"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.
The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.
And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.
A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.
Trump’s recent pardons have broken double-pane windows.
Not only has he shattered the norm for presidential pardons – usually granted because of a petitioner’s good conduct after conviction and service of sentence – but he’s pardoned people who themselves shattered windows. By pardoning them, he has rendered them unaccountable for their acts.
They include aides convicted of lying to the FBI and threatening potential witnesses in order to protect him; his son-in-law’s father, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to the Federal Election Commission; Blackwater security guards convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians, including women and children; Border Patrol agents convicted of assaulting or shooting unarmed suspects; and Republican lawmakers and their aides found guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.
It’s not simply the size of the broken window that undermines standards, according to Wilson and Kelling. It’s the willingness of society to look the other way. If no one is held accountable, norms collapse.
Trump may face a barrage of lawsuits when he leaves office, possibly including criminal charges. But it’s unlikely he’ll go to jail. Presidential immunity or a self-pardon will protect him. Prosecutorial discretion would almost certainly argue against indictment, in any event. No former president has ever been convicted of a crime. The mere possibility of a criminal trial for Trump would ignite a partisan brawl across the nation.
Congress may try to limit the power of future presidents – strengthening congressional oversight, fortifying the independence of inspectors general, demanding more financial disclosure, increasing penalties on presidential aides who break laws, restricting the pardon process, and so on.
But Congress – a co-equal branch of government under the Constitution – cannot rein in rogue presidents. And the courts don’t want to weigh in on political questions.
The appalling reality is that Trump may get away with it. And in getting away with it he will have changed and degraded the norms governing American presidents. The giant windows he’s broken are invitations to a future president to break even more.
Nothing will correct this unless or until an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize and condemn what has occurred.
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Read Reich’s full article at the link.
As I have mentioned, the lack of accountability could be a problem for the Biden-Harris Administration. And, 74 million voters who pulled the lever for an overtly corrupt, anti-American, racist, clown is an even bigger obstacle to the future of our nation.
On the other hand, although he was a “minority President” from the git go, Trump had nothing but contempt for the majority of us who didn’t favor his maliciously incompetent and divisive policies; he completely disregarded both truth and the common good.
Biden and Harris start with something that Trump never had — the support of a clear majority of 7 million plus voters. So, if they govern wisely, humanely, and in the public interest they could succeed in saving our nation from the 74 million who joined Trump’s war against American democracy. And despite their short-signtedness and intransigence, the 74 million and their families in Trumpland will get the benefits of better government in the public interest. Sometimes, you have to save folks in spite of themselves.
If the policies of decency, honesty, courage, and governing in the public interest work, it could create a longer-term governing majority. If not, it will still be worth a shot at saving our democracy. Another Administration of Trump and his minority minions would be the end of our democracy anyway —the majority of us have little to lose by giving it our best shot with the Biden Harris Team!
The Government appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Carter, J.), granting Carlos Alejandro Velasco Lopez’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Velasco Lopez was detained pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), which provides for discretionary detention of noncitizens during the pendency of removal proceedings. His habeas petition challenged the procedures employed in his bond hearings, which required him to prove, to the satisfaction of an immigration judge, that he is neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk. We hold that the district court correctly granted the petition, and provided the correct remedy by ordering a new bond hearing in which the Government bore the burden of showing by clear and convincing evidence that Velasco Lopez was either a danger or a flight risk.
KEY QUOTE:
The irony in this case is that, in the end, all interested parties prevailed. The Government has prevailed because it has no interest in the continued incarceration of an individual who it cannot show to be either a flight risk or a danger to his community. Velasco Lopez has prevailed because he is no longer incarcerated. And the public’s interest in seeing that individuals who need not be jailed are not incarcerated has been vindicated.
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Judge Parker is correct insofar as he cogently states what should be a “win-win-win” under a functioning Government. I wholeheartedly join lead counsel Julie Dona of the Legal Aid Society, NY, in appreciating and recognizing Judge Parker’s understanding of the grim realities of today’s mal-functioning Immigration Courts and the important Constitutional rights being abridged by DHS & EOIR (essentially one and the same under the Trump kakistocracy).
But, that statement of how Government should be functioning glosses over the unfortunate reality of the Trump regime’s lawless, White Nationalist, nativist immigration agenda. The Trump regime doesn’t seek to create “win-win-win” situations! Instead, they seek to make political statements, dehumanize and degrade “the other,” and promote the biases of their “base” over sound public policy that benefits the common good.
The purpose of imprisonment in the Trump Gulag all too often has little or nothing to do with the legal criteria of danger to the community or flight risk. Rather, detention in the Gulag is used by the Trump regime’s DHS, with the connivence of the DOJ and often the courts, to punish individuals who choose to assert their legal rights; make it more difficult for them to obtain effective representation; and to coerce them into abandoning viable claims for relief, appeals, and judicial review. It’s all about punishment and deterrence, not mainly about the public interest, which is ill-served by most of Trump’s biased and counterproductive immigration policies.
DHS detention in the Trump era primarily serves Trump’s political interests and the interests of those running the for-profit prisons comprising much of Trump’s New American Gulag. Any time Trump’s policies match up with a legitimate national interest, it’s purely happenstance, not part of some overall plan to govern in the public interest.
Miller’splans are so explosively ugly, overtly racist, and anti-American that they are being kept under wraps (for now) because of a (quite legitimate) fear that they could drive the small, yet potentially significant, minority of voters of color that Trump needs to have any chance of extending his rule to do something rational and in their self-interest: Vote for Biden-Harris. Look for things like eliminating birthright citizenship, eradicating all refugee and asylum laws, making it difficult or impossible for family members and people of color to immigrate legally, a wave of summary deportations, deporting “Dreamers,” and exterminating every last ounce of compassion and humanity from our laws. If you think that Black Lives don’t matter much to Trump and his cronies, just wait until he turns the Gruppenfuhrer loose! Think the Federal Courts will stop him? Just look at Trump’s “wholly owned and proud to brag about it” Supremes’ majority! And, he’s also “stacked” — effectively “packed” — the lower Federal Courts with loyalist ideologues.
America can no longer afford life-tenured judges who treat Trump as “normal” and are unwilling or incapable of “connecting the dots” among the dehumanization and demonization of migrants, institutionalized racism, and the end of American democracy. Immigrants’ rights are human rights; human rights are Constitutional rights; dehumanization of “the other” dehumanizes us all!
It’s past time that America stopped granting the privilege and responsibilities of life-tenure to those who won’t publicly adhere to those fundamental truths! Not rocket science! Just basic Constitutional law and human decency! Better judges for a better America! It all starts with a better President and a better Senate! That’s why this election might be our final chance to take back our country and preserve our democracy!
This is no longer the case. Public confidence and public perception that the courts are non-partisan has eroded. The Republican boycott of Garland, together with Trump’s unprecedented nomination of Barrett and her likely confirmation, will seal the Republican theft of two supreme court seats, at least in the eyes of more than half the electorate, and will ensure conservative control of the court for decades to come.
If Barrett’s record is any indication, the court will soon turn its back on its most treasured precedents and turn America into a more regressive country. Before joining the bench just three years ago, she served as a law clerk to Scalia, whose judicial philosophy she has fully embraced. She has also been a longtime member of the rightwing Federalist Society.
Public confidence and public perception that the courts are non-partisan has eroded
Her short judicial record, together with her scholarly writings, reveal that she is a rock-solid conservative jurist. Like Scalia, she defines herself as an originalist and textualist, which means that the constitution must be viewed as of the time it was written. From that perspective, there is nothing in the constitution that would explicitly support abortion rights, gay marriage, mandatory school desegregation, or the right to suppress evidence that is illegally seized. By contrast, in one of her most famous opinions, United States v Virginia (1996), Ginsburg wrote that “a prime part of the history of our constitution … is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded.”
In a 2013 article, Barrett repeatedly expressed the view that the supreme court had created, through judicial fiat, a framework of abortion on demand that ignited a national controversy. In an opinion she joined with another judge, she expressed doubt that a law preventing parents from terminating a pregnancy because they did not want a child of a particular sex or one with a disability could be unconstitutional. These writings surely indicate that Barrett will do whatever she can to limit or eliminate abortion rights.
Barrett has also expressed dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act and support for a broad interpretation of the second amendment. She has writtenthat Chief Justice John Roberts “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning”. She also quoted Scalia,when he wrote that “the statute known as Obamacare should be renamed ‘Scotuscare’” in “honor of the court’s willingness to ‘rewrite’ the statute in order to keep it afloat”. There is little doubt that Barrett would be inclined to find the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional and thereby deprive millions of Americans of affordable healthcare coverage. Similarly, she wrote a dissenting opinion questioning the constitutionality of a statute that prohibited ex-felons from purchasing guns. Thus, she has demonstrated her fealty to the NRA position that the more guns the better – inevitably leading to more Americans dying from gun violence.
When addressing the legal doctrine known as stare decisis, meaning respect for precedent, Barrett wrote that she “tend[ed] to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the constitution rather than a precedent she thinks is clearly in conflict with it”. In other words, she would overturn landmark decisions such as Brown v Board of Education or Roe v Wade if those decisions did not reflect her best understanding of the constitution.
Amy Coney Barrett: what will she mean for women’s rights?
Read more
Stunningly, in an interview in 2016, when asked whether Congress should confirm Obama’s nominee during an election year, Barrett responded that confirmation should wait until after the election because an immediate replacement would “dramatically flip the balance of power”. Given that answer, she should decline the nomination, as her confirmation would even more dramatically flip the balance of the court, entrenching a 6-3 conservative majority.
Confirming this nominee before the outcome of the national elections – which will determine both the identity of the next president and the composition of a new Senate – is unprecedented, inexcusable and a threat to many rights that the majority of Americans have embraced. This is a tragedy about to happen.
Shira A Scheindlin served as a United States district judge for the southern district of New York for 22 years. She is the co-chair of the board of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a board member of the American Constitution Society
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Read the rest of Judge Scheindlin’s article at the link.
As I have been saying “Better Judges For A Better America!” It starts with electing a President who will nominate them and a Senate that will confirm them. That requires “regime change” and defeat of the GOP Anti-Democracy Party at all levels.
Dems need to stop sputtering about Barrett, whom they don’t appear able to stop anyway, and get out the vote to insure that she will be the last GOP far right shill on Supremes for many years!Rebuilding and improving American democracy starts NOW, with THIS ELECTION. As Willie Nelson says: “Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!”
BTW, “Moscow Mitch” and his GOP toadies have plenty of time to race through the Barrett confirmation during an election, but no time to help Americans thrown out of work or losing their health insurance because of the pandemic!🤮⚰️
To Trump and his core enablers and supporters, the laws of Trump Nation authorize him to do whatever he wants. Anti-Trump Nation’s laws constrain him, but they’re illegitimate because they are made and enforced by the people who reject him.
If he loses the election, Trump will not accept the result because it would be the product of Anti-Trump Nation
So Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine seeking help with the election was “perfect”. It was fine for Russia to side with him in 2016, and it’s fine for it to do so again. And of course the justice department, postal service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should help him win re-election. They’re all aiding Trump Nation.
By a similar twisted logic, Anti-Trump Nation is dangerous. Hence, says Trump, the armed teenager who killed two in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acted in “self-defense”, yet the suspected killer of a rightwinger in Portland deserved the “retribution” he got when federal marshals killed him.
It follows that if he loses the election, Trump will not accept the result because it would be the product of Anti-Trump Nation, and Trump isn’t the president of people who would vote against him. As he recently claimed, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
In the warped minds of Trump and his acolytes, this could lead to civil war. Just this week he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. His consigliere Roger Stone urges him to declare “martial law” if he loses. Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warns “the shooting will begin” when Trump refuses to go.
Civil war is unlikely, but the weeks and perhaps months after election day will surely be fraught. Even if Trump is ultimately forced to relinquish power, his core adherents will continue to view him as their leader. If he retains power, many if not most Americans will consider his presidency illegitimate.
So whatever happens, Trump’s megalomaniacal ego will prevail. America will have come apart over him, and Trump Nation will have seceded from Anti-Trump Nation.
Perhaps ironically, the pro-democracy, pro-health care, pro-environment, pro-jobs, pro-science, more fiscally responsible Government promoted by Biden & Harris will help “Trump Nation” much more than anything in Trump’s tiny and overwhelmingly negative book of “achievements.” Even the pre-pandemic economy that Trump and his cult like to tout was as at least as much Obama as Trump.
Vote like your life and our future depend on it. Because they do!
Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limit on child separations
Former deputy attorney general’s 2018 conference call with US prosecutors in border states shocked some participants, Guardian learns
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
Published:
06:00 Thursday, 23 July 2020
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Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, advised US attorneys implementing the 2018 zero-tolerance policy that there could be no blanket ban on prosecuting migrant parents who had children under the age of five, the Guardian has learned.
The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to face criminal prosecution.
‘Suddenly they started gassing us’: Cuban migrants tell of shocking attack at Ice prison
The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.
The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under 10.
Rosenstein issued his guidance to US attorneys from states on the Mexican border about two weeks after the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued an order that there would be an “escalated effort” to prosecute all illegal entries into the US along the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity.
Previously, under the Obama administration, most families who crossed the border illegally were detained together if they were arrested or were released pending an immigration trial, but were only separated if authorities deemed children to be in danger.
There were questions among the border state US attorneys at that time about how the zero-tolerance policy would be implemented and the conference call with Rosenstein sought to address those issues.
On the call, one US attorney, John Bash of the western district of Texas, said he had declined to prosecute several cases that had been referred to him by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that involved children under the age of five.
In response, sources familiar with the matter said Rosenstein told the US attorneys that they could not decline to prosecute cases based on the age of the children who would be separated from their parents because there was “no categorical exemption” under the order.
During the call, Rosenstein was also asked whether prosecutors could decline to prosecute parents with children who only spoke indigenous languages, meaning they were unable to communicate in English or Spanish, or those whose children had intellectual disabilities. Rosenstein said that prosecutors could opt to decline to prosecute individuals with children under those two circumstances on a case-by-case basis, sources said.
The comments were met with shock by some of the US attorneys, sources said, because there was concern that children who were under the age of five would not know their own names or their parents’ names and that it posed a risk of children potentially getting lost in the system.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
What does this say about firms like King & Spaulding who offer employment and “cover” to human rights abusers like Rosenstein? Why is serving a racist, neo-Nazi, would-be authoritarian regime considered “OK” by “big law” and other supposedly “legitimate” employers? Where’s the outrage?
If human lives and human dignity matter, why is Rosenstein on anyone’s payroll? Why is he still licensed to practice law?
On the bright side: Unapologetic White Nationalist racist “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions is finally off the public dole, hopefully for good.
Donald Trump told thousands of supporters on Saturday that he had asked US officials to slow down testing for Covid-19 because case numbers in the country were rising so rapidly.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the US president used racist language, referring to Covid-19 as “kung flu”, and described testing for the virus as a “double-edged sword” because it led to the identification of more cases.
The US had now tested 25 million people, far more than other countries, Trump said, adding: “When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”
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A White House official later told Reuters that Trump was joking.
Don’t call it a comeback: Trump’s Tulsa rally was just another sad farce | Richard Wolffe
Across the US, more than 119,654 people are confirmed to have been killed by Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. It remains the country worst hit by coronavirus, followed by Brazil, which now has more than a million cases, and Russia, which has 576,162 infections.
Trump said the “radical fake news” media had not given him credit for doing what he called “a phenomenal job” of responding to the outbreak.
The campaign rally in Tulsa went ahead despite warnings from health officials that it risked fuelling a spike in coronavirus cases. The crowd was smaller than expected, with many empty sections in the 19,000-seat arena, but few attendees wore masks.
Globally, 8,753,853 coronavirus cases have now been recorded and 463,281 fatalities confirmed, according to Johns Hopkins University.
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Read the rest of Rebecca’s global report at the link.
This from a dude who 1) has no sense of humor; and 2) lacks any trace of human decency.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
For more than two decades, Roberto Valdez has harvested crops in California’s eastern Coachella Valley, a scorching region dotted with impoverished communities that are surrounded by bountiful fields of grapes, bell peppers, broccoli, watermelon and more. In 2005, after his son nearly died from heatstroke while picking grapes, Valdez advocated for improved safety measures for farm workers, which culminated in new state regulations that protect workers from heat stress. An undocumented immigrant, he is not eligible for federal relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, but while millions of people shelter in place, he continues to work in the fields with his wife. Here he tells Gabriel Thompson about his life as an essential worker.
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Right now I’m harvesting eggplant for $13 an hour. The company gives the crew a 50 cent bonus for each box we fill, so in eight hours we can earn an extra $15 or so. The plants are about 4ft tall and the eggplants grow low, so we usually work on our knees in the dirt. You cut off the eggplants with scissors and fill up buckets that weigh between 40 and 50 pounds, carry them to a large tub where they are washed and packed, and dump them in.
California’s farm workers pick America’s essential produce – unprotected from coronavirus
It tires you out, especially when it’s hot. It was 105 degrees today. By 10 in the morning your clothes are completely soaked with sweat and it’s hard to make it through the eight hours. In fact, some days there are people who leave, who can’t make it.
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Because of the coronavirus we always cover our faces now, no matter what the temperature is. The company has given us disposable blue masks, but we mostly use bandannas. The masks don’t stay clean for very long and they start to smell. When they’re dirty, it’s very hard to breathe. The sun is hot, the ground is hot, you’re working fast, and you can’t breathe. A bandanna you can wash and use again. I bring three bandannas every day: one that goes over my head to protect my neck, and two that I use as masks. We have breaks every four hours, and I use that time to wash the old one out with water and soap and put on a new one. My wife and I work together on the crew, and I bought 16 bandannas that we use.
We leave two rows between each person now, a distance of about 8ft. Before, we ate lunch together around portable tables in the shade. We’d share food. “Hey, grab a taco!” That’s all over. Now we eat apart, mostly in our cars. I also can’t greet people like I used to do, either. I’m the kind of person who likes to shake hands, pat people on the back. “How’s it going? How’re you doing this morning?” Among us Latinos, that’s very common. That’s over, too.
Farm workers wear protective equipment and work behind plastic dividers in the field. Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images
But we still joke and talk, even though we’re separated. There are about 30 people in the crew, and some of us have worked together for years. There are people who are tired, and we’ll tell them a story, just so they’ll be able to get through the day – that’s how we make the work more bearable. Some people have had to stop working because of the coronavirus. There’s a young woman, a single mother with two kids, and she couldn’t keep working because the schools and daycares have shut down. It’s very hard right now – so many mothers have had to stay home.
You have to respect this disease. My brother-in-law died eight days ago, in Mexicali. He was in his 40s and worked at a plant that makes glass. He had high blood pressure and kidney problems, and they had to operate on his kidneys in March. While he was in the hospital he had a hard time breathing, and they suspected he had the coronavirus. They isolated him and put him in an area where the Covid-19 patients were. They didn’t give my sister any information about how he was doing. The government said he died of the coronavirus, but we’re still waiting for the official cause of death. It hurt us a lot, because he was a very good person and no one could visit him.
I saw a news report from New York, where doctors were saying that people weren’t keeping quarantine – going out even when they were supposed to be at home, and more people got infected. That’s something we think a lot about. We stay very clean at work, because we know innocent people are buying the food we harvest, with money they have earned, so that their families will be healthy. And the majority of farm workers, we’re happy to work, we do so with love, and the coronavirus won’t stop us. It’s not going to stop us. Because we know that our work supports the whole nation.
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Right now, Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed giving undocumented immigrants $500 each. There are people who have sued to try and stop this, a woman named Jessica Martinez and a man from El Salvador, Ricardo Benitez. I’d like these people to come out and meet us. I’d like them to see us working. There are people out here who really need this $500, especially people who have lost their jobs. We are the people who are feeding the country. No one else is going to be able to do this. We are the only ones who know how.
We are people who’ve lived in the country 10 and 20 years, and we don’t have a social security number. From my point of view – I say this from my heart – we are like chess pieces that politicians move around. They haven’t done anything, since Barack Obama, since Bill Clinton, since 9/11. I remember I was picking grapes in Arvin when they attacked the twin towers. Back then there was talk of immigration reform for workers. We’ve had hope for a long time, and nothing has happened. We pay taxes. We go to stores and we buy things. Our kids are studying in school. My daughter is about to graduate high school. It’s hard for me to understand why they aren’t letting us become legal residents.
In the media, they’re now calling us “essential workers”. But that’s what we’ve always been. We think of doctors, firefighters and police as important. People who never saw us before now see that we also have value. The coronavirus has brought us both good and bad opportunities. It has hurt us, and it has also made many people realize something they didn’t realize before: that they need us.
Last Monday I arrived home from work and there was a box at my door. The box was filled with milk, bags of lettuce, cabbage, onions and potatoes. I don’t know who brought us the food. I asked the person who manages the trailer park, and he just said some people came to drop off food for everyone. It made me want to cry. It meant that someone was thinking about us, that someone was worrying about us. This was a gesture of kindness toward us. Nothing like that had happened before.
Roberto’s name has been changed to protect his identity.
This is an excerpt from the Unheard Voices of the Pandemic series from Voice of Witness. Thompson is editor of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.
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It’s time to stop the disgraceful waste of taxpayer resources by the Trump regime’s cruel, wasteful, and just plain dumb efforts to penalize, dehumanize, and deport productive members of our society whom we have failed to offer a path to full membership.
The Trump Family, Steven Miller, Chad Wolf, Billy Barr, Cooch Cooch, and the rest of the White Nationalist restrictionists wouldn’t last a day picking fruits and vegetables in the hot sun, and I guarantee they wouldn’t do a very good job at it.
The pandemic is teaching us lots about who’s really essential; and who’s not!
This November, vote like you life depends on it! Because it does!
THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.
Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.
“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life
The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.
None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.
People gather to protest the stay-at-home orders outside the state capitol building in Sacramento, California, this month. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”
A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.
A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.
Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.
“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”
Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.
The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.
‘It will disappear’: the disinformation Trump spread about the coronavirus – timeline
“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”
In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.
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Read the full article at the above link.
Are we still “to be feared,” even if no longer admired or respected?Good question!
Probably, insofar as our collapse would take down a chunk of the world’s economy with it, leave a leadership vacuum, and change the balance of power, perhaps in favor of China, Russia, South Korea, Canada, and India. We also still have a big military and lots of sophisticated weapons, although modern terrorism has shown that sophistication in expensive weaponry is not always the “be all and end all” either for winning wars or causing mass disorder, death, and mayhem.
Still, as our civil governance and international influence disintegrates, what happens with and to our military is a huge concern and a “big X factor.” Will the tradition of “civilian control over the military” also fall victim to the kakistocracy and the failure of civilian governing institutions? What’s happened to our intelligence community under the Trump kakistocracy is likely a bad omen.
Who would have thought that Trump could do so much permanent or at least long-term damage in such a short period of time? And who would have believed that our centuries-old constitutional and democratic institutions, meant to protect individual rights, enforce the rule of law, and check unrestrained abuses of power by a megalomaniac, yet highly incompetent, dishonest, dangerous, and evil Executive would have crumbled so quickly and performed so haplessly when confronted by a President and an unscrupulous, corrupt, authoritarian regime and party of toadies perfectly willing to press aggressively inane and illegal policies and false narratives to destroy the nation and everyone in it as a means of pillaging and enhancing their own power?
Yet, here we are! Much of the rest of the world appears to “get” it. Yet tens of millions of Americans who continue to support and enable the kakistocracy don’t, or they simply don’t care about our nation and the common good.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Charles Kaiser writes about Krugman in The Guardian:
The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has four essential rules for successful punditry:
Stay with the easy stuff
Write in English
Be honest about dishonesty
Don’t be afraid to talk about motives
Active Measures review: how Trump gave Russia its richest target yet
Those maxims have consistently made Krugman the most intelligent and the most useful New York Times pundit, at least since Frank Rich wrote his final must-read column 11 years ago. A new collection of Krugman’s pieces, therefore, is a timely reminder that actual knowledge and ordinary common sense are two of the rarest qualities in mainstream journalism today.
Krugman’s enemies are the “zombie ideas” of his book’s title, especially the belief that budget deficits are always bad and the notion that tax cuts for the rich can ever benefit anyone other than the plutocrats who never stop pleading for them.
The same tired arguments in favor of coddling the rich have been rolled out over and over again, by Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, even though there has never been a shred of serious evidence to support them.
These relentless efforts over five decades culminated in the Trump tax cut, memorably described by the political consultant Rick Wilson as a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.
Wilson also identified the billionaires’ effect on the nation’s capital. Washington, he wrote, has become “the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious”.
Krugman’s columns act like a steady stream of antibiotics, aimed at restoring the importance of the economic sciences that have been so successfully displaced by brain-dead Republican ideology.
Very few political columns are worth reading 12 months after they are written – the New York Times grandee James Reston accurately titled one of his collections Sketches in the Sand. But Krugman’s book proves that he, a Nobel-prize winning economist, shares two rare qualities with George Orwell, the novelist who also wrote much of the best journalism of the 20th century: deep intelligence and genuine prescience.
The modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks
Krugman is at his Orwellian best here: “When you’re confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith.”
It’s “important to point out that the people who predicted runaway inflation from the Fed’s bond buying were wrong. But it’s also important to point out that none of them have been willing to admit that they were wrong.”
Krugman also writes that “even asking the right questions like ‘what is happening to income inequality’” will spur quite a few conservatives to “denounce you as un-American”. And it’s worse for climate scientists, who face persecution for speaking the truth about our continued dependence on fossil fuels, or social scientists studying the causes of gun violence: “From 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths.”
The history of the last half-century is mostly about how the unbridled greed of the top 1% has perverted American democracy so successfully, it has become almost impossible to implement rational policies that benefit a majority of Americans.
To Krugman, an “interlocking network of media organizations and think tanks that serves the interests of rightwing billionaires” has “effectively taken over the GOP” and “movement ‘conservatism’ is what keeps zombie ideas, like belief in the magic of tax cuts, alive.
“It’s not just that Trump has assembled an administration of the worst and the dimmest. The truth is that the modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Hopefully, Joe Biden has Krugman and others like him on “speed dial.” He’s going to need lots of help and ideas from “the best and the brightest” to undo the damage inflicted by the Trump kakistocracy and Moscow Mitch.
And, the “best and the brightest” should also be the plan for rebuilding an independent Immigration Judiciary and the Article III Judiciary. The severe damage inflicted by Trump, Mitch, and the White Nationalists can’t be undone overnight, but “gotta start building for a better future somewhere.”
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
The Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin Retired US District Judge SDNY Spector8745, 8/6/13, 8:58 AM, 8C, 3000×4000 (0+0), 50%, ten stop S cur, 1/12 s, R38.4, G30.1, B67.6
Whether or not he is re-elected, Donald Trump will be revered by conservatives for his judicial appointments. As of March, Trump has appointed 193 judges to the federal bench, with another 39 pending on the floor of the Senate or in the Senate judiciary committee. Those nominations will surely be acted on favorably by the Senate before 20 January 2021, when there may be a new president and a new Senate. There are another 38 district court vacancies awaiting nominations. In one presidential term, Trump may appoint up to 270 federal judges, or 31% of the entire federal judiciary. For perspective, Barack Obama appointed 329 in eight years.
There is no doubt that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, will confirm Trump’s appointments until the very last day of his term. This is of course the same Senate gatekeeper who infamously blocked Obama’s final supreme court nomination, Merrick Garland, for an entire year – on the ground that in the final year of a presidency, the Senate should await “the will of the people” in the upcoming general election. But that was then. The rules have apparently changed. McConnell will pack the courts with “right-thinking” ideologues who will carry out Trump’s agenda long after he has been subjected to the scorn of historical scrutiny.
We now know a lot about Trump’s judicial appointments. Eighty-five per cent are white and 76% are male. This is a significant step backward. Obama’s judicial appointments were 64% white and 58% male. Today, after more than three years of Trump’s appointments, the federal judiciary is 73% white and 66% male, but it will be even more male and pale by the end of his term. Even more troubling is the average age of the Trump judges. According to Brookings, the median age of Trump’s judicial appointments by the beginning of his fourth year in office is 48.2. By the same time in his presidency, the median age of Obama’s appointees was 57.2. This means that Trump judges will serve, on average, for 10 years more than the Obama judges.
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Statistics only tell part of the story. More important is the impact of these statistics on the critical issues that face the courts now and in the future. Courts should reflect the people they serve. I served as a federal district judge for 22 years. The vast majority of criminal defendants (in non-white-collar cases) were either African American or Hispanic, as were their family members. Plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases were overwhelmingly women, minorities or persons with disabilities. The same was true in actions involving prisoner rights, voting rights, housing discrimination and public benefits. Not all cases involve big corporations and business disputes.
This series examines the historic pace and nature of Trump’s remaking of the federal courts and the conservative agenda it will usher in on a range of issues from voting rights to climate and from healthcare to criminal justice
A diverse bench engenders trust and credibility. Many studies have shown that decision-makers reach better decisions when they bring a variety of experiences to their analysis. A 36-year-old lawyer who has never tried a case, has not represented individual clients, and has not spent years facing life’s challenges is not well-positioned to decide on the length of a prison term, the need for access to healthcare, abortion, food stamps, Medicare or housing, or the impact of pollution or discrimination on working people’s quality of life. It is for this reason the American Bar Association’s standing committee on the federal judiciary insists that a candidate for judicial office have at least 12 years of experience practicing law – not talking about it as a speech writer, lobbyist or media star.
When I was appointed to the bench I was 48. I had been a federal prosecutor, a defense lawyer, and had handled many civil cases in trial and appellate courts. That experience was invaluable. I knew both the substance and procedure of federal practice. The same cannot be said of many of Trump’s nominees, whose only qualifications appear to be their consistently rightwing voting records.
Consider the following four Trump judges, all of whom were appointed in their 30s. What they have in common is not their legal experience, but their outspoken support of Trump’s political agenda. All were members of the Federalist Society or other rightwing organizations, clerked for conservative judges, and have written articles or advocated for legal positions that are vastly out of step with most Americans.
Allison Rushing was 36 when she was confirmed to a seat on the fourth circuit court of appeals, 11 years after graduating from law school, and Trump’s youngest nominee to a circuit court judgeship. She clerked for then-circuit judge Neil Gorsuch and for Justice Clarence Thomas. Her law practice during the remaining nine years was limited to representing big corporations at one of the nation’s largest law firms.
Andrew Brasher was 38 when he was confirmed to a seat on the 11th circuit court of appeals, after serving for only nine months on the district court for the middle district of Alabama. In the years just before his appointment he served as Alabama’s solicitor general, often advocating for rightwing causes.
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Justin Walker, best known for his full-throated defense of Brett Kavanaugh (for whom he clerked), was appointed as a district judge in the western district of Kentucky, at 37, just 10 years after graduating law school. He is a protege of Mitch McConnell, who held up debate on a Covid-19 relief bill to attend Walker’s induction ceremony. Less than six months after Walker took the bench, Trump announced that he intended to nominate him for an upcoming vacancy on the DC court of appeals.
Patrick Wyrick was 38 when he was confirmed as a judge for the western district of Oklahoma. Four years after graduating law school he became the solicitor general of Oklahoma. He is a protege of Scott Pruitt, the disgraced former head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
One of these judges could easily end up on the supreme court; two are known to be on the shortlist. All will probably still be on the bench 40 years from now. That alone should make voters think hard about the upcoming presidential election. As the saying goes: elections have consequences.
Shira A Scheindlin served as a United States district judge for the southern district of New York for 22 years. She is the co-chair of the Board of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a board member of the American Constitution Society
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I’ve been preaching on “Courtside” for some time now about the serious deterioration of America’s Article III Judiciary in the face of Trump’s tyranny. While there are some notable exceptions among appointees of both parties, even some of the “non-Trump appointees” have done a less than heroic job of standing up for Due Process, fundamental fairness, equal justice for all, and human rights, particularly when it comes to vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers, some children, being abused by a system that just no longer cares.
Witness the clearly unconstitutional and essentially unconscionable abuse and open mockery of the American Justice system, the rule of law, and respect for human dignity going on every day in our broken and dysfunctional U.S. Immigration “Courts” that betray and sometimes mock the most fundamental of American values.
Any Article III Judge personally subjected to the kind of intentional dehumanization (a/k/a/ “Dred Scottification”) and disrespect going on daily in Immigration Court would be outraged! But, that outrage seems to disappear when the grotesque abuses are only being inflicted on “the other.” Since, according to Trump and his cronies, the majority of Americans are “the other” — in some way or another — this abdication of judicial integrity has ominous implications far beyond the “world of immigration” — where those mistreated often get deported so their voices can no longer be heard!
While, yes, the Administration frequently gets bashed by some U.S. District Courts and some Circuits, we’re only getting at the “tip of the iceberg” for a system that is allowed to grind out unfair and substandard results and where far too many are simply railroaded out of the country without fair access to lawyers, Article III judicial review, and even time to prepare their cases or understand what they are required to prove to save their lives.
Emboldened by judicial intransigence and fecklessness, the Administration has now “one-upped” the complicit Article IIIs by simply unilaterally, and without legislation, cutting off access to even the Immigration Courts while the “J.R. Five” nods approval like a bunch of “judicial bobbleheads” gracing Stephen Miller’s mantle.
No, we can’t change life tenure. But, we can elect a President and a Senate majority committed to a diverse Federal Judiciary that will put excellence, due process, equal justice, human rights, and human understanding and empathy before far-right ideology. That’s an important start on fighting back and taking the challenge directly to those now on the bench who are committed to dehumanizing, degrading, and ignoring the rights of those who comprise the real America.
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
As the coronavirus spread through California and the economic fallout of the pandemic began to hit Patricia’s community in the rural Coachella Valley, she said a new Trump administration policy had layered worries upon her worries.
The so-called “public charge” rule, which allows the government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants who rely on public benefits, went into effect in late February, just as the first cases of Covid-19 were being reported across the US.
“Now, we are in panic,” said Patricia, a 46-year-old mother of three and daughter of two elderly parents. The Guardian is not using Patricia’s real name to protect her and her undocumented family members.
Patricia’s father, who stopped seeking treatment for his pancreatic cancer after a lawyer advised that using some public medical benefits could affect his bid to gain legal status, is among the most at-risk for complications from contracting the coronavirus. So is her mother, who is diabetic.
“I have a broken heart,” she said. “We’ve been told that if we want papers to feel secure and calm here, there’s a tradeoff.”
‘I won’t survive’: Iranian scientist in US detention says Ice will let Covid-19 kill many
Although the US Citizenship and Immigration Services last week announced under pressure from lawmakers and advocacy groups that immigrants who undergo testing or treatment for Covid-19 would not be denied visas or green cards under the new rule, fear and confusion are stopping people from seeking medical care. In the midst of a pandemic, health and legal experts say that policies designed to exclude vulnerable immigrant communities from medical care are fueling a public health disaster.
“The community doesn’t trust the government right now.” said Luz Gallegos, who directs the Todec Legal Center in southern California. As Covid-19 spreads across the state, much of the center’s efforts recently have been dedicated to reassuring immigrants that they can and should take advantage of health programs if they can.
Patricia, who went to Todec for advice, said even though she’s been told that the public charge rule doesn’t apply to those who want to get tested for the coronavirus, she can’t help but worry. “With this president, you can never know,” she said. When immigration policies can change overnight, she said, “how can we have trust?”
Even before the public charge rules went into effect, a UCLA analysis found that more than 2 million Californians enrolled in the state’s public food and medical benefits programs could be affected by the rule, which allows immigration officials to turn away those seeking green cards and visas based on who are “likely to be a public charge”.
“We can’t stop the spread of disease while denying health coverage to people,” said Ninez Ponce, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “It’s irresponsible public health policy.”
Although several groups of immigrants, including asylum-seekers and refugees, are exempt from the rule, the complicated, 217-page regulation has a “chilling effect”, Ponce said, driving people to withdraw from social services even if they don’t have to.
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Read the rest of Maanvi’s report at the link.
SUPREME COMPLICITY SPELLS SUPREME DANGER FOR ALL AMERICANS
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Exclusive for Courtside
April 3, 2020
So, let’s be clear about what happened here with the so-called public charge regulations. The expert public commentary opposing this unlawful and unnecessary (i/o/w “stupid and malicious”) change in the regulations was overwhelming.
Support for the change outside of White Nationalist nativist “fringies” was negligible and had no basis in fact.
The Administration’s rationale, sacrificing health and welfare and screwing immigrants for some small fabricated savings that failed to consider the offsetting harm to the public and individuals, was facially absurd.
Then, the “real emergency” (as opposed to Francisco’s fabricated one) predicted by the health officials who had opposed the regulation change occurred. Now, immigrant families who often form the backbone of our “essential workforce” are at risk and they, in turn, will unavoidably spread the risk. Americans, citizens, residents, documented, undocumented, will unnecessarily die because the J.R. Five were derelict in their duties.
The truth is very straightforward: “The coronavirus pandemic is ‘Exhibit A for why the public charge rule is stupid’ said Almas Sayeed, at the California Immigrant Policy Center.” Apparently, “Exhibit A” was too deep for the “J.R. Five” to grasp.
The Constitution actually doesn’t enable the Executive to promulgate irrational policies that contradict both the best science and endanger the public health and welfare to achieve openly racist and xenophobic political goals. “Stupidity based on racism and ignorance” has no place in our Federal Government.
As Mark Joseph Stern so clearly said in Slate:
Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants.
“Stupid” actually means “illegal” in this and most other cases. That such an an obvious concept is over the heads of the ideologically biased “J.R. Five” should give us all great pause. The next time these folks decide to elevate the “stupid” and the “racist” over “rational, legal, and humane,” it could be YOUR life and future going down their drain.
If we continue to empower a regime that elevates poorly qualified individuals who have lost any sense of human values and common decency they might have possessed to life tenure in the highest courts of our land, there will be no end to the avoidable human disasters, unnecessary suffering, and tragedies that will ensue.
We need regime change in November! That won’t change the composition and qualifications of the Federal Judiciary overnight. But, it will be an absolutely necessary start toward a Government and a judiciary that understand and respect the Constitution, the rule of law, and the individual rights and human dignity of all persons before our laws. In other words, due process and equal justice for all.
Vote like you life depends on it. Because, it does!
1) The exceptional and extremely unusual hardship for cancellation of removal is based on a cumulative consideration of all hardship factors, but to the extent that a claim is based on the health of a qualifying relative, an applicant needs to establish that the relative has a serious medical condition and, if he or she is accompanying the applicant to the country of removal, that adequate medical care for the claimed condition is not reasonably available in that country.
(2) The Immigration Judge properly determined that the respondent did not establish eligibility for cancellation of removal because he did not demonstrate that his qualifying relatives will experience hardship, including medical, economic, and emotional hardship, that rises to the level of exceptional and extremely unusual.
PANEL: MALPHRUS, Acting Chairman; CREPPY and CASSIDY, Appellate Immigration Judges
OPINION BY: Judge Garry D. Malphrus, Acting Chairman
María looked for work as a waitress as soon as she arrived. She knocked on the doors of 15 restaurants and was rejected each time. “Right now, no one is hiring workers, they’re firing people,” María said. Under the lockdown, she has had to put her search on hold.
María’s options in Guatemala are limited, particularly since it is not safe for her to go back to her home town. She and her little girl fled Guatemala for the US in late 2018 after the same gang that murdered María’s entire family over a land dispute, including the little girl’s mother, killed María’s partner and shot at María. Last summer, a US immigration judge found María’s account credible but decided her case did not meet the narrow legal standard for asylum. María filed an appeal but could no longer endure being locked up away from her niece. Because she was not the girl’s biological mother, Ice refused to release her from detention to reunite the family. After nearly a year apart, María requested deportation with the hope she and the girl could return together.
“It was notably easier for Ice to concede the bona fides of the relationship between María and her niece when removal to Guatemala was the goal,” said Suzannah Maclay, María’s attorney.
‘It is beyond cruel’: Ice refuses to reunite girl with the only family she has left
María was craving freedom after so long in detention but still finds herself spending her days inside. She wants her niece to go to school and get the education she never got. She feels restless, unable to start building a better life for them both. “I can’t do anything,” she said.
She believes the gang that murdered her family still wants to kill her, and she is always fearful they will discover she is back. She doesn’t want her niece to grow up alone. She tries to give the girl a sense of security, but the truth is hard to hide. “Why did they send us here?” the girl asked her upon arriving in Guatemala. “It’s too dangerous.”
As María and her child focus on day-to-day survival, they are also trying to heal from the trauma of their separation. Sometimes the girl tells María about foster care in New York. The stories are hard to hear. The girl describes getting her hands slapped when she touched things or being scolded in restaurants. “They humiliated her,” María said.
“Mami, I missed you so much,” the girl tells her. “I don’t ever want to be apart again.” María responds with a promise: “This won’t happen again.”
Now, a real appellate court, with qualified judges acting independently, might have used this as an opportunity to direct that Immigration Court hearings in all “non-criminal” cancellation of removal cases be deferred until such time as we can understand what is actually happening in Guatemala and other countries after the worldwide pandemic is brought under control.
After all, the situation is rapidly evolving. Or, I should say devolving! What’s the purpose of holding “trials” on conditions in foreign nations that are likely to change materially on a weekly or even daily basis?
Just look at the difference between the impact of the coronavirus in the United States one month ago and what is happening today. A month ago, folks were strolling the beaches of Florida and our President was basically minimizing the potential impact. Now there are over 10million Americans out of work, three-fourths of the country under “stay at home” orders (except for Immigration Court), with nearly 200,000 reported cases, and “best case” predictions of several hundred thousand deaths!
So, why would any rational person think, like the BIA does, that things will be “hunky dory” for those deported to Guatemala, particularly if they choose to take their U.S.C. children? Why would a poor corrupt country with a limited economy and few resources fare better than the world’s richest nation in weathering this crisis? When hospitals are breaking down all over the U.S., why would health care be readily available to recent returnees in Guatemala? With 10 million out of work here, why would jobs to support a family of five be readily available in Guatemala? The BIA’s decision in this case is as “counterfactual” as it is needlessly cruel!
Looking at it from a factual, legal, public health, or humanitarian viewpoint, the BIA’s timing and decision in this case were totally irresponsible.
We need an independent U.S. Immigration Court with better, more responsible, and more humane judges.
Mon 16 Mar 2020 00.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2020 09.20 EDT
Daira García wakes up at 5.50am. She takes out her dog, then tries to eat some breakfast before boarding the bus that gets her to school by 7.26 in the morning.
After class, she heads back home, where her parents, Silvia and Jorge, watch Noticiero and sip mate (she sometimes tries the drink as well but admits she’s never quite gotten used to it). They eat something, talk. When Daira goes off to finish her homework, she forgoes the desk in her room to curl up in her parents’ bed.
“It’s more comfy,” she quips.
Daira, 17, has a fairly standard routine for an American teenager: school, homework, family time. But unlike most kids, the schedule she’s come to rely on each day could easily be disrupted at any point.
Silvia and Jorge traveled from Argentina to the United States as 2001 became 2002, and with a new year came their new life in an unknown country. Daira’s big brother was just an infant then; now a college student, he doesn’t even really remember the place where he was born. And yet he’s only shielded from deportation because of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), an Obama-era program the Trump administration has been trying to end for years. Silvia and Jorge, meanwhile, have no protection and could be picked up by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at any time.
Daira begins to cry just thinking about it.
“We’ve never had a plan for it if it happened,” Silvia says in Spanish. “Maybe we don’t give much thought to that because we think it’s healthier.”
Daira García, an aspiring artist, depicts family separation. She is a US citizen, but both her parents are undocumented. Illustration: Daira García/The Guardian
An estimated 4.1 million US-citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent in recent years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. They’re kids who anti-immigrant groups disparage as “anchor babies”, a derogatory term that insinuates these children are little more than pawns used by their immigrant parents to get a foothold in the US and eventually become citizens themselves.
It’s a narrative trope that completely misrepresents the harsh realities of America’s current immigration laws, as well as just the natural progression of life, experts suggest.
“People have this notion that you have a child in the United States, now you’re a citizen. It’s what people think because it’s the easy way to explain it. So it’s an easy way to make up a myth,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
It’s true that children born on US soil have been granted citizenship through the 14th amendment to the US constitution, and that a landmark supreme court decision set the precedent for that right to be extended to almost all children of foreigners. But Americans can’t just immediately safeguard their family members from deportation. In fact, a US citizen must be 21 years oldbefore they can sponsor their parents for a green card. They also must be able to financially support their parents.
Now the Trump administration’s new public charge rule targeting low-income immigrants is adding yet another burden.
Even if parents do get a green card, they have a five-year holding period before they can finally apply for naturalization.
In the end, the so-called “anchor baby” pathway to citizenship is at least a 26-year endeavor, even for those who entered the US legally.
“It’s ludicrous to think that that’s some sort of a tactic that people use to come here, get citizenship, ’cause it just isn’t true,” said Leopold. “It’s a myth, and it’s a specious talking point.”
A talking point that’s popular among anti-immigrant groups, pundits and the Republican party.
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Read the rest of Alexandra’s article at the link.
This is what “Dred Scottification” preached by Trump, Miller, Sessions, “Cooch Cooch,” and their White Nationalist allies, and encouraged and enabled by the willfully “tone-deaf” Roberts Court, is all about. Ultimately, their aim is to consciously dump on our fellow citizens and human beings because of the color of their skin or their ethnic origin, or perhaps in some cases, their religion. Utterly disgusting!
The “Beauty of the 14th Amendment” is that it eventually automatically solves the issues that politicians of both parties, but primarily the GOP, have been avoiding for decades. Over time, a generation of so-called “undocumented” residents passes into history; the new generation are full U.S. citizens who will achieve their full potential in America and exercise the political power necessary to put the toxic views, actions, and rhetoric of the “nativist right” behind us as we move forward as a nation. Thus, we avoid creating generations of “perpetually disenfranchised” members of our society.
No, the 14th Amendment doesn’t take the place of a long overdue, sane legalization program and some reality and market-based reforms of our legal immigration system. But, it does provide a “fail safe” against the callous misrule of Trump, the GOP, and the enabling actions of the Roberts Court.
The trauma Donald Trump’s administration caused to young children and parents separated at the US-Mexico border constitutes torture, according to evaluations of 26 children and adults by the group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The not-for-profit group’s report provides the first in-depth look at the psychological impact of family separation, which the US government continued despite warnings from the nation’s top medical bodies.
“As a clinician, nobody was prepared for this to happen on our soil,” the report co-author Dr Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser at PHR, told the Guardian. “It is beyond shocking that this could happen in the United States, by Americans, at the instruction and direct intention of US government officials.”
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Legal experts have argued family separation constituted torture, but this is the first time a medical group has reached the determination.
PHR volunteer psychiatrists evaluated 17 adults and nine children who had been separated between 30 to 90 days. Most met the criteria for at least one mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder “consistent with, and likely linked to, the trauma of family separation”, according to the report.
Not only did the brutal family separation policy create trauma, it was intensified by the families’ previous exposure to violence on their journey to the US and in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
All but two of the adults evaluated by PHR said they had received death threats in their home countries and 14 out of the 17 adults said they were targeted by drug cartels. All were fearful their child would be harmed or killed if they remained at home.
Almost all the children had been drugged, kidnapped, poisoned or threatened by gangs before they left. One mother told investigators she moved her daughter to different schools in El Salvador several times so gang members couldn’t find her and kill her.
In the face of these threats, parents tried to move within the country, change their phone numbers, meet extortion demands and go silent on social media. Ultimately, however, the report said: “Parents were confident that the journey to the United States would result in protection for their children.”
This is not what happened at the border.
The Trump administration instituted a policy in April 2018 that formally enabled the mass separation of children and parents at the US-Mexico border. Trump ended the policy in June 2018, but it has since been revealed that the administration separated thousands of families before and after the policy was in place.
There was also no system to reunite the families, according to an internal government watchdog. The Trump administration also ignored warnings from the nation’s leading medical organizations that family separation would traumatize children and adults.
How Trump’s immigration policies hurt people’s lives – in pictures
People who experience trauma, especially as children, have higher rates of medical conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. They also have an increased risk of psychiatric disorders and detrimental coping behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse.
“Something like that does not just resolve once you’re reunified with your parents, it’s something you carry with you possibly forever,” Mishori said.
One Honduran father described how badly his son reacted the four times a psychologist came to their apartment for treatment in the report: “Each time the son would refuse to cooperate and would throw things at the therapist … It appears his son was afraid of strangers, afraid they will take him away from his father.”
Kathryn Hampton, a senior officer in PHR’s asylum program, said the group PHR had assessed was small but represented separated families from different detention centers and foster homes across the country over a two-year period.
“This is a really disparate group of people and yet their stories are practically identical,” said Hampton. “So that’s very disturbing, to see that level of consistency.”
Amid the despair, PHR has seen an outpouring of support in money and volunteers. Hampton said since the beginning of 2018, its Asylum Network had more than doubled to 1,700 clinicians who provide free medical and psychological evaluations to asylum seekers. There were also three times as many medical school clinics partnering with the organization in that period.
Dr Stuart Lustig, a California-based psychiatrist and longtime volunteer, evaluated a seven-year-old girl from Guatemala. He said when he and the girl did a common evaluation tool called the Squiggle Test, she had one of the more inhibited reactions he had seen in 20 years.
“These kinds of separations were filled with uncertainty, there was no information about where people are going, so it is not surprising at all that these separations ended up being extremely traumatizing for kids and parents,” Lustig said.
In November, a federal court ordered the US to compensate for the trauma separated families faced at the hands of the government. Lustig said there were many treatment options for children who experienced this deep level of trauma in the US, but he and PHR were concerned about how these families would have access to them.
Lustig said: “Part of the work is simply building trust in humanity again.”
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We are diminishing ourselves as a nation; but, in the end, it won’t stop human migration. While the purpose of torture is dehumanization and degradation of the “other,” torture actually increases the humanity of its victims while dehumanizing the torturers and their enablers.
It’s also worthy remembering the next time “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, Kelly, ”Gonzo” Sessions and other noted torturers want to “clean up their images” and capitalize on their misdeeds by speaking to an organization to which you belong or attend. Remember who they REALLY are beneath their facades: unpunished perpetrators of “Crimes Against Humanity.”
More than two-thirds of the migrants fleeing Central America’s northern triangle countries – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – experienced the murder, disappearance or kidnapping of a relative before their departure, according to a new study by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
The MSF study said 42.5% of interviewees reported the violent death of a relative over the previous two years, while 16.2% had a relative forcibly disappeared and 9.2% had a loved one kidnapped.
The study – based on interviews with migrants and refugees at MSF medical facilities in Central America and Mexico – once again showed the despair driving migrants to abandon some the hemisphere’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Central America’s rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
“We’re speaking of human beings, not numbers,” Sergio Martín, MSF general coordinator in Mexico, said at the study’s presentation on Tuesday. “In many cases, it’s clear that migration is the only possible way out. Staying put is not an option.”
In 45.8% of the interviews, migrants said that “exposure to violent situations” was a key reason for leaving their home country. Of those fleeing due to violence, 36.4% had become internally displaced in their countries of origin, but were eventually forced to flee.
The research was published at a time when the US border is becoming increasingly difficult to reach.
Mexico has been launched a crackdown against people trying to cross its southern frontier and deployed its newly created national guard to dismantle large groups of migrants, while the Trump administration has made the asylum process practically impossible for most applicants.
US officials are returning asylum seekers to dangerous Mexican border cities – where MSF has found many are kidnapped and preyed upon by drug cartels – under scheme known as migrant protection protocols to await their court cases. Some migrants are now being flown to Guatemala to apply for asylum in the impoverished Central American country.
Remain in Mexico: 80% of migrants in Trump policy are victims of violence
“The aggressive migration policies adopted by the US and Mexico mean that more and more people are trapped in a vicious circle,” the MSF report stated. “Patients describe an increase in the predatory violence perpetuated by criminal organisations operating along the migrant route.”
Meanwhile, violence against migrants transit Mexico is escalating, the study found: 39.2% of interviewees were assaulted in the country, while 27.3% were threatened or extorted – with the actual figures likely higher than the official statistics as victims tend not to report crimes committed against them.
Nearly 6% of migrants reported witnessing a death during their time in Mexico, according to MSF. In 17.9% of those cases, it was a murder.
Members of MSF teams have themselves witnessed kidnappings outside migrant shelters.
“The physical obstacles to entering the United States are taken for granted. But what surprises [migrants] … is the violence that they experience in Mexico,” the report said.
“Coming from a country where violence is endemic, they decide to make the journey because they have no other option.”
Violence is just of a range of factors driving migration, and motives vary from region to region and country to country.
A 2019 survey from Creative Associates International found violence was the main driver of migration for 38% of Salvadorans, 18% of Hondurans and 14% of Guatemