a “cause celeb” for hatred and racial bigotry.

I agree with Leonhardt that we all would be better off if we solved the issues surrounding undocumented immigration. The answer is actually fairly straightforward: more properly screened legal immigrants to meet the realistic market needs of American employers and to satisfy our legal obligations to those who are persecuted. That would reduce undocumented immigration and allow DHS to concentrate on real criminals and those who come outside the more generous system. That’s likely to be a much lesser number than we have now.

Still, no system is capable of screening out all of those who might prove to be “bad actors” in the future, particularly where there is no past record of problems to go upon. However, to continue or “double down on” our current, overly restrictive, system is merely to guarantee that more and more individuals will be in the United States without the proper pre-screening and identification necessary to run an orderly system. America was built by immigrants (that’s all of us, except Native Americans), prospered because of them, and still needs them in large numbers to move forward into the future. That’s why the White Nationalist restrictionist proposals being pushed by Trump and his cohorts are not only stupid and immoral, but are ultimately doomed to failure.

PWS

08-29-18

COURTS OF THE ABSURD: KIDS FORCED TO DEFEND THEMSELVES WITH COLORING BOOKS IN SESSIONS’S STAR CHAMBERS!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/opinion/zero-tolerance-separated-migrant-children-court-system.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Jennifer Anzardo Valdes writes in the NY Times:

Your Honor, Can I Play With That Gavel?

The U.S. government expects children as young as 18 months to represent themselves in immigration court. Lawyers in Miami made a coloring book to help kids understand what they’re facing.

Aug. 22, 2018

The U.S. government expects children, as young as 18 months and unable to speak, to represent themselves in immigration court to fight against their deportation. Lawyers in Miami made a coloring book to help kids understand what they’re facing.Aug. 22, 2018Image by Alfredo De Lara

Media coverage of the border crisis has heavily focused on separated parents and children. But migrant children’s nightmares are just beginning once they set foot here, as documented in the video above. Every child that crosses the border without permission has an immigration court case to fight, but there is no right to free counsel in that court.

So children, who sometimes speak only an indigenous language, are going up alone against government lawyers to fight to stay in the United States. If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is. Congress has the power to change this.

After President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy went into effect, we at Americans for Immigrant Justice began to see an increase in young children needing legal representation. We thought: How do we get toddlers to understand the gravity of their situation?

We created a coloring book to explain to these children their rights. It explains concepts such as what a country is, who is an immigrant and what a judge does. We read the book to separated and unaccompanied children as part of our “know your rights” presentations and have them act out scenarios from the story.

The kids in this video op-ed are the lucky ones. They were released from a children’s shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to family members in Miami. We are representing them in court free. But for many children we engage with at the shelters, the coloring book is the only legal advice they receive.

The stakes are high: Over half of all children in immigration court are unrepresented. Nine out of 10 of them will be ordered deported. If we as a country are truly invested in protecting children, the bare minimum that we can do is ensure access to a lawyer for immigrant children who cannot afford one.

Jennifer Anzardo Valdes is the director of the Children’s Legal Program at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm based in Miami.

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

Click the above link and watch the video by Leah Varjacques.

Under Jeff Sessions, intentional child abuse has become a norm and the operation of the Immigration Courts with little or no regard for Due Process, common sense, and human decency is a national disgrace. When will it end? How many will suffer needlessly and be abused to feed Sessions’s White Nationalist myth? Where is justice?

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to hold Jeff Sessions accountable for all of his illegal and immoral actions!

PWS

08-28-18

NYT EDITORIAL: “DON’S CONS” — TRUMP TAKES CORRUPTION TO A NEW LEVEL!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/manafort-cohen-guilty.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ty_20180822&nl=opinion-today&nlid=79213886edit_ty_20180822&ref=headline&te=1

All the President’s Crooks

One of them, Mr. Trump’s own lawyer, has now implicated him in a crime.

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.

Aug. 21, 2018

Image
Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.CreditLeft, Jeenah Moon for The New York Times; right, Zach Gibson/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.

On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.

Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”

Related in Opinion

Opinion | Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke and Norman L. Eisen

What the Manafort Verdict Means

Aug. 21, 2018

Opinion | Ken White

Can Michael Cohen Bring Down Trump?

Aug. 22, 2018

The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.

A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.

Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.

But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.

As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.

He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.

Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.

What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.

RELATED

More on Mr. Cohen and Mr. Manafort

Trump Praises Manafort for Refusing to ‘Break,’ Unlike Cohen, His Former Fixer

Aug. 22, 2018

Cohen and Manafort Are in Deeper Legal Trouble. Mueller Could Benefit.

Aug. 22, 2018

Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction

Aug. 21, 2018

Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts

Aug. 21, 2018

A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels

Aug. 21, 2018

While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:

In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.

Others have pleaded guilty to identity fraud and making false statements. Mr. Manafort’s longtime associate Rick Gates also pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.

Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.

And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.

As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).

For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2018, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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

Unfortunately, the Trump Circus is just picking up steam. We’re sure to be subjected to a “carpet bombing” of lies, tweets, insults, and threats as the Emperor’s clothes come off piece by piece while the emasculated GOP Congress merely sits and watches. And, of course, there will be the “normal” Trump strategy of attempting to shift blame to the victims and away from himself and the other corrupt individuals associated with him. Seems Trumpie owes Stormy (and Melania) an apology

PWS

08-22-18

Quinta Jurecic @ NY TIMES: THE PERSISTENT CRUELTY AND UGLINESS OF THE TRUMP/SESSIONS/MILLER WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES!

David Leonhardt is on a break from writing this newsletter until Aug. 27. While he’s gone, several outside writers are taking his place. This week’s author is Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare, the national-security website. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.

By Quinta Jurecic

As of Thursday, 565 migrant children — 24 of them under the age of five — remained separated from their parents after the Trump administration tore families apart at the United States-Mexico border. Though the administration backed away from its “zero tolerance” immigration enforcement policy after prolonged outcry, this level of casual cruelty is not so easily cleaned up: It lingers both in the children who have yet to see their parents again and in the lasting trauma done to even reunified families. Today, a federal judge will hold a hearing and listen to the American Civil Liberties Union’s concerns that the government is not allowing parents who were deported without their children to return to the United States to seek reunification and asylum.

Over the last week, I’ve stepped in for David Leonhardt in writing this newsletter; today is the last day you’ll hear from me. The pain and terror of the family separations story has ground on throughout the time I’ve been writing here. But instead I’ve focused on topics closer to the Russia investigation and President Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

I noted yesterday the tendency of journalists and commentators to decry certain behavior by the Trump administration as “distractions” from more important issues. My day-to-day work at Lawfare focuses on a topic that many do consider a distraction: the special counsel investigation and the president’s destruction of the democratic foundation of our society. Among some Democratic Party leaders and writers and activists on the left, it’s become common to situate airy concerns over “norms” as subservient to the work of opposing policies that take bread out of people’s mouths and children out of their parents’ arms.

I would argue that the erosion of American democracy at the hands of a would-be authoritarian — and the possibility that the president’s campaign collaborated knowingly with a hostile government in order to swing an election — should be of concern to everyone. But feverishly speculating on the special counsel’s next move when young children are separated from their parents has a ring of absurdity. And when someone is hungry or fearing deportation, demanding a focus on the Russia investigation shows a numbness to the urgency of human pain.

This is a question without an easy answer. The Trump presidency is a time of too many horrors — everything is a distraction from everything else, because it all matters. To some extent we can rely on the division of labor. There’s a reason I didn’t spend the last week writing about deportations and asylum-seekers; there are immigration lawyers and reporters for that. But that also means holding onto a level of humility about the vastness of what we don’t have time to see in full.

More on immigration. BuzzFeed News reports that government attorneys are seeking to reopen thousands of deportation cases that courts had suspended — foreshadowing a potential surge in deportations. If you’re interested in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit I described at the beginning of the newsletter, Ms. L v. ICE, you can’t do much better than following the work of Dara Lind, an immigration reporter at Vox. At Lawfare, we’ve been keeping an open-access list of all court documents in family separation cases as the litigation moves forward.

And more on Trump. In response to the president’s revocation of the former C.I.A. director John Brennan’s security clearance, the retired Navy admiral William McRaven — who oversaw the 2011 raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed — wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump: “I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”

Next week, Chris Buskirk, a contributing Op-Ed writer for The Times and the editor of American Greatness will be filling in for David Leonhardt.

