"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.
A former conservative stalwart in the Senate, the attorney general acknowledged that some Republicans sought similar legal battles on friendly turf, in states like Texas, during Obama’s time in office, in a process known as forum shopping. But with Trump now in the White House, it is liberals who are hoping for advantages in places like California and Hawaii. The Obama administration failed to convince the Louisiana-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to strike down an injunction against DACA with a similar argument.
The Supreme Court has not weighed in definitely on the topic of nationwide injunctions; instead justices have ruled on the particulars of a specific case. But Sessions is optimistic that the highest court in the land will soon issue a brush back to would-be legal resisters. A federal appeals court can overturn or limit the scope of an injunction.
“We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will soon send a clear message to the lower courts that injunctions ought to be limited to the parties of the case,” he said.
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Read the complete article at the link.
I don’t remember Ol’ Gonzo giving impassioned speeches on the floor of the Senate against a single Federal Judge’s decision to block the Obama DAPA plan!
So, according to Gonzo, every individual who suffers from the Administration’s daily misinterpretations and intentional misapplications of the Constitution and Federal statutes should have to bring an individual suit. Sounds like a judicial nightmare and a way for the Executive to co-opt the Federal Courts, the only branch of Government that their patsies and sycophants don’t yet control (but the Administration is certainly working on “dumbing down” the Federal Judiciary with its appointees).
As I’ve pointed out before, the GOP appointees to the Supremes have a choice to make. Trump, Sessions, the Koch Bros, and other GOP bigwigs are publicly making it clear that the GOP considers them to be “bought men” (no women in this group) who can be counted on to dance to the tune of their benefactors.
The Supremes turn down of Gonzo’s outrageous scofflaw request to short-circuit the legal system on Dreamers gave the Court a little momentary credibility. But, that’s been offset by their handling of the travel ban cases and their shrug-off of the major Constitutional violations in the “New American Gulag” in Jennings v. Rodriguez.
In particular, the obtuse, tone-deaf, legally bankrupt position of Justices Thomas and Gorsuch in Jennings showed an unseemly eagerness to stomp on the individual rights of the people to please their Fat Cat political “handlers.” America deserves better from two of the life-tenured judges serving on our highest Court! Perhaps if they or their families had spent some time in “the Gulag” it would help “clarify” their fuzzy thinking and get them over some of their highly bogus jurisdictional roadblocks to doing justice . . . .
“Thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children could face disruptions in their ability to work, even though the Trump administration has for months been under a federal court order to renew protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The problem arises chiefly from the Department of Homeland Security’s refusal to prioritize those DACA renewals due to expire soonest. Instead, the applications are being processed in the order in which they were filed. Consequently, many so-called Dreamers who’ve applied to renew will see their DACA protections expire before DHS acts, increasing their risk of being fired from their jobs or, possibly, being arrested and deported.
“You can’t just say, ‘Don’t show up to work and we’ll kind of keep paying you,’ or ‘wink wink, nod nod,’” said Todd Schulte, president of the pro-immigration FWD.us. “I just think we should assume that a ton of these people are going to lose their jobs.”
DHS did not respond to a request to clarify its enforcement policy for people with recently expired DACA grants.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services estimates 13,090 people have grants that will expire in March. Of those, 4,470 had a renewal pending as of Jan. 31. USCIS,the division of DHS that administers DACA, makes an effort to process DACA renewals within 120 days, but it doesn’t always move that fast, according to Leon Rodriguez, director of USCIS from 2014 to 2017.
The need to process DACA renewals quickly was unforeseen last September, when President Donald Trump announced that he would sunset the Obama-era program. Trump halted DACA renewals in early October and set March 5 — Monday — as a deadline for Congress to take action to protect Dreamers. After that date, Dreamers would start losing DACA protections in large numbers.
But Congress didn’t act, at least partly because San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup largely mooted the March 5 deadline in early January when he ordered DHS to resume DACA renewals. A Brooklyn-based federal judge issued a similar ruling in mid-February. The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to intervene, but the high court declined, choosing instead to allow the matter proceed through the lower courts.
USCIS resumed DACA renewals in January, but that unplanned resumption has not proceeded smoothly. “When you have a lot of stopping and starting of activity,” said Rodriguez, “that poses some risk that something might be set up the wrong way and some group of people not be handled as expeditiously as they should,” he said.
“I think it is going to keep getting more chaotic,” Rodriguez said of the weeks ahead.
The agency’s refusal to pull out of the queue renewals that are due to expire soonest (as, for instance, airlines do at the check-in line for passengers whose planes will take off soonest) poses an enormous problem for those Dreamers who filed for renewal after Judge Alsup’s Jan. 9 order.
But another difficulty is that not many Dreamers took advantage of the court ruling, possibly because uncertainty over whether Alsup’s order would be overruled by the Supreme Court left them reluctant to pay the $495renewal fee. The Supreme Court didn’t announce that it would let Alsup’s order stand until Feb. 26.
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Please go on over to Politico at the above link to read Ted’s complete analysis.
I suspect that there might be more legal challenges in the offing, from both the Dreamers and their employers. To date, the Government has pretty much “lost ’em all” when it comes to DACA, a trend that I see continuing at least in the lower Federal Courts where the litigation is likely to be confined for the foreseeable future.
In my view, the Administration’s unwise, callous, and legally questionable treatment of Dreamers to date is providing advocates for Dreamers with some “golden opportunities” to make some “good law” in the Dreamers’ behalf that hopefully can carry over into blocking some of the Administration’s other anti-immigrant initiatives. A good chance for the New Due Process Army to capture some valuable territory in the fight for truth, justice, Due Process, and the American way!
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley hit back hard at Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday after his former Senate colleague launched a preemptive strike on his criminal justice bill.
The legislation, which Grassley has worked on for more than two years, is expected to win committee approval Thursday. But it faces a tough climb to the Senate floor amid reluctance from GOP leaders and conservative resistance. Sessions, who opposed the reform effort during his time on the Judiciary panel, piled on Wednesday with a letter warning that the bipartisan proposal “risks putting the very worst criminals back into our communities.”
Grassley responded with a powerful brushback pitch to the attorney general.
“It’s Senator Sessions talking, not a person whose job it is to execute law, and quite frankly I’m very incensed,” he told POLITICO.
What Sessions’ letter “doesn’t recognize here,” Grassley added, “and why I’m incensed about it is, look at how hard it was for me to get him through committee in the United States Senate. And look at, when the president was going to fire him, I went to his defense.”
The Iowa Republican said “all kinds of” potentially polarizing Justice Department nominees who have proven “very difficult to get through the United States Senate” have also landed in his lap as chief of the influential Judiciary Committee.
“If he wanted to do this,” Grassley said of Sessions, “he should have done what people suggested to him before: resign from attorney general and run for the Senate in Alabama again. We’d have a Republican senator.”
Grassley was referring to the special election for the Senate seat Sessions vacated to become President Donald Trump’s attorney general. Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) ultimately won after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with minors against GOP nominee Roy Moore. Republican leaders considered asking Sessions to join the race as a write-in candidate in a bid to save the seat for their party. Sessions has also had a tumultuous time in the Trump administration, at one point reportedly offering his resignation.
The criminal justice bill, which Grassley negotiated alongside Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), counts co-sponsorship from 18 other senators, evenly distributed between the parties. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), who supported the broader reform effort in the previous Congress, has shifted his focus this year to a narrower prison reform measure that he has said has a better chance of Trump signing into law.
But Grassley hasn’t abandoned the push to win floor time for the legislation, which would ease mandatory minimum sentences for certain non-violent offenders and end the required life sentence for some repeat drug offenders. Other elements of the proposal would create new mandatory minimum sentences for other categories of offense and bolster punishment for those convicted of trafficking in drugs containing the opioid fentanyl.
Grassley disputed Sessions’ characterization of the criminal justice reform bill in his Wednesday letter as bringing “potentially dire consequences” for efforts to fight the nationwide opioid epidemic.
“I agree with Sessions that mandatory minimums are important, and we don’t touch that,” the Iowan said.
Sessions’ critique of the legislation “makes it sound like these guys are going to be out on the streets as soon as the judge makes the decision,” Grassley added. “So he can have his strong position, and I can have my position that brings a little bit of fairness to it.”
Grassley also tweeted his frustration with Sessions Wednesday. Asked for a comment, a Justice Department spokeswoman said the letter from the attorney general would suffice.”
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The chickens come home to roost, Chuckles! Implied, if not actually stated by Grassley, is that Gonzo lied under oath about more than his Russian connections during his confirmation hearings.
Gonzo falsely claimed that he would leave the partisan role of the extreme rightist Senator from Alabama behind and recognize that the role of U.S. Attorney General involved fairly and impartially representing the diverse interests of all Americans. I actually gave him the “benefit of the doubt” on that one.
But, Gonzo quickly established beyond any reasonable doubt that he could not leave behind a lifetime of racism, xenophobia, White Nationalism, and lies. He continues to be the same “shill” for racist restrictionist hate groups that he always has been.
Yup, Chuckles! Gonzo’s disdain for bipartisanship, reasonable compromise, equal treatment, and sane delivery of justice runs deep. Perhaps you should have “done the right thing” during the confirmation process!
The good news: by the time Mueller gets through, Gonzo might well wish that he had eased off a little on Chuckles’s proposal to revise sentencing for “nonviolent” offenses — like perjury, obstruction of justice, or providing false or misleading information. He’ll have to hope that his mouthpiece “Chuckie” Cooper can help him beat the rap for his “bad memory.”
Members of the Model Congress: To simulate a real immigration negotiation, we tried to select participants from across the policy spectrum—advocates and operatives, defenders of more immigration and proponents of less. In the end, we ended up with a well-rounded expert group of four:
Theresa Cardinal Brown is director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a research group in Washington. She was an immigration policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2008 and the agency’s attaché in Canada under Obama from 2008 to 2011. Before that, she served as director of immigration and border policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Steven Camarota is director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that seeks less immigration overall and has opposed past measures to legalize undocumented immigrants.
Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer at Holland and Knight, was previously a staff member for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he was one of the main drafters of the comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013.
Tom Jawetz is vice president for immigration at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy group. As chief counsel to the immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee and adviser to Democrats, he helped negotiate an immigration reform bill in the House in 2014. It never went to a vote.
I acted as the moderator.
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The makings of a deal: So that’s where our negotiators ended up after two hours: A pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and a 50,000 reduction in visas across several categories that would last for some period of time.
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Find out how they got there by going on over to Politico at the above link and reading Julia’s entire report. Most impressive! Julia’s certainly got my vote for President!
Vladimir Putin might get tired of winning. Ever since the U.S. intelligence community discovered the Russian operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and aid President Donald Trump’s victory, some Republicans have been laboring to undermine…
The greatest threat to American democracy doesn’t come from abroad or even from MS-13. No, it comes from the GOP “dupes and stooges” that were (remarkably) elected to protect our country, as it turns out, from themselves! But, their desire to protect and further their own kleptocracy dwarfs any small amount of allegiance they might have to the “common good.”
Will Putin be able to “close the deal” before American voters finally wake up to the danger they have elected?
SEUNG MIN KIM, HEATHER CAYGLE and ELANA SCHOR 12/19/2017 08:40 PM EST
Top senactors and White House officials are laying the groundwork for a major immigration deal in January to resolve the fate of young undocumented immigrants whose legal protections were put in limbo by President Donald Trump.
At a Tuesday afternoon meeting with nearly a dozen senators deeply involved in immigration policy, White House chief of staff John Kelly pledged that the administration will soon present a list of border security and other policy changes it wants as part of a broader deal on so-called Dreamers, according to people who attended the meeting. The plan could come in a matter of days, senators said.
About a half-dozen senators have been negotiating a bipartisan package prompted by Trump’s decision to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era executive action that granted work permits to nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came here as minors. Yet the senators could not fully flesh out a deal before they knew what Trump was willing to sign.
“We couldn’t finish this product, this bill, until we knew where the administration was,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been negotiating a DACA compromise for weeks, said in an interview after the meeting with Kelly. “And that’s why this meeting was so important.”
Congressional Republicans and the White House have long said any DACA deal would need to be paired with security and other enforcement measures. Democrats say that’s fine as long as the provisions weren’t too onerous. But the border security question has been a sticking point for weeks, as senators swapped proposals without cutting a deal, so far.
And while liberal Democrats and grass-roots activists are pressuring Congress to enact permanent legal protections for Dreamers this year, both Democrats and Republicans at the meeting with Kelly said there was a consensus that legislation wouldn’t pass before lawmakers leave Washington. It was one of the clearest sign yet that a Dreamers agreement won’t, to the chagrin of liberals, come before 2018.
“Our belief is that if this matter is not resolved this week — and it’s not likely to be resolved — that come the omnibus and the caps, that we have another chance to finally come up with a bipartisan package of things to include” by mid-January, said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also attended the meeting. “The closer we get [to the March deadline], the more nervous I get, not to mention the way these young people feel. I’m sorry that it’s taken this long.”
Flake said he believes he has a commitment from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to hold a cloture vote on the floor on an immigration deal by mid-January, before the next likely deadline to fund the government, Jan. 19.
A spokesman for McConnell did not immediately return a request for comment. But the majority leader said during a Fox News interview that he has talked about the immigration issue with his counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
“No, we’ll not be doing DACA … this week,” McConnell said. “That’s a matter to be discussed next year. The president has given us until March to address that issue. We have plenty of time to do it.”
At the Tuesday meeting, Kelly and other administration officials went into detail about how much of the southern border is currently fenced and how much more the White House would want in exchange for a DACA deal, according to people who attended.
Senators also pressed the White House on other immigration demands, such as an overhaul of the nation’s asylum system or a change in policy toward unaccompanied minors who are apprehended at the southern border, and whether they needed to be included in the current DACA talks.
“Which of those policy items, or immigration law changes, do we need to make as part of this and what can wait for something else?” Flake said, summing up the questions from senators. “There’s a lot of nice things we need to do as part of broader comprehensive reform, but we need to have a bill in January and we need to know what has to be in it and what the administration will support.”
The bipartisan group of senators — Flake and Durbin, Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) — has discussed a legalization plan that would marry the DREAM Act, drafted by Durbin and Graham, with a more conservative proposal for Dreamers written by Tillis and Lankford, Flake said.
Those seven senators attended Tuesday’s meeting with Kelly, as did Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia.“I think what we’re trying to do is to get some clarity from the administration on what they require by way of border security and other enforcement measures,” Cornyn said as he left the meeting. “We got a promise to provide it to us and hopefully we’ll get that in short order. Maybe even this week.”
Republicans’ commitment to taking up a DACA deal next month won’t spare Democrats the fury of liberal groups that have demanded that any spending bill this year include a solution for Dreamers.
Democratic leaders have signaled that they won’t risk a government shutdown this month to secure relief for the Dreamers, though some lawmakers have vowed to withhold their votes for any must-pass funding measure without an immigration fix.
Durbin, the influential second-ranking Senate Democrat, is firmly in the camp of senators who won’t vote for a spending bill without help for Dreamers. That group also includes liberal Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Durbin was asked by reporters Tuesday if there was a divide between him and Schumer over where to draw the line on the issue, and acknowledged that there “may be.”
Schumer, for his part, put Republicans on notice Tuesday that they shouldn’t count on Democratic votes for a short-term funding package that includes just some of Democrats’ priorities — such as children’s health insurance — while leaving immigration for next year.
In the House, lawmakers, including several in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, privately say they don’t see a path to secure a legislative fix for Dreamers before the end of the year. They acknowledge that the sides are now positioning themselves for a fight in January.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) touched on dynamics during a private leadership meeting Monday night.
“We need to stick [together] and show that they need us,” said one Democratic member with knowledge of the strategy going into January. Republicans “are not going to be able to keep going on with the CRs. … Then we’re at an inflection point in January.”
That hasn’t stopped some members from making a last-ditch effort to reach a bipartisan agreement, in hopes Democrats can use it as leverage in the House if Republicans need their votes to pass a short-term funding bill later this week.
“I believe that my leadership is gonna close the deal and I have to believe that,” said CHC Chair Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), noting she’s canceled all Christmas travel to stay in Washington and work on a legislative fix.
Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) are behind one effort that would pair a proposal similar to the DREAM Act with border security, according to several members.
And the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of 48 moderate Democrats and Republicans, is preparing to publicly embrace a specific proposal in the next day or two. A subset of the group has been working for weeks to hammer out an agreement and the entire caucus planned to meet again Tuesday night.
“There’s certainly scenarios where this could get done this week. I’m not an expert on how all these pieces could unfold,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a co-chairman of the group. “But everything is clearly on the table, which is why we think it’s important we move and move quickly here.”
Cristiano Lima contributed to this report
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Ironically, as I’ve pointed out before, the controversial “Border Wall” seems to be the least overtly harmful to humans and the long-term interests of the US of the various unnecessary enforcement measures the GOP has put out there in negotiations. Yeah, it is a waste of money, a boondoggle for certain contractors, and makes us look like a nation of scared nincompoops.
But, ending normal family migration (or as GOP White Nationalists pejoratively have termed it “chain migration”), funding the “New American Gulag,” and/or providing more unneeded agents for the Trump-Sessions-Bannon “American Gestapo” all will do much more long-term damage to actual human beings and to the economic future and social fabric of our country,
Perhaps, at some better time in the future, we could pay a diverse group of native and immigrant workers to tear down “The Wall” as part of our gala Fourth of July celebration on TV. Or, it could work as part of the celebration of the birthday of President Ronald Reagan. Or, we could implode The Wall on national TV.
“The Department of Homeland Security’s official watchdog is accusing his own agency of slow-walking the public release of a report about confusion that ensued earlier this year after President Donald Trump issued his first travel ban executive order.
The still-unreleased inspector general report found that senior managers at Customs and Border Protection were “caught by surprise” by Trump’s order and that agency officials “violated two court orders” limiting implementation of Trump’s directive to suspend travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, according to a letter sent to lawmakers Monday and obtained by POLITICO.
The report’s conclusions appear to be sharply in tension with the picture the White House tried to paint of the execution of Trump’s Jan. 27 order, which led to confusion throughout the air travel system, protests at airports and delays at ports of entry to the U.S.
“It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level,” a senior administration official told reporters two days after Trump ordered the move.
The unusual missive to Congress on Monday from Inspector General John Roth said his 87-page report was sent to DHS leadership Oct. 6, but officials have declined to authorize its release over the past six weeks.
Roth said officials informed his office that the report is under review for information that may be subject to attorney-client privilege or to a privilege protecting the agency’s “deliberative process.”
“I am very troubled by this development,” Roth wrote, referring to the deliberate process claim. “This is the first time in my tenure as Inspector General that the Department has indicated that they may assert this privilege in connection with one of our reports or considered preventing the release of a report on that basis. In fact, we regularly have published dozens of reports that delve into the Department’s rationale for specific policies and decisions, and comment on the basis and process on which those decisions were made.”
Asked about Roth’s letter, DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton defended the department’s handling of the report, as well as the travel ban Trump ordered Jan. 27.
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Despite the lack of permission to release the report, Roth’s seven-page letter does outline its key findings. He suggests that while most Customs and Border Protection staffers did their best to implement the policy humanely, the lack of advance notice caused significant problems and led to a lack of clarity on key issues, including whether so-called green card holders were covered by the ban.
“During the early period of the implementation of the order, neither CBP nor the Department was sure of the answers to basic questions as to the scope of the order, such as whether the order applied to Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs), a significant percentage of the affected travelers and a fundamental question that should have been resolved early in the process,” Roth wrote.
The IG review compliments CBP personnel at various ports, saying many used their own funds to buy food and water for travelers delayed by the policy. The report also finds that officers generally complied with court orders that were quickly issued freezing efforts to expel travelers from the U.S.
However, Roth said CBP defied court orders by providing guidance to airlines not to allow travelers from certain countries to board flights bound for the U.S.
“While CBP complied with court orders at U.S. ports of entry with travelers who had already arrived, CBP was very aggressive in preventing affected travelers from boarding aircraft bound for the United States, and took actions that, in our view, violated, two separate court orders,” he wrote.
Records obtained by POLITICO through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit underscore concerns by DHS personnel that there was no clear guidance about how to interpret the first order.
“We got a memo from the White House saying one thing and now the Press Secretary said another,” a senior CBP official wrote to an American Airlines executive in a Feb. 1 email explaining why the agency just abruptly withdrew guidance sent to major international air carriers.
Former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich said a letter like Roth’s is a rarity, but so is an agency trying to block disclosure of a report on the grounds being cited by DHS.
“It’s quite unusual. If agencies asserted these privileges as broadly as the letter says DHS is doing in this case, the ability of IGs to investigate important matters would be significantly compromised,” Bromwich told POLITICO. “In my tenure as IG, I don’t recall any instances in which the attorney-client or deliberative privileges were invoked by DOJ.”
“One of the biggest future crises in U.S. health care is about to collide with the hottest political issue of the Trump era: immigration.
As the largest generation in American history – the baby boom – heads into retirement and old age, most of those aging boomers will need someone to help take care of them for at least some portion of their twilight years. Demand for home health aides is expected to outstrip the growth for nearly all other jobs in coming decades, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting the number of home health aide positions will increase 38 percent by 2024. That puts it among the top five fastest-growing U.S. occupations.
So who’s going to do it? The question is one of the biggest uncertainties looming over not only the health care, but the labor market overall. Health policy experts have been raising the alarm for some time: No matter how you look at it, the United States is going to need a lot more caretakers and home health aides. And we’re going to need them soon.
Right now, immigrant workers fill a significant share of the formal and informal caretaker workforce. In health care overall, immigrants (both legal and undocumented) make up roughly 17 percent of workers, on par with their representation in the broader labor force. When it comes to home health care, however, that figure is considerably higher: about 24 percent, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
There’s a reason foreign-born workers take so many home health jobs: they’re low-paid, low-skilled and increasingly plentiful. Barriers to entry are low; a high school degree is not usually a requirement and neither is previous work experience. Much caretaking comes from family members, of course. But with families getting smaller, more Americans living alone and chronic diseases growing more complex, a lot of that care in the future will need to come from professionals.
The job also isn’t easy. Home health aides can be tasked with bathing and feeding clients, cleaning the person’s house, driving them to doctor’s appointments and even helping with trips to the bathroom. It’s one of those occupations that comes to mind “when people say that immigrants do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do,” notes Patricia Cortés, an assistant professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
Bianca Frogner, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said the low barriers to entry make it a natural fit for immigrants who are new to the U.S. workforce. “It’s easy to get into and they’re in high demand,” she said.
This is where politics comes in: The current move to curb immigration threatens to cut off the main supply of potential new workers to care for aging Americans.
Illegal immigration isn’t the issue. The home health care immigrant workforce is vastly legal. The Pew Research Center found that just 4 percent of nursing, psychiatric and home health aides are in the country without legal status, based on an average from 2005 to 2014. Some home health aide positions require certification, which may drive down the ranks of undocumented immigrants in those positions.
The question for the health care system is what will happen to the flow of legal immigrants. Trump and immigration hawks in Congress have endorsed a bill that would cut legal immigration in half over a decade. The bill would also refocus the immigration system to prize better-educated and more highly skilled immigrants — potentially choking off the supply of lower-skilled workers who are the likeliest candidates to fill the home health aide jobs of the future.
In theory, native-born Americans could take some of those jobs, but there are reasons to assume they won’t.
. . . .
The strange thing about home health care work is that immigrants don’t appear to drive down wages, as happens in some other fields. If anything, they tend to push wages higher. Naturalized citizens who worked as nursing, psychiatric and home health aides earned 22 percent more than their U.S.-born counterparts, according to 2015 American Community Survey data analyzed by the University of Washington Center for Health Workforce Studies.
Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, said the wage phenomenon and the fact that the work is a natural fit for new immigrants make it a no-brainer: Immigrants are our best caretaking option for the foreseeable future. “You put all that together,” Lowell said, “and I think it’s a good thing.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
In a sane system led by competent individuals with the common good in mind, this would be a “no brainer.” Legalize the existing undocumented workforce to provide some “upward and sideways” mobility to staff these jobs in the short run, while expanding legal immigration opportunities for these positions in the future. More legal immigration would also contribute to the tax coffers and add needed workers to the Social Security contribution base. Moreover, it would conserve considerable Government funds now being squandered on counterproductive immigration enforcement and unnecessary detention, as well as relieving the pressure on the overwhelmed Immigration Courts. That, in turn, would free up enforcement resources to concentrate on removing serious criminals and shutting down international smuggling cartels.
However, when policy is driven by bias, prejudice, and irrationality, as with guys like Trump, Sessions, Bannon, Miller, and the “RAISE Act Bunch” the results are a lose – lose.
“On September 4, immigration judge Denise Slavin followed orders from the Department of Justice to drop everything and travel to the U.S.-Mexico border. She would be leaving behind an overwhelming docket in Baltimore, but she was needed at “ground zero,” as Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it—the “sliver of land” where Americans take a stand against machete-wielding, poison-smuggling criminal gangs and drug cartels.
As part of a new Trump administration program to send justices on short-term missions to the border to speed up deportations and, Sessions pledged, reduce “significant backlogs in our immigration courts,” Slavin was to spend two weeks at New Mexico’s Otero County Processing Center.
But when Slavin arrived at Otero, she found her caseload was nearly half empty. The problem was so widespread that, according to internal Justice Department memos, nearly half the 13 courts charged with implementing Sessions’ directive could not keep their visiting judges busy in the first two months of the new program.
“Judges were reading the newspaper,” says Slavin, the executive vice president of the National Immigration Judges Association and an immigration judge since 1995. One, she told POLITICO Magazine, “spent a day helping them stock the supply room because she had nothing else to do.”
Slavin ended up leaving Otero early because she had no cases her last day. “One clerk said it was so great, it was like being on vacation,” she recalls.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the DOJ to deploy U.S. immigration judges to U.S. detention facilities—most of which are located on or near the U.S.-Mexico border. The temporary reassignments were intended to lead to more and faster deportations, as well astake some pressure off thecurrently overloaded immigration court system. But, according to interviews and internal DOJ memos, since the new policy went into effect in March, it seems to have had the opposite result: Judges have frequently had to cancel cases on their overloaded home dockets only to find barely any work at their assigned courts—exacerbating the U.S. immigration court backlog that now exceeds 600,000 cases.
According to internal memos sent by the DOJ’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) and obtained by the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) via a Freedom of Information Act request, judges delayed more than 20,000 home court hearings for their details to the border from March to May.
“I canceled about 100 cases in my home court to hear 20,” says Slavin, who was forced to postpone those Baltimore hearings by a year since her court schedule was already booked through most of 2018. In Otero, she had no more than 50 hours of work over the course of two weeks (she typically clocks 50 hours per week in Baltimore). But she couldn’t catch up on her work at home because she had no access to her files.
Her three colleagues at the facility who had also been ordered there by the DOJwere no busier. One who had been sent to Otero previously told her the empty caseloads were normal.
“Sending judges to the border has made the backlog in the interior of the country grow,” says Slavin, “It’s done exactly the opposite of what they hoped to accomplish.”
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On April 11 in Nogales, Arizona, Sessions formally rolled out the DOJ’s judge relocation program. “I am also pleased to announce a series of reforms regarding immigration judges to reduce the significant backlogs in our immigration courts,” he told the crowd of Customs and Border Protection personnel gathered to hear him. “Pursuant to the president’s executive order, we will now be detaining all adults who are apprehended at the border. To support this mission, we have already surged 25 immigration judges to detention centers along the border.”
The idea was to send U.S. immigration court judges currently handling “non-detained” immigration cases—cases such as final asylum decisions and immigrants’ applications for legal status—to centers where they would only adjudicate cases of those detained crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, along with others who had been picked up by ICE for possible deportation. More judges would follow, the attorney general said.
But as Sessions spoke, nearly half of those 25 “surge” judges—whose deployments typically last two weeks or a month—were largely unoccupied. One week before the attorney general’s Nogales announcement, EOIR—the Justice Department office that handles immigration cases—published an internal memo identifying six of 13 detention centersas offering inadequate work for their visiting justices.
“There are not enough cases to fill one immigration judge’s docket, let alone five,” the DOJ wrote of Texas’ T. Don Hutto facility, which had been assigned five Miami judges to hold hearings via video teleconference with the women detained there.
One judge sent to the South Texas Residential Center, a family detention facility, had no cases at all; a judge at another family facility, Karnes Residential Center, had a “light” docket; and Texas’ Prairieland Detention Center, which had received a judge, also was “not receiving enough cases to fill a docket or even come close to it,” the memo stated.
The two judges assigned to New Mexico’s Cibola Detention Facility also had barely any work to do, and Louisiana’s La Salle Detention Center—not on the border but treated as such in its receipt of five “surge” judges—had similarly been overstaffed. “There is not enough work for five judges,” said one DOJ memo. “There is enough work for a reasonable docket and three judges.”
The Justice Department documents also revealed a number of logistical issues with the border courts, including a lack of phone lines or internet connectivity, and noise infiltrating the courtroom from the detention facility. “The courtrooms at Imperial Regional Detention Facility are not suitable for in-person hearings because security is wholly inadequate,” said one memo of the California facility. “The court cannot do telephonic interpreters and the request for in-person interpreters remains pending. … Last week an immigration judge was left in the courtroom without a bailiff.”
Meanwhile, the judges sent to the border were forced to abandon thousands of home court cases—which the DOJ was aware could increase pressure on the U.S. immigration court system, where a specialized cadre of judges handles questions over whether people can remain in the country or face deportation. “It is likely that the backlog will increase for the locations from which a judge is assigned,” predicted one March 29 document, which also projected the deployments would cost $21 million per fiscal year.
Within the first three months of the program, judges postponed about 22,000 cases around the country, including 2,774 in New York City alone, according to the DOJ memos. (The delays added to an already clogged system: New York City’s immigration court backlog stood at 81,842 as of July, according to the immigration data tracker TRAC Immigration.)
When asked about these FOIA documents, and why the DOJ had deployed judges where they were not needed, a Justice Department spokesmanresponded that the program had improved in recent months. “After the initial deployment, an assessment was done to determine appropriate locations to increase the adjudication of immigration court cases without compromising due process,” he said.
Immigration judges and advocates acknowledge that the program has slightly improved since May—but many say that’s largely because the DOJ is sending fewer judges on temporary missions. “Some of the least productive assignments have either been discontinued or converted to video teleconferencing hearings, and it seems that fewer judges are being sent overall,” says National Association of Immigration Judges President Dana Marks, who serves as an immigration judge in San Francisco. But, she says, “the basic problem still persists.”
More than 100 total judges have been reassigned since March, but Politico was not able to obtain data on whether deployments are declining or increasing, or how many judges are still facing empty caseloads.
The spokesperson declined to comment on Slavin’s experience at Otero. But the DOJ discontinued deployments to Otero this month, as soon as Slavin completed her assignment there.
The U.S. immigration court backlog has increased under Trump, moving from 540,000 in January to 600,000 in July. But the DOJ spokesperson denied thatthe deployments were responsible for the bump, instead blaming the overloaded system on the Obama administration’s policies. He noted that the first six months of the Trump administration had seen a14.5 percent increase in final immigration court rulings from the previous year,and that more than 90 percent of cases by “surge” judges had led to deportation orders.
But just because judges have ruled on more cases doesn’t mean the Trump administration hasn’t worsened the backlog, NIJC communications director Tara Tidwell Cullen says. In fact, it could likely mean the opposite. Trump’s first six months in power saw 40 percent more immigration arrests in the country’s interior than the year before, adding more cases to already overloaded dockets.
“The ‘home’ courts where judges are sent from continue to be understaffed and their caseloads are adversely impacted as judges are sent to temporary assignments,” adds Marks, the San Francisco judge. Adding to the problem, she points out, istheadministration’s decision to detain immigrants without allowing the Department of Homeland Security to grant them bonds. Now, detainees have to go to immigration court to get a bond, creating extra work for those justices.
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Not everyone thinks sending judges to the border is a bad idea.
“The best use of resources is to throw them all at detention,” says Leon Fresco, who served as deputy assistant attorney general under President Barack Obama. Judges typically release individuals detained for more than 90 days with no trial on habeas corpus, he explains, in which case the government has “wasted money in detaining them” to start. Better, then, to hear all the detained cases quickly.
Any administration will have to make tough calls, says Fresco. “You have just about 300 judges to hear more than 500,000 cases, so you have to prioritize.” Under Obama, the DOJ—while it hadn’t sent judges to the border—had also prioritized recent border crossers in order to send a message that the U.S. would immediately hear their cases, rather than allow them to “wait eight years to be adjudicated” while staying in the country, Fresco says. Trump’s priorities similarly send a message to potential border crossers that “we do have quick justice.”
The problem, Fresco adds, is that the Trump administration has been clumsy in its border deployments—sending judges to places where they aren’t needed. “There are ways to do this, but they need to be more flexible and nimble, and they’re not being as nimble as they can be,” he says. “EOIR is an agency badly in need of some sort of consulting firm. … There’s still too little rhyme or reason about how case assignments work—you shouldn’t have weeks with judges with hours of idle time.”
Chicago immigration judge Robert D. Vinikoor says his deployment went smoothly. He had a full caseload in his two-week detail at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego this April, and he maintains that the reassigned judges were necessary to get immigrants out of detention as expeditiously as possible. “DHS is detaining more and more people and keeping them in custody, so that’s the need for the judges,” says Vinikoor, who retired in June after serving 33 years as an immigration judge. “The question is: Are they over-detailing? In some cases they put the cart before the horse.”
But Marks, who has been an immigration judge for 30 years, disagrees. Even if the DOJ gets deployments right, she says, the surge policy shows the administration has the wrong priorities. She says the administration’s biggest mistake was making a “politically motivated decision” and not consulting immigration judges. “The judges weren’t asked and that’s always been our big frustration,” she says.” The judges are the ones who are the experts in handling their cases.”
Marks notes that her union had similar frustrations with the Obama administration’s prioritization of recent border crossers—predominantly Central American women and children seeking asylum—to send a message they would be deported quickly if they could not prove they qualified for asylum. That decision, she says, worsened the backlog, too.
The overloaded system jeopardizes due process for immigrants, says NIJC’s policy director Heidi Altman, who filed the FOIA for EOIR’s memos after hearing about “chaos” in the courts when the border details began.
“When the backlog is exacerbated it makes it exponentially harder for us and other legal services to take on clients,” says Altman, whose NIJC organizes pro-bono attorneys handling immigration cases, which do not guarantee legal representation. Without a lawyer handling a case, she says, it is less likely to proceed fairly.
But there’s another reason that Trump might want to reconsider the border surge, says John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE under the Obama administration: It takes the pressure off the undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country for years and may be fighting to prevent an order of deportation.“They’re basically giving amnesty ironically to the non-detained docket.”
“By shifting the judges away they’ll never have their hearing so they’ll never be ordered deported,” he says. “You’re letting them stay.”
“JEROME, IDAHO —In the Magic Valley of southern Idaho, milk is money.
Over 400,000 cows reside in this area, where the miracle of modern irrigation from the Snake River fed pioneer farming. Bovines now outnumber humans by more than two to one. Workers in rubber boots pull long shifts feeding livestock, clearing mountains of manure and extracting millions of pounds of milk all day, every day, all year, on ranches tucked into the rock and sagebrush-studded landscape. Sleek silver tankers filled with milk barrel down Interstate 84 toward dairy processing plants, among them one owned by Chobani, which opened the world’s biggest yogurt factory five years ago just down the road in Twin Falls. Since 2000, milk production has doubled in Idaho, providing the state with $10.4 billion in direct sales, according to University of Idaho economists. Chobani’s gleaming $750 million, cream-colored plant is just one of the many big businesses linked to Idaho’s voluminous milk production, now around third- or fourth-largest among states.
In short, the Magic Valley’s dairy boom is a contemporary rural American success story—the kind that President Donald Trump railed as a candidate is too often missing across the country. Unemployment here was less than 3 percent this summer, about as good as it gets, and optimism should be high. Yet on dairy farms, among both owners and workers, a sense of dread hangs in the dry southern Idaho air.
Dairy farmers lean heavily Republican in this deeply red state of only 1.7 million people, where 88 percent of the voting-age population are non-Hispanic whites. But in the age of Donald Trump—who won Idaho handily —even the farmers who supported the new president fear their businesses are about to run headlong into a harsh political reality. They’re frightened that Trump’s aggressive deportation policies will soon start to pick off or push away the mostly Hispanic immigrants who do the gritty work that Americans aren’t interested in doing. Many of these workers are probably undocumented, farmers acknowledge, yet they’re the sturdy backbone of a surging industry. Here in the Magic Valley, the farmers’ perspective is starkly different from the president’s claim that undocumented workers “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.”
An immigrant woman attaches cleans cows’ teats and attaches pumps in a state-of-the art milking parlor. Hundreds of cows file in and instinctively turn around to be milked, three times a day. Sometimes the animals kick and defecate, milkers say.
An immigrant woman attaches cleans cows’ teats and attaches pumps in a state-of-the art milking parlor. Hundreds of cows file in and instinctively turn around to be milked, three times a day. Sometimes the animals kick and defecate, milkers say. | Joy Pruitt for the Center for Public Integrity
And the farmers’ view is pitting them against a vocal contingent of neighbors who’ve responded both to Trump’s rhetoric and far-right media that has targeted immigrants as a threat. Southern Idaho, in fact, became a flashpoint for xenophobia this past year when outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars, seized on false reports about Muslim refugees—accusing them of gang rapes and the spread of fatal diseases like tuberculosis—and turned the remote area into an anti-immigrant cause celebre. But locally, it’s starting to sink in that Trump’s vows to oust undocumented workers—whom he claims are a drain on the economy—could actually kick the legs out from under the “Made in America” model the Magic Valley exemplifies.
Idaho dairy industry representatives estimate that between 85 to 90 percent of on-site dairy workers in the state are foreign-born. The U.S. Department of Labor and other estimates suggest that nearly half to 70 percent of all U.S. farm laborers are undocumented—certainly enough to shut down many of the milk pumps here if workers are ousted as a result of Trump’s policies.
That’s why farmers’ groups have for years pushed Congress, unsuccessfully, to make it possible for them to legally employ immigrants they say are desperately needed. Prospects don’t look any rosier now. In recent months, anti-immigrant rhetoric has only grown more vitriolic, and Trump supporters—including some here—are expecting the president to follow through on campaign promises and deport more people.
Those who understand the dairy business here fear that a political solution won’t materialize before it’s too late, if ever. And that means businesses could struggle due to labor shortages and plummeting production.
Shannon Perez, an American who was married to Mexican dairy worker who was deported, believes Americans don’t understand that the current immigration system doesn’t allow immigrant workers to “get legal.”
Shannon Perez, an American who was married to Mexican dairy worker who was deported, believes Americans don’t understand that the current immigration system doesn’t allow immigrant workers to “get legal.” | Susan Ferriss for the Center for Public Integrity
“The dairy industry is a big money maker. But without workers, without somebody that’s going to be there 12 hours a day, milking your cows, getting dirty, there’s no business,” said Shannon Pérez, a non-Hispanic Anglo, as people here say, who’s worked on dairy and calf ranches. She’s already watched helplessly as her own family was split by deportation.”
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Read the entire article at the above link.
For those of us who have worked in the field of immigration for decades, it is hardly surprising that policies driven by White Nationalism, xenophobia, and just plain old racism and meanness would hurt a wide and diverse swarth of Americans, including many of those same misguided souls who ignored the facts and voted Trump into office.
We need to screen the undocumented folks who are here now, remove those who are criminals or engaging in socially destructive conduct, and give some type of legal status to the rest. Then, we need to significantly expand the number of legal immigrants we accept each year to more closely match market demand, save more lives of those fleeing harm, harness the energy, skills, and talents that will allow us to prosper and lead in the future, and make future immigration enforcement rational, efficient, and effective (by not wasting time arresting, detaining, and deporting those who actually are here to help us).
Folks like Jeff Sessions are pushing an irrational program that if it actually were achievable (which is isn’t) would cripple and perhaps destroy both the economy and the social fabric of our great nation.
It’s time for the majority of “rationalists” (regardless of party affiliation) to band together and defeat the attack of a well-organized minority that is out to harm our country and endanger our future.
“The Department of Homeland Security is “actively considering” delaying a looming deadline for so called-Dreamers to renew their status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a Justice Department attorney said at a court hearing Thursday, according to attendees and a government official.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate cited the hurricanes that recently hit Texas, Florida and nearby states as grounds for the potential delay to the Oct. 5 deadline, while noting that no final decision had been made, an official said.
Word of the possible delay came as a federal judge signaled that he might postpone the cut-off date unless the Trump administration acted first, attendees at a Thursday court hearing said.
During the session, in federal court in Brooklyn, U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis repeatedly labeled the deadline “arbitrary” and said he saw little harm in pushing it back, according to advocates.
“He focused quite a bit on the October 5 deadline and called it arbitrary,” said David Chen, a Yale law student helping litigate the issue, “and said essentially that so many people who are DACA recipients would face quite a lot of harm and experience quite a lot of chaos if they were unable to renew by the deadline.”
The Trump administration announced last week that it was winding down the Obama-era program known DACA, a mechanism used to give quasi-legal status and work permits to about 800,000 undocumented foreigners who arrived in the U.S. as children.
Homeland security officials announced that people whose work permits are set to expire between Sept. 5, 2017, and March 5 of next year must submit a renewal application by Oct. 5 to receive another two-year permit. After March 5, no more DACA permits will be granted, leading to a two-year phase-out of the program, officials said.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Judges hate it when they can’t talk the USG into “voluntarily” doing the right thing!
“Democrats tried attacking Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency. They’ve made the case that he’s ineffective, pointing to his failure to sign a single major piece of legislation into law after eight months in the job. They’ve argued that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and that his campaign was in cahoots with Russia.
None of it is working.
Data from a range of focus groups and internal polls in swing states paint a difficult picture for the Democratic Party heading into the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election. It suggests that Democrats are naive if they believe Trump’s historically low approval numbers mean a landslide is coming. The party is defending 10 Senate seats in states that Trump won and needs to flip 24 House seats to take control of that chamber.
The research, conducted by private firms and for Democratic campaign arms, is rarely made public but was described to POLITICO in interviews with a dozen top operatives who’ve been analyzing the results coming in.
“If that’s the attitude that’s driving the Democratic Party, we’re going to drive right into the ocean,” said Anson Kaye, a strategist at media firm GMMB who worked on the Obama and Clinton campaigns and is in conversations with potential clients for next year.
Worse news, they worry: Many of the ideas party leaders have latched onto in an attempt to appeal to their lost voters — free college tuition, raising the minimum wage to $15, even Medicare for all — test poorly among voters outside the base. The people in these polls and focus groups tend to see those proposals as empty promises, at best.
Pollsters are shocked by how many voters describe themselves as “exhausted” by the constant chaos surrounding Trump, and they find that there’s strong support for a Congress that provides a check on him rather than voting for his agenda most of the time. But he is still viewed as an outsider shaking up the system, which people in the various surveys say they like, and which Democrats don’t stack up well against.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Don’t forget that Trump has seldom “polled well” except among his base. He never really crossed the 50% mark in any credible polls (assuming that any polls were in fact credible, something cast into doubt by the 2016 Election) even on Election Day. But, that hasn’t stopped him from becoming President and won’t necessarily stop him from being a 2-term President.
If nothing else, Trump has proved that a fanatic base, properly distributed across the U.S., can allow him to exploit the peculiarities of the US system to win elections without ever being “the people’s choice.” According to this article, there is little reason to believe that voters will hold either Trump or the GOP accountable for their lackluster performance at governing. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the GOP will wake up the morning after the November 2018 Elections with even bigger majorities in the House and Senate.
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ assertion Tuesday that so-called Dreamers have taken jobs away from American citizens is “wrong,” Sen. Lindsey Graham declared Wednesday morning, pushing back against his former Senate colleague and calling for compassion from Congress.
“Jeff Sessions is wrong. These kids are not taking jobs from American citizens, they’re part of our country,” Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC’s “Today” show, rebutting Sessions’ assertion from the previous day. “They’re fully employed for the most part, they’re in school, they will add great value. The president is right to want to have a heart for these kids.”
The attorney general’s comment about Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, came during his announcement that the Trump administration will rescind DACA, a program that offers work permits to Dreamers and protects them from deportation. Sessions, known as a hawk on immigration issues during his Senate tenure, blamed the program for hurting American job-seekers and for creating a “humanitarian crisis” on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Sessions lacks credibility even with his own former colleagues from his own party.
President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises.
Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. He has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program and struggled with his own misgivings about targeting minors for deportation.
Conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program, the two sources said, though White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.
In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
This could be one of Trump’s shrewder political moves. He doesn’t really have to do anything right now, while getting the issue off his desk and putting pressure on the Dems and those more responsible Republicans who have urged him to retain the program to get their collective act together and legislate.
Now it depends on whether Trump can disengage without the usual barrage of xenophobic White Nationalist race baiting truth-challenged rhetoric that tends to accompany all of his immigration moves. That might be hard for Trump, given his normal need to pander to the basist biases of his base.
There is also the problem of what happens if Congress fails. There is no practical way of removing 800,000 American young people. It’s simply beyond the capacity of the system, not to mention that it would destroy our economy and rip apart our society.
REALITY CHECK: Many U.S. Immigration Courts are already setting “new” non-detained cases out to Individual Hearing dates in 2020 & 2021. As Judge Burman’s remarks in the preceding post suggest, those courts that claim not to be out as far might well be using ADR (“Aimless Docket Reshuffling”) techniques to mask the true extent of the backlog and docketing problem.
A few Dreamers got DACA after the entry of a final order of removal. But, the vast majority either 1) applied before being placed in Removal Proceedings; or 2) had their Removal Proceedings “Administratively Closed” (thereby removed from the Immigration Court’s “active docket”) after DACA was granted. All of these cases would have to be initially docketed or re-docketed upon DHS motion.
The US Immigration Courts’ docket already extends beyond the end of Trump’s current term in 2021. By the time “Dreamer” cases get to Individual Hearings the next Presidential term likely will have expired. After all, even without Dreamers on the docket, and with additional US Immigration Judges on the bench, backlogs have continued to rise as a result of the Administration’s “gonzo” approach to immigration enforcement.
So far, the Administration has addressed the impracticality of unlimited enforcement of a broken immigration system with a pattern of “random acts of cruelty” intended to spread fear, create unease, and keep ethnic and migrant communities on edge.
Let’s hope Congress can get its act together and solve the problem in a bipartisan manner. If not, more disruption, dislocation, disorder, and just plain downright arbitrary meanness are likely to follow.
“Bad things will happen” to a country that allows a xenophobic, racist, White Nationalist minority (two-thirds of Americans favor some type of relief for Dreamers) to overrule the majority and attack our country’s most precious asset: the young people who are America’s (and the world’s) future. It’s time for those of us in the majority who aren’t part of the “Trump base” to stand up and be heard in opposition to those who would destroy our country’s future and trash the lives of fine American young people in the process! And, politicians who oppose relief for Dreamers need to be removed from office through the electoral process.
“President Trump’s condemnation of his own attorney general may seem bizarre and unprecedented, but here’s something many in America’s gobsmacked chattering class are forgetting: The vaunted independence of the Justice Department took over a century to build, and it’s a far more fragile institution than we realize.
The spectacle of Trump attacking Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest and most stalwart supporters, as “beleaguered” and “unfair” is certainly jarring. The president seemingly cannot help but vent his frustration over the attorney general’s decision to step aside in the Department of Justice’s probe into Russian election interference—a step that led indirectly to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. If Sessions “would have recused himself before the job,” Trump told the (“failing”) New YorkTimes. “I would have said ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’”
The prospect that the president might fire Sessions, whose immigration policies and draconian approach to law enforcement are anathema to the left, places Democrats in an unusual position. They despise the attorney general but find themselves bound to protect the independence of his office. But the real test lies with Republicans, who have largely looked the other way as Trump has laid waste to one political norm after another. Will they draw a sharp line in the sand, or bury their heads in it?
It took well over a century for the office of the attorney general to accrue the very power and independence that Trump now stands poised to blow up. Originally a minor position with little authority or autonomy, over the years the AG emerged as the nation’s top law enforcement official and a key adviser to the president. The office withstood considerable strain in the latter quarter of the 20th century. But like so many civic institutions today, it is imperiled precisely because it is largely the product of traditions, and administrative rules that capture those traditions, rather than permanent statutes or laws. Once broken, it may not be so easily reassembled.”
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Read the complete article, which contains a fascinating short history of the DOJ, at the link.
Washington was, in fact, built on swampland with Tiber Creek running through it. I’m sort of expecting that the old swamp will just open up again some day and swallow Trump and the whole corrupt mess surrounding him.
