Sanctuary Cities – Page 23 – immigrationcourtside.com

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-inhumanity-at-the-border-reveals-their-grand-scam/2018/05/28/b3b18d9c-62b0-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.38485dbb9b85

Republicans’ inhumanity at the border reveals their grand scam

By Catherine Rampell

Since October, more than 700 minor children have been separated from their parents at the border. More than 100 have been under 4 years old.

Some, like an 18-month-old Honduran boy torn from his mother in February, are just toddlers.

“The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle. My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” the boy’s mother said in a sworn statement. “I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.”

This mom was not trying to “sneak across” the border, by the way. She had crossed an international bridge into Brownsville, Tex., and presented herself to immigration authorities to request asylum from political violence.

Instead of receiving refuge, she lost her child. It was months before they were reunited.

Such stories are enraging and shameful. They also put the lie to sacred principles that Republican politicians have long claimed to stand for, chiefly: family values and rule of law.

For decades, Republicans have championed traditional family values and having parents, rather than the state, take responsibility for their children.

This Republican administration’s inhumane treatment of helpless children — who are ripped from their mothers’ arms, detained in human warehouses and drop-kicked into “foster care or whatever” — reveals such rhetoric to have been a scam.

The Trump administration’s goal is to inflict pain upon these families. Cruelty is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of White House immigration policy; it is the objective.

After all, if forced separations are sufficiently agonizing, fewer families will try to come here, no matter how dangerous their home countries are. Administration members have argued as much.

Last year, then-Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly acknowledged he was considering separating children from their parents at the border “to deter” potential border-crossers. Again this month, he said “a big name of the game is deterrence.”

This vile and unpopular policy has been roundly condemned, including by prominent conservatives. So President Trump did what he always does when facing backlash for using children (remember the “dreamers” and children’s health insurance?) as a bargaining chip: Blame the Dems.

“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.,” Trump tweeted Saturday.

Got that? Our law-and-order-obsessed president is merely enforcing an evil Democratic law!

There is, however, no statute — supported by Democrats or otherwise — that requires immigrant families to be torn apart.

The most cogent possible point Trump could have been making is one that other Republicans have made: that crossing the border unlawfully is a crime. If you prosecute every border crossing criminally — as Trump’s administration says it now does, even for asylum seekers — that means parents will go to jail.

And as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen put it, when parents go to jail, whether for unlawful entry or another crime, that requires separating them from their children.

Which is true, to a point; prisons generally can’t house children.

But here’s the part Trump apologists neglect to mention: The government is keeping immigrant families forcibly separated even after criminal proceedings are over and the parents get released from jail.

Take the case of a Brazilian family that also crossed the border to seek asylum.

The mother, named in court documents as “Ms. C.,” was prosecuted for entering the country illegally in August 2017, a misdemeanor for which she spent 25 days in jail. Her 14-year-old son was sent to a facility in Chicago.

After she was released, she passed a “credible fear interview” and began the process of applying for asylum. She was sent first to an immigration detention center, then released to a nonprofit shelter in El Paso. This shelter is willing to take in her son.

But the government still refuses to release him. She has been out of detention for five weeks and still hasn’t been allowed to see her boy.

“What they’re really basically saying is that these people don’t have a due-process right to remain with their child,” says American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project Deputy Director Lee Gelernt, who is representing Ms. C. and other asylum-seeking immigrants challenging Trump’s family separation policy. The Constitution, of course, guarantees due process for all, regardless of immigration status.

Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.

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Yup.

PWS

05-30-18

GONZO’S WORLD: Ann Telnaes: Where Cruelty, Immorality, & Intellectual Dishonesty Rule!

Opinions

The evil of separating children from their parents

By Ann Telnaes May 29 at 6:13 PMEmail the author

Just because Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that every illegal immigrant crossing the border would be prosecuted (resulting in parents being separated from their children), that doesn’t mean it’s morally defensible.

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Yup! Captures the essence of the man.

PWS

05-30-18

REIGN OF LIES: Trump, Sessions, & Nielsen Continue Lie About Separating Migrant Children – NO, It Isn’t Required By Law!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-is-blaming-democrats-for-separating-migrant-families-at-the-border-heres-why-this-isnt-a-surprise/2018/05/27/c07810d8-61d3-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html

reports for the Washington Post:

President Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border is renewing a political uproar over immigration, an issue that has challenged Trump throughout his presidency and threatens to grow more heated as he imposes more restrictions to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

In one of several misleading tweets during the holiday weekend, Trump pushed Democrats to change a “horrible law” that the president said mandated separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis.

In April, more than 50,000 migrants were apprehended or otherwise deemed “inadmissible,” and administration officials have made clear that children will be separated from parents who enter the country illegally and are detained. The surge in illegal border crossings is expected to continue as the economy improves and warmer weather arrives.

“I keep imagining somebody taking my kids from me. My kids are 2 and 4 years old, and that’s the age of some of the children that have been separated from their parents at the border,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), who is helping to organize a Thursday rally in San Antonio to highlight the issue. “When a lot of people hear the story, they get a similar reaction. They can’t imagine why this would be a standard government practice.”

Trump’s deflection offers a familiar playbook, critics of the administration’s policies say. In their view, Trump’s most recent comments are strategically similar to tactics he used when he ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and then insisted on hard-line measures in a bill to permanently protect “dreamers.”

“He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”

. . . .

“The law does not require this inhumane and immoral action – DHS could stop it today. We do not need a law. This is a punt. They literally just ran this bad-faith play with DACA,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted Sunday. “They are going to use the suffering of children as political leverage for the wall, and we must refuse to participate, because if this kind of hostage taking is ever successful it will never stop.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

No, protections for refugees and children aren’t “loopholes!” They are important protections for those who have a right to seek a fair determination of their applications for refuge in the United States under our laws!

The statement that families can be “deported together” is simply more proof that Trump, Nielsen, and Sessions have already prejudged these cases. Although many are in fact denied, many more would be granted, possibly a majority, if individuals were given fair access to counsel, as the law contemplates, and the Government were actually required to correctly apply asylum and protection laws. Instead, for years the government has been getting away with politically influenced, unduly restrictive legal constructions and also coercing individuals with detention, entering bogus “in absentia orders” against them, or otherwise hustling them through the system without Due Process. Most of these tactics are directed specifically against those seeking protection from the Northern Triangle of Central America — one of the most dangerous regions in the world.

Join the New Due Process Army and stand up against the dishonest scofflaw public officials administering Trump’s sick immigration policies.

PWS

05-28-18

THE HILL: Nolan On Who Really Benefits From Cal’s “Sanctuary Cities” Laws

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/389600-the-people-really-benefiting-from-californias-sanctuary-laws

Nolan writes:

. . . .

But are California’s sanctuary laws really protecting them from being deported?

According to a report from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts have been hurt by pushback from California and cities such as Chicago, New York, and Boston that have sanctuary policies.

Sanctuary policies prevent local police departments from turning inmates over to ICE when they are released from custody, which has resulted in returning some dangerous criminal aliens to the community.

ICE had to change its enforcement operations from taking custody of aliens at police stations to looking for undocumented aliens in the community, which resulted in arresting approximately 40,000 noncriminal aliens in FY 2017.

The main obstacle to deporting removeable aliens is the immigration court backlog crisis.

According to TRAC Immigration, as of the end of April 2017, when the backlog was 585,930 cases, most aliens were waiting around 670 days for a hearing.

At a panel discussion last year on the backlog, Immigration Judge Larry Burman said:

“I cannot give you a merits hearing on my docket unless I take another case off. My docket is full through 2020, and I was instructed by my assistant chief immigration judge not to set any cases past 2020.”

From April 2017 to April 2018, the backlog for the immigration courts in California increased by almost 20 percent to 692,298 cases.

These lengthy wait times make it necessary to release newly arrested aliens until hearings can be scheduled for them, which gives them time to disappear into the shadows.

Conclusion.

Apparently, the main beneficiaries of California’s sanctuary policies are deportable aliens in police custody who otherwise would be turned over to ICE when they are released and unscrupulous employers who exploit undocumented immigrant workers.

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Go on over to The Hill to read Nolan’s complete article! this article also was featured on ImmigrationProf Blog.

PWS

05-28-18

MASHA GESSEN IN THE NEW YORKER: THE GREAT MORAL DILEMMA OF THE TRUMP ERA: Total Resistance Or “Damage Control?” — “In our case, stepping outside the lie means refusing—stubbornly, consistently, incrementally—to lend credence to the opposite of politics, the opposite of diplomacy, and the opposite of sanity. That would require thinking, reading, and speaking critically: not treating an outburst as though it were politics, a tantrum as though it were diplomacy, and a delusion as though it were aspiration.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-the-trump-era-we-are-losing-the-ability-to-distinguish-reality-from-vacuum

Gessen writes:

The Trump Presidency is an age of unanswerable questions and lose-lose propositions. How is one to maintain sanity, decency, and a measure of moral courage? In a pair of thoughtful essays in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick tackles the problems of dealing with the everyday nature of our current political disaster and of deciding on the best way to try to save the country from Donald Trump: by staying close to him, or by walking away. The latter is a question for members of the Administration and for congressional Republicans. “This is the time,” Lithwick writes, to “think about what combination of exit and voice can make a meaningful difference if a real crisis were to happen. Or rather, when the real crisis happens—if we are not there already.”

This is not a new question. Many people will continue posing it to themselves and others with ever more frustrating results, because it cannot be answered. Is the possibility of moderating the damage done by this Administration worth sacrificing one’s moral principles? Should one protect one’s individual integrity by sacrificing the chance to moderate damage done by this Administration? We can’t possibly know. We don’t have the information necessary to evaluate these options in the short term. Did H. R. McMaster, during his tenure as Trump’s national-security adviser, prevent an unknown number of disasters? If he did, was it worth whatever psychic and intellectual price he paid? It’s likely that he himself doesn’t know. For those who have so far decided to stay, whether in the Administration or in the Republican Party, small daily sacrifices of personal integrity become part of their sunk cost in the project of staying in; these people inevitably grow more committed and less critical. The landscape keeps shifting, the stakes keep changing, and the crises keep mounting.

The overstimulation of the age of Trump, meanwhile, makes us lose track of time and whatever small sense humans normally have of themselves in history. We forget what happened a month ago. If we look away for a day, we miss news that seems momentous to others—only to be forgotten, too, in a week. Living in a shared reality with our fellow-citizens is an endless triathlon of reading, talking, and panicking. It creates the worst possible frame of mind for answering vexing moral questions, especially ones that require a choice between two desperately unsatisfying options.

Thinking morally about the Trump era requires a different temporal frame. It requires a look at the present through the prism of the future. There will come a time after Trump, and we need to consider how we will enter it. What are we going to take with us into that time—what kind of politics, language, and culture? How will we recover from years of policy (if you can call it that) being made by tweet? How will we reclaim simple and essential words? Most important, how will we restart a political conversation? Political discourse was in crisis before Trump—no wonder Americans of all stripes have become accustomed to using the words “politics” and “political” to denote substance-free transactions in the electoral arena. But, under Trump, it is nearing complete destruction.

Consider the last month’s worth of conversation about Trump and North Korea. Forgetting the President’s “little rocket man” remarks and building on months of denial that Trump had brought the world as close to the brink of nuclear annihilation as it has ever been, politicians, bureaucrats, policy wonks, and journalists have been speaking as though Trump were engaged in actual negotiations with Kim Jong Un. Some deliriously joined him in contemplating the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize. The voices of a few experts who dared say that nothing had been accomplished yet and expressed doubt that the summit would actually occur were quickly drowned out. The ritual of analysis and anticipation that normally accrues to diplomacy was accruing instead to Trump’s flailing gestures, in the same way that the normal rituals of punditry have accrued to Trump’s tweets, harangues, and inconsistencies, all of which are the opposite of politics. On Friday, the Times’ morning podcast, “The Daily,” offered up a thoughtful analysis of Trump’s summit-cancelling missive, which was written in the language of a sulking, lovelorn seventh grader. But no sooner was the podcast posted than Trump told the media that he might hold the summit after all.

We are losing the habit, and perhaps the capability, of distinguishing reality from vacuum. This is disorienting in the present and disastrous for the future—it is the one factor that will make post-Trumpian recovery, when it comes, so difficult. We must pose a bigger question than whether Administration members or congressional Republicans should stay or go, for it’s not only Trump’s appointees or fellow party members who are implicated in the daily insults and damage to our perceptions. We should be asking what each one of us can do to assert a fact-based reality at any given time. The great French thinker and activist Simone Weil had a prescription that she wrote down in her journal in 1933: “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” A few days later, she added, “Refuse to be an accomplice. Don’t lie—don’t keep your eyes shut.”

Throughout the twentieth century, writers and thinkers who faced reality-destroying regimes kept producing similar recipes. “Live not by lies,” the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. The Czech dissident playwright and future President Václav Havel pondered the predicament of living, unquestioningly, “inside the lie”—and the uncanny power of stepping outside of it. In our case, stepping outside the lie means refusing—stubbornly, consistently, incrementally—to lend credence to the opposite of politics, the opposite of diplomacy, and the opposite of sanity. That would require thinking, reading, and speaking critically: not treating an outburst as though it were politics, a tantrum as though it were diplomacy, and a delusion as though it were aspiration. The good news is that this is not an entirely impossible task.

LA TIMES: JUDICIAL BURNOUT: Unjust Failed Laws That Congress Ignores; Morally Corrosive Policies Of The Obama & Trump Administrations; & An Overwhelming Workload Combine to Demoralize Even Article III Judges! — “I have presided over a process that destroys families!”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=9f85955b-8f63-4c72-a322-e89f2d83b70b

Lauren Villagran reports for the

‘I have presided over a process that destroys families’

Judge can’t reconcile values and the law

Crackdown on illegal immigration takes its toll on a federal judge with an unparalleled sentencing record.

By Lauren Villagran

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Day in, day out, immigrants shuffle into Judge Robert Brack’s courtroom, shackled at the wrist and ankle, to be sentenced for the crime of crossing the border.

The judge hands down sentences with a heavy heart. Since he joined the federal bench in 2003, Brack has sentenced some 15,000 defendants, the vast majority of them immigrants with little or no criminal record.

“See, I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” said Brack one day in his chambers in Las Cruces. “And I think we as a country are better than this.”

Brack’s court in rural southern New Mexico is swollen with immigration cases, the migrants brought to his courtroom by the dozen. They exchange guilty pleas for “time served” sentences, usually not more than two months on the first or second offense. They leave his court as felons.

For years, federal authorities in this area along the New Mexico border have taken a distinctively hard-line approach to enforcing immigration law, pursuing criminal charges rather than handling cases administratively.

Essentially, authorities here have already been carrying out the “zero tolerance” policy Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions unveiled in April, when he announced that all immigrants who cross the border will be charged with a crime.

Together, the Border Patrol and U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico bring charges against nearly every eligible adult migrant apprehended at the state’s border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That amounted to 4,190 prosecutions last fiscal year.

Vigorous enforcement in New Mexico is a result of ample bed space in the state’s border county jails and a fast-track system that prosecutes nonviolent migrants quickly. The state also doesn’t face the volume of illegal crossings that south Texas does, for example.

“It is an efficient process,” says U.S. Atty. John Anderson of the District of New Mexico. “That is one of the key features that allows us to implement 100% prosecutions.”

For Judge Brack, it’s a punishing routine. And it has been building for a long time. Back in 2010, the judge had been on the federal bench for seven years, his docket overloaded with immigration cases, when “at some point I just snapped,” he said.

He sat down to compose a letter to President Obama to call for a more compassionate approach to immigration, one that would keep families together and acknowledge that the demands of the labor market drive immigration:

I write today because my experience of the immigration issue, in some 8,500 cases, is consistently at odds with what the media reports and, therefore, what many believe.

I have learned why people come, how and when they come, and what their expectations are. The people that I see are, for the most part, hardworking, gentle, uneducated and completely lacking in criminal history. Just simple people looking for work.

He didn’t get a reply.

No other federal criminal court judge comes near Brack’s sentencing record.

In the five years through 2017, Brack ranked first among 680 judges nationwide for his caseload, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks court data. He sentenced 6,858 offenders — 5,823 of them for felony immigration violations.

It’s a dubious honor for a man who is a devout Catholic and makes plain his moral dilemma in public hearings. He takes seriously his oath to uphold the laws of the United States. But he is a cog in a system he believes is unjust.

Johana Bencomo, director of organizing with the Las Cruces immigrant advocacy group Comunidades en Acción y Fe — Communities in Action and Faith — calls criminal prosecution of migrants “dehumanizing.”

“We’re just this rural community with some of the highest prosecution rates,” she said. “That is Brack’s legacy, no matter how you spin it.”

Advocates of stronger immigration enforcement counter that prosecutions are a crucial element of border security and have contributed to today’s historically low rates of illegal immigration.

“Criminal charges turn out to be one of the most effective tools for dissuading people from trying [to cross] again,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tougher border enforcement.

The effects of this enforcement play out at the five-story, copper-colored federal building in Las Cruces, about 47 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Brack’s chambers are on the top floor.

In windowless cellblocks on the bottom floor, migrants from Mexico, Central America and Brazil wait to make their initial appearance in a federal magistrate courtroom.

The same scene repeats again and again: The immigrants crowd five broad benches, the juror’s box and the swivel chairs meant for attorneys. They wear the jumpsuits of the four county jails where they are being held: a sea of orange, navy, dark green, fluorescent yellow.

They hear their rights and the charges against them. They eventually plead guilty, to benefit from New Mexico’s fast-track process. Within a month or so, they will find themselves in Brack’s court for sentencing and within days they’ll be deported.

The border used to be wide open, but now it is closed, Brack tells each migrant at sentencing. There are more Border Patrol agents than you can count. Immigration used to be handled as a civil offense, but now it is criminal: a misdemeanor on the first attempt, a felony on the second.

“Everyone gets caught and what’s worse, everyone goes to jail,” he told one migrant, a Mexican woman named Elizabeth Jimenez Rios. “That is not how it has always been, but that is how it is now.”

Their fate is sealed, but Brack still asks the public defenders to tell each migrant’s story.

Elías Beltran, an oil field worker from Mexico, with no criminal history, tried to return to his wife and two kids, U.S. citizens in eastern New Mexico. He lived there for 15 years before he was deported.

Andres Badolla Juarez, a farmworker from Mexico, wanted to pick strawberries in California to support his wife, toddler and new baby — all U.S. citizens — in Arizona. He lived in the U.S. for 16 years and got deported after an aggravated DUI. It was his fourth failed attempt to cross the border.

Rosario Bencomo Marquez, a 52-year-old maid from Mexico, with no criminal history, hoped to return to her daughter and grandchildren in Santa Fe. She lived in the U.S. for 19 years before she was deported.

Brack also sees migrants charged with drug offenses or long criminal records and is unsparing in their punishment. But they are a minority, he said.

“I get asked the question, ‘How do you continue to do this all day every day?’ I recognize the possibility that you could get hard-edged, you could get calloused, doing what I do,” he said. “I don’t. Every day it’s fresh. I can’t look a father and a husband in the eye and not feel empathy.”

Brack, 65, is the son of a railroad-worker father and homemaker mother and earned a law degree at the University of New Mexico. He served as a state judge before being named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush.

In his chambers, above a shelf stacked with books on jurisprudence, Bible study and basketball, hang framed pictures of his forefathers: men who immigrated to the U.S. from England and Prussia. Brack grew up in rural New Mexico, where immigrants — whatever their status — were viewed as “valuable co-workers,” not a threat, he said.

After that first letter to Obama in 2010, he wrote another. And another. As the nation periodically heaved toward the possibility of immigration reform, only to leave the issues — and lives of millions — unresolved, Brack continued to write letters to the White House.

He told more heart-wrenching stories about families divided. He kept it up for four years. He pleaded for a civil debate: “See what I see, hear what I hear. Be wary of the loudest, angriest voices.”

He signed each letter with prayer: “May God continue to bless all those who serve our great nation.”

He never got a response. He stopped writing.

And now, after so many grueling years and thousands more immigration cases, Brack has decided enough is enough. He takes “senior status” in July, effectively stepping aside to serve part time. President Trump will name his replacement.

Villagran writes for Searchlight New Mexico.

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Imagine what the stress levels are like for U.S. Immigration Judges! They often have pending dockets in excess of 2500 cases; are expected to “grind out” so-called “oral decisions” in “life or death” cases without time to reflect or the assistance of judicial law clerks; lack the job tenure, independence, and status of an Article III judge; operate in an out of control court system largely without rules; have been stripped of effective control of their dockets; and are constantly subjected to disingenuous attacks, “production quotas” and a “bogus blame game” by their so-called “boss” Attorney General Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions — who has a well-earned reputation for lacking any moral sensitivity or responsibility for his statements and actions, having a biased and one-sided view of the law, and being totally unqualified and incompetent to administer a major court system that is supposed to be providing Due Process for migrants.

PWS

05-27-18

SENATE DEMOCRATS URGE SESSIONS TO UPHOLD REFUGEE PROTECTIONS FOR LGBTQ AND OTHERS IN MATTER OF A-B-

May 23, 2018

CORTEZ MASTO, COLLEAGUES CALL ON SESSIONS TO UPHOLD PROTECTIONS FOR LGBTQ ASYLUM SEEKERS FLEEING PERSECUTION

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Cortez (D-Nev) Masto joined Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) and other Senate Democrats in sending a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging that the Justice Department uphold a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that provides protections for LGBTQ asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution. In the letter, the senators highlight the increasing threat of violence LGBTQ individuals face in many parts of the world.

“LGBTQ individuals’ access to the U.S. asylum process has assumed increased urgency today as their persecution by both state and private actors is worsening in many parts of the world,” said the senators. “As of 2017, 72 countries worldwide effectively outlaw same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults. Eight apply the death penalty as a punishment for such relations. A majority of countries lack applicable hate crime laws and have law enforcement agencies that neither effectively investigate nor document hate-motivated private violence against LGBTQ individuals.”

The senators continued, “Altering the BIA’s decision in Matter of A-B- to place additional roadblocks and burdens upon asylum seekers could potentially deprive deserving LGBTQ applicants with an opportunity to secure protection in the U.S. that would save their lives. Any increase in the burden of proof for LGBTQ asylum seekers experiencing private harm – additional evidence not now needed by either the immigration courts or asylum officers to fairly adjudicate claims – would be unnecessary and contrary to the public interest.”

In addition to Cortez Masto, Harris and Feinstein, the letter was signed by U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Patty Murray (D-WA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Bob Casey (D-PA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Bob Menendez (D-NJ).

A copy of the letter can be found HERE and below:

Dear Attorney General Sessions:

We write to express our concerns about your pending review of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) decision in Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 227 (A.G. 2018) and the adverse impact such a decision could have on vulnerable populations fleeing persecution and violence. We urge you to uphold the BIA’s decision, which reflects a well-settled matter of law that provides critical protections for vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ individuals subject to private persecution that foreign governments are unwilling or unable to control.

LGBTQ individuals’ access to the U.S. asylum process has assumed increased urgency today as their persecution by both state and private actors is worsening in many parts of the world. As of 2017, 72 countries worldwide effectively outlaw same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults. Eight apply the death penalty as a punishment for such relations. A majority of countries lack applicable hate crime laws and have law enforcement agencies that neither effectively investigate nor document hate-motivated private violence against LGBTQ individuals. As just two alarming examples of state sponsored anti-LGBTQ actions this past year, Russian authorities in Chechnya undertook an anti-gay purge that involved the alleged torture of dozens of men, and Egyptian authorities engaged in a campaign to target and incarcerate individuals solely based on their sexual orientation.

Your referral order for the Matter of A-B- – in which you aim to address, “Whether, and under what circumstances, being a victim of private criminal activity constitutes a cognizable ‘particular social group’ for purposes of an application for asylum or withholding of removal” –has great import for the majority of LGBTQ asylum seekers who arrive in the United States fleeing persecution by private individuals. In the decades since this country first recognized LGBTQ status as a protected particular social group, it has been well established that LGBTQ individuals face grave risks in reporting private persecution or seeking governmental protection from such persecution abroad. Any change to this body of law would be a mistake.

In countries where government authorities engage in serious physical and sexual assaults of LGBTQ individuals, it is effectively impossible for them to seek protection from those same authorities when faced with private persecution. In some countries, simply asking for protection from state authorities can result in government-sponsored persecution. Even where state authorities are not active perpetrators of violence against LGBTQ individuals, they frequently turn a blind eye, emboldening private actors to engage in hate-motivated violence. U.S. State Department research highlights that foreign government retribution towards and lack of assistance for LGBTQ individuals who face private threats of persecution is commonplace, even when the population is not expressly criminalized. This chills the ability of LGBTQ individuals to report such persecution in their home countries.

Societal and familial considerations also often prevent LGBTQ victims of private persecution from coming forward to foreign authorities. They may be threatened with reprisals from their persecutors or coming forward would reveal their LGBTQ status and increase other persecution. In many countries, the act of reporting violence can have deadly consequences.

Altering the BIA’s decision in Matter of A-B- to place additional roadblocks and burdens upon asylum seekers could potentially deprive deserving LGBTQ applicants with an opportunity to secure protection in the U.S. that would save their lives. Any increase in the burden of proof for LGBTQ asylum seekers experiencing private harm – additional evidence not now needed by either the immigration courts or asylum officers to fairly adjudicate claims – would be unnecessary and contrary to the public interest. As such, we strongly urge you to leave undisturbed the BIA’s decision in Matter of A-B-.

###

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The effort is likely to be futile. It’s hard to believe that Sessions, given his xenophobic record and anti-asylum rhetoric, certified the case to himself (actually over the objection of both the DHS and the Respondent) just to uphold and strengthen refugee protections for abused women and LGBTQ individuals. Indeed, Sessions has a clear record of anti-LGBTQ views and actions to go along with his anti-asylum bias.

But, the law favoring asylum protections for victims of DV and LGBTQ individuals who suffer harm at the hands of non-state-actors that governments are unwilling or unable to control is now well established. Therefore, Sessions’s likely “scofflaw” attempt to undo it and deny protections to such vulnerable refugees is likely to “muck up the system” and artificially increase the backlogs in the short run, while failing in the long run to achieve the perversion of justice and denial of Due Process for asylum seekers that he seeks to impose.

Surprisingly, the Article III (“real”) courts don’t allow the disgruntled prosecutor to “certify” results that he doesn’t like to himself and rewrite the law in his own favor! That’s why the facade of “courts” operating within the USDOJ must come to an end, sooner or later!

PWS

05-26-18

SPLC ON THE POLITICS OF HATE & BIGOTRY: 1) SESSIONS DISSES DUE PROCESS BY TRASHING ADMINISTRATIVE CLOSING; 2) TRUMP’S NATIVIST RHETORIC “OVERLAPS” HATE CRIMES AGAINST MINORITIES!

SPLC STATEMENT ON SESSIONS’ DECISION TO CURTAIL ‘ADMINISTRATIVE CLOSINGS’ OF IMMIGRATION COURT CASES

By Dan Werner, Senior Supervising Attorney

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ ideologically driven decision today to bypass the immigration courts and decide himself to remove another avenue of relief for immigrants undermines due process and the rule of law.

It will add thousands more cases back into the huge backlog of the immigration courts, and will result in the imprisonment and deportation of immigrants who now have a clear path toward legal immigration status.

This decision is just further evidence of Sessions’ anti-immigrant agenda, which separates families, creates fear in communities, and punishes vulnerable people who may be fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Though President Trump may call them “animals” to justify his administration’s inhumane policies, these immigrants are friends, neighbors, and members of our families and communities.

With every new hate-driven policy emerging from this administration, we must rededicate ourselves to speaking out and taking action to preserve our nation’s fundamental values.

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How Trump’s nativist tweets overlap with anti-Muslim and anti-Latino hate crimes

Words matter. Heated political rhetoric, especially derogatory language toward groups of people, can create all kinds of unintended consequences, including sometimes physical violence.

When individuals of influence, including political candidates and heads of state use such words, the consequence can be especially pronounced.

In the run-up to, and since his election as President of the United States, Donald Trump’s words have attracted a lot of attention. Many commentators and activists have charged that Trump’s rhetoric has fueled hate crimes in the United States against minorities. Until recently, many individuals voicing such concerns pointed to high-profile individual cases, rather than systematic data. Now that’s changing as new research is emerging.

Hatewatch spoke with Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz, two researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom who have been studying the impact of hate speech on social media and how that translates to hate crimes in the real world. Muller and Schwarz discuss their latest study, “Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Crime Under Trump”

Their study used Twitter and FBI hate crimes data to come to a stark conclusion: hate crimes against Muslims and Latinos occurred shortly after Trump made disparaging tweets about Muslims and Latinos. Moreover these anti-Muslim and anti-Latino hate crimes were physically concentrated in parts of the country where there is high Twitter usage.

Karsten and Carlo, can you give us an overview of your research interests and your recent study on President Trump’s tweets and Muslim hate crimes?

Carlo: We are economists working in slightly different areas, but we both have an interest in what people usually call political economy. What we try to do is to apply modern quantitative methods to study political outcomes and the role of social media. In our most recent study, we find that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. has increased quite markedly under Trump. We show that this increase started with the beginning of Trump’s presidential campaign and is predominately driven by U.S. counties where a large fraction of the population uses Twitter. The data also show that this increase cannot be easily explained by differences in demographics, votes for Republicans, crime rates, media consumption or other factors.

Karsten: The second thing we do in the paper is to look at the correlation between Trump’s tweets about Islam-related topics and hate crimes that target Muslims. And what we find is that this correlation is very strong after Trump had started his campaign, but basically zero before. We also find that when Trump tweets about Muslims, hate crimes increases disproportionately in those areas where many people use Twitter. It is also important to note that hate crimes against Muslims were not systematically higher in those areas during previous presidencies, so it seems unlikely we are simply capturing the fact that people in some areas dislike Muslims more than in others.

Are you claiming Trump’s tweets have caused hate crimes?

Karsten: We are very careful not to make that claim in the paper because I think it is extremely hard to tell based on our data. After all, we are not looking at a controlled laboratory experiment so there is always room for other drivers. But if you look at the results, some point in that direction, for example that Trump’s tweets are particularly correlated with future hate crimes in counties where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: A simple thing to do here is to think about what alternative stories could explain our findings. For example, one could imagine that people who Trump himself follows (such as Fox & Friends or Alex Jones) are the real driving factor. Or that people have recently become more radicalized in rural areas, or where the majority votes Republican. But a careful look at the data reveals that Twitter usage is in fact lower in counties where people tend to vote Republican and in rural areas, and we use some survey data to show that Twitter users generally prefer CNN or MSNBC over Fox News. These factors also cannot easily explain why the increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes should occur precisely with Trump’s campaign start and not before or after.

Karsten: So overall, we take our findings as suggestive of a potential connection between social media and hate crimes. But at the end of the day, readers have to make up their own minds.

What were some of the other key findings that stood out with regard to Muslims?

Karsten: What really stands out to me is just how strong the correlation of Trump’s tweets is with future anti-Muslim hate crimes. So, for example, one might be worried that Trump simply tweets about Muslims when people are generally very interested in everything related to Islam. But what we find is that Trump’s tweets are correlated with hate crimes even if we first even if we control for the effect of general attention to Islam-related topics (as measured by Google Searches). Although there are other explanations, I also found it striking that you see a spike in hate crimes against Muslims in the week of the Presidential election, but only in areas where many people use Twitter.

Carlo: Another thing I found quite interesting is that Trump’s tweets about Muslims are not correlated with other types of hate crimes. The reason this is important is because one could easily imagine that people just happen to be particularly angry at minorities in some weeks compared to others, and that Trump is just part of that. But if this was true, we would also expect there to be more hate crimes against Latinos, or LGBTQ people or African Americans, which does not seem to be the case at all. We also do not find any evidence that other types of hate crimes increased in areas with many Twitter users around Trump’s campaign start — except a small shift for anti-Latino crimes.

Your study also noticed a statistically significant association between anti-Latino tweets and hate crimes. Why do you think there has been a similar, but less robust set of results?

Karsten: When we started our study, we only had data on hate crimes until the end of 2015 — after Trump’s campaign started in June 2015, but before his election. And what you see in the data is a very strong correlation between Trump’s tweets about Latinos and subsequent anti-ethnic hate crimes starting with the beginning of his campaign until December 2015, while there is virtually no correlation before. After the 2016 data were released, we found that the effect becomes substantially weaker from around mid-2016 onwards.

Carlo: When we looked at that more closely — and we think that is consistent with the media coverage during that time as well — Trump toned down his anti-Latino rhetoric quite a lot in the run-up to the campaign. There was, for example, his tweet with a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo 2016. If you go through Trump’s Twitter feed in the pre-election period, you will see only a handful tweets about Latinos at all during that time. And while hate crimes against Latinos remained slightly elevated in areas with many Twitter users during that time, that means the correlation with the timing of Trump’s tweets became weaker. A potential interpretation is that it is not that the results are so much weaker than those for anti-Muslim hate crime, it’s just that Trump essentially stopped tweeting negative things about Latinos.

How does this study compare and contrast with your earlier investigationinto the online activities of the far-right and nativist political party Alternative for Germany (AfD)?

Carlo: In our study on Germany, we found a very similar correlation between posts about refugees on the AfD’s Facebook page and crimes targeting refugees. We look at these two studies as complementary, even though they use somewhat different methodologies. In the German setting, we have very granular data on internet and Facebook outages that we can use as “quasi-experiments” to get at the causal effect of social media. And what we found there is that, even if you compare neighboring cities, refugees are more likely to be victims of violent attacks where many people use social media, particularly when tensions are high. Importantly, these are relative effects.

What is different for the U.S. is that we find this link between Trump’s campaign start and the increase in the absolute number of hate crimes against precisely those minorities in his verbal crosshairs (e.g. Muslims and Latinos), making the link by using Trump’s tweets. and FBI hate crimes dataset. By using the FBI hate crimes statistics, it also allow us to compare the recent change in hate crimes to those under presidents since 1990s.

For civically conscious users of the internet, what are the most important takeaways and implications from your research?

Carlo: On one hand, our goal is to suggest that politicians should not ignore social media, because the correlation with real-life hate crimes seems to be pretty strong. We think that this discussion should be taken seriously. On the other hand, we want to caution against any attempts at censorship. Some countries have an outright ban on certain social media platforms, and these states are usually not known for their open political discourse and freedom of speech. The challenge is to come up with solutions that can help protect citizens from violent extremists without imposing drastic limits on freedom of expression. In the end, the people who actually commit hate crimes are the ones we have to hold accountable.

Karsten: I want to give a somewhat different perspective here. Many people talk about a potential “dark side” of social media, but the number of studies that have actually looked at this issue with data is surprisingly small. One of the most important takeaways for me is that as a society we should be spending more time and resources to support researchers working on this area. It is clearly something that many people care about, and it matters tremendously for policymakers as well.

What do you plan to do next in your research?

Karsten: We think a big open question is to come up with more concrete ways of measuring whether “echo chambers” on social media really exist, and how they differ from echo chambers in other domains. If social media is indeed different, the question is what can be done to get people to consider information from outside of their bubble. Our data for Germany in particular will hopefully also allow us to show how exactly online hate on Facebook is transmitted in practice.

Illustration credit: zixia/Alamy Photo

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Trump is certainly the wrong man for the job at this point in our history.

PWS

05-26-18

FULL FRONTAL: SAMANTHA BEE ICES ICE! (WARNING: Video Clip Contains Explicit Language)

https://youtu.be/AiBtPy0EOno

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Most of the ICE folks that I met during my career (including with the “Legacy INS”) were hard-working, dedicated civil servants performing a very difficult and often thankless job. In particular, the attorneys in the Office of ICE Chief Counsel in Arlington were not only talented lawyers but had strong senses of justice that often went beyond the most narrow constructions of the law.

They also had strong senses of being part of the larger “justice system team” working cooperatively with both the Immigration Judges and the private bar to keep the dockets moving while dispensing justice with humanity that reflected legal knowledge, the willingness to exercise their discretion, and the courage to do what was necessary to make a broken system function in something approaching a fundamentally fair manner.

For those of us involved the creation of the forerunner of the “Modern Chief Counsel System” at INS in the 1980’s, it’s exactly what we had in mind. According to my sources, that important attitude and the values upon which it was based (which, admittedly, might never have existed in some ICE offices) has now largely disappeared in light of the Trump Administration’s mismanagement and “gonzo” enforcement policies.

I don’t see how I could have done my job as a judge without the thoughtful assistance and professionalism of the ICE Office of Chief Counsel in Arlington. Working with them, our private bar, and our dedicated court support team as a group was a daily pleasure and probably extended my career by a number of years.

The main problem with ICE these days appears to stem from extraordinarily poor leadership from the top down, starting, but by no means ending, with Trump himself. As a result, ICE is now well on its way to becoming the most hated and least trusted law enforcement agency in America. While it might not require abolition of ICE, it will require fundamental changes to ICE structure, culture, and policies in the future under more talented, practical, and humane leaders.

Unfortunately, and not necessarily thorough the fault of individual employees at the “working” level, today’s ICE is a national disgrace and an embarrassment — for American justice, the Constitution, and our national values.

PWS

05-25-18

TRUMP’S COWARDLY ATTACK ON CHILDREN – More Lies, Distortions, Smears, & Racism Mark Administration Officials’ Bogus Attempts To Link Refugee Children & Their Legal Rights With Gangs!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-warns-against-admitting-unaccompanied-migrant-children-theyre-not-innocent/2018/05/23/e4b24a68-5ec2-11e8-8c93-8cf33c21da8d_story.html

Seung Min Kim reports for the Washington Post:

. . . .

The issue is compounded, Rosenstein said, by the fact that these migrant children must eventually be released from detention, and many never show up for their immigration proceedings before a judge. Rosenstein, quoting statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, said less than 4 percent of unaccompanied minors are ultimately removed from the United States.

“We’re letting people in who are creating problems. We’re letting people in who are gang members. We’re also letting people in who are vulnerable,” Rosenstein said. Because many of the migrant children lack families or a similar support system, they become “vulnerable to [gang] recruitment,” the deputy attorney general said,

Thomas Homan, the departing deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said about 300 arrests related to the MS-13 gang were made on Long Island last year. Of those arrested, more than 40 percent entered the United States as unaccompanied minors, he said.

=

“So it is a problem,” Homan said. “There is a connection.”

Other federal statistics paint a somewhat different tale. From October 2011 until June of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials arrested about 5,000 individuals with confirmed or suspected gang ties, according to congressional testimony from the agency’s acting chief, Carla Provost, in June.

Of the 5,000 figure, 159 were unaccompanied minors, Provost testified, and 56 were suspected or confirmed to have ties with MS-13. In that overall time frame, CBP apprehended about 250,000 unaccompanied minors, according to Provost.

. . . .

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Read the full article at the link.

The Trump claims are, as usual, totally bogus. The percentage of gang members who come in as “unaccompanied minors” is infinitesimally small. The vast majority of these kids are gang victims entitled to asylum or relief under the Convention Against Torture if the law were fairly applied (which it isn’t).

Contrary to the suggestion by Rosenstein, when given access to legal representation, approximately 95% of the unaccompanied children show up for their hearings. And the “vulnerability” mentioned by Rosenstein is largely the result of the Trump Administration’s “reign of terror” against migrant communities which has made nearly all migrant children, along with other community members, “easy pickings” for gangs, with no realistic recourse to law enforcement. There are actually strategies for combatting gangs. But the Trumpsters have no interest in them.

Indeed, gangs have recognized that folks like Trump, Sessions, Homan, Neilsen, and now Rosenstein are their best recruiters and enablers. How dumb can we be as a country to put these biased, spineless, and clueless dudes in charge of “law enforcement.”

Interesting that in an obvious attempt to kiss up to Trump, Sessions, & Co and save his job, Rosenstein pathetically has decided that being a sycophant and sucking up to the bosses is his best defense. Particularly when it’s at the expense of kids and other vulnerable migrants seeking protection. Pretty disgusting! And, I doubt that it will eventually save him from Trump. Just tank his reputation and his future like others who have been “slimed for life” by their association with Trump.

Join the New Due Process Army and stand up for kids against the “child abuse” being practiced by the Trump Administration and its corrupt and incompetent officials.

PWS

05-24-18

SARA RAMEY @ THE HILL: To Achieve Justice, We Must Get The U.S. Immigration Courts Out Of The Department Of Justice!

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/388876-doj-shouldnt-be-in-charge-of-immigration-courts

On April 18 the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on strengthening the Immigration Court system. Several organizations, including the American Bar Association and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, recommended that Congress make the immigration courts independent courts under Article I of the Constitution. Congress should do so without delay, especially in light of the attorney general’s May 17 decision in Matter of Castro-Tum eliminating administrative closure.

People on both sides of the political divide agree that the immigration courts are overburdened. The approximately 350 immigration judges who work in about 60 courts around the country are currently tasked with reviewing close to 700,000 cases. The Trump administration has made several, mostly misguided, attempts to fix this backlog. However, as Former Chairman of the BIA Paul Schmidt stated recently ‘‘Nobody… can fix this system while it remains under the control of DOJ.’’

Because the immigration courts, along with the Board of Immigration Appeals, are currently part of the Department of Justice, the attorney general, and others in the executive, not least of all the president, are in charge of agency regulations, case procedures, the hiring and firing of judges, and decision-making.

In recent months the administration has made unprecedented attacks on the judicial independence of immigration judges, including policy changes that are in direct contradiction to the recommendations of an April 2017 Booz Allen Hamilton report commissioned by the Department of Justice.

On March 30 the administration instituted a case completion quota of 700 a year for a “satisfactory” performance rating. This amounts to each Immigration Judge needing to complete on average three cases every working day. For judges who have dockets with a high number of asylum cases, for example, this arbitrary requirement will push them to expedite cases in ways that are extremely dangerous to due process.

As the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, Judge Tabaddor, testified at the congressional hearing, there has been ‘‘no quota ever, in any court; somehow implicit in [designating a quota] is that judges are not doing enough… [However, w]e should focus on [is] how we can support our judges.’’

Over the last six years I have directly or indirectly litigated over a hundred asylum cases, and in 95 percent of the cases the hearing takes about 3.5 hours, or the equivalent of one working morning or afternoon. This does not include the time a judge needs in camera to review the hundreds of pages of evidence in the record. In reality, a judge who completes one asylum case a day, and not three, is already extremely efficient.

The real problem is not with how hard-working the immigration judges are. As I explained in a 2016 article, part of the problem lies with understaffing. Instead of hiring a reasonable number of judges and law clerks, and otherwise investing in supporting the work of our Immigration Judges, the Administration is eliminating administrative closure and calling for administratively closed cases to be put back on the docket, actions that only serve to raise the number of pending cases.

If, for example, the Department of Justice puts all the administratively closed cases back on the docket, it would increase the court backlog to over 1,000,000. These are cases of crime victims and DACA recipients and others where an immigration judge has already determined that it would not be a good use of judicial resources, or in the public interest, to litigate, usually because the person is eligible for some non-judicial form of immigration relief and has a case pending with USCIS. Re-calendaring these cases would not only unnecessarily increase the work of taxpayer-funded DHS Trial Attorneys but it would add more pressure to the already overworked immigration judges.

The attorney general has also stepped into managing the immigration courts by restricting the use of continuances, which in the fast-paced detention context where my organization works are often necessary in order to have time to obtain crucial pieces of evidence and otherwise prepare for trial.

While the attorney general is the boss and is responsible for the judges’ performance, he should have a little more faith in the good judgement of his immigration judges, who, unlike the attorney general, are looking at the situation-specific issues in the individual case before them.

While the helpfulness of the attorney general’s methods for carrying out his job are questionable at best, the underlying problem remains that, regardless of our political opinion on the administration’s policies, those policies are affecting the judicial independence of our immigration courts and putting due process in jeopardy.

What the attorney general says matters to the immigration judges working under him. In one recent case, the immigration judge cited him as saying there is a lot of fraud in the asylum process as evidence that the asylum seeker was lying. Not only was the attorney general’s statement not based on facts — at least not on facts made publicly available, or that anyone even claimed exist, and which statement runs in stark contrast to my six years of on-the-ground experience — but that statement had nothing to do with the truthfulness of the individual asylum seeker present before the court.

Additionally, as stated by the former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges Dana Marks, there is a ‘‘conflict of interest between the judicial and prosecutorial functions [of the Department of Justice that] creates a significant (and perhaps even fatal) flaw to the immigration court structure.’’

It appears that the administration is looking for specific outcomes in cases with little regard to the merits of the claim. The attorney general has certified an unprecedented number cases to himself for review with the idea that he might change the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. This extraordinary power of one political-appointee to overturn the decision of trained immigration judges is fundamentally at odds with judicial independence.

Unfortunately, it appears that not only the review and firing of judges has become political, but their hiring too. Information has surfaced that the Department of Justice is asking candidates questions about their political party affiliation, their position on same-sex relationships, and their opinion on abortion; preparing internal memos on those whose immigration views that do not align with the administration’s policies; slowing down review of applications where there are ideological differences; and withdrawing employment offers or delaying start dates by up to a one and a half years.

Making judicial decisions subject to the political whims of the times, and not dependent on the accurate execution of the law, is a serious risk to the checks-and-balances system underlying our democracy. The need for independent immigration courts has never been clearer.

Sara Ramey is an immigration attorney and the executive director at the Migrant Center for Human Rights in San Antonio, Texas. The views in this article are not intended to reflect the official position of the organization.

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

As this article shows, inappropriate anti-asylum statements and knowingly false narratives from Jeff Sessions do affect the fairness of results. Yes, there are many courageous judges in the system who continue to treat respondents fairly and grant relief in appropriate cases.

But, numerous reports have established that there are Immigration Judges with anti-asylum and anti-migrant biases similar to Sessions’s. They now feel “empowered” to ignore the law, fairness, and Due Process to deny most applications and remove more migrants.

Moreover, some of the more experienced judges are retirement eligible and therefore largely immune from Sessions’s power because they are immediately eligible to retire. But, as they grow frustrated with the Aimless Docket Reshuffling and growing backlogs created by this Administration’s irresponsible actions and retire, they will be replaced by inexperienced judges. These new judges, in addition to being hand-picked by Sessions, without public input, are subject to removal at will during a two-year “probationary period.” Therefore, new judges are more likely to be influenced by Sessions’s xenophobic, anti-Due-Process views.

Additionally, Sessions is hard at work misusing his “certification” authority to overturn or limit established interpretations and procedures that implement protection and further Due Process and fairness for migrants.

Another important part of Sara’s article — giving lie to the concept that Immigration Judges can complete more than tow “full merits” asylum hearings per day consistent with Due Process.

Over the last six years I have directly or indirectly litigated over a hundred asylum cases, and in 95 percent of the cases the hearing takes about 3.5 hours, or the equivalent of one working morning or afternoon. This does not include the time a judge needs in camera to review the hundreds of pages of evidence in the record. In reality, a judge who completes one asylum case a day, and not three, is already extremely efficient.

Given the tendency of the current Administration not to settle or otherwise reasonably negotiate Immigration Court cases, the number of “full merits” hearings and appeals is likely to increase dramatically, thus adding to the already overwhelming backlog!

Time to end this farce!

PWS

05-24-17

TAL @ CNN: HOUSE GOP SIFTS THROUGH WRECKAGE OF THEIR OWN IMMIGRATION POLICIES; TRUMP CRITIC AIMS TO BE NEXT GOV. OF NEW MEXICO!

Republican leaders search for a path amid immigration civil war

By Tal Kopan, CNN

Last September, Paul Ryan had an idea.

The House speaker gathered together a group of Republican thought leaders on immigration and border security and gave them a mission: agree on something.

They couldn’t.

Almost exactly eight months later, on Friday, he stood in the back of the House floor, resting his chin on his hand and leaning against a rail as he watched an unrelated farm bill — which would have achieved one of his legacy goals of welfare reform — go down in flames, a casualty of the still-unresolved immigration debate.

Now, still staring down the barrel of a rebellion from his typically staid, centrist colleagues, Ryan and leadership is tasked with trying to find a way forward for his members, ahead of the looming midterm elections and following the public airing of dirty laundry that has been dividing the GOP conference for months.

The dramatic implosion of an agriculture policy legislation nicknamed the “farm bill” on Friday came after days of tense negotiations regarding immigration — unrelated to the bill but an issue that has become so fraught for Republicans that the fight over it has now consumed all matters. The bill failed after a group of conservatives withheld their support as they demanded a vote on a hardline immigration bill that does not have the votes to pass.

Conservatives’ actions were prompted by the momentum of a rare rebellion from the other side of the ideological spectrum within the party — a group of moderates who will continue their efforts to bypass leadership this week.

Monday marks the return of lawmakers to the House and the next chance for at least five Republicans to sign on to an effort that would force an immigration floor vote despite repeated pleas from GOP leadership to not resort to the rarely-used, and rarely-successful, procedural step.

As of Monday morning, 20 Republicans and 176 Democrats have signed the so-called discharge petition. If a minimum of 25 Republicans and all 193 Democrats sign it, it will automatically trigger a vote on four competing bills to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, including one to-be-determined bill of Ryan’s own choosing.

Much, much more: http://www.cnn.com/2018/05/21/politics/gop-immigration-republican-house-leaders-daca-farm-bill/index.html

Trump’s top immigration critic could become the governor of a key border state

By Tal Kopan, CNN

President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda has few more outspoken opponents than Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who, as chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has served as the voice of Hispanic and Democratic members of Congress in condemning the administration’s policies.

The New Mexico Democrat is hoping to take that message to a new platform next year, leaving Congress to run to be governor of her border state, where a win would position her to square off directly with Trump on everything from National Guard deployments on the border to his policies affecting legal and illegal immigration.

Signs of what could be to come are obvious on the campaign trail. At a pep talk for volunteers headed out to canvas on a recent Saturday at her Albuquerque campaign office, Lujan Grisham was introduced by two young undocumented advocates, one of whom, Ivonne Orozco, is a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient and was New Mexico’s teacher of the year.

Lujan Grisham dedicated part of her remarks at that event to an update on efforts in Congress to force a vote on preserving DACA on the House floor — and slammed what she called “racist” and “bigoted” recent remarks about immigrants from Trump chief of staff John Kelly, which were met with boos and hisses from her supporters.

“So we called him out, we’re going to keep calling him out, and while we do that, what they’ve done is now 50 Republicans are fighting with their speaker, and … that is a big deal,” Lujan Grisham said, crediting the local advocates with keeping the pressure on to force the vote. “Can you imagine the power we have as New Mexicans if we take that attitude and we bring it to every single neighborhood, every single community, we take it statewide and we show the rest of the world what New Mexicans are made of?”

More from NM: http://www.cnn.com/2018/05/20/politics/michelle-lujan-grisham-new-mexico-trump/index.html

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The GOP restrictionists are often the own party’s worst enemy. If the Dems could get just a little electoral leverage, they should be able to hold off the restrictionists’ anti-immigrant program.

PWS

05-22-18

THE HILL: NOLAN SAYS TRUMP‘S “GET TOUGH” IMMIGRATION POLICIES COULD BE “SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING!”

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/388488-enforcing-trumps-immigration-plan-will-be-harder-than-he-thinks

Nolan writes:

Trump inherited a number of immigration enforcement problems from the Obama administration, the most serious of which was an immigration court backlog that has prevented him from using removal proceedings to reduce the size of the undocumented alien population.

His solution seems to be to heed the advice of Mitt Romney, who said, when asked about reducing the population of undocumented aliens during a debate in 2012:

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”

But Trump is using harboring prosecutions to discourage people from helping undocumented aliens to remain here illegally in addition to enforcing employer sanctions to discourage employers from giving them jobs.

Neither is likely to be successful.

. . . .

If Trump doesn’t find more promising enforcement measures, historians familiar with Macbeth may say that his “hour upon the stage” just amounted to “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article with much more analysis!

I agree with Nolan that in practical terms of reducing the overall undocumented population, Trump’s strategies are not likely to succeed to a numerically significant extent. But, maybe that’s not the objective.

If the real objective to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering, keep stirring the pot of xenophobia, and rev up a restrictionist base, the policies might make more sense. And, certainly guys like Trump, Sessions, & Neilsen never take any responsibility for their own failures — they just shift the blame to others and use that as a bogus justification for seeking (or demanding) unneeded, draconian changes in the law.

PWS

05-21-18

THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE A U.S. CITIZEN YOUR RIGHTS AREN’T UNDER ATTACK BY DHS IN THE “AGE OF TRUMP?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/20/a-border-patrol-agent-detained-two-u-s-citizens-at-a-gas-station-after-hearing-them-speak-spanish/?utm_term=.5bc9585e478a

Amy B. Wang reports for WashPost:

A Montana woman said she plans to take legal action after a Border Patrol agent detained and questioned her and a friend — both U.S. citizens — when he overheard them speaking Spanish at a gas station.

The incident occurred early Wednesday morning at a convenience store in Havre, Mont., a town in the northern part of the state, near the border with Canada.

Ana Suda said she and her friend, Mimi Hernandez, were making a midnight run to the store to pick up eggs and milk. Both are Mexican American and speak fluent Spanish, and they had exchanged some words in Spanish while waiting in line to pay when a uniformed Border Patrol agent interrupted them, Suda said.

“We were just talking, and then I was going to pay,” Suda told The Washington Post. “I looked up [and saw the agent], and then after that, he just requested my ID. I looked at him like, ‘Are you serious?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, very serious.’ ”

Suda said she felt uncomfortable and began recording the encounter with her cellphone after they had moved into the parking lot. In the video Suda recorded, she asks the agent why he is detaining them, and he says it is specifically because he heard them speaking Spanish.

“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent can be heard saying in the video.

Suda asks whether they are being racially profiled; the agent says no.

“It has nothing to do with that,” the agent tells her. “It’s the fact that it has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store, in a state where it’s predominantly English-speaking.”

[‘My next call is to ICE!’: A man flipped out because workers spoke Spanish at a Manhattan deli]

Suda, 37, was born in El Paso and raised across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, but has spent much of her adult life moving around the United States with her husband and young daughter. Hernandez is originally from central California, Suda said.

Despite explaining this to the agent and showing him their IDs, Suda said, he kept them in the parking lot for 35 to 40 minutes. Though no one raised their voices in the video, Suda said she and Hernandez were left shaken and upset by the encounter, which ended around 1 a.m.

“I was so embarrassed … being outside in the gas station, and everybody’s looking at you like you’re doing something wrong. I don’t think speaking Spanish is something criminal, you know?” Suda said. “My friend, she started crying. She didn’t stop crying in the truck. And I told her, we are not doing anything wrong.”

When she got home, Suda posted on Facebook about what had taken place at the gas station. She said her shock began to give way to sadness in the following days, after some local news outlets reported the incident, and her 7-year-old daughter asked whether the video meant they should no longer speak Spanish in public.

“She speaks Spanish, and she speaks English,” Suda said. “When she saw the video, she was like, ‘Mom, we can’t speak Spanish anymore?’ I said ‘No. You be proud. You are smart. You speak two languages.’ This is more for her.”

[Lawyer who threatened to call ICE about Spanish speakers is now target of complaint]

A representative from U.S. Customs and Border Protection told The Post the agency is reviewing the incident to ensure all appropriate policies were followed. Border Patrol agents are trained to decide to question individuals based on a variety of factors, the agency added.

“U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers are committed to treating everyone with professionalism, dignity and respect while enforcing the laws of the United States,” the agency said. “Although most Border Patrol work is conducted in the immediate border area, agents have broad law enforcement authorities and are not limited to a specific geography within the United States. They have the authority to question individuals, make arrests, and take and consider evidence.”

Havre is a rural town with a population of about 10,000, about 35 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border. Border Patrol agents have broad authority to operate within 100 miles of any U.S. border, though they cannot initiate stops without reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation or crime.

Suda said she is used to seeing Border Patrol agents in Havre because it’s so close to Canada, especially at gas stations, but had never been stopped before.

“It’s a nice town. I don’t think it’s a confrontational [population] here,” Suda said. “But now I feel like if I speak Spanish, somebody is going to say something to me. It’s different after something like this because you start thinking and thinking.”

Suda said she plans to contact the American Civil Liberties Union to seek legal guidance. ACLU representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.

“I just don’t want this to happen anymore,” Suda said. “I want people to know they have the right to speak whatever language they want. I think that’s the most important part, to help somebody else.”

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Nobody’s rights are safe in the Age of Trump, Sessions, & Nielsen. Harm to one is harm to all! Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect the Due Process and other Constitutional rights of everyone in America!

PWS

05-21-18

RELIGION: JIM WALLIS @ SOJOURNERS: Can The Real Jesus Who Preached Kindness, Mercy, Forgiveness, Tolerance, Peace, Humility, Sacrifice, and Stood With The Most Downtrodden In Society Be Reclaimed From The Clutches Of The Religious Right? — “Would Jesus talk this way about immigrants, act this way toward women, use such divisive language of racial fear and resentment, show such a blatant disregard for truth, prefer strong-man to servant leadership, and really say that one country should be ‘first?'”

What About Jesus?
Jim Wallis

Just recently, a Washington lawmaker asked me a question over breakfast that has stayed with me ever since. The national legislator is a Christian, but genuinely was having a hard time understanding the message and motivation of the evangelical “advisers” to President Donald Trump. He posed the sincere query, “What about Jesus?” It is exactly the right question and I have thought about it since our conversation: “What about Jesus?”

What do these evangelicals do with that question as they listen and talk with and for Donald Trump? Would Jesus talk this way about immigrants, act this way toward women, use such divisive language of racial fear and resentment, show such a blatant disregard for truth, prefer strong-man to servant leadership, and really say that one country should be “first?” What do we do with Jesus? That is always the right question, including when it comes to politics, and especially if we say we are followers of Jesus Christ.

I ask you to watch this short four-minute video in which several Christian elders from across many traditions and racial lines ask that vital question in their message of Reclaiming Jesus in a Time of Crisis. Listen to their voices and the core teachings of Jesus they are raising.

SEE THE VIDEO

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Of course the “Biblical Jesus” would “just say no” to the rhetoric, philosophy, and corrupt actions of the Trump Administration. Stomping on the poor to aid the rich? “Suffer the children to come unto me” so that I can can separate them from their mothers and put their mothers in prison? Denying protection to the vulnerable stranger? Adultery? Sexual humiliation and abuse of women? Lies? Elevating the material over the spiritual? Putting one’s own “cult of personality” and financial interests ahead of God’s? Self aggrandizement as opposed to self-sacrifice? No Way!

If Jesus were among us, He certainly would be one of the members of the “Migrant Caravans” waiting with the vulnerable to see how we will judge Him and whether He and those around him will receive mercy and justice. There is no way He would be “hanging out” with the Trump Administration and their vile dehumanizing actions and false narratives!

PWS

05-20-18

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Nobody’s rights are safe in the Age of Trump, Sessions, & Nielsen. Harm to one is harm to all! Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect the Due Process and other Constitutional rights of everyone in America!

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