The full Opinion report from The Times follows.

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

A good summary of why America’s heart and soul will continue to be lost until Trump and the White Nationalists are gone from office.

PWS

08-17-18

MIRIAM JORDAN @ NYT – CREDIBLE FEAR APPROVALS FOR REFUGEES AT BORDER PLUNGE AS A RESULT OF SESSIONS’S ASSAULT ON DUE PROCESS, WOMEN, HISPANICS, & THE US ASYLUM SYSTEM – ACLU Sues To Thwart White Nationalist AG’s Efforts To Make Border A Killing Field For The Most Vulnerable Among Us!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/us/migrants-asylum-credible-fear.html

Miriam writes for the NY Times:

Nine years ago, a Guatemalan woman named Irene said, she watched as gangs murdered her husband in front of her when he refused to pay them a “tax,” or extortion fee, to keep the family musical-instruments business open. Some of the assailants were imprisoned, and she continued to run the shop on her own.

Recently, though, the menace resumed, she said. The perpetrators, fresh out of prison, threatened to kill Irene if she did not pay. Fearing for her life, she fled to the United States with her 17-year-old daughter. They arrived at the southwest border seeking asylum on June 13.

Under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy, the 47-year-old woman was detained and her daughter was sent to a shelter. A few weeks later, Irene had her initial interview with an asylum officer, the first hurdle applicants must clear in the asylum process.

The officer, who conducted the interview over the phone, determined that Irene had not proved a “credible fear” of persecution if she returned home. Irene was dumbstruck. What was their definition of fear?

“I can’t go back to my country,” Irene, who asked that only her first name be used because she feared reprisals, said this week in a phone interview. “They’ll kill me if I go back.”

Immigration attorneys and advocates report that asylum applicants in recent months are failing their crucial initial screenings with asylum officers at the border in record numbers, the first sign that the Trump administration is carrying out promises to reduce the number of people granted asylum in the United States and limit the conditions under which it is granted.

New reports that people are being rejected at the border with only a cursory review of their claims has raised an alarm among immigrant advocates, who warn that many of those with legitimate claims are being sent home to face danger, or even death, despite international laws that guarantee the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries.

Behind the new practices are recent changes to asylum adjudication unveiled by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in June. Critics have said those changes render it all but impossible for those fleeing domestic abuse, gang brutality and other violence to win protection in the United States.

Mr. Sessions’s decision was codified in a memo issued in July to the officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who conduct credible-fear interviews at the border.

. . . .

Data suggests that the number of people succeeding in making a case for credible fear began to decline sharply earlier this year, even before Mr. Sessions announced his new legal guidance.

According to figures collected and released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration statistics, findings of credible fear in immigration court began to “plummet” in what appeared to be a “dramatic change” during 2018. During the six months ending in June, only 14.7 percent of the case reviews in immigration court found the asylum seeker had a credible fear. Approval levels were twice that level during the last six months of 2017, the researchers found.

Eileen Blessinger, the attorney representing Irene, the Guatemalan woman, tweeted a photograph on July 12 of a stack of papers. “This is what 29 blanket credible-fear interview denials looks like,” she wrote, noting that among her clients who had been detained apart from their children, “every single separated parent” who was interviewed had received a negative determination.

She said that the trend has persisted since last month’s tweet.

“I haven’t met a single person in the last few weeks who passed their credible-fear interview,” said Allegra Love, executive director of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, who leads a team of lawyers assisting migrants in detention in New Mexico. She added, “We have never seen such a high volume of denials.”

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the new policies, which it argues violate due process “in numerous respects” and effectively close the door to asylum to people fleeing domestic abuse and gang brutality.

The lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, asks the judge to declare the new credible-fear policies illegal and to enjoin the government from applying the new standards.

“This is a naked attempt by the Trump administration to eviscerate our country’s asylum protections,” Jennifer Chang Newell, the managing attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It’s clear the administration’s goal is to deny and deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”

. . . .

Paul W. Schmidt, who retired as an immigration judge in 2016, said it appears that the attorney general’s move to reinterpret judicial precedent was “very intentional — to undermine claimants from Central America.”

“Sessions has made it much, much more difficult to fit your case into a category for relief, even if you have suffered very serious harm,” said Mr. Schmidt, who served as chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001.

One case decided before Mr. Session’s decision provides an example of how such cases were often handled in the past. In 2015, a Guatemalan woman named Ana decided that she and her then 11-year-old daughter could no longer endure the relentless psychological and physical aggression inflicted on them by her former partner. They had reported the abuse to local police, to no avail, and finally journeyed north to seek refuge in the United States.

Ana passed the credible-fear interview and moved with her daughter to Kentucky, where a lawyer helped them make their case before an immigration judge.

In early June, a week before Mr. Sessions’s new legal guidance, Ana was granted asylum and the right to remain legally in the United States. “I thank God we can be where we are safe, instead of returning to danger,” she said.

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

Read Miriam’s entire story at the link.

I’ve heard USCIS officials claim that “nothing has changed” in the credible fear interview process or results as the result of Sessions’s rewrite of asylum law in Matter of A-B-, and his overtly anti-asylum, anti-Hispanic, anti-female message which has certainly been echoed by the actions of USCIS Director Cissna. Cissna has removed “customer service” (read “human service”) from the agency’s mission. I have been and remain highly skeptical of those claims of “business as usual.”

Perhaps those officials need to go down to the border and watch while the “Irenes of the world” are improperly blocked by their officers from even having a chance to put on a full asylum case before an Immigration Judge. This is neither Due Process nor is it compliance with the Refugee Act of 1980, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the Convention Against Torture. It’s disgusting, plain and simple! A low point in U.S. history for which even career Civil Servants who are “going along to get along” with Sessions’s vile and lawless message have to bear some responsibility. And that definitely includes some U.S. Immigration Judges “rubber stamping” these parodies of justice. History is recording who you are and what you have done and continue to do.

Indeed, what is “their definition of fear?” Obviously, nothing suffered or to be suffered by those with brown skins under the Sessions regime.

For years, even before Trump, the law has been intentionally manipulated and unfairly tilted against asylum seekers from Central America by “captive” judges working for the DOJ and responding to political pressure to reduce the flow of refugees across the Southern Border. But, Sessions has removed all vestiges of Due Process and legality — he overtly seeks to send vulnerable asylum seekers back to danger zones without fair hearings.

If these folks could get lawyers, gather evidence, and have a fair hearing before an impartial judge, and an interpretation of protection law consistent with the generous aims of the Refugee Act of 1980 and the international Convention that it implements, and a right to seek corrective review before “real courts” (those not working for Sessions) they would have a decent chance of qualifying for protection. Beyond that, even those who don’t satisfy all of the arcane technical requirements for asylum often face life-threatening danger in countries where the government protection system has broken down or joined forces with gangs and abusers. They should also be offered some type of at least temporary refuge.That’s exactly what the 1959 Convention and Protocol contemplated and some other countries have implemented.

Some day, we as a nation will be held accountable, if only by history, for what Trump, Sessions, and the White Nationalists are doing to refugees and migrants of color under the cover of, but actually in contravention of, the law (and human decency). But those who are “going along to get along” by not standing up to these abuses of Executive Power, Due Process, and human rights will also be complicit!

PWS

08-08-18

ADAM BONICA @ NYT: DEMOCRACY FAVORS DEMOCRATS – NO WONDER THE GOP IS WORKING OVERTIME TO SUPPRESS THE VOTE!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/opinion/sunday/democracy-democrats-voters-disenfranchisment.html

Amid the political turmoil of the past few years, there have been faint rustlings of a democratic revival. States have begun to take steps to empower citizens by making voting easier and more inclusive. Since 2015, 12 states have adopted automatic voter registration; voters in Florida will decide in November on a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to felons; in New York and Virginia, Democratic governors have done so (in the case of New York extending these rights to parolees); and the District of Columbia may lower its voting age to 16.

These bright spots in an otherwise bleak political landscape hint at a path forward for American democracy. Seldom, if ever, have Democrats had so much to gain by increasing turnout. At the same time, the generational tide has turned decisively in the Democratic Party’s favor, with millennials poised to push the electorate steadily to the left. As these two trends converge over the next decade, major election reforms long written off as unrealistic will suddenly become politically viable.

While it is tempting to view elections as being decided in the moment, much of the groundwork is set in place decades earlier. Looking at survey data from the 1950s, political scientists observed that voters who came of age during the Great Depression identified as Democrats at much higher rates than prior and subsequent generations. The Great Depression and the remaking of American government during the New Deal left a lasting imprint on a generation of voters. A 2014 study by Andrew Gelman and Yair Ghitza demonstrates that the “political events of a voter’s teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these long-term partisan preferences.”

. . . .

Carrying out practical and proven policies to increase voter turnout will swell Democratic majorities, strengthen the party’s mandate to govern and shore up support for progressive policies. Medicare for All would be a much easier sell if 18-year-olds turned out like 80-year-olds.

So would policies intended to combat economic inequality. Among advanced democracies, turnout in national elections is a strong predictor of income inequality. The United States has both the lowest turnout and highest share of income going to the top 1 percent. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. There are good theoretical reasons to believe the two are related.

More Inequality, Lower Turnout

The United States is an outlier among these industrialized nations, where people vote in much higher proportion and where income is more evenly distributed.

By The New York Times | World Inequality Database; International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance

This makes democracy an issue to campaign on. The Democratic base understands that it is waging a battle for the future of the country. Many Democrats are rightly concerned about the state of our democracy. They are also painfully aware that our electoral system is biased against them. A rallying cry to put democracy back on the offensive will get the base to sit up and pay attention. Delivering on the promise will get them to the polls.

What the party needs now are leaders willing to champion electoral reforms. To any potential 2020 presidential contenders out there, know this: If you make comprehensive electoral reforms the centerpiece of your administration’s first 100 days, you will have all but guaranteed your re-election and the congressional majorities needed to push forward on the rest of your policy agenda.

Fixing our democracy is perhaps our best shot at getting Congress back to work on solving the serious problems facing the nation. Generational change is coming and with it an opportunity to fundamentally transform American government and who it serves, so long as Democrats insist on making voters mirror the population and do everything in their power to make it happen.

This is not about weaponizing electoral institutions for partisan gain; it is about delivering on the promise of American democracy. The nation is at its best when democracy is on the rise. Many of our most celebrated figures — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez — fought to enfranchise the disenfranchised and left a more inclusive republic as their legacy. Let’s finish what they started.

Adam Bonica (@adam_bonica) is a political scientist at Stanford.

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

Read the rest of Bonica’s excellent article (with charts and graphs) at the above link!

Democrats need to get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote if we want to get “regime change” and avoid more years of toxic, anti-democracy minority government dedicated to further enriching and empowering the already rich and powerful and disadvantaging and disenfranchising the rest of us!

And, you can bet that with “voter suppression pros” like Kris Kobach, Mike Pence, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and the like out there, the White Nationalist GOP isn’t going quietly into the night! Indeed, they are going to pull out all the stops in a formidable effort to disable American Democracy and reverse demographics before they catch up with their “bring back the bad old days of a ‘Whites Only America'” program.

WE MUST STOP DETAINING AND ABUSING CHILDREN! — Government’s Own Doctors “Blow Whistle” On How We Are Permanently Damaging Kids! — “[T]heir report uncovered problems including a child who lost a third of his body weight and an infant with bleeding of the brain that went undiagnosed for five days.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/us/migrant-children-family-detention-doctors.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fmiriam-jordan&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

Miriam Jordan reports for the NY Times:

LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration, faced with a public outcry over the separation of migrant families at the Southwest border, has said it is exploring a major expansion of family detention centers. But two of the government’s own medical consultants said this week that they had identified a “high risk of harm” to migrant children housed at such facilities.

A series of 10 investigations over the past four years, conducted during both the Obama and Trump administrations, “frequently revealed serious compliance issues resulting in harm to children,” the two physicians, Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, said in a letter to the Senate’s Whistleblower Protection Caucus.

The doctors said they had “watched in horror” as migrant children were separated from their families over the past several months in a bid to deter illegal border crossers. But they cautioned that the Trump administration’s fallback position may not be much better.

“The likely alternative — detention of children with a parent — also poses high risk of harm to children and their families,” said the doctors, who currently serve as “subject-matter experts” for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “In our professional opinion, there is no amount of programming that can ameliorate the harms created by the very act of confining children to detention centers.”

The examinations described in their report uncovered problems including a child who lost a third of his body weight and an infant with bleeding of the brain that went undiagnosed for five days.

In a separate filing this week with a court in Los Angeles, lawyers who conducted more than 200 interviews with migrant parents and children said they had collected “shocking and atrocious” reports about conditions at various government-run detention centers, especially at the initial processing centers operated by Customs and Border Protection along the Southwest border.

The interviews in that case were conducted over the past two months, although similar reports of unpleasant and even dangerous conditions in border processing facilities had emerged even before President Trump took office and imposed the current crackdown on the border.

In the latest interviews, migrants reported freezing conditions, filthy toilets, inadequate water and food that alternately was frozen or made them vomit. “The burritos were spoiled,” one wrote. “The ham looked green,” said another.

One woman, identified in the court filing as Lidia, said she and her 4-year-old son had to wait eight hours for water when they arrived at the processing center and were given only frozen sandwiches that could not be eaten. “My son was crying from hunger,” she said.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Mariam’s article about the shocking degradation of human rights, human dignity, common sense, and moral values being carried out by this Administration, outrageously (and falsely) in the “name of the people.”

We need to both remove unsuitable individuals like Trump, Sessions, and Nielsen from office, and hold them fully accountable for the abuses they are committing! There is nothing that folks like Trump and Sessions fear more than being held accountable for their intentional misconduct! Like all child abusers, they think they can “get away with it.”

PWS

07-21-18

GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!

Here’s Emily Kassie’s short documentary containing actual descriptions from victims and their abusers. Also starring refugee advocates Michele Brane of the Women Refugee Commisson, Barbara Hines, Esq., and others who “blow the whistle” on Sessions’s depraved policies and the unnecessary pain and suffering they are causing!

I Just Simply Did What He Wanted’: Sexual Abuse Inside Immigrant Detention Facilities – Video – NYTimes.com

By Emily Kassie

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005559121/sexual-abuse-inside-ice-detention-facilities.html

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

So, get this! Gonzo, for no particular reason, reverses a well-established, working precedent — agreed upon by all parties, sponsored by DHS, and the product of 15 years of painstaking work by attorneys on both sides — that protected abused women under our refugee laws. This precedent, Matter of A-R-C-G-, actually saved lives and helped some of the most deserving and long-suffering refugees I dealt with in my decades long career enter and contribute to U.S. society. It was a perfect example of how asylum law could and should work to protect the most vulnerable! A “win – win” for the refugees and for our country!

Then, Sessions intentionally creates a system where these already abused refugees are detained and further abused and persecuted in the United States. Then, he returns them (without fair consideration of their claims for protection) to the countries in which they were persecuted to face further abuse, torture, or death.

The problems faced by women in detention were well-known in the Obama Administration. In fact, the Trump Administration immediately abolished the office within DHS that had been established to deal with allegations of sexual abuse. So, this isn’t “mere negligence.” It’s knowing and intentional misconduct! Usually, that results in criminal prosecution or civil liability!

How perverse is Sessions? I’ll go back to Eugene Robinson’s question from a recent blog posted on “courtside:” Why aren’t kidnappers, child abusers, and promoters of sexual abuse like Sessions and his White Nationalist cronies in jail rather than holding high office? https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2O8

WE ARE DIMINISHING OURSELVES AS A NATION, BUT, THAT WON’T STOP HUMAN MIGRATION!

PWS

07-17-18

Related posts:

Related posts:

Sep 28 Kavanaugh and Judicial Impartiality

Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable

And why Christine Blasey Ford was.

The Senate’s Failure to Seek the Truth

It is impossible to justify the lack of a neutral investigation into the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

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

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”)!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

David Leonhardt

Related posts:

Your Honor, Can I Play With That Gavel?

The U.S. government expects children as young as 18 months to represent themselves in immigration court. Lawyers in Miami made a coloring book to help kids understand what they’re facing.

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to hold Jeff Sessions accountable for all of his illegal and immoral actions!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

I Just Simply Did What He Wanted’: Sexual Abuse Inside Immigrant Detention Facilities – Video – NYTimes.com

By Emily Kassie

WE ARE DIMINISHING OURSELVES AS A NATION, BUT, THAT WON’T STOP HUMAN MIGRATION!

Related posts: