"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
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PWS
10-01-20
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire
Sept. 27, 2020
- 1701
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.
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Read the full report at the link.
Duh! According to NBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, an American who actually worked for a living and made $18,000 would pay $760 in taxes.
Not much of a surprise to those familiar with Trump’s endemic lies, corruption, and dishonesty. You can be sure that whatever lies and misdirection Trump spews forth about this report, it will have little or nothing to do with truth.
PWS
09-28-20
From The NY Times:
By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer
The authors are writers.
- Aug. 28, 2020
. . . .
In March 1876, Bradley and his fellow Supreme Court justices decreed that he was correct in rescinding the convictions of William Cruikshank and the other white defendants, ruling that although the 14th Amendment gave the federal government authority to act against violations of civil rights by state governments, it did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. Furthermore, the court ludicrously declared, the prosecution failed to show that crimes against the murdered Black men were committed “on account of their race or color.” All 98 defendants escaped accountability, emboldening white supremacists across the land.
The Cruikshank decision reinforced a grotesque judicial precedent that severely limited the power of the federal government to prosecute violent crimes against the formerly enslaved. Given free rein by the Supreme Court, white supremacists continued their coordinated campaign of terror against Black people, hastening the demise of Reconstruction. By 1877, every Southern state had been “redeemed,” and they would remain under the control of their white redeemers for decades.
By eviscerating crucial protections of the 14th Amendment, the Cruikshank ruling ensured that the most basic constitutional rights of Black citizens would be denied well into the 20th century. The crabbed, inhumane logic of Cruikshank provided legal cover that allowed systemic racism to flourish and denied civil rights to millions of Americans, perpetuating what John Lewis called a “soul-wrenching, existential struggle.”
A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo., Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought.
William Briggs is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of “How America Got Its Guns: A History of Gun Violence in America.” Jon Krakauer is the author of numerous books, including “Into Thin Air” and “Missoula.”
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Read the full article at the link.
I’ve previously highlighted the Colfax Easter Massacre and the Supremes’ disgusting historical ties to racism, White Supremacy, and the suppression and murder of people of color on Courtside!
It’s an ugly and disturbing story. But, the worst part is that the ugliness is being repeated in the bogus, White Supremacist friendly jurisprudence of the Roberts’ Court’s GOP majority!
Great deference is given to the illegal and overtly racist schemes of Trump, Miller and their cronies. By contrast, short shrift is given to the voting rights of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The rights and lives of asylum seekers and other migrants are treated as beyond the realm of humanity. Who cares what abuses the scofflaw regime heaps on them. After all, they aren’t really “persons” entitled to exist.
Pulling out a few toenails? Hey, A-OK with the JR Five just as long as it’s not their toenails and their exalted positions protect them from having to hear the screams of the tormented or get blood and gore all over their pristine black robes!🤮⚰️☠️👎🏻
It’s called “Dred Scottification” or “dehumanization of the other.” It has no place in 21st Century America. And, neither do the public officials and complicit Justices and judges who enable rampant racism and inhumanity. The “JR Five” would have felt right at home on the “Cruikshank Court.” They are masters at finding disingenuous legal gobbledygook to avoid protecting the rights and lives of people of color from invidiously Executive tyranny and abuse!
Had enough? If we want equal justice under law in America, we must start by taking back control of our nation at the ballot box. Get enough voters and even the Trump regime and the GOP Supremes won’t be able to suppress the results and keep the majority from exercising political power.
PWS
08-30-20
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/opinion/trump-convention-platform.html
Jamelle Bouie in The NY Times:
. . . .
It is not news that the Republican Party has a stagnant governing agenda cobbled together from the long-discredited dogmas and shibboleths of the conservative movement. “The current iteration of the G.O.P. is indifferent to the substance of government,” Steve Benen, a political writer and producer for The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, writes in “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics”:
It is disdainful of expertise and analysis. It is hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized or implemented.
What is news is the extent to which the Republican Party has embraced the trappings of its leader, which is to say, the trappings of a right-wing cable news network: a nonstop parade of conspiracy, demagogy and grievance, in service to a cult of personality, all for the sake of a politics of plunder, theft and extraction.
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Read the rest of Jamelle’s op-ed at the link.
Pretty good explanation of The Party of Trump (formerly known as “The Party of Lincoln”).
My question is why the so-called “mainstream media” (excluding Jamelle and a few others) handles with “kid gloves” folks like Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Melania, who go on national TV and present knowingly bogus, totally disingenuous, fabricated portraits of Trump as a benign presence in U.S. politics. In a vain, continuing search for “normalization” of overt 21st century Jim Crow nationalist fascism, the “mainstreams” appear ready to credit speaking in complete, largely grammatical, sentences in the English language and not screaming racist tropes or absurdist internet conspiracy theories as all that is necessary to be considered “credible” and a “moderating force” in today’s “Trumpized” GOP!
The disingenuous treatment by the “mainstreams” of dishonest attempts to “soften” Trump’s true “Mini-Mussolini” persona as election-season gimmick is a gross dis-service to the public welfare and the abdication of the duty of courageous independent journalism to provide critical coverage — not just regurgitate RNC propaganda!
Why are “the mainstreams” rolling over for the RNC?
PWS
08-26-20
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html
THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION
By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut
Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.
This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.
Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.
The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.
Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.
In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.
From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.
. . . .
Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.
The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”
Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.
Reporting and translation were contributed by Pedro Pablo Solares in Guatemala and El Salvador, and Louisa Reynolds and Juan de Dios García Davish in Mexico.
Data for opening globe graphic from “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” by Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Marten Scheffer, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic by Bryan Christie Design/Joe Lertola.
Maps in Central America graphics sequence show total population shift under the SSP5 / RCP 8.5 and SSP3 / RCP 8.5 scenarios used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it is calculated on a 15-kilometer grid. A cube-root scale was used to compress the largest peaks.
Projections based on research by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Model graphics and additional data analysis by Matthew Conlen.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint and Shannon Lin.
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Read the full article, with pictures and neat graphics, at the link!
“Safe Third Countries” indeed! It’s total fraud-enhanced immorality by the Trump regime, with our failed and failing “governing institutions” and the rest of the world fecklessly watching us be driven by the irrational hate and stupidity filled agenda of a madman and his toadies!
No wall will be high enough, no “American Gulag” cruel enough, no rhetoric racist enough, no laws hateful enough, no Supreme Court dehumanizing enough, no immorality and stupidity gross enough to stop mass human migration driven by climate change. “Desperate people do desperate things!”
PWS
07-26-20
Caitlin reports:
In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-the-scenes look at the process.
But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election. After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day.
Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.
At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.
“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.
The filmmakers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, who are a couple, turned drafts of their six-part project called “Immigration Nation” over to ICE leadership in keeping with a contract they had signed with the agency. What they encountered next resembled what happened to Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, who was eventually sued in an unsuccessful attempt to stop her from publishing a memoir that revealed embarrassing details about the president and his associates.
Suddenly, Ms. Clusiau and Mr. Schwarz say, the official who oversaw the agency’s television and film department, with whom they had worked closely over nearly three years of filming, became combative.
The filmmakers discussed their conversations on the condition that the officials they dealt with not be named out of fear that it would escalate their conflict with the agency.
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Read Caitlin’s full article at the link.
The multi-part documentary begins airing on Netflix on August 3. You can watch the trailer at this link:
See firsthand how your tax dollars are being largely wasted on cruel, unnecessary terrorizing of ethnic communities and populating the “New American Gulag” — “enforcement” that in too many cases actually harms our economy and our society and certainly diminishes both our integrity and humanity as a nation.
Catlin’s concluding paragraphs are worth keeping in mind:
The filmmakers said they came away with some empathy for the ICE officers, but became convinced that the entire system was harmful to immigrants and their families.
The problem, they said, was summarized in the first episode by Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.
“Is a government agency evil? No. Is every single person inside ICE evil? No,” Ms. Heller told the filmmakers. “The brilliance of the system is that their job has been siphoned off in such a way that maybe what they see day to day seems justified, but when you add it up, all of the people just doing their job, it becomes this crazy terrorizing system.”
We have all been harmed by Trump’s racist-driven “weaponization” of DHS and the Immigration Courts, and that includes the DHS employees and the Immigration Court employees who are caught up in this grotesque, often illegal, and overall immoral abuse of government authority and resources.
We should also be concerned about the First Amendment implications of Trump’s attempts to misuse Government authority to manipulate the election in his favor by, once again, suppressing truth in reporting. Thank goodness we have courageous journalists like Caitlin and these filmmakers to keep exposing the ugly truth about the Trump/Miller/Wolf/Barr ongoing White Nationalist immigration charade.
PWS
07-24-20
So again I must ask, where is your outrage? How is this happening? How is it being allowed to happen? Real people, Americans, are being allowed to get sick and die while Trump plays a political game. How long can this continue?
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Read the complete op-ed at the link.
No wonder the rest of the world is aghast at the massive failure of American democracy and our public institutions that were supposed to protect us from an evil, “maliciously incompetent,” totally unqualified “leader!”
PWS
07-20-20
By NY Times Editorial Board:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/opinion/john-lewis.html
Representative John Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, will be remembered as a principal hero of the blood-drenched era not so long ago when Black people in the South were being shot, blown up or driven from their homes for seeking basic human rights. The moral authority Mr. Lewis exercised in the House of Representatives — while representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District for more than 30 years — found its headwaters in the aggressive yet self-sacrificial style of protests that he and his compatriots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee deployed in the early 1960s as part of the campaign that overthrew Southern apartheid.
These young demonstrators chose to underscore the barbaric nature of racism by placing themselves at risk of being shot, gassed or clubbed to death during protests that challenged the Southern practice of shutting Black people out of the polls and “white only” restaurants, and confining them to “colored only” seating on public conveyances. When arrested, S.N.C.C. members sometimes refused bail, dramatizing injustice and withholding financial support from a racist criminal justice system.
This young cohort conspicuously ignored members of the civil rights establishment who urged them to patiently pursue remedies through the courts. Among the out-of-touch elder statesmen was the distinguished civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, who was on the verge of becoming the nation’s first Black Supreme Court justice when he argued that young activists were wrong to continue the dangerous Freedom Rides of early 1961, in which interracial groups rode buses into the Deep South to test a Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed segregation in interstate transport.
Mr. Marshall condemned the Freedom Rides as a wasted effort that would only get people killed. But in the mind of Mr. Lewis, the depredations that Black Americans were experiencing at the time were too pressing a matter to be left to a slow judicial process and a handful of attorneys in a closed courtroom. By attacking Jim Crow publicly in the heart of the Deep South, the young activists in particular were animating a broad mass movement in a bid to awaken Americans generally to the inhumanity of Southern apartheid. Mr. Lewis came away from the encounter with Mr. Marshall understanding that the mass revolt brewing in the South was as much a battle against the complacency of the civil rights establishment as against racism itself.
On “Redemptive Suffering”
By his early 20s, Mr. Lewis had embraced a form of nonviolent protest grounded in the principle of “redemptive suffering”— a term he learned from the Rev. James Lawson, who had studied the style of nonviolent resistance that the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi had put into play during British colonial rule. The principle reminded Mr. Lewis of his religious upbringing and of a prayer his mother had often recited.
In his memoir “Walking With the Wind,” written with Michael D’Orso, Mr. Lewis explains that there was “something in the very essence of anguish that is liberating, cleansing, redemptive,” adding that suffering “touches and changes those around us as well. It opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves, a force that is right and moral, the force of righteous truth that is at the basis of human conscience.”
The essence of the nonviolent life, he wrote, is the capacity to forgive — “even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on you, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck” — and to understand that your attacker is as much a victim as you are. At bottom, this philosophy rested upon the belief that people of good will — “the Beloved Community,” as Mr. Lewis called them — would rouse themselves to combat evil and injustice.
Mr. Lewis carried these beliefs into the Freedom Rides. The travelers described their departing meal at a Chinese restaurant in Washington as “The Last Supper.” Several of the participants had actually written out wills, consistent with the realization that they might never make it home. No one wanted to die, but it was understood that a willingness to do so was essential to the quest for justice.
The Ku Klux Klan did its best to secure such a sacrificial outcome. It firebombed a bus at Anniston, Ala., and tried unsuccessfully to burn the Freedom Riders alive by holding the exit doors shut. “Walking With the Wind” describes the especially harrowing episode that unfolded on the Freedom Ride bus on which he arrived in Montgomery, Ala.
The terminal seemed nearly deserted, he writes, but “then, out of nowhere, from every direction, came people. White people. Men, women and children. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Out of alleys, out of side streets, around the corners of office buildings, they emerged from everywhere, from all directions, all at once, as if they’d been let out of a gate . … They carried every makeshift weapon imaginable. Baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, even garden tools — hoes and rakes. One group had women in front, their faces twisted in anger, screaming, ‘Git them niggers, GIT them niggers!’ … And now they turned to us, this sea of people, more than three hundred of them, shouting and screaming, men swinging fists and weapons, women swinging heavy purses, little children clawing with their fingernails at the faces of anyone they could reach.”
Mr. Lewis’s fellow Freedom Riders tried in vain to escape the mob by scaling trees and terminal walls. “It was madness. It was unbelievable,” Mr. Lewis recalled “… I could see Jim Zwerg now, being horribly beaten. Someone picked up his suitcase, which he had dropped, and swung it full force against his head. Another man then lifted Jim’s head and held it between his knees while others, including women and children, hit and scratched at Jim’s face. His eyes were shut. He was unconscious …. At that instant I felt a thud against my head. I could feel my knees collapse and then nothing. Everything turned white for an instant, then black.”
“Burn Jim Crow to the Ground”
Mr. Lewis clashed again with the elder statesmen of the movement when they prevailed on him to tone down a speech he was about to give at the March on Washington in 1963. Thrown out were the harshest criticisms of the John F. Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill as well as a fiery passage threatening that the movement would “march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently.”
Yet even the softened speech was radical for the context. At a time when civil rights leaders were commonly referring to African-Americans as Negroes, the Lewis speech used the term Black: “In the Delta of Mississippi, in Southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation the Black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom.”
To the dismay of many, the 23-year-old Mr. Lewis described the movement as “a revolution,” appealing to all who listened “to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution.”
Mr. Lewis carried his faith in the power of nonviolence into the fateful Selma, Ala., voting rights demonstration — in March of 1965 — that was soon named Bloody Sunday to commemorate the vicious attack that state troopers waged on peaceful marchers. Mr. Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was one 58 people treated for injuries at a hospital.
The worldwide demonstrations that followed the brutal police killing of George Floyd underscored the extent to which many people need visual evidence to grow outraged over injustice that is perpetrated all the time outside the camera’s eye.
A television broadcast of the violence meted out by the police on Bloody Sunday worked in the same way. It generated national outrage and provided a graphic example of the need for the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law that summer.
The linchpin part of the law required certain states and parts of states to seek federal permission before changing voting rules. This seemed almost a godsend to the civil rights cohort and at least a partial repayment for the lives of the many men and women who had died in pursuit of voting rights.
Soon after the Supreme Court crippled the act in 2013, states began unveiling measures limiting ballot access. At the time of the decision, Mr. Lewis wrote that the court had “stuck a dagger into the heart” of a hard-won and still necessary law. With his customary eloquence, he urged Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act, describing the right to vote as “almost sacred” and “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy.”
The passing of John Lewis deprives the United States of its foremost warrior in a battle for racial justice that stretches back into the 19th century and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Americans — and particularly his colleagues in Congress — can best honor his memory by picking up where he left off.
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With an overtly racist President, an ineffective Congress where progress is blocked by a GOP that embraces and furthers racism, a Supreme Court that doesn’t believe in equal justice for all, actively undermines civil rights, and disenfranchises voters, and GOP-controlled states that have used the moral and intellectual failures of all of the foregoing to roll back voting access for people of color, America has actually backtracked on Congressman Lewis’s vision.
Who is big enough to fill Congressman Lewis’s shoes and lead America to a better future? Certainly not the moral and intellectual Lilliputians in the White House, the GOP, and the “JR Five” on the Supremes.
In the process of veneration, a “sanitized” version of Lewis’s life and legacy has already appeared. GOP politicos who have spent a lifetime working against everything Lewis stood for will issue the obligatory disingenuous condolences.
We shouldn’t forget the real John Lewis. The man who called Trump’s presidency “illegitimate” for the git go, even when other Democrats refused to go there.
He also spoke forcefully and passionately for Trump’s impeachment:
“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, do something,” the civil rights icon said. “Our children and their children will ask us: ‘What did you do? What did you say?’”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-lewis-dies_n_5e095e32e4b0b2520d179a3f
We should remember that Lewis’s GOP colleagues (but for Sen. Mitt Romney) “honored” him by voting unanimously against the overwhelming weight of the evidence and against conviction and removal of the corrupt, racist, unqualified President who, as Lewis had previously said, never should have been in office in the first place. Thousands of Americans and numerous refugees and others have subsequently been killed or suffered traumatic harm as a result of Trump’s continuing “malicious incompetence” in office.
The real questions that our children and grandchildren will ask is: What did YOU do to honor the legacy of John Lewis and other true American heroes by removing Trump and the GOP from office and insuring that such racists and a party that promotes racism will never be empowered to infect American governance again?
That struggle has just begun, and victory is neither assured nor easy. Yet, without turning Lewis’s words into actions and insuring that those who refuse to honor the Constitutional requirement of voting rights and equal justice for all are never again allowed to infiltrate and destroy our institutions of Government, Lewis’s vision of an America that finally provides “liberty and justice for all” will remain unfulfilled. And, that will be a true national tragedy!
PWS
07-18-20
🏴☠️☠️🤮THE UGLY TRUTH BEHIND TRUMP’S COVID-19 LIES: Immigrants Don’t Spread COVID-19, But ICE Spreads It Throughout The U.S. & The World, According To a New Report From The NY Times & The Marshall Project!
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/07/10/how-ice-exported-the-coronavirus
By Emily Kassie & Barbara Marcolini
This video was produced in collaboration with The New York Times.
Admild, an undocumented immigrant from Haiti, was feeling sick as he approached the deportation plane that was going to take him back to the country he had fled in fear. Two weeks before that day in May, while being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana, he had tested positive for the coronavirus — and he was still showing symptoms.
He disclosed his condition to an ICE official at the airport, who sent him to a nurse.
“She just gave me Tylenol,” said Admild, who feared reprisals if his last name was published. Not long after, he was back on the plane before landing in Port-au-Prince, one of more than 40,000 immigrants deported from the United States since March, according to ICE records.
Even as lockdowns and other measures have been taken around the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, ICE has continued to detain people, move them from state to state and deport them.
An investigation by The New York Times in collaboration with The Marshall Project reveals how unsafe conditions and scattershot testing helped turn ICE into a domestic and global spreader of the virus — and how pressure from the Trump administration led countries to take in sick deportees.
We spoke to more than 30 immigrant detainees who described cramped and unsanitary detention centers where social distancing was near impossible and protective gear almost nonexistent. “It was like a time bomb,” said Yudanys, a Cuban immigrant held in Louisiana.
At least four deportees interviewed by The Times, from India, Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador, tested positive for the virus shortly after arriving from the United States.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the introduction and view the video at the link.
There is no reliable evidence that migrants and asylum seekers are a significant source of COVID-19 spread, particularly if they are properly screened, tested, and quarantined when necessary. https://www.cato.org/blog/no-mr-president-immigration-not-correlated-covid-19-united-states
On the other hand, as this report as well as numerous Federal Court actions have shown, there is powerful evidence that the “maliciously incompetent” immigration policies of the Trump regime are spreading COVID-19 in the U.S. and the world.
Consequently, Trump’s COVID-19 based immigration and asylum restrictions are a bad faith pretext for a White Nationalist, racist, xenophobic agenda. It’s a cowardly coverup for the truth that the Trump Administration threatens America’s health, not migrants and asylum seekers.
Reality is actually pretty straightforward, even if some Federal Courts and most GOP legislators pretend otherwise.
PWS
07-13-20
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/opinion/racism-united-states.html
Blow writes in The NY Times:
Now that we are deep into protests over racism, inequality and police brutality — protests that I’ve come to see as a revisiting of Freedom Summer — it is clear that Donald Trump sees the activation of white nationalism and anti-otherness as his path to re-election. We are engaged in yet another national conversation about race and racism, privilege and oppression.
But, as is usually the case, the language we used to describe the moment is lacking. We — the public and the media, including this newspaper, including, in the past, this very column — often use, consciously or not, language that shields anti-Black white supremacy, rather than to expose it and hold it accountable.
We use all manner of euphemisms and terms of art to keep from directly addressing the racial reality in America. This may be some holdover from a bygone time, but it is now time for it to come to an end.
Take for instance the term “race relations.” Polling organizations like Gallup and the Pew Research Center often ask respondents how they feel about the state of race relations in the country.
I have never fully understood what this meant. It suggests a relationship that swings from harmony to disharmony. But that is not the way race is structured or animated in this country. From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof.
Protests, and even violence, have erupted when white people felt their hold on those things was threatened or when Black people — or Indigenous people, or Hispanics — rebelled against those things being denied.
So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
White Supremacy is at the core of Donald Trump and today’s GOP. It is willfully enabled by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Supreme Court Justices who refuse to acknowledge the obvious anti-Hispanic and anti-people of color motivations behind unconstitutional and inhuman immigration and asylum restrictions designed by notoriously outspoken neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller.
Likewise, the intellectually corrupt Supremes’ majority fails to prevent the GOP’s racist strategy of suppressing voting rights of African Americans and Latinos. The unconstitutionality of these schemes to deny the vote and dilute the political power of people of color has been crystal clear under our Constitution since the enactment of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.
You don’t need a Harvard law degree to figure this out. Just honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity — things that I once took for granted among Supreme Court Justices, but now see are sorely missing on today’s Court where extreme rightist ideology identified with white supremacy has replaced judicial qualifications as selection criteria when the GOP was in charge.
Ending white supremacy in America will require ousting Trump and the GOP and ending the GOP’s power to put more unqualified judges who are opposed to racial and social justice in America on the Federal Bench.
PWS
07-09-20
From: Alex Aleinikoff
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 1:58 PM
To: Immprof
Subject: [immprof] Entry Denied on the Tempest Tossed podcast
Please excuse this shameless self-promotion. We launched today the first of an 8-episode series on the Tempest Tossed podcast on Trump immigration policies. The series is called Entry Denied: Immigration policies in the time of Trump. In this first episode, Deb Amos (NPR) and I speak with NY Times reporters Michael Shear and Julie Hirshfeld Davis on how immigration became central to the Trump campaign. There will be a new episode each of the next 7 Tuesdays (on asylum, the wall, DACA, etc).
It is available on most podcast platforms (Apple, SoundCloud, Spotify)–search for Tempest Tossed.
Alex
—
University Professor
Director, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
The New School
********************
I trust that at some point Alex will get around to telling everyone about the time back in the Carter Administration when we were on the verge of making then Associate Attorney General John H. Shenefield an official “Immigration Officer” to serve process on the tarmac @ JFK International. Or how with a little help from our late friend Jerry Tinker, Alex, David Martin, and I “perfected” the Refugee Act of 1980 just in time for the Cuban Boatlift. Whose idea was “Cuban/Haitian Entrant Status Pending” anyway? How come you never had to visit the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary during a lockdown, Alex?
Sounds like a most timely and fascinating series involving one of the all time great modern legal minds.
Thanks and best wishes to all involved in this historic enterprise! 🍾🥂🍻
PWS
07-02-20
AMY WRITES IN SCOTUSBLOG:
And in Albence v. Guzman Chavez, the justices will decide which provision of immigration law – 8 U.S.C. § 1231 or 8 U.S.C. § 1226 – applies to the detention of a noncitizen who is seeking withholding of removal after a prior removal order has been reinstated. As John Elwood explained last week, the issue is arcane but the distinction between the two provisions matters, because under Section 1226 noncitizens generally have the right to a bond hearing, while the government argues that they do not have that right under Section 1231.
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This was another of Solicitor General Francisco’s petitions, after the DHS and DOJ quite deservedly lost on the bond issue in the Fourth Circuit.
While presented as an issue of statutory interpretation, the DOJ/DHS restrictive bond procedures are riddled with 5th Amendment unconstitutionality, including denial of opportunity to seek a bond before an fair and impartial decision-maker, putting the burden of proof on the prisoner, and failing to consider ability to pay, to name a few.
These abuses came to light recently in a comprehensive ruling invalidating unconstitutional bond practices in the Baltimore Immigration Court, Miranda v. Barr, U.S.D.C. D. MD., U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake, 05-29-20.
It’s not a difficult constitutional issue. It would take a Court that saw immigrants as fellow human beings and were willing to apply its own due process precedents about six sentences to unanimously throw DOJ and DHS out on their tails for such unconstitutional behavior, statute or no.
But, this version of the Supremes is all over the place on immigration. While immigrants have scored a few well-deserved victories, mostly on issues involving misinterpretation of statutes by the immigration bureaucracy, the Supremes have “tanked” on the larger issues involving constitutional and human rights.
They actually have furthered and in some cases bought into the false narratives and dehumanization of migrants, particularly asylum seekers, by Trump & co. That’s why folks who probably should be granted asylum or long since admitted as refugees were the government required to follow the law and the Court’s 1987 ruling in INS v. Cardoza Fonseca are instead illegally condemned to rot in Mexico, suffer in refugee camps, arbitrarily and capriciously returned to danger zones to face torture and possible death, separated from their families, or put in cages and “iceboxes.”
Depending on how you characterize it, the Supremes’ majority have been part of judicially-enabled child abuse or “Dred Scottification” of immigrants. Either way, it’s legally wrong and morally indefensible. Equal justice and social justice for all in America will continue to be both elusive and divisive until we get a majority of Supreme Court Justices who believe in it, put it first, and require it even in the face of a recalcitrant Executive whose political agenda is built on the exact opposite.
I’m certainly not the first or last critic of the “Supreme failure” of our highest judges to show the necessary legal and moral leadership at this key point in our history. Professor Steven I. Vladeck from U. of Texas Law essentially says the same thing in a more circumspect manner in an op-ed today’s NY Times. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/05/30/due-process-victory-us-district-judge-requires-baltimore-immigration-court-to-comply-with-due-process-in-bond-hearings-round-table-warrior-judge-denise-noonan-slavin-provides-key-evidence/
I find no reason for circumspection about the failure of privileged judges at the top of our legal system who are unwilling to treat vulnerable individuals as human beings and to give them the legal and constitutional protections to which they are entitled. Enabling the cruel, illegal, and racially-driven Trump immigration agenda is disgraceful conduct that deserves to be called out. Three-plus years into a regime dedicated to running roughshod over our Constitution and eradicating human rights we “are where we are” to a large extent because those empowered and entrusted to prevent such abuses have failed — miserably!
And, with an emboldened scofflaw Administration promoting an unconscionable and illegal trashing of the little still left of our imperfect, yet previously functional and occasionally aspirational, asylum system by Executive fiat, the worst is yet to come if we don’t get better performance from the Supremes! We have a “Frankenstein proposal” out now because we have a Supremes’ majority who think “Frankenstein is OK” as long as the monster only devours migrants and their families (folks apparently below their “humanity index”). Wait till it turns on them and their families!
PWS
06-17-20
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/sunday/supreme-court-religion-coronavirus.html
Linda Greenhouse writes in The NY Times:
The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.
A Southern California church, represented by a Chicago-based organization, the Thomas More Society, which most often defends anti-abortion activists, had sought the justices’ intervention with the argument that by limiting worshipers to the lesser of 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, while setting a 50 percent occupancy cap on retail stores, California was discriminating against religion in violation of the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause.
Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California’s limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second-guessing.
So why did the court’s order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief?
It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like.
As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying.
Does that sound like an overstatement? Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion. “California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses,” he wrote. “Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”
It’s interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he’s just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. Fair enough, but he evidently couldn’t be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Linda’s op-ed at the above link.
This is just a symptom of an ongoing cancer at the Court. Cases like Hawaii v. Trump (“greenlighting” arbitrary and capricious punishment of refugees, Muslims, certain immigrants based on clearly pretextual “security grounds”), Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (“Let ‘Em Die in Mexico!” Particularly when they are “only” Central American asylum seekers), and Wolf v. Cook County (final greenlighting of Stephen Miller’s racist scheme to deny health care and spread deadly fears in American Hispanic communities) should all have been 9-0 in favor of those opposing Trump’s racially-biased, illegal, unconstitutional policies.
Additionally, Trump Toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco should have been strongly cautioned against continuing to bend the ethical codes with largely fabricated “emergencies” intended to interfere with the normal functioning of the Federal Courts.
Instead, the Supremes’ majority gave the regime totally undeserved, immoral victories in all three cases. As a result, many innocent individuals were denied rights, forced into life-threatening conditions, and some even died. The Supremes’ inflicted damage on society at large. They assisted in trampling social justice and human rights. They grotesquely perverted and “turned on its head” the concept of “irreparable harm.” They indelibly and irreparably damaged their reputation and our system of justice.
In the meantime, the message to Francisco and the rest of his human rights denying scofflaw crowd over at the DOJ is clear: Justice is dead, courage has fled, you’re in charge.
Unhappily, by most accounts, the tone-deaf and disconnected Supremes’ majority might be on the cusp of throwing more gasoline on the fires of social justice, at the worst possible time for our nation. If, as expected, they endorse the regime’s intentionally cruel, illegal, dishonest, and racially charged scheme to,”shaft” Dreamers — some of our finest young people, many of whom are “essential workers” — it’s likely to spark more justified outrage and further protests!
So certain are the regime’s White Nationalists that they have the “J.R. Five” in their pocket that they reportedly already are planning to use these American youths as “hostages” to demand even further immigration restrictions as “ransom” from House Dems. The Dems are unlikely to bite, so Dreamers will be left to “twist in the wind” pending the results of the election.
The Supreme Court majority has been hand selected by the GOP to insure that a minority, anti-democratic ideology, often willfully devoid of humanity and historical awareness, will continue to exercise disproportionate influence over the U.S. legal system for years, perhaps decades, to come.
We can’t change the past. But, a better “appointing authority” will be a start of long overdue change and “pushback” from the forces and institutions of democracy, humanity, and racial justice to restore integrity to our highest Court that, in actuality, now functions more like the lowest denominator and an instigator of racial and institutional injustice in our hurting nation.
PWS
06-06-20
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/trump-bible-speech-st-johns-church.html
Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The NY Times:
Late Monday afternoon, President Trump emerged from the White House and strode in the cool spring daylight to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square. It was supposed to be an act of defiance: Mr. Trump has bristled at the observation that during the protests roiling the capital he has burrowed into a fortified bunker rather than addressing the nation.
Like most performances arranged by Mr. Trump and associates, it made only a disjointed sort of sense. Yes, the president’s decision to march through the heart of the city’s unrest caused police and National Guard units to blast a peaceful crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets, carving a punishing path to the steps of St. John’s. But the show of force seemed to emphasize only that his legitimacy has shrunk to the point that he feels moved to dominate his own people with military power.
As he took up his post before the church, which was partially boarded up after a minor fire that broke out during a recent protest, Mr. Trump set his face in a stony scowl and held up a black Bible, tightly closed. “Is it your Bible?” a reporter shouted. “It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump said neutrally. The entire routine was vulgar, blunt: There Mr. Trump was, holding aloft this mute book — neither opened, cited, nor read from — in the shadow of a vandalized church, claiming the mantle of righteousness.
After all, that was what he had come to do. A ruler maintaining order strictly by brute force has a problem. Such regimes are volatile and fragile, subject to eruptive dissolution. Mr. Trump may lack the experience or interest to even pantomime genuine Christian practice, but he has acute instincts when it comes to the symbolism of leadership. He seemed to know, as he positioned himself as the defender of the Christian faith, that he needed to imbue his presidency with some renewed moral purpose; Christianity was simply a convenient vein to tap.
“I think that’s a standard trope in American political frames of reference,” Luke Bretherton told me on a Monday night phone call. Mr. Bretherton, who is a professor of moral and political theology at Duke University’s Divinity School, cited Cold War efforts to demonize socialism as viciously atheistic and amoral. It was work undertaken with anxious eagerness precisely because socialist criticisms of American life were substantial and compelling.
. . . .
************
Read the rest of Liz’s op-ed at the link.
Christ’s humanity, forgiveness, and empathy for the outcasts of the world is completely lost on the totally immoral and willfully ignorant Trump. The Bible is just another prop. If Jesus came back to earth today, he certainly would be found with the protestors seeking social justice rather than the current inhabitant of the White House and his equally corrupt and immoral cronies like Billy Barr.
PWS
06-03-20
Check out Tom Toles’s cartoon “Sermon From the Pit” (“Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lowered”) from today’s WashPost here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/trump-does-photo-op-show-just-how-low-he-can-go/
Just when you think Trump has hit the rock bottom, he takes it to an even lower level!
PWS
06-03-20
https://apple.news/AfPeFLsDGQTyTuvEeyuQsIg
Esther Wang writes in Jezebel:
Another day, another extreme cruelty: according to a report in the New York Times, the Trump administration has deported almost 1,000 migrant children and teens during the past two months of the covid-19 pandemic, sending them out of the United States alone and at times putting them on a flight without even telling their family members. Stephen Miller, who is unfortunately still alive, must be thrilled.
Trump’s latest tactic in the service of slashing immigration is, as the New York Times points out, a complete 180 from past policy:
The deportations represent an extraordinary shift in policy that has been unfolding in recent weeks on the southwestern border, under which safeguards that have for decades been granted to migrant children by both Democratic and Republican administrations appear to have been abandoned.
Historically, young migrants who showed up at the border without adult guardians were provided with shelter, education, medical care and a lengthy administrative process that allowed them to make a case for staying in the United States. Those who were eventually deported were sent home only after arrangements had been made to assure they had a safe place to return to.
But now, not even children who are already in the United States with pending asylum cases are safe from deportation. As the Times reported, in addition to the more than 900 children and teens who were deported in March and April shortly after arriving at the border, 60 young people who were already being held in government shelters were also abruptly sent out of the United States, at times “rousted from their beds in the middle of the night.”
According to the Times, even young children have been put on flights by themselves. Take the case of Sandra Rodríguez and her 10-year-old son Gerson, whom she sent across the southern border with the expectation that once Gerson arrived in the United States, he would be able to eventually live with Rodríguez’s brother in Houston. But instead, shortly after entering the U.S., Gerson was sent to Honduras alone.
This incredibly callous treatment of young migrants as well as their families is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to erase any vestige of due process at the border with Mexico. Citing the pandemic, immigration officials have used provisions in the 1944 Public Health Act as justification to essentially close the United States to all asylum seekers who cross the border. The impact has been severe: In an almost two-month period from mid-March to May, only two people seeking protection on humanitarian grounds at the border were allowed to stay within the United States.
“What is happening at the border right now is a tragedy. We are abandoning our legal commitment to provide asylum to people whose lives are in danger in other countries,” Kari Hong, an immigration attorney and Boston College law school professor, told the Washington Post. “By invoking these emergency orders, the Trump administration is simply doing what it’s wanted to do all along, which is to end asylum law in its entirety,” she said.
While Trump administration officials have justified their likely illegal use of emergency orders in the name of public health, the fact that officials have also deported children and teens who were already in the care of the federal government sure indicates that something else is going on here. I wonder what that could be.
*********************
Who would have thought that America would become a nation of child abusers and that Federal Courts would be so feckless and complicit in the face of such clear abuses? Three years of concerted failure, led by John Roberts and the Supremes, to give meaning to Due Process and Equal Protection in the face of the “New Jim Crow” have emboldened the regime’s White Nationalist, anti-American abusers while kneecapping democratic and constitutional institutions.
Then, there’s the extreme, wanton cruelty and dehumanization inflicted on the mostly vulnerable among us that has come to symbolize our nation in the Age of Trump. Like all the other abuses by the regime, it’s been “normalized” by feckless legislators and judges: “Another day, another extreme cruelty!” ☠️⚰️🤮🏴☠️
Somewhere down there in the fires of the underworld, Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous “Dred Scott Decision” must be feeling totally vindicated by Roberts and his gang!
Is this really how we want to be remembered by future generations? If not, vote ‘em out this November!
PWS
05-21-20
