Slate – Page 3 – immigrationcourtside.com

“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

Dead Refugee Child Washes Ashore in Turkey — Stephen Miller Hopes To Kill More Refugees in The Americas

Stephen Miller & Wife — Mr. & Mrs. Stephen Miller Look Forward to Planning Together for More “Crimes Against Humanity” Targeting World’s Most Vulnerable Refugees

“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah”

— From “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors (1971)

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Feb. 24, 2019

I have been getting “unverified hearsay” reports from Courtside readers and others across the country that an emboldened and now totally unrestrained Trump regime actively is planning an all-out extralegal, extrajudicial onslaught against established asylum laws. It’s likely to claim the lives of many of the most vulnerable and deserving asylum seekers in the United States.

Predictably, this atrocious attack on humanity and human dignity is the “brainchild” of newly married neo-fascist White Nationalist hate monger Stephen Miller. Although unconfirmed, these reports have come from diverse enough sources and sound so consistent with the regime’s nativist, xenophobic approach to asylum that I, for one, give them credence. It’s time to start sounding the alarm for the regime’s latest vile assault on the rule of law and our common humanity!

I have gleaned that there is a 200-page anti-asylum screed floating around the bowels of the regime’s immigration bureaucracy representing more or less the nativist version of the “final solution” for asylum seekers. The gist of this monumental effort boils down along these lines:

[W]ould ban the grant of asylum claims involving PSGs defined solely by criminal activity, terrorist activity, persecutory actions, presence in country with generally high crime rates, attempted recruitment by criminal, terrorist, persecutors, perception of wealth, interpersonal disputes which government were not aware of or involved in and do not extend countrywide; private criminal acts which government was not aware of and do not extend countrywide; status as returned from U.S. and gender. Note the inclusion of “gender” at the end.

Thus, in one “foul swoop” the regime would illegally: 1) strip women and the LGBTQ community of their decades-long, hard-won rights to protection under asylum laws; 2) eliminate the current rebuttable regulatory “presumption of countrywide future persecution” for those who have suffered past persecution; 3) reverse decades of well-established U.S. and international rulings that third party actions that the government was unwilling or unable to protect against constitute persecution; and 4) encourage adjudicators to ignore the legal requirement to consider “mixed motivation” in deciding asylum cases.

There is neither legal nor moral justification for this intentional distortion and rewriting of established human rights principles. Indeed, in my experience of more than two decades as a judge at both the appellate and trial levels, a substantial number, perhaps a majority, of the successful asylum and/or withholding of removal claims in Immigration Court involved non-governmental parties and/or gender-based “particular social groups.” They were some of the clearest, most deserving, and easiest to grant asylum cases coming before the Immigration Courts.

At the “pre-Trump” Arlington Immigration Court, many of these cases were so well-documented and clearly “grantable” that they were “pre-tried” by the parties and moved up on my docket by “joint motion” for “short hearing” grants. This, in turn, encouraged and rewarded multiparty cooperation and judicial efficiency. It was “due process with efficiency, in action.”

Consequently, in addition to its inherent lawlessness, cruelty, and intentional inhumanity, the regime’s proposed actions will stymie professional cooperation between parties and inhibit judicial efficiency. This is just one of many ways in which the regime has used a combination of wanton cruelty and “malicious incompetence” to artificially “jack up” the Immigration Court backlog to over 1.3 million pending and “waiting” cases, even with the hiring of hundreds of additional Immigration Judges.

In a functioning democracy, with an independent judiciary, staffed by judges with knowledge, integrity, and courage, you might expect a timely judicial intervention to block this impending legal travesty and humanitarian disaster as soon as it becomes effective. But, as Justice Sotomayor recently pointed out in a blistering dissent, Chief Justice Roberts and his four GOP colleagues appear to have “tilted” in favor of the regime.

They can’t roll over and bend the laws fast enough to “greenlight” each new immigrant-bashing gimmick instituted by the regime. Moreover, as I’m sure is intended, once these new anti-asylum regulations are railroaded into force, the USCIS Asylum Offices will deny “credible fear” in nearly all cases, thus preventing most asylum applicants from even getting a day in court to properly challenge the regulations. All this will happen while the life-tenured Article III Courts look the other way.

For Stephen Miller, the coming Armageddon for defenseless asylum seekers must represent the ultimate triumph of fascism over democracy, hate over reason, and racism over tolerance. Miller was recently quoted in a New Yorker article about how screwing asylum applicants, and presumably knowing that they and their families would suffer and die, be tortured, or be otherwise harmed by his unlawful acts, was, in effect, his “life’s dream.” “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life,” said Miller after a meeting in which he had promoted a fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreement” with El Salvador, a country he acknowledged was without a functioning asylum system.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/stephen-miller-immigration-this-is-my-life.html.

It appears that even Miller’s forlorn “love life” has taken an upturn. Although the Trump Administration has been a “coming out party” for racists, White Nationalists, and White Supremacists of all stripes, the “hater dater circuit” has remained somewhat “restricted.” Evidently, not everyone “gets off” on the chance to get “up close and personal” with “wannabe war criminals.”

Nevertheless, in the middle of all the suffering he has caused, Miller finally found somebody who apparently hates and despises humanity just as much as he does, in Vice Presidential Press Secretary Katie Waldman. They were recently married at the Trump Hotel in D.C. with the “Hater-in-Chief” himself attending the festivities. How can America “get any greater,” particularly if you have the good fortune not to be a refugee condemned to rape, torture, abuse, family separation, beatings, disfiguration, burning, cutting, extortion or other horribles by this cruel, scofflaw, and “maliciously incompetent” regime?

TOM SCOCCA @ SLATE WITH ABOUT ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT “MOSCOW MITCH” & THE GOP’S RIGGED IMPEACHMENT “TRIAL” — “Schiff and the other impeachment managers have all the facts and principles on their side. The president’s defenders had nothing to counter them with but nonsense and lies. Nonsense, lies, and 53 votes.”

https://apple.news/A3t3E97jpSQCSgTT0YG8ZnQ

THE SLATEST

Impeach-O-Meter Goes to the Senate: Schiff Takes His Losses Like a Winner

JANUARY 22 2020 5:25 PM

The re-relaunched Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump will be removed from office by impeachment trial before the end of his first term.

At 1:31 a.m., the tail end of a long Tuesday night in the Senate, Rep. Adam Schiff stepped to the lectern to deliver his final remarks on the Senate Democrats final attempt to amend Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposed rules for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Schiff, the lead impeachment manager from the House, had been talking off and on for hour upon hour, as legal Twitter marveled at his agility and endurance, the president’s legal team snarled derisively at his arguments, and the rock-solid Republican majority voted again and again to ignore whatever his side was proposing.

This time it was a measure to give Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the trial, the authority to resolve disputes about which witnesses would or wouldn’t be relevant to the case—if McConnell’s rules ever did allow any witnesses to be called. Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal attorney, had mounted the argument against it, making a terse case that continued along the path established by all the previous defense arguments, heading inexorably toward the legal doctrine of Nuh-Uh.

“With no disrespect to the chief justice,” Sekulow said, “this is not an appellate court. This is the United States Senate. There is not an arbitration clause in the United States Constitution. ‘The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.’ We oppose the motion—the amendment.”

Sekulow had been hunched over the podium, visibly annoyed at the length of the proceedings. Roberts, throughout the day, had lost his own famous bloom of boyishness till he looked more and more like his predecessor William Rehnquist. But Schiff smiled a little as he started speaking.

“Well,” he said, “this is a good note to conclude on, because don’t let it be said we haven’t made progress today. The president’s counsel has just acknowledged for the first time that this is not an appellate court. I’m glad we have established that. This is the trial, not the appeal. And the trial ought to have witnesses, and the trial shouldn’t be based on the cold record from the court below, because there is no court below, because, as the counsel has just admitted, you are not the appellate court.”

This was, in a certain sense, a triumph. The premise behind McConnell’s trial rules, worked out in advance with Trump’s defense team, was supposed to be that the House has already given the president’s misdeeds a full airing. The Senate is simply there to review the House’s conclusions, and if the House failed to secure all the witnesses and documents to make the case indisputable—thanks to blanket executive defiance of subpoenas, backed by judicial slow-walking—then the Senate has no constitutional duty to try to learn more.

The premise was absurd, but the president’s defenders had been arguing absurd things all day, when they weren’t arguing false ones. Schiff had patiently, thoroughly countered each argument. And now he had maneuvered Trump’s personal lawyer into making the case against the ostensible core of the defense strategy.

It was elegant and pointless, like seeing a basketball player put on a scoring exhibition in an empty gym after even the janitor has swept up and gone home. The real core of the defense strategy is that Mitch McConnell is going to acquit the president no matter what happens. Trump is obviously guilty of abusing his power to try to force Ukraine to advance his political interests for him; between impeachment and trial, the Government Accountability Office helpfully affirmed that his plain undisputed act of withholding aid funds was illegal all on its own.*

The figurative gutters of Fifth Avenue are awash in blood and spent shell casings. What the Senate cameras recorded was a day-long showdown between reason and brute force. Schiff and the other impeachment managers have all the facts and principles on their side. The president’s defenders had nothing to counter them with but nonsense and lies. Nonsense, lies, and 53 votes.

*********

Yup.

Refugees at our border get sent into harm’s way by a scofflaw Trump regime without any Due Process.

But, Trump gets a rigged guaranteed acquittal in a “show trial’ without regard to the evidence, engineered by corrupt GOP “jurors” who pre-pledged to violate their oaths of fairness and impartiality.

Who says American democracy isn’t on the ropes?

PWS

01-23-20

DAHLIA LITHWICK @ SLATE: How Corrupt GOP Minority Rule Is Destroying America! — “ The Republican howls about an unruly minority of socialists and protesters who seek the removal of this president misconstrue the fact that a majority of Americans do not agree to be governed by diktat.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/richmond-to-impeachment-senate-minority-rule-rules.html

Lithwick writes:

On Monday, Kellyanne Conway responded to a reporter’s question about why the president’s public schedule of events included no function to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., on a holiday designated to honor him. Conway decided to answer this question by claiming that Dr. King would have hated impeachment: “The president … agrees with many of the things that Dr. Martin Luther King stood for and agreed with for many years, including unity and equality,” she said. “He’s not the one trying to tear the country apart through an impeachment process and a lack of substance that really is very shameful at this point.”

If this claim—that really it’s the impeachment process that’s tearing this nation apart—sounds familiar, it’s because it was also the lament of GOP House members as impeachment unfolded there. Yes, the day before the president’s impeachment trial opens in the Senate, and on the selfsame day Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced rules that will, he hopes, preclude the calling of witnesses, hearing of evidence, and any other indicia of a “trial” in the Senate trial, the GOP has fallen perfectly in line behind the “stop tearing the country apart” argument as its impeachment defense. It’s the new authoritarian’s lament.

“This is a sad day for America,” intoned Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson, as the House debated the articles of impeachment in December, before calling for a moment of silence to memorialize the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. As Michelle Goldberg noted at the time, “On the surface it seems strange, this constant trumpeting of a vote total that is more than two million less than the total received by Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump didn’t just lose the popular vote—he lost it by a greater margin than any successful presidential candidate in American history. … But as I watched impeachment unfold, it seemed like something more than that—an assertion of whom Republicans think this country belongs to.” The Republican howls about an unruly minority of socialists and protesters who seek the removal of this president misconstrue the fact that a majority of Americans do not agree to be governed by diktat. A new CNN poll shows that 51 percent of Americans want Trump removed from office, 74 percent of them are closely watching impeachment coverage, and 69 percent want to hear witness testimony. In other words, the majority of America does not consent to authoritarian Senate procedures and rules, and it is not some small faction of illiberal Democrats who are tearing the country apart, as Conway suggests. The majority of Americans are not willing to submit to autocracy, though we will turn to the Senate Tuesday to see if the majority of Americans’ wishes are to be trammeled by Senate Republicans. Spoiler alert: It seems all but inevitable that they will be, which tells you a good deal about how the Senate represents American voters.

The Republican howls about an unruly minority of socialists and protesters who seek the removal of this president misconstrue the fact that a majority of Americans do not agree to be governed by diktat.

If you would like to see another example of what minority rule feels like, kindly turn your attention to the 22,000 people who showed up in Richmond, Virginia, for what is now being described in the media as a “peaceful” march and a triumph of peaceable assembly. Armed with assault-style weapons and body armor, militia members were seen wearing masks and carrying semi-automatic rifles outside the seat of government. The biggest star of the rally—identified by the Washington Post as Brandon Lewis—brandished his .50-caliber Barrett M82A1 rifle, as passersby expressed admiration. “This sends a strong visual message,” Lewis, cradling the firearm and decked out in a helmet and bulletproof vest, told the Post. “The government is not above us. They are us.” The Washington Post clocked another protester wearing full-body camo, with a bulletproof vest, a handgun and an AR-15–style assault rifle. The protesters were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly dedicated to a vision of “peace” that looks like this. They were there to refuse to abide by any democratically passed gun control measures, and they stood outside the state capitol chanting First Amendment–protected threats to oust Virginia’s democratically elected governor. More than 100 counties, cities, and towns in Virginia have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries and vowed to oppose any new “unconstitutional restrictions” on guns, presumably following the lead of one of Monday’s speakers, a county sheriff who last month promised to “deputize” gun owners if lawmakers continue to push gun control measures. This nullification will be attempted despite the fact that the great majority of Virginia voters actually favor Democratic proposals to limit gun access, a Washington Post–Schar School poll found in October.

Todd Gilbert, the Republican Leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, issued a statement on Jan. 10 after the decision was taken to declare a temporary state of emergency, banning all weapons from the Capitol grounds from Friday at 5 p.m. until Tuesday at 5 p.m. Gilbert’s statement deplored that action as “disgusting and wrong.” The same Todd Gilbert reversed himself on Sunday, issuing a statement opposing protesters who would spread “white supremacist garbage,” hate, civil unrest, or violence, after multiple white supremacists and Nazis were arrested and it became clear that there was at least a possibility of violence at the march. The threat of violence is only as serious as your most recent FBI briefing, it seems. That doesn’t make for a peaceful demonstration—it puts you at the mercy of the armed marchers.

But because there was no violence in the end, we are told, the rally was “peaceful.” As Jim Geraghty at National Review noted smugly, the threatened violence never occurred, which means that the media panic (and apparently that of Todd Gilbert) was overblown. The march was apparently peaceful, he writes, because “perhaps the hateful types decided to stay away.”

Perhaps there were violent people who decided to stay away from Richmond on Monday. But there were also nonviolent people who decided they needed to stay away from Richmond on Monday. As Garrett Epps notes, those who stayed away included many other groups who had equally compelling First Amendment statements to offer:

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had also planned to assemble and petition for gun-control legislation—as it had done in peaceful competition with gun-rights groups in previous years. This year, because of the threats of armed violence surrounding the gun-rights march, that gun-control demonstration had to be canceled. The delegate from Manassas, Lee Carter, the South’s only socialist legislator, went into hiding because of death threats. Carter had not, in fact, sponsored an anti-gun measure, but gun-rights groups spread disinformation on the internet that he had done so; his life—and his ability to function as a legislator—was endangered.

Pages from the Legislature’s page program were told to stay home. Many legislators asked their staffs to stay away or work from home. The rally forced officials to reschedule the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day vigil for the first time in 28 years. New Virginia Majority—one of the largest progressive groups in the commonwealth—postponed its annual MLK Day of Action due to threats from armed racist groups and because “we cannot protect our people from individuals committed to acts of violence.” Mothers Demand Action stayed off the streets and held phone-banking events, and it almost goes without saying that virtually all people of color stayed home. And so a “peaceful” march, as fêted in the media and fêted by those who seek to blur the line between First Amendment speech and Second Amendment threats, will now include in its definition mass marches in which participants are armed with assault weapons, many of whom were also wearing masks. (Only one person in a mask was arrested Monday despite the fact that hundreds were masked. She was unarmed.)

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

I have always found ridiculous the GOP’s disingenuous claim that removal of Trump would “disenfranchise 63 million voters,” when more than 71 million voters didn’t vote for him and have basically been dismissed by Trump and the GOP who have pandered almost exclusively to the parochial interests of the minority. Included in the majority who didn’t vote for Trump are the nearly 66 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton.

It’s clear that the GOP won’t remove Trump from office no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him. But, even if he were removed, it would in no way be a “reversal” of the 2016 election.

Trump would be replaced not by Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat, but by his hand-picked GOP toady Mike Pence, who was actually elected with him. So, the most corrupt and lawless GOP President in history would be succeeded by a perhaps somewhat less overtly corrupt GOP politico.

To the extent that Trump voters wanted a regime motivated by White Nationalism, religious intolerance, hate, disenfranchisement of voters of color, intellectual dishonesty, and lots of tax breaks for the wealthy few, Pence wouldn’t disappoint them. It’s possible that Pence wouldn’t be as chummy with authoritarian dictators and wouldn’t publicly treat our allies with contempt and disrespect. He might also cut a deal with the Dems on infrastructure improvements or some other relatively non-controversial topic. And, he seems capable of speaking and writing in complete, largely grammatical sentences. But, Trump voters should be able to live with that, particularly since removal from office wouldn’t remove Trump from Twitter.

PWS

01-23-20

WILLIAM SALETAN @ SLATE: “Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity” – “But Trump’s election and his persistent approval from more than 40 percent of Americans are a reminder that nothing in our national character protects us from becoming a rapacious, authoritarian country. What protects us are institutions that stop us from doing our worst.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/trump-remorseless-advocate-crimes-against-humanity.html

Saletan writes:

It’s hard to keep up with President Donald Trump’s scandals. One day he’s covering up taxpayer-funded travel expenses for his family. The next, he’s stealing money for his border wall. The next, he’s being implicated by an accomplice in the extortion of Ukraine. But one horror is right out in the open: Trump is a remorseless advocate of crimes against humanity. His latest threats against Iran, Iraq, and Syria are a reminder that he’s as ruthless as any foreign dictator. He’s just more constrained.

Trump admires tyrants and defends their atrocities. He has excused North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s mass executions (“Yeah, but so have a lot of other people”) and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murders of journalists and dissidents (“At least he’s a leader”). As a presidential candidate, Trump shrugged off the gravity of using chemical weapons. “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy,” he joked.

At home, Trump has encouraged religious persecution and political violence. He called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States (he later imposed a modified version of the ban) and for collective punishment of Muslims who live here. As a candidate, Trump urged his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters. In 2018, at a political rally, he praised a Republican congressman for criminally assaulting a reporter. “Any guy that can do a body slam,” said Trump, “he’s my guy.”

Trump has long advocated war crimes. He has endorsed torture not just for information, but because our enemies “deserve it.” As a candidate, he proposed that for the sake of “retribution,” the United States should “take out” the families of terrorists. Wives and children were legitimate targets, he argued, because by killing them, we could deter terrorists who “care more about their families than they care about themselves.” Two months ago, he intervened in legal and military proceedings to thwart punishment of three American servicemen who had been indicted for or convicted of atrocities. Then he deployed the men in his reelection campaign.

Trump agrees with past presidents that we and our terrorist adversaries have played by “two [different] sets of rules.” But unlike his predecessors, he takes no pride in America’s higher standards. He sees them as a needless impediment, defended by “weak” and “stupid” people. In 2016, Trump complained that ISIS was “cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind.” Torture laws should be relaxed, he argued, “so that we can better compete with a vicious group of animals.” “You have to play the game the way they’re playing the game,” he explained.

Trump takes no pride in America’s higher standards. He sees them as a needless impediment, defended by “weak” and “stupid” people.

Some presidents have caused pain through recklessness or indifference. Trump inflicts pain on purpose. To deter migration from Latin America, his administration separated migrant parents from their children. Trump argued that the separation was a “disincentive.” Too many people, he explained, were “coming up because they’re not going to be separated from their children.” Later, he used the same sadistic logic to force a migration in Syria. He boasted that by facilitating Turkey’s invasion of that country, he had precipitated the “pain and suffering” necessary to compel Syrian Kurds “to leave.”

In Africa and the Middle East, Trump proudly advocates plunder. In October, he said the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil to make sure we were “paid back” for the costs of our occupation of that country. In Syria, he stationed U.S. forces at oil fields, explaining that he viewed those fields as a revenue stream. (“$45 million a month? Keep the oil.”) He proposed a business arrangement to exploit Syria’s oil: “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” Last Friday, in a Fox News interview, the president repeated that he cared only about the oil. “I left troops to take the oil,” he told Laura Ingraham. “The only troops I have are taking the oil.”

Two weeks ago, the United States killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.
To deter retaliation, Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s cultural sites—an explicit war crime. “If Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets,” he tweeted, “we have targeted 52 Iranian sites … some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” In an exchange with reporters, Trump dismissed legal objections to his threat. “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people,” he fumed. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”

Iraq’s Parliament, furious that Trump had killed Soleimani on its soil and without its consent, voted to expel American troops. But Trump refused to comply unless Iraq paid ransom. “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there,” he told reporters. “We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” He threatened to “charge them [the Iraqis] sanctions like they’ve never seen before.” Later, Trump told Ingraham that Iraq would also “have to pay us for embassies.” When she asked him how he planned to extract the payment, Trump replied, “We have $35 billion of their money right now sitting in an account. And I think they’ll agree to pay. … Otherwise, we’ll stay there.”

Trump views the military as a mercenary force he can send around the world for hire. A Very Stable Genius, the new book by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, describes a White House meeting at which Trump said American troop deployments should yield a profit. Trump told Ingraham he’s doing exactly that: “We’re sending more [troops] to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia’s paying us for it.” He recounted his business pitch to the Saudis: “You want more troops? I’m going to send them to you, but you’ve got to pay us.” And he proudly reported that the Saudis had accepted the deal. “They’re paying us,” he told Ingraham. “They’ve already deposited $1 billion in the bank.”

Trump’s amorality—his complete indifference to rules against theft, abuse, exploitation, and killing—is a public relations problem for his apologists. They struggle to cover it up. First they softened his Muslim ban to a “travel ban” on certain majority-Muslim countries. Then they concocted non-sadistic rationales for his family-separation policy. Last week, after Trump threatened Iran’s cultural sites, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the public that Trump would obey the law. Pompeo also whitewashed Trump’s threats against Iraq, insisting that American troops were in that country to protect its “sovereignty.” Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, claimed that when Trump spoke of Saudi Arabia paying for U.S. troop deployments, “What the president is referring to is burden sharing.”

But Trump refuses to be silenced. Hours after Pompeo promised that the president wouldn’t target Iran’s cultural sites, Trump repeated that he would. Later, Trump stiff-armed Ingraham’s attempts to clean up his language about stealing Syrian oil. “I left troops to take the oil,” he told her. She tried to correct him: “We’re not taking the oil. They’re protecting the facilities.” Trump shrugged off this reformulation. “Well, maybe we will, maybe we won’t,” he said. “Maybe we should take it. But we have the oil.”

Having an evil president doesn’t make the United States evil. We have a lot to be proud of: a culture of freedom, a strong constitution, vigorous courts, democratic accountability, and laws that protect minorities and human rights. On balance, we’ve been a force for good in the world. But Trump’s election and his persistent approval from more than 40 percent of Americans are a reminder that nothing in our national character protects us from becoming a rapacious, authoritarian country. What protects us are institutions that stop us from doing our worst.

Thanks to Magda Werkmeister and Daijing Xu for research assistance.

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

I’d argue that far from being a strong bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian tyranny, our democratic institutions – Congress, Article III Courts, the bureaucracy, and even much of the media — are in a state of constant meltdown under his regime’s relentless attacks. We can see that graphically played out every day in the GOP’s largely fact free and totally dishonest defense of Trump’s running roughshod over both the Congress and our Constitution.

I can’t detect a sliver of desire on the part of the GOP and its enablers to hold Trump accountable for any misdeed — even soliciting foreign interference in our electoral process and then lying to cover it up. The facts really aren’t in dispute here. Whether the U.S. could survive another four years of Trump and remain a democratic republic is still, unfortunately, an open question.

We can hope for the best. But, without “regime change” in November 2020, the worst might still be ahead.

In the meantime, the Article III Courts should do their constitutional duty and stop “coddling” the regime’s various schemes and gimmicks to commit, encourage, and enable “crimes against humanity.” We certainly aren’t going to get any accountability or restraint on Trump’s misconduct and open contempt for American institutions from a Congress where the Senate is led by “Moscow Mitch” and his enablers.

PWS

01-22-20

NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

Sebastian Murdock
Senior Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-anti-immigration-op-ed-hate-group_n_5e21d9d8c5b673621f752f9c

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, is categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

BY SEBASTIAN MURDOCK

SENIOR REPORTER

HIUFFPOST

The New York Times published an op-ed decrying immigration by an author claiming to be a “liberal restrictionist” who is in fact attached to a known hate group.

The column, published Friday, was written by , “a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,” according to the biography listed under his byline.

CIS, which calls itself “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” is a known hate group that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant movement that hires racist writers and associates with white nationalists.

“I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” Kammer’s headline reads. The piece begins with an anecdote about how immigrants take the jobs of American-born workers and later claims “many liberal Democrats” want illegal immigration to run rampant:

Now many liberal Democrats, including those who call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seek to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Under the banner of inclusiveness, equality, human rights, racial reconciliation and reparations for American interventions in the third world, those liberals demand sanctuary for those who make it past the Border Patrol or overstay a visa. Few speak openly of open borders, but that is essentially what they are calling for.

Throughout the piece, Kammer seems set on reminding readers that he is liberal, even if his views might suggest otherwise.

“That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist,” Kammer, a former journalist, writes. “I have long considered myself a moderate liberal, in part because Democrats have always been the allies of working people.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, has cited CIS when speaking about immigration, and in 2011, the group released a report attempting to connect immigration with the creation of future terrorists, calling them “terror babies.”

The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science “research” papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language. According to the SPLC, “longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements.”

Running a column by an author employed by a known hate group is the latest in the Times’s run of publishing racist pieces in its opinion section. In December, columnist and known bedbug Bret Stephens cited a study by a white nationalist that falsely claimed Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other races. The study he cited “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the SPLC.

Do better, New York Times.

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

Ben Mathis-Lilley
Chief News Blogger
SLATE

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/times-op-ed-white-nationalist-center-for-immigration-studies.html

THE SLATEST

Times Taps White Nationalist Organization for Thought-Provoking Perspective on Immigration

By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY

JAN 17, 20206:42 PM

The New York Times opinion section under editor James Bennet ostensibly aims to challenge the paper’s predominately liberal readers by presenting them with thoughtful critiques of their worldview. In practice, it runs pieces like this recent argument that launching a war against Iran would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East—which was written by a veteran of the Bush administration who had predicted confidently in a 2003 piece also published by the Times that launching a war against Iraq would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East. There was no acknowledgment in the new piece of the old one, as an opinion section committed to intellectual honesty might require, nor was it particularly challenging in the sense of being difficult to rebut. But it did make people on the left feel bad, and like they were losing their minds, which is the bar that Bennet’s section requires an argument to clear.

The essay “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” published in the Times Thursday, may represent the nadir of this approach. It makes a familiar argument: that “the left” believes in a “post-national” system of open borders which sacrifices the interests of native-born working Americans to the interests of low-skilled foreign immigrants who drive down wages and disrupt the cultural cohesiveness of their communities. It argues for respecting a distinction between legal and illegal immigration and asserts that Donald Trump’s position on immigration can be appreciated, in a non-racist way, as “a patriotic battle to defend common people.” It accuses Trump’s critics of having had their minds addled by “tribal passions” and a fetish for conflict “between ethnic groups,” and it proposes a “conciliatory” policy that would offer amnesty to existing undocumented workers but institute a crackdown regime of visa enforcement that would prevent future undocumented individuals from finding jobs.

The familiarity of the article’s arguments is matched by the familiarity of its flaws. While large-scale immigration is, in fact, believed by some non-racists to flatten wages at the bottom of the pay scale, it’s also known to accelerate rather than retard economic expansion overall, and tends to be supported by progressives who advocate for other means of increasing working-class wages and sharing the benefits of GDP growth. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some ancient, race-agnostic pillar of global affairs, but rather a concept that was instituted in the United States in the early 20th century to explicitly discriminate against Asian, southern European, and eastern European individuals and expanded in the 1960s to explicitly discriminate against Mexicans. Trump’s support is strongest in areas where there are fewer undocumented immigrants, not more, and he lost four of the five states that have the highest undocumented populations per capita. Many of the most immigration-heavy and ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. are also the safest and wealthiest and are considered so desirable to live in by migrating native-born Americans that they are experiencing housing crises.

As to whether criticizing an administration that instituted the premeditated, systematic separation of young children from their parents after they applied legally for asylum is a matter of unseemly “tribal passions,” or whether support for the principles of inclusive American citizenship described on the Statue of Liberty constitutes “post-national” anti-patriotism, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

More concerning than any of these specific problems, though, is the piece’s provenance: It’s written by someone named Jerry Kammer, a fellow at a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies. Kammer has made a career out of covering immigration policy, he writes, for two reasons: “I was fascinated by its human, political and moral complexity. I also wanted to push back against the campaign by activist groups to label restrictionism as inherently racist.” He expresses regret that “odious people” with white-power affiliations have given the cause of cutting back on immigration a “bad name.”

What neither Kammer nor the Times discloses is that the Center for Immigration Studies was in fact founded by these people, most prominent among them a white nationalist named John Tanton who died last year. Tanton, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, believed that the United States needed to maintain a “European-American majority, and a clear one at that”; he founded CIS, he wrote in the 1980s, in order to give his ideas the appearance of independent “credibility.”

Kammer does write that he disagrees with “some of the center’s hard-line positions.” Among his more hard-line colleagues at CIS are a writer named Jason Richwine, who contributed to a journal founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer and who has said that “IQ” is the “most important” difference between racial groups. (As the SPLC has documented, CIS has circulated literally hundreds of articles by explicit white supremacists like Spencer via links in its weekly newsletter. Its director once accused Barack Obama of trying to “foment race war.”) A statement of purpose on the CIS website is credited to longtime Tanton collaborator Dan Stein, who once complained that mass immigration was a tool developed by “Ted Kennedy and his political allies” in approximately 1958 to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.”

In 1997, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Tanton in a piece called “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism.” It was a scathing article which noted that Tanton had once described the immigrant’s contribution to society as “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” The piece expressed concern that “otherwise sober-minded conservatives” and “reasonable critics of immigration” were affiliating themselves with his ideas. The author of that WSJ article, a 28-year-old journalist named Tucker Carlson, has since made the career-advancing decision to embrace Tanton-style nativism; he was in the news not too long ago for complaining in his role as a Fox News host that immigrants make the United States physically “dirtier.”

Whatever space ever existed between mainstream conservatism and white-power nationalism, Carlson demonstrates, has collapsed. And it turns out that the “odious people” that Kammer references in the Times are actually his colleagues and forebears, who created his organization so that policies intended to perpetuate “European-American” and “Anglo-Saxon” superiority could be laundered into the respectable discourse. What else is there to say but: It worked!

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

So, we have a White Nationalist in the White House assisted by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller actually turning nativism into “Government policy.” Other white supremacists are scattered in key positions throughout the Government, particularly the immigration bureaucracy. Trump tweets and right-wing media put out a constant barrage of nativist lies, misrepresentations, false narratives, and racial, ethnic, and religious slurs.

So, just why is it that the “mainstream media” owes White Nationalists yet another forum to spread their nativist propaganda?

It’s not limited, of course, to just the Times. The WashPost regularly publishes largely fact and value free right-wing blather from professional shills like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt under the guise of “op-eds.”

And Chuck Todd regularly invites GOP congenital liars and Trump toadies like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to spread their lies, false narratives, and debunked “conspiracy theories” from the “bully pulpit” of “Meet the Press.” To top it off, Chuck then appears to be flabbergasted that when he confronts these guys with truth and facts, they “double down” continuing to lie to his face, ignore established facts, and spread Putinesque conspiracy theories.

Fact is, most of the Trump agenda is corrupt, counterfactual, unethical, inhumane, divisive, and corrosive to American democracy. We receive enough of it from lots of sources every day, pretty much 24-7-365. Is it really necessary for those supposedly dedicated to truth and democracy to give more free “air time” to nativist shills spreading their racially corrosive, divisive, anti-democracy propaganda?

PWS

01-18-20

“THE GIFTS OF THE MAGA-I:” DESPAIR, DEHUMANIZATION, DEATH — “[W]e keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

Kristin Clarens, Esquire
Project Adelante

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

JURISPRUDENCE

Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

DEC 23, 20191:17 PM

The tent camp set up by asylum-seekers next to the bridge to the U.S. in Matamoros, Mexico, seen on Dec. 9.

John Moore/Getty Images

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On this week’s episode of Amicus, Slate’s podcast about the Supreme Court, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Kristin Clarens, an attorney with Project Adelante, a group of multidisciplinary professionals, including lawyers, doctors, ministers, and psychologists, working across the country to help mobilize and concentrate support for asylum-seekers at the border. A transcript of the interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can you just start by explaining what it is that you do and how as a lawyer you were able to kind of amble in and out of border facilities, detention facilities?

Kristin Clarens: People who previously would have been detained [in the U.S.] are now living in sort of makeshift refugee camps on the Mexico side of the border because of the “Remain in Mexico” policy. So now it’s incredibly easy to amble in and out, as easy as it is for the cartel members and other organized criminals who are circulating in these camps.

The Remain in Mexico policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols, is just about a year old. Can you describe what the world was like before it, what the world has been like since?

The estimates are that there are around 3,000 people [in the tent camp in Matamoros] living just in squalor and in tents, and that 80 percent of them are families with young children. A year ago, in the Rio Grande Valley, most of those people would come to the United States either after asking for permission at a port of entry or after crossing without permission and they would be apprehended, put into one of the temporary facilities that so many of us have seen on the news with the kids in cages and the very overcrowded conditions, lack of sanitation and medical care. After that, the families and young kids were sent to longer-term detention centers where many of us, many lawyers who speak Spanish, have worked across the country.

As of June or July of this year, the United States government started implementing something that they call, I think very ironically, the Migrant Protection Protocols, which is a policy guideline that says that border patrol agents are able to return asylum-seekers to Mexico for the duration of their immigration hearings. So now an asylum-seeker who comes up from Central America arrives in these incredibly sketchy and stressful border towns, asks for asylum at the port of entry, and after a quick trip to one of the cage facilities, they are sent back into the streets of Mexico.

That moment where they’re shoved back into Mexican territory from the U.S. officials is an incredibly vulnerable one. It’s kind of like bad guys lurking on the sides.

Now that you’re looking at the tent cities in Mexico, what kinds of things are you seeing, what kinds of legal aid are you able to provide if you are in Matamoros trying to help?

The legal aid that we’re able to provide at this point is becoming so much more limited because the statistics out now are that 0.1 percent of asylum-seekers who have their cases heard in the MPP courts—many of whom have valid claims, who would have succeeded with time and due process and legal support—0.1 percent are succeeding. Nothing has changed with respect to the nature of the cases—single women who have been persecuted specifically because they’re vulnerable in their home countries by gangs and by other types of organized crime. They’re incredibly vulnerable living in these—it’s just like a tent, the kind of tent that you would take to go camping in the woods in the summer. Except for single women—sometimes pregnant with young children with no other form of support, no network whatsoever—living for months at a time in freezing cold conditions in rain and in superhot conditions the next day, just incredibly exposed on every single level.

The circumstances change almost weekly with respect to the parameters and expectations, the due process provided in the MPP camp, and also, with respect to just the feasibility of [the legal support] we can offer as the numbers of people on the ground grow and the backlog increases in the MPP courts.

The camp facility where people are sort of constrained physically has somewhere between 2,600 and 3,000 people in it at any given day, and it’s growing. But the total number of people who’ve been returned to Mexico under MPP is closer to 68,000. So only a small fraction of the people who need legal services are even visible at this point.

On the ground and at least at Matamoros, people don’t have enough showers, they don’t have enough food. There’s rampant illness. I mean, you are seeing kids with tremendous medical and nutritional and other needs that are not getting that.

There’s sort of a group that’s come onto the scene over the past month that’s providing mobile health care via a clinic and also a humanitarian support to try and improve the shelters. They’re all volunteer based. It’s kind of all of us rolling up our sleeves and trying to figure out the best way to get support in there. But it’s subject essentially to the whims of the Mexican government. At any point, this could be shut down, or relocated, or people could just be forced to scatter. You just don’t know how things are going to unfold when the United States government’s policies might be enjoined, or when the Mexican government may decide that it can no longer tolerate these large refugee camps.

“How many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

— Kristin Clarens

The Mexican government initially restricted humanitarian groups’ access to sort of building things like toilets and showers and did so themselves in Matamoros. But the facilities that they built were really not adequate. They have showers that are not linked to any sort of drainage systems so there’s just big puddles of disgusting water that smelled bad and it’s just really kind of dehumanizing. Prior to the existence of the showers though, people were bathing in the river, which is contaminated with human waste, and people were getting sick and these awful skin infections all over. Little kids were swimming in the same place where little kids were also vomiting and having diarrhea. It’s just kind of a recipe for humanitarian crisis, within 100 feet of an American city.

You’ve been dealing this week with a critically ill child.

It’s really difficult for people who could die at any minute of their illnesses to get medical care in Matamoros for a variety of reasons. It’s hard for them to get around. It’s a scary city and it’s not safe. And so, this past week, we heard about several more critically ill migrants waiting at the tent city, including a 7-year-old who had, I think it can best be described as, sort of a breach in her abdominal wall.

So her fecal matter was leaking out and kind of reinfecting her, kind of getting reabsorbed by parts of her body as she wasn’t able to access clean water or water at all, to drink or to bathe herself to prevent just massive infection that could really quickly turn to a life-and-death situation. So, we did the best we could. I’ve been on the bridge trying to cross with people and been kind of mistreated and treated aggressively by the Border Patrol agents, and I know how scary and hard that is. I can’t imagine having gotten that experience as a 7-year-old girl who has to wear a diaper because her stomach is no longer able to contain her intestines. Fortunately, she was able to cross after, I think, a collective eight or nine hours waiting on the bridge and advocating and negotiating with Border Patrol. She was able to get across and get to the hospital on Tuesday night.

I had to try to twist your arm to get you to come talk about her story, because nobody died so it feels like nobody is going to care?

That’s the sense that I get in trying to focus attention on this in such a stressful time in America. It seems scary. Our government is unstable and stressful right now, and at the same time, these incredible egregious human rights violations are happening at our Southern border. And it’s like, how do we cut through this noise and really stand up for the weakest people that our country is negatively impacting right now? And I don’t have those answers, but we keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?

You can listen to Amicus in the player below or via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, and the Courts

Divided Realities

Lawyers on the crisis at the border, and a cacophony of bad faith in the Capitol.

01:10:57

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Donald Trump Immigration Mexico

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

As the article points out, vulnerable refugees with valid asylum claims that might well have been granted prior to the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy are now being railroaded without legal representation or any semblance of fairness, impartiality, or due process.

Another way of putting Kristin Clarens’s very valid concerns: “How many seven-year old girls would have to die before complicit, tone-deaf, life-tenured Supreme Court Justices and Article III Appellate Judges take off their blinders, get out of their ivory towers, stop kowtowing to Trump and the forces of White Nationalist darkness and evil, and start seeing Trump’s victims as human beings, or even as their own children or grandchildren?”

Thank goodness for courageous, talented, dedicated folks like Kristin who represent the “True Spirit of Christmas” in an age where kindness, compassion, mercy, and justice have been forgotten and are daily being trampled by the regime, its supporters, and enablers.

Merry Christmas,

PWS

12-25-19

KILLING KIDS, COVERING UP, EVADING ACCOUNTABILITY: Juvenile Died In Trump’s Gulag — Then, The CBP Lies Started Flowing!

Carrie Cordero
Senior Fellow
Center for New American Security

Heidi Li Feldman
Professor of Law
Georgetown Law

Chimene Keitner — Chimene Heitner
Professor of Law
UC-Hastings Law

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/cbp-teenager-death-carlos-vasquez-criminal-liability.html

By CARRIE CORDERO, HEIDI LI FELDMAN, and CHIMÈNE KEITNER In Slate:

ProPublica published an extensive investigative report last week detailing the circumstances surrounding the death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez. The teenager died in Customs and Border Protection detention in May, approximately one week after entering the United States—even though children are not supposed to be held by CBP for more than 72 hours before being transferred to Health and Human Services. Vasquez had boarded a raft on the Rio Grande with dozens of others and was promptly apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents after landing in Hidalgo, Texas. He was separated from his adult sister, with whom he had been traveling, and placed in CBP custody, where he apparently developed and then died from the flu.

While Vasquez’s death was reported in the press at the time, the new ProPublica report includes a video appearing to be from the time period before and after Vasquez’s’ death in the CBP cell. (Vasquez’s’ family has since indicated that they had not seen the video and had not consented to its release or distribution.) The video appears to show that—contrary to the Department of Homeland Security’s public explanation last spring when his death was first reported—Vasquez did not receive proper welfare checks during the night, and was found lifeless by his cellmate in the morning. These new circumstances raise grave questions about whether the government and individual CBP officials will face legal consequences for failing to provide him with adequate medical treatment, failing to monitor his deteriorating health, and, potentially, attempting to conceal the actual circumstances of his death.

The ProPublica report explains that there is an open internal DHS Office of Inspector General investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death, following an earlier local law enforcement investigation conducted by the Weslaco Police Department. The police investigation apparently did not result in enforcement action. Meanwhile, the administrative process within DHS is awaiting the outcome of the OIG investigation. It should not go unnoticed that this death occurred during a period of heightened instability in the agency’s leadership ranks. Vasquez’s’ death took place the month after Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned, and during the period when CBP was under the direction of an acting director, John Sanders, since former Kevin McAleenan had been the CBP chief before being elevated to acting secretary. Sanders resigned shortly after the incident and told ProPublica that “I really think the American government failed these people. The government failed people like Carlos,” he said. “I was part of that system at a very high level, and Carlos’ death will follow me for the rest of my life.”

Press reports over the spring spring stated that in addition to the local police and DHS OIG investigation, the FBI also was conducting an investigation. Given the information released by ProPublica, that FBI investigation should include a civil rights investigation for color of law violations (that is, unlawful acts by CBP officials), and obstruction of justice, given the report of potentially falsified logs. Jurisdiction for such investigation would reside with the FBI’s McAllen Resident Agency, San Antonio Division.

The status and outcome of that FBI investigation is important and should not be delayed pending the separate DHS OIG process. The death of a child in federal custody must be subject to greater scrutiny than administrative measures alone. Not only is DHS’s border security, immigration, and law enforcement activity in need of greater internal oversight and accountability mechanisms, but there are certain circumstances where individual accountability is necessary to punish and deter wrongdoing. To be clear, this is a pro–law enforcement and pro-security argument. In order for law enforcement and homeland security professionals to maintain order and effectiveness in carrying out their lawful duties, individual instances of wrongdoing must be subject to meaningful accountability.

There should also be a public accounting of the results of the FBI investigation. As discussed here in the context of family separation, federal law provides that civil rights violations that take place while enforcing the law may also amount to federal crimes under Section 242 of Title 18. According to the ProPublica report, Vasquez had a fever, was administered medication, and then was returned to a holding cell, contrary to medical advice. The cell—visible in the video posted online by ProPublica—was akin to a prison cell, containing, apparently, only what appear to be cement block benches and a toilet area. The report alleges that a CBP officer recorded conducting multiple welfare checks during the night; however, the video shows none, and four hours of the video during which those checks purportedly took place were not provided by CBP to the local police.

We do not have any basis to know why the local police received an incomplete video, but the missing four hours of the video is beyond curious. It is potentially criminal. If efforts were taken to delete or sequester the missing four hours, that would constitute obstruction of justice. If individuals coordinated their efforts to shield that portion of the video from law enforcement investigators, then those individuals have potential legal exposure for conspiracy to obstruct justice.

In addition to the FBI’s criminal and civil rights investigation, there may be civil recourse for Vasquez’s’ family. The U.S. government may be subject to a wrongful death claim on the grounds that CBP agents negligently deprived Vasquez of proper medical care. Such claims are permitted by the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives sovereign immunity for the U.S. government when its officers commit acts that would give rise to tort claims were they committed by private parties. (We discuss civil liability extensively with respect to family separation in the immigration context more broadly in a forthcoming scholarly article previewed here).

The death of a child in federal custody must be subject to greater scrutiny than administrative measures alone

A private institution with custody of a severely ill child would certainly be vulnerable to tort liability on facts similar to those reported about Vasquez’s’ situation. Before he was transferred to the Weslaco station where he died, Vasquez was seen by a nurse practitioner in McAllen. She administered ibuprofen and Tylenol and ordered Tamiflu. She recommended that Vasquez receive additional medical attention within two hours and that he should be taken to an emergency room if his symptoms persisted or worsened. According to ProPublica’s investigation, Vasquez was not seen again by a health care worker for about 18 hours, when another nurse practitioner, this time at Weslaco, administered Tamiflu but left no record of any other medical treatment or examination. The time lapse between these two medical interventions strongly suggests a breach of the basic duty of care that tort law places upon anybody who has taken physical custody of a child, making it impossible for anybody else to assist him with known medical needs.

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

Official corruption and impunity, normally considered hallmarks of dictatorships and Third World states, have become huge problems in the U.S. under the Trump Administration. An emasculated Congress and feckless, complicit Article III Courts are major contributors to the arrogantly lawless performance of DHS under Trump.

PWS

11-09-19

DAHLIA LITHWICK @ SLATE & THE REST OF US SHOULD BE THANKFUL FOR THE NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY — No Subpoenas, No Fat Book Contracts, No “Anonymous” Editorials, Shoestring Budget – But, They’re Out There Every Day Throughout Our Nation & Across Borders, Working Tirelessly & Thanklessly For Due Process & Against The Legal Nihilism Of The Trump Regime & The Complicity Of The Courts That Lithwick Fears!

https://apple.news/AapOCnRi6R9mdcAZfT0s-FA

Dahlia writes @ Slate:

Jurisprudence

America’s Descent into Legal Nihilism

The president would always like to be the president. And he’s bending the law to his will to do so.

November 27 2019 4:41 PM

It is a Thanksgiving tradition to spend time thinking about what one is thankful for; a healthy practice that reminds us to see the world in a positive light. Gratitude is good for us and we should not take it for granted. This year, though, I feel compelled to spend at least a bit of time focusing not only what I am thankful for, but on what I am freaking out about. And the thing that concerns me greatly these days is simple: The president seems to have no intention of leaving office and we seem to have no meaningful plan to address that.

It’s not just that this president benefitted from Russian interference in the 2016 election (and in fact solicited it publicly, recall “Russia if you’re listening”). It’s not just that he denies—in the face of the incontrovertible conclusions of his own intelligence agencies and the Senate intelligence committee—that Russia played any part in his 2016 electoral victory. It’s that he still believes a demonstrable fraud about illegal voting and Ukrainian election interferenceand deep state plots to oust him and has demanded his cabinet officers repeat it. Moreover he has demanded that his Attorney General investigate it. His insistence that everyone around him participate in his version of reality allows him to repeat the material falsehood that he won by a landslide in 2016, and that there will be more attempts to suppress his victory in 2020.

The president has also taken the legal position that he cannot be indicted while in office; a position rooted in a memorandum that originated in the Office of Legal Counsel in 1973, and was reaffirmed in 2000, that may or may not be correct, as legal experts are thoroughly conflicted. Trump and his Justice Department have extrapolated from that memorandum that he also cannot even be investigated while in office. In court proceedings defending that unprecedented position, his attorney has in fact stated that even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue while in office, he could not be subject to criminal processes, because he is the president and presidents are immune from such things even if they themselves commit murder. Under this untested legal theory, the president is incapable of criminal conduct, and his lawyers, and even some of his recently seated judges, when pressed, claim that the only proper channel through which to investigate a president’s criminal conduct would be via impeachment.

Happily, an impeachment process has begun, which is, in its way, something to be thankful for. And yet the Trump White House refuses to participate, insisting that the entire process is unconstitutional. Not only does the President claim that the investigation is impermissible, he has also issued a blanket refusal for anyone in his administration, or who has ever been in his administration, to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Even as a federal judge rejected that position outright on Monday evening, former White House Counsel Don McGahn, joined by the Department of Justice, have appealed that ruling, which might have unblocked the obstruction of several vital impeachment witnesses. John Bolton, who is very busy tweeting and pitching a book, will also decline to testify, although the district court order expressly rejects his reasoning. Bolton’s refusal to testify, even when offered the cover of a judicial order, meaning that he could claim to testify reluctantly, and even if testifying in an impeachment inquiry could conceivably mean nothing more than refusing to answer every single question under claims of executive privilege, suggests that the White House’s efforts to stymie the only means of investigating a president that it says it would permit, will prevail.

The growing hysteria about imaginary past Ukranian election interference, a ludicrous impeachment defense, will be used to deflect from the emphatically certain future Russian election interference (as well as interference from other nations who reasonably want in on the fun). The Mitch McConnell-dominated Senate has declined to do anything to protect against that certainty and instead is building a judiciary that will permit it. Please consider, as well, that the geniuses among us who claim that we should ignore Trump’s effort to conscript Ukraine into working on his 2020 presidential run, and just defeat him roundly at the polls, are forgetting that Donald Trump’s entire raison d’etre, his past and future destiny, is to manipulate presidential elections in ways that preclude his round defeat at the polls. That is why he worked—as we now know—with Roger Stone to distort the outcome of the 2016 elections, it is also why he withheld almost $400 million in appropriated aid to Ukraine this summer. Insisting that we will let the voters decide this matter in a free and fair election in 2020 has to be the Lucy-football-est move ever, in a three-year festival of Lucy-footballing.

There’s more. Donald Trump does not necessarily intend to leave office even if he loses the 2020 presidential election. He jokes about it constantly. He never agreed that he would concede if he lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, remember. His claims about election and voter fraud are not just ego-food about his popular vote numbers in 2016, but also set up for 2020. The anonymous author of a new Trump book says as much. It’s taken a long time to even consider this possibility openly. And just as we soothed ourselves that the military would be the keystone to his removal if it came right down to that, the president has redefined the US military as an appendage of his own desires. At his Florida rally on Tuesday night, Trump dismissed any resistance to his actions in pardoning servicemembers accused of war crimes as emanating from “the deep state.” He reportedly wants these new military heroes he is elevating to join him on the campaign trail. And just as he has falsely dismissed honorable career professionals in the foreign service as “deep staters,” and “Never Trumpers” he will now refuse to hear from anyone in the military who argues for internal honor codes and discipline as the same.

Don McGahn thinks someone else is responsible for taking care of all this, as, evidently, does John Bolton. Robert Mueller made the same mistake last spring, when he decided it was Congress’s responsibility to act on what he had found. And so, to be frank, did most of the impeachment witnesses, many of whom only came forward to corroborate the whistleblower’s anonymous report, and some of whom only came forward only pursuant to a subpoena. Everyone seems to assume vast quantities of courage in other people that they cannot seem to find in themselves. Yet somehow, our greatest worry in the coming days will be how to remain civil with one another over a large bird and its cute little cranberry accessories. The president believes that he is above the law and has foreclosed any attempt to prove otherwise. The president seems unable to conceive of himself losing an election. The president is counting on all of us to merely hope that something somewhere gets done about all this stuff at some point, but to never actually do anything ourselves beyond passing the stuffing around. This year, what I am most thankful for is the people who are trying to do that something themselves.

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

I’m most thankful for all of my wonderful, dedicated colleagues in our Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges, an important “brigade” of the New Due Process Army. The NDPA does more than “merely hope that something somewhere gets done about all this stuff at some point.”

We’re out there leading “the Resistance” (yes, Billy Barr, not everyone is a sleazy sycophant like you) and fighting the forces of White Nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and “legal nihilism” every day in every possible way! Thanks for all you do my friends and colleagues for America, American justice, and to see that the most vulnerable among us get the rights to which they are legally entitled but which are being denied by a fundamentally dangerous and dishonest regime assisted by complicit courts.

Due Process Forever; Legal Nihilism & Complicit Courts Never!

Happy Thanksgiving,

PWS

11-28-19

LET THE IMMIGRATION JUDGES SPEAK! — What Kind Of “Court System” Muzzles Judges, Shuns Educational Dialogue?

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/10/immigration-law-professors-let-immigration-judges-speak.html

Adjunct Professor Carrie L. Rosenbaum
Golden Gate Law

Professor Maureen Sweeney
U. of Maryland Law

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Immigration Law Professors: Let Immigration Judges Speak!

By Immigration Prof

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Four immigration law professors, Laila L. Hlass, Elora Mukherjee, Carrie L. Rosenbaum, and Maureen Sweeney on Slate criticize the Trump administration for barring immigration judges, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys, and asylum officers from talking to classes about immigration law and policy.Such guest lectures were common in the recent past. However,

“things have recently changed. When we’ve asked judges, ICE attorneys, and asylum officers to visit our classes, almost all have declined. They’ve told us they can’t speak with our classes even on their days off, even in their personal capacities, without prior clearance and approval from high-level supervisors—approval that is increasingly difficult to obtain. This silencing of line officers is a marked departure from past years. It is taking place across the country, and it is no coincidence. The administration has denied these civil servants permission to speak publicly. According to former immigration judge Jeffrey Chase, immigration judges `are not even allowed to speak at conferences or law schools, because the administration does not consider them qualified to speak on behalf of the agency or its policies.’”

KJ

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Obviously, this is an “agency,” not a “court,” at war with the public it supposedly serves.

Somewhat “below the radar screen” in the Administration’s all-out White Nationalist attack on migrants is the assault on those who represent them. Studies show that represented individuals both show up for their hearings at an exceptionally high rate and succeed in their cases at a rate that is multiples of unrepresented individuals. Therefore, some type of “universal representation program” utilizing a combination of public and private sector funding, would be the “first logical step“ in solving the Due Process and operational crises in our Immigration Courts. And, it wouldn’t cost any more than the expensive, inhumane, often illegal, and frequently ineffective “enforcement only gimmicks” being employed against migrants, and often their attorneys, by this Administration.

PWS

10-28-19

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Trump’s Cowardly, Racist War On The Most Vulnerable Humans Could Collapse International Refugee Protection System, Putting Millions Of Lives In Jeopardy!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/refugees-trump-third-country-refoulement.html

Stephanie Schwartz @ Slate:

Last month, the Trump administration announced the latest in a trio of bilateral agreements effectively barring refugees coming through Central America from seeking asylum in the United Sates. These agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and now Honduras, known as “safe third country” agreements, allow the U.S. to send back asylum-seekers who pass these countries on their way to the U.S. but do not apply for asylum there first. At first glance, this may seem like just one more way that the Trump administration is trying to keep refugees out—a diplomatic version of the president’s tactical snake fantasy. Nor do the agreements seem that different from how the EU tries to prevent refugees from seeking asylum. Indeed, a year ago I wrote about how Donald Trump sending troops to the Southern broader was consistent with a broader global trend of hollowing out asylum norms.

But this is different. These new agreements flout global asylum norms in a way others have not dared: They send refugees directly back into the danger they were fleeing in the first place.

A safe third country agreement is meant to be just that: safe. It provides a way for states to send refugees to an alternative (third) destination without sending them home, a practice that is prohibited under international law. While they have yet to be implemented, in the past three months, the United States has strong-armed Central America’s Northern Triangle countries into signing third-country agreements. Under the terms of these agreements asylum-seekers who pass through Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras on their way to the U.S. (which anyone traveling by land has to do) could be sent back from the U.S. border to one of those countries, so long as they are not a citizen of that country. So, while Honduran asylum-seekers would not be sent back to Honduras, they could be sent to Guatemala or El Salvador. Mexico has refused to sign a similar agreement, however the Trump administration has already begun implementing a new set of rules with regard to Mexico called the Migrant Protection Protocols. One of the stipulations of the MPP requires asylum-seekers who make it to the U.S. Southern border to stay in Mexico while they wait for the U.S. to process their claims.

On the surface, these policies look rather similar to the EU’s approach to asylum. Like the agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the EU’s Dublin Regulation requires that all asylum-seekers entering the EU apply for asylum in the first country they reach in the union. The 2016 EU-Turkey deal also has a “safe third country” component, such that certain migrants passing through Turkey on their way to Greece can be sent back (though migrants are still allowed to apply for asylum when they reach the EU). Similar to the MPP, the EU has also said it is going to explore the use of “regional disembarkation platforms” such that refugees would have to wait in another country while their claims for asylum in Europe are evaluated.

The Trump approach, however, is much worse. First, the Dublin Regulation dictates which countries in the EU will provide asylum to those with valid claims; the new arrangements between the U.S. and the Northern Triangle countries dictate that U.S. will not provide asylum to certain individuals with valid claims. Put another way, in many ways the EU’s Schengen zone operates as a single governing body—there are common laws, a single currency, and freedom of mobility across states. Once you cross the border into one Schengen zone country, you are free to travel to the others without showing a passport. The Dublin Regulation, then, lets asylum-seekers into the European Union, but it cuts people off from arriving in one member state, for example Greece, and continuing on to apply for asylum in another, say Germany.

But there is no North American Union. The U.S. cedes its sovereignty to no one. And the administration is not saying refugees can enter the U.S., but they must stay in Arizona rather than go to New York. Instead, the agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras allow the U.S. to say that it will not provide asylum to certain people. If you can’t afford a plane ticket and show up at the Southern border, the United States does not have to hear your case. This is in direct contravention to the 1951 convention on refugees that requires states to provide asylum to those who qualify without discrimination. Refugee rights activists claim that the third safe country agreement between the U.S. and Canada is in breach of international asylum law for the same reason. The difference, though, is that asylum-seekers enjoy equally safe haven in the U.S. as the do in Canada (though some in Canada are questioning how safe the U.S. really is).

This brings us to the second, and most important issue, with the Trump administration’s policies.

Both the MPP and the agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala send asylum-seekers to places where their lives remain in danger. In some cases, it is precisely the same danger they were trying to flee. The violence from which people in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are fleeing stems from transnational criminal organizations, like MS-13 and MS-18. Per the United States’ own 2018 human rights report on Honduras, these transnational gangs “committed killings, extortion, kidnappings, human trafficking, and intimidation of police, prosecutors, journalists, women, and human rights defenders.” These organizations are not limited by borders. They operate throughout the Northern Triangle region. Gangs targeting someone in Honduras could easily get to that person if they were sent to Guatemala. Therefore, sending someone fleeing violence in Honduras to apply for asylum in Guatemala or El Salvador keeps them in harm’s way—the same harm.

While the MPP, which forces migrants to remain in Mexico, might not keep asylum-seekers from the Northern Triangle directly in the grasp of gangs like MS-13 and MS-18 that operate in the Northern Triangle, it does place them into a highly dangerous context. As has been extensively reported, gangs local to Mexico are targeting asylum-seekers with kidnapping, extortion, and violence. The U.S. knows how unsafe these places are, having issued its highest level of security warnings against travel to some of the cities in

Mexico where migrants are being kept.

Sending refugees back into the line of fire attacks the foundation of the international asylum regime: the norm of non-refoulement. Non-refoulement is the prohibition against states sending individuals to any territory in which there is threat of persecution or torture—country of origin or otherwise. Per the 1951 Refugee Convention, non-refoulement prohibits states from expelling or returning a refugee “in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The 1984 Convention Against Torture also prohibits refoulement, in some ways expanding its strength and application, stating that states cannot “expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Such grounds include a “consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.”

Without non-refoulement, asylum is moot.

There are any number of things wrong with the Dublin Regulation and the EU-Turkey agreement, but the one line neither of these arrangements cross directly is defying non-refoulement. Requiring refugees to apply for asylum in Greece rather than proceeding on to Germany impinges on the spirit of refugee law and endangers refugees, but it doesn’t refoule them. With the EU-Turkey agreement, many observers have challenged the designation of Turkey as a safe third country given that the Turkish government has been accused of imprisoning migrants and sending refugees back to Syria. Turkey has outright stated that one of the goals of its military incursion into Syria is to send refugees back to recaptured territory. The veil of non-refoulement in this case is whisper thin. But at least in sending refugees to Turkey, the EU is not forcing Syrian refugees directly back into the line of fire from which they originally fled. Neither Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces nor the myriad rebel groups active in Syria are equally active in Turkey.

The Trump administration’s new policies, on the other hand, outright deny that non-refoulement is a rule the U.S. needs to follow—at least for a particular class of people. There is no pretending that Mexico is safe when migrants are being attacked left and right. By flouting non-refoulement, the U.S. threatens the principle on which the entire asylum system rests.

And the world is watching. If the United States can send asylum-seekers back into danger, why can’t other countries do the same? While the Trump administration’s policies are likely illegal, and are currently being challenged in court, there is reason to fear the administration will be allowed to proceed unchecked. A recent order from the U.S. Supreme Court allows the administration to continue implementing these policies until a final decision on their legality is reached. In the meantime, many asylum-seekers are living in danger.

Finding a way to deal with displacement crises requires political leadership. For once, the U.S. is taking on this leadership role, setting a road map for how countries can respond to asylum claims. It just so happens that the proposal is to pull the one thread that could unravel the asylum system as we know it.

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Someday, Trump and his toadies will be classified as the notorious human rights violators that they are. And, his racist, fascist reign will be remembered as one of the low-points in U.S. history.

But, we shouldn’t forget that “MPP” a/k/a “Remain in Mexico,” a/k/a “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” is only in force because of a complicit Ninth Circuit. See Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan (incoherent order vacating proper injunction against statutory and Constitutional abuses of “Remain in Mexico” policy). The judges responsible for this travesty and for continuing to “sit on” this clear case of illegal and unconstitutional policies should also be considered human rights violators.

PWS

10-22-19

DOJ IS A NATIONAL DISGRACE UNDER TRUMP: The Race To The Bottom, Started Under White Nationalist Zealot “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Becomes A Death Spiral Under Shamelessly Corrupt Trump Toady Billy Barr! — “Malicious Incompetence,” White Nationalism, & Anti-Democracy Are Institutionalized @ DOJ, Enabled By Feckless Article III Courts Pretending To Look The Other Way Rather Than Standing Up To Tyranny & Assaults On Our Constitution & The Rule Of Law By The Trump Administration!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/william-barr-trump-and-ukraine-the-doj-hit-a-new-low-to-bury-the-whistleblower-complaint.html

Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate:

As more details emerge about Donald Trump’s whistleblower scandal, it’s clear the man standing in the way of any investigation into the president’s actions, once again, is Attorney General William Barr. The House’s now formal impeachment inquiry may be the last remaining tool that Barr cannot tamper with.

Barr has already successfully stymied one investigation of presidential misconduct: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. The attorney general released a misleading “summary” of the report before its publication, one that rankled Mueller himself. He also devised dubious legal standards to find insufficient evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Barr then prefaced the report’s release with an appalling press conference that painted Trump as the real victim. In congressional testimony, he trashed his own Justice Department to further defend Trump. Later, Barr took pains to hide the full Mueller report from Congress, deploying a baseless legal theory to conceal key redactions from lawmakers.

With each new development in the Ukraine scandal, we are seeing the Trump administration run the Barr playbook all over again. But there is an important difference. When Barr took the reins at DOJ, the Mueller investigation was near its end: Barr could not interfere with the probe itself; he could only run damage control once it concluded. This time, Barr has been in control from the start. And his Justice Department has blocked every avenue through which Trump might be held accountable.

Notes on the telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky suggest Barr is implicated in Trump’s dirty work. (The memo is not a transcript, but rather a compilation of “notes and recollections” from officials listening in.) Trump mentions his attorney general six times as a resource for Zelensky. The president urges Zelensky to investigate his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden—referring to unsubstantiated allegations that, as vice president, Biden used his position to quash a Ukrainian investigation into his son. “[W]hatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump adds. He also told Zelensky that he would have his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani “give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.”

Barr has been in control from the start.

The Justice Department released a statement Wednesday claiming that neither Trump nor Giuliani have spoken with Barr about pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son. But there is ample evidence that Barr played a substantial role in protecting Trump from a whistleblower complaint over the call. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has already insisted that Barr recuse himself “until we get to the bottom of this matter.” House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff also sent a letter to Barr Wednesday saying the DOJ’s involvement “raises the specter that the Department has participated in a dangerous cover-up to protect the President.”

Before Barr’s possible involvement in the Ukraine affair had even been made public, the DOJ stepped in to mute the whistleblower complaint over this call. Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, or ICWPA, whistleblowers in a federal intelligence agency must send their complaint to Michael Atkinson, Intelligence Community inspector general. The law tasks Atkinson with deciding whether the complaint is credible and of “urgent concern.” If it is, Atkinson must send it to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. ICWPA states that Maguire, in turn, “shall … forward” the complaint to congressional intelligence committees within seven days.

This process worked as intended—until the DOJ stepped in. Atkinson received the whistleblower complaint and found it to be a credible allegation of “urgent concern.” So he sent it to Maguire. Instead of sending it to Congress, as he was legally obligated to do, Maguire asked the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which makes law that binds the executive branch. The OLC declared that he could not pass it on in an opinion later released to the public in modified form, holding that the whistleblower complaint did not pertain to a matter of “urgent concern.”

This opinion is bizarre, because the law does not allow Maguire—and, by extension, the OLC—to overrule Atkinson’s assessment of a whistleblower complaint. It tasks Atkinson with deciding whether the complaint meets ICWPA’s standards, not Maguire. OLC claimed a right, on Maguire’s behalf, to independently determine whether the complaint constitutes an “urgent concern.” No such right exists.

The OLC then followed a different law, which requires executive branch officials to notify the attorney general if they discover potential “violations of Federal criminal law involving Government officers.” So instead of going to Congress, the whistleblower’s complaint went to the DOJ and, apparently, to Barr himself. The DOJ then assessed whether Trump may have committed a campaign finance violation, since it is a federal crime for any person to “solicit” any “thing of value” from a foreign national in connection with an election.

On Wednesday, the DOJ released a statement announcing that the agency had determined that “that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.” It reached this finding by deciding that dirt on a political opponent is not a “thing of value”—disagreeing with Robert Mueller, who believed opposition research could qualify as a “thing of value.” The DOJ’s contrary conclusion theory of campaign finance law is far-fetched if not outright incorrect, ignoring the immense value that Trump and Giuliani evidently saw in a Biden investigation.

We don’t know for sure that Barr’s fingerprints are on this decision. But the OLC purported to follow a statute that required the whistleblower complaint to be “expeditiously reported to the Attorney General.” Thus, Barr was, at a minimum, presumably aware of the criminal referral. Moreover, there is no indication that Barr recused himself from the whistleblower matter, even though Trump invoked him on the call at the center of the affair.

In short, Barr’s Justice Department first manipulated ICWPA to prevent Maguire from sending the whistleblower complaint to Congress. It then manipulated campaign finance law to determine that Trump had committed no crime and refused to open an investigation. And the Attorney General himself, who appears to be implicated in the whistleblower’s complaint, almost certainly played a role in quashing any probe into the president.

Faced with this stonewalling at DOJ, House Democrats have no choice but to pursue impeachment if they want to get to the bottom of this scandal and punish Trump accordingly. Barr and his allies at the Justice Department certainly aren’t going to do it. To the contrary, the Justice Department seems eager to shield the president from any consequences. Under Barr, the DOJ has defended Trump’s refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas into his personal finances. It has even intervened on behalf of his former campaign chairman, convicted felon Paul Manafort, lobbying for him to receive special privileges behind bars. The Justice Department has all but announced that it will aide Trump’s allies and fight his enemies.

Barr will do whatever he can insulate Trump from federal law. We can certainly expect his DOJ to fight the House’s impeachment inquiry by attempting to stop executive officials from testifying, as it has before. But there is one important power that Barr lacks: He cannot stop Congress from concluding that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.

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Stern doesn’t even get into the equally serious problem of Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” mis-management, his intentional misconstruction of immigration law, and his promotion of biased, xenophobic, anti-asylum applicant decision making in the failing U.S. Immigration Courts which, despite their clearly unconstitutional structure, continue to operate as an appendage of DHS enforcement within the DOJ, as the Federal Appellate Courts disgracefully (and spinelessly) pretend to look the other way. History won’t be so kind to the “enablers” on the Federal Bench.

PWS

09-26-19

BLOOD ON THEIR JUDICIAL ROBES! — WHEN A CORRUPT, XENOPHOBIC, RACIST GOVERNMENT IS ASSISTED BY COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS, HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIVES OF THE REFUGEES THEY ARE BETRAYING: “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.”

https://apple.news/AHwi8LL9GT8qKZ3YHhAPcrQ

Leon Krauze reports for Slate:

The World

Mexico’s Capitulation to Trump Has Put Thousands of Lives in Danger

The Mexican foreign minister says his government has nothing to be ashamed of. He’s wrong.

September 20 2019 4:51 PM

In recent months, at least 3,000 immigrants have been sent back to towns along the Mexican border between Tamaulipas and Texas, one of the country’s most dangerous areas. What they have faced there defies the imagination. The city of Nuevo Laredo is a well-known hotbed of extortion and kidnapping. Immigrants make easy targets. “These people have been thrown into the lion’s den,” local journalist Daniel Rosas told me recently.

According to Rosas, President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program has been particularly harmful, placing thousands of immigrants in imminent danger. “If even us locals are going through a very difficult time dealing with violence here, just imagine what life is like for an immigrant who doesn’t have a home and doesn’t know anyone. This place is completely unsafe,” Rosas told me. In the city of Nuevo Laredo, Rosas described a Dantean scene in which people working for cartels are tasked with identifying and abducting immigrants, who are then taken away to safehouses where they are held for ransom.

“In Tamaulipas, migrants are the most vulnerable. They suffer every kind of abuse imaginable,” he told me. Rosas seemed particularly worried for women and children in Tamaulipas. “They are completely defenseless,” Rosas told me. “When they were waiting and trying to rest under the bridge, there were kids sleeping on cardboard, without any help. They live through sheer horror,” he said.

This nightmare is the predictable result of recent actions by governments on both sides of the border. Three months ago, faced with Trump’s tariff blackmail, Mexico’s government capitulated and agreed to a series of unprecedented measures to reduce the flow of Central American immigrants reaching the United States. Terrified by the possibility of a trade war, President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s administration deployed thousands of troops along Mexico’s southern border, gave control of the country’s immigration authority to an expert in incarceration and enforcement, and pledged full cooperation with some of Trump’s more controversial immigration policies. As part of the deal, Mexican government officials agreed to return to Washington every few months with evidence of results, a recurrent humiliating pilgrimage in search of Trump’s approval and a renewed deferral of the looming tariff threat.

Ten days ago, after his first assessment in Washington with Trump’s inner circle—and, briefly, the president himself—Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard gave a victorious but ultimately unfortunate news conference. Ebrard claimedthat the much-touted downward trend in the number of immigrants reaching the United States would likely be “permanent,” although historical trends suggest the flow of immigrants will likely increase during the fall. Ebrard then said the Mexican government had demanded new and strict gun control measures in the United States. The goal, Ebrard boasted, was to “freeze” gun trafficking along the border. This is disingenuous. Ebrard knows any sort of significant reduction in gun smuggling from the United States would require legislative measures that the Trump administration and the Republican Party will not pursue.

Ebrard then concluded by saying the López Obrador administration had nothing to apologize for on immigration. “We do not regret anything of what’s been implemented,” Ebrard said. “We haven’t done anything we should be ashamed of.”

He is wrong.

The Mexican government’s cooperation with Donald Trump’s punitive immigration strategy has created a calamity along the country’s northern border. Of the many complications, none is more potentially catastrophic than the broad implementation of Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The measure forces potential refugees to wait for months (or years) in Mexico for a slim chance at asylum in the United States. It has opened the door to the creation of a massive community of rootless and marginalized immigrants living in perilous limbo in some of Mexico’s most dangerous areas. There are now close to 38,000 immigrants waitingin Mexico because of MPP. After meeting with Ebrard, the White House announcedthe program would be expanded “to the fullest extent possible,” dramatically increasing the number of potential refugees returned to Mexico, many to regions of the country where they face almost certain peril.

No place seems safe, not even shelters run by religious organizations, one of the few reliable options in other border towns like Tijuana. In Nuevo Laredo, organized crime knows no bounds. Just last month, local pastor Aarón Méndez, who runs the “Casa del Migrante AMAR” shelter in the city, reportedly tried to protect a group of Cuban migrants from a group of abductors. They kidnapped Méndezinstead. No one has heard from him since.

Things aren’t much better in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. In recent years, the city has seen “open warfare” between rival cartels. American attorneyKristin Clarens, who has been traveling to the region over the past few months to assist potential refugees and make sense of the dire situation in the region, told me she has never met an asylum-seeking immigrant who felt safe in Mexico. “To the contrary,” Clarens said, “most of the people I’ve met described routine and regular acts of violence, such as kidnapping, assault, and extortion.” According to Clarens, migrants in Matamoros, like those in Nuevo Laredo, are facing a full-blown humanitarian crisis. “The heat is intense and unrelenting, and they lack access to sanitation, water, shade, food, and basic shelter,” she told me. “People hike down to the river and use the river to clean themselves, wash their clothes, and occasionally drink. Children and adults are sick and covered with bug bites and lesions.”

Like Rosas, Clarens believes “Remain in Mexico” has complicated the already formidable immigration challenge in the region. “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.” Clarens thinks the crisis will likely worsen. “I know that Mexico can be a safe and stable place for many people, but impoverished and incredibly vulnerable Central Americans who are desperate for security and are leaving their countries of origin for the first time are not able to stay safe,” she told me.

If Mexico continues to quietly go along with the radical expansion of the MPP program, the number of immigrants waiting for asylum in the country could reach the hundreds of thousands. With Mexico’s official refugee agency operating on a ridiculous $1.3 million yearly budget, the López Obrador administration is not remotely ready for such an undertaking. The consequences could be severe. If that happens, Ebrard should be asked again if Mexico really has nothing to be ashamed of.

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Those who should really be ashamed are the cowardly life-tenured judges of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit who as a group have utterly failed to protect migrants’ statutory, Constitutional, and Human Rights from lawless, invidious, and very intentional abuse by Trump’s White Nationalist regime and his DHS and DOJ sycophants.

Article III Federal Judges are absolutely immune from liability for their wrongdoing and abuses. But, they shouldn’t be immune from shame and the judgment of history for abandoning our system of justice and the most vulnerable it is supposed to protect at their greatest time of need. That’s basically the definition of legal incompetence and moral cowardice.

PWS

09-22-19

MITCH McCONNELL & HIS GOP CRONIES ARE INSURING THAT OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WILL CONTINUE TO BE IN UNNECESSARY DANGER OF RIGHT-WING TERRORIST GUN VIOLENCE NO MATTER WHO IS PRESIDENT – Judges Can Be “Stooges” Too, & That’s The Litmus Test For The NRA’s Wholly-Owned Subsidiary, GOP Enterprises & Its “CEO!”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/senate-republicans-gun-control-judges.html

Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:

The Republican Party has no real plan to stop the epidemic of mass shootings that has turned American life into a gruesome Hobbesian nightmare. It’s easy to see why. All available evidence confirms that the guns are the problem: The United States’ patchwork of lax firearms laws allows Americans to slaughter civilians with astonishing ease. To stop mass shootings, lawmakers will need to tighten both federal and state gun laws, which Republicans refuse to do. We must remain sitting ducks, waiting to learn—in Sen. Marco Rubio’s memorable phrasing—whose “turn” it is next to be massacred.

Shortly after the El Paso, Texas, shooting on Saturday, the New York Times published an article that inadvertently presaged Republicans’ nonresponse to the imminent bloodbath. Senate Republicans, the Times noted, have passed virtually no legislation of any kind so far this year. In the face of mounting crises, the Senate’s GOP leaders have allowed little deliberation and few votes. They certainly won’t bring H.R. 8, a universal background check bill that already passed the House of Representatives, to the floor.

Instead, the Senate operates as “an approval factory” for Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, the Times found. Under Trump, the Senate has confirmed two Supreme Court justices, 99 district courts judges, and 43 federal court of appeals judges. Today, nearly 1 in 4 judges on the powerful courts of appeals was nominated by Trump. The president is reshaping the judiciary in the image of the Republican Party’s far-right conservative wing.

Today, nearly 1 in 4 judges on the powerful courts of appeals was nominated by Trump.

It would be a mistake to claim that the Senate has taken no action on gun control. While the House passes gun safety measures, the Senate installs judges who are eager to strike such measures down. Republican lawmakers have taken the long view: They may lose majorities in Congress and state legislatures, but Trump’s judges will sit on the bench for decades to come. Any future firearms restrictions may be invalidated; many existing gun safety laws are in serious jeopardy. The GOP may have no plan to stop mass shootings, but it does have a plan to ensure that Democrats can’t stop them, either.

To understand the dynamic here, it’s important to remember that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions have been fairly narrow. In 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, the court ruled that the amendment protects law-abiding individuals’ right to keep handguns in the home for self-defense. In 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, the court held that this right applies against state and local governments. Thus, the Constitution prevents the government from outlawing the possession of a handgun in the home. Under current precedent, the Second Amendment poses no threat to the vast majority of proposed gun regulations.

Try as it might, the National Rifle Association and its allies have failed to persuade the Supreme Court to go any further. The court has declined to hear challenges to a ban on assault weapons, a requirement that guns be stored in a lockbox, a prohibition on concealed carry, and a mandatory waiting period between firearm purchases. A majority of the justices have simply refused to expand Heller and McDonald to curb Americans’ ability to protect themselves from the gun massacres that plague us today.

Trump’s judges are desperate to change that. Start with his Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In 2017, Gorsuch joined Justice Clarence Thomas in declaring that states may not ban civilians from carrying concealed weapons in public. Their dissent accused the court of treating “the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.” By joining Thomas’ opinion, Gorsuch signaled that he would force every state to allow concealed carry—even though states with looser concealed carry laws have more gun deaths. Gorsuch and Thomas also dissented from the Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, which were used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.

Kavanaugh, too, proved to be a gun extremist during his tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In a 2011 dissent, Kavanaugh declared that D.C.’s ban on assault weapons infringed upon the Second Amendment. The District argued that the ban would save lives, since these guns are disproportionately used in mass shootings. Kavanaugh, however, claimed that Heller established a right to purchase assault weapons because there “is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction” between semi-automatic handguns and rifles. (In fact, a typical semi-automatic rifle bullet exits the muzzle with far more powerthan the typical semi-automatic handgun bullet, making it substantially more devastating to the human body.)

Trump’s lower-court nominees are now openly lobbying the Supreme Court to strike down more gun laws. These judges have advanced an ambitious argument that limitations on the right to bear arms must pass strict scrutiny, the most stringent constitutional standard available. A strict scrutiny test would effectively kill any legislation that was not “narrowly tailored” to advance a compelling state interest—and preventing a mass shooting may not be a good enough reason.

In July 2018, four of Trump’s nominees to the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals condemned a federal law that bars licensed dealers from selling handguns to out-of-state residents. The law does not ban interstate gun transfers; it merely requires handguns to be transferred to a dealer in the state where the buyer resides.

There is nothing especially burdensome about this law. Congress intended dealers to ensure that every handgun transfer complies with the laws of the state where the buyer resides. A panel of judges for the 5^thCircuit upheld the law, and the full court voted not to disturb that ruling. Yet seven judges, including four Trump nominees, dissented, arguing that the law is unconstitutional. Judge James Ho, one of Trump’s most outwardly partisan nominees, scorned the government’s reasoning that “to protect against the violations of the few, we must burden the constitutional rights of the many.” Ho applied strict scrutiny, arguing that because there are “less restrictive alternatives,” like “better information sharing,” the law is not narrowly tailored.

In December, Judge Stephanos Bibas, another Trump nominee, wrote a similar dissent to a decision by the 3^rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A panel of judges upheld New Jersey’s ban on large-capacity magazines (or LCMs). The majority noted that LCMs “have been used in numerous mass shootings” and result “in increased fatalities and injuries.” Without access to LCMs, shooters “must reload more frequently,” giving bystanders opportunities to flee or intervene. Applying intermediate scrutiny, the majority found that the New Jersey law “reasonably fits the State’s interest in promoting public safety.”

Bibas’ dissent could’ve been ghostwritten by the NRA’s lawyers. “The Second Amendment is an equal part of the Bill of Rights,” he wrote. “We may not water it down and balance it away based on our own sense of wise policy.” Bibas argued that the New Jersey law impaired the “core right” of self-defense and must therefore be subject to strict scrutiny. He found that the statute flunked that test, dismissing the “armchair proposition that smaller magazines force shooters to pause more often to reload.”

Many of Trump’s nominees appear to agree that some unknown number of people must be shot to death before the government can limit access to firearms.

“Armchair proposition”? Here, Bibas questioned a fact that countless mass shooting survivors can confirm: When a shooter pauses to reload, his intended victims have more time to escape. Bibas’ casuistry demonstrates a flaw in the conservative approach to the Second Amendment. Trump nominees keep demanding that any firearm restriction be subject to heightened scrutiny. But this test is a chilling mismatch for the Second Amendment, because when we talk about “tailoring” gun restrictions, we are really asking how many people must die before the government can justify its laws.

U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez, a George W. Bush nominee, illustrated this grisly truth in June 2017. Benitez blocked a California measure that outlawed large-capacity magazines, finding that it failed heightened scrutiny. Why? “Of the ten mass shooting events that occurred in California,” Benitez wrote, “only two involved the use of a magazine holding more than 10 rounds.” The ban’s “marginal good effects”—that is, the lives it would’ve saved—did not justify it. Because “only two” California mass shootings involved LCMs, the law was not reasonably tailored to protect the public.

The next year, a man walked into a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, and killed 12 people. He used large-capacity magazines that he purchased legally. The weapons would have been illegal if Benitez had not blocked California’s ban on LCMs.

Many of Trump’s nominees appear to agree that some unknown number of people must be shot to death before the government can limit access to firearms. Others take an even more extreme approach. In his 2011 dissent, Kavanaugh suggested that courts must look to “text, history, and tradition” to gauge the legality of gun control laws. They cannot deploy any kind of “interest-balancing test.” Unless a gun restriction is “longstanding,” Kavanaugh wrote, it is unconstitutional. This standard—which Ho cited favorably—would prohibit the government from experimenting with any new gun safety law. We would be stuck with the small set of regulations deemed “longstanding” by the courts. No matter how many bodies piled up, we would be helpless to protect ourselves against the butchery.

Trump’s judges are hoping the Supreme Court will kickstart this Second Amendment revolution. They might not have to wait long. This fall, the justices will hear a challenge to New York City’s restriction on the transportation of guns outside the home (unless it’s dismissed as moot). They may use the opportunity to enshrine a new Second Amendment standard into law. The conservative majority could demand that gun laws survive strict scrutiny. Or it could hold that any law that’s not “longstanding” be struck down, as Kavanaugh prefers.

Whatever the justices decide, scores of Trump judges in the lower courts will be waiting to vigorously enforce their decision, knocking down as many gun restrictions as possible. Republican senators will continue to confirm judicial nominees at a record pace. To the extent that the GOP has a plan to address mass shootings, this is it: stack the courts with more judges who will prevent American from addressing gun violence. Trump and the Senate are working together to build a judiciary that renders our government permanently powerless to take action against the bloodshed.

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

No perversion too great, no cause too grotesque for the GOP and their “Head Turtle.” While Mitch & Co. might think that their kids, because of their White Supremacist lineage, will be immune from bullets fired by White Supremacists and other hate mongers, there is no scientific evidence that is true. On the other hand, to be in today’s GOP is to ignore scientific evidence (except for the pseudo-science behind racism and restrictionist immigration policies).

At some point after the U.S. disappears as a nation, historians will look back in awe at how stupid a supposedly advanced country could be by empowering scam artists like Trump, McConnell, and the GOP. Indeed, “fiddling while Rome burns” would be an apt analogy for most of today’s GOP on gun control, immigration, climate change, heath care, debt control, income inequality, realistic taxes, retirement security, infrastructure, education, global cooperation, trade, and a host of other pressing issues.

PWS

08-05-19

GO FIGURE: BKavs Stands Up For Rights Of African-Americans, While Clarence Thomas Presents Incoherent & Disingenuous Defense Of Jim Crow!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/brett-kavanaugh-clarence-thomas-racist-juries-mississippi.html

Mark Joseph Stern reports for Slate:

Much of the Supreme Court’s 7–2 decision in Flowers v. Mississippi on Friday reads like a nightmare. The facts are straight out of the Jim Crow South: A white Mississippi prosecutor, Doug Evans, prosecuted a black man, Curtis Flowers, for the exact same crime six times in search of a capital conviction that might stick. In the process, Evans struck 41 of 42 black prospective jurors, an obvious attempt to secure an all-white jury. Several convictions were overturned due to flagrant prosecutorial misconduct. At Flowers’ sixth trial, however, Evans finally got a death sentence upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Can that punishment possibly comport with the Constitution’s command of equal protection?

In a decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court said no, reversing Flowers’ conviction in light of obvious racial bias. To Kavanaugh’s credit, his opinion confronts Evans’ racism head-on and bolsters constitutional safeguards against prosecutorial attempts to purge minorities from juries. Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a scorching dissent, joined in part by Justice Neil Gorsuch, savaging the majority for trying to “boost its self-esteem” while “needlessly prolong[ing] the suffering of four victims’ families.” Thomas, in fact, is eager to overturn decades of precedent limiting prosecutors’ ability to exclude minority jurors on the basis of their race.

The facts of Flowers are simply appalling. In 1996, someone murdered four people at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi; Evans, the district attorney, decided Flowers was the killer. The evidence against Flowers was astonishingly meager: It rested largely on eyewitness testimonies, provided weeks and months after the crime, that often provided conflicting details. No eyewitnesses came forward until the state offered a $30,000 reward, and several later reported being coerced by prosecutors into implicating Flowers. Investigators never found DNA evidence or fingerprints tying Flowers to the murder. Instead, they identified a single particle of gunshot residue on Flowers’ hand—which, they acknowledged, could have come from the police car that took him to the station, or from the fireworks he set off the day before.

Throughout the six trials, three “jailhouse snitches” testified that Flowers confessed to them; each later recanted, admitting that they had lied. One conceded that he fabricated the confession to receive a sentence reduction. The victims were executed with chilling efficiency, several execution-style, yet Flowers had no criminal history; he did not even own a gun. His cousin, Doyle Simpson, owned the gun allegedly used in the killings. Multiple eyewitnesses saw a man who looked like Simpson outside Tardy Furniture on the morning of the crime. Their evidence was not contradictory or coerced.

Nonetheless, Evans relentlessly targeted Flowers, engaging in a quest to remove black Mississippians from the jury each time. He did so using peremptory strikes, which allow trial attorneys to strike prospective jurors without providing a reason. In 1986’s Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court attempted to come up with a tool to combat racist peremptory strikes: If a defendant challenged a strike on racial grounds, prosecutors had to provide a “neutral explanation” for their decision. The court explained that the Constitution “forbids the States to strike black [jurors] on the assumption that they will be biased in a particular case simply because the defendant is black.” Otherwise, the “core guarantee of equal protection … would be meaningless.”

Nonetheless, at Flowers’ first trial, Evans used peremptory strikes to remove every potential black juror, obtaining an all-white jury that sentenced Flowers to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed because the prosecution acted “in bad faith” by baselessly disputing the credibility of a defense witness and mentioning facts not in evidence. Next time around, Evans once again used his peremptory strikes to remove all black jurors, but this time the trial judge objected and seated one black juror. The jury convicted Flowers, but its verdict was reversed again for essentially the same reasons.

Third time up: Prosecutors used all their peremptory strikes to remove black prospective jurors. Only one black juror was seated. The jury sentenced Flowers to death, but the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed, finding a Batson violation. At the fourth and fifth trials, prosecutors ran out of peremptory challenges and had to settle for juries with multiple blacks. Both times, the jury failed to reach a verdict, resulting in mistrials. Finally, at Flowers’ sixth trial, prosecutors used five out of six peremptory strikes on black potential jurors. A jury of 11 whites and one black sentenced Flowers to death. He argued another Batson violation, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld his sentence, so he appealed to SCOTUS.

Technically, only the peremptory strikes at Flowers’ sixth trial are at issue in this case. But Kavanaugh recounted the history of Evans’ racist machinations and clarified that this “historical evidence” matters. Across Flowers’ many trials, he wrote:

[T]he State employed its peremptory strikes to remove as many black prospective jurors as possible. The State appeared to proceed as if Batson had never been decided. The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury.

“We cannot ignore that history,” the justice concluded, when assessing Evans’ removal of blacks from the jury at Flowers’ most recent trial. “We cannot take that history out of the case.”

Kavanaugh also pointed to “dramatically disparate questioning of black and white prospective jurors in the jury selection process for Flowers’ sixth trial.” Prosecutors “asked the five black prospective jurors who were struck a total of 145 questions.” Yet they asked “the 11 seated white jurors a total of 12 questions.” Put differently, each prospective black juror was grilled with an average of 29 questions; each seated white juror was asked an average of one.

Why? By “asking a lot of questions of the black prospective jurors,” Kavanaugh wrote, “a prosecutor can try to find some pretextual reason—any reason—that the prosecutor can later articulate to justify what is in reality a racially motivated strike.” But a court “confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.” This “lopsidedness” can demonstrate that the prosecutor was attempting to “disguise a discriminatory intent.”

Assessing all this damning evidence, Kavanaugh found that prosecutors struck at least one potential black juror from Flowers’ sixth trial on the basis of race. He tossed out the death sentence and sent the case back down to Mississippi for a new trial. Evans still serves as district attorney and could handle Flowers’ seventh trial—even though SCOTUS has now made clear that his conduct in this case has been permanently tainted by racism.

In dissent, Thomas accused the majority of taking Flowers’ case because it wanted to “scorn” Mississippi state courts, or perhaps “because the case has received a fair amount of media attention.” (The media, he warned, often prefers “to titillate rather than to educate and inform.”) Thomas dismissed Kavanaugh’s opinion as “manifestly incorrect,” insisting that Evans had perfectly good reasons to strike five black prospective jurors from the sixth trial. And he wrote that the majority “builds its decision around the narrative that this case has a long history of race discrimination. This narrative might make for an entertaining melodrama, but it has no basis in the record.” (It does; Thomas just rewrites the record to excuse every single instance of Evans’ egregious racial bias.)

Gorsuch joined those portions of the dissent, but declined to sign onto its most radical assertion: that Batson itself should be overruled. Black defendants tried by all-white jurors created by racist prosecutors, Thomas wrote, suffer “no legally cognizable injury.” The accused suffer no equal protection violation when they are tried by a jury selected on the basis of race. Moreover, prosecutors should be permitted to make “generalizations” about black jurors, because “race matters in the courtroom.” Thomas ended his screed by berating the court for “needlessly prolong[ing] the suffering of four victims’ families” in an effort to “boost its self-esteem,” and declared: “If the Court’s opinion today has a redeeming quality, it is this: The State is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”

It’s an encouraging sign that Kavanaugh just ignored Thomas’ dissent, as it is really too wacky, too hostile, and aggrieved to merit a response. Rather, with a majority of the court behind him, Kavanaugh made the case that courts can identify discriminatory intent without a smoking gun of overt racism. Evans never used racial epithets in the courtroom or stated his desire for a white jury; his actions alone told the court everything it needed to know about his motivations. This Supreme Court may not always confront unconstitutional prejudice with such clear-eyed pragmatism, but it’s worth celebrating a decision that enforces constitutional limits on racist prosecutions.

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

I admit to not being a big BKavs fan. But, I appreciate his strong and courageous leadership on this case.

PWS

06-23-19

TRUMP SEEKING TO END LEGAL IMMIGRATION? — Proposed Appointment Of Supremely Unqualified Far Right Bigot “Cooch Cooch” To Replace Fired Hardliner Cissna @ USCIS Threatens To Topple Whole System With “Malicious Incompetence” — But, Has He Finally Pushed Senate’s “Top Turtle” Too Far?

https://apple.news/AndEGsINTRO-3yhD1KPQLAw

Raul Reyes writers in Slate:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that former Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli will be tapped for a role in the Trump administration. He will be put in charge of the country’s legal immigration system, as head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). While it had been earlier rumored that Cuccinelli would be placed in a new job as “immigration czar,” both the Times and the Washington Post noted that he now seems set for the top spot at USCIS.

No matter what job Cuccinelli ends up in, he is neither deserving nor qualified to play any role in shaping immigration policy. He is an immigration hardliner with views that are at odds with American values. He has a history of xenophobic, homophobic, and sexist comments. Ironically, one nice thing that can be said about Cuccinelli is that he fosters bipartisanship — he has generated opposition from both sides of the aisle.

Given that Cuccinelli could soon be presiding over USCIS, his comments on immigration are worthy of review. In 2018, he told Breitbart News Daily that states should use “war powers” to turn back migrants: “You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it,” he said. In 2015, appearing on a conservative radio station, he claimed that President Obama was encouraging an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants. In 2012, he compared immigration policy to pest control. He’s called the infamous Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) “one of my very favorite congressman.” So Cuccinelli is hardly someone who can be trusted to run USCIS in keeping with the agency’s core values, which include “respect” and “integrity.”

Most importantly, Cuccinelli has no significant experience in immigration policy, notwithstanding his failed attempt to end birthright citizenship as a state senator. He is not from a border state, nor has he been a credible voice in the immigration debate. His background is in law enforcement, not immigration law.

Cuccinelli’s prime qualification for his new job seems to be that he has been a tireless defender of the president on cable news. That could almost be seen as laughable if the stakes were not so high. Consider that as head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would wield tremendous power over immigrants like refugees, domestic abuse victims, and asylum-seekers. Or that our legal immigration system is byzantine and complicated, attracting the largest number of immigrants in the world. In FY 2017, the U.S. granted Legal Permanent Resident status to about 1.1 million people, including 120,000 refugees and 25,000 asylum-seekers.

Cuccinelli’s anti-LGBTQ record is especially troubling. As attorney general, he was against policies banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public colleges and universities. As a state senator, he unsuccessfully fought to criminalize sodomy, calling “homosexual acts… intrinsically wrong.” In 2008, he declared that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” The extreme views matter because LGBTQ people are among our most vulnerable immigrants. The Human Rights Campaign, for example, has documented “the precarious position of transgender immigrants and asylum seekers.” Sadly, it seems unlikely that Cuccinelli would respect their human rights, let alone treat LGBTQ immigrants with kindness and compassion.

There are myriad ways in which Cuccinelli has demonstrated that he is far out of the mainstream, so much so that handing him a huge job would be dangerous. The man who worried about getting his newborn son a social security number because he was concerned about the government tracking his family is probably not the ideal person to put in charge of E-Verify, the federal database that checks employment eligibility.

True, the president can choose whomever he likes for high-level positions. But Cuccinelli isn’t even a smart political pick. In addition to being unpopular with Democrats, he doesn’t have the full support of Republican lawmakers either. According to the website Vox, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not want to confirm Cuccinelli (the ill will stems from the fact that Cuccinelli headed up a political action committee that supported primary challenges to incumbent Republicans in 2014). Besides, on immigration most Americans are moving away from Trump. This January, the Pew Center found that 62 percent of Americans believe that immigrants strengthen our country. A restrictionist like Cuccinelli is not what the public wants or needs.

As head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would bring little to the job except a track record as a Trump loyalist. With his outdated and narrow views, he would be a disaster overseeing our legal immigration system.

Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, he is also a contributor to NBCNews.com and CNN Opinion. You can follow him on Twitter at @RaulAReyes, Instagram: raulareyes1.

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

Let’s remember that fired hardliner L. Francis Cissna was the man who “took the ‘Services’ out of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.” His dismal anti-immigrant polices and undermining of public service have brought unprecedented backlogs to USCIS adjudications that are now under Congressional investigation. He also reportedly “tanked” employee morale at USCIS. Nevertheless, he wasn’t quite nasty enough for Trump and his neo-Nazi White Nationalist advisor Stephen MIller.

As a Virginia resident who suffered through “Cooch Cooch’s” disastrous tenure as Attorney General and his thankfully unsuccessful bid to become our Governor, I can testify that he is indeed without any redeeming social values. In other words, a perfect fit for the “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy.” But, “Cooch Cooch” has some powerful enemies in the GOP Senate. He pissed off Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and powerful Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) can’t be too pleased with Trump’s treatment of his former staffer Cissna.

In the meantime, it’s “chaos as usual” in the DHS/USCIS kakistocracy.

PWS

05-31-19

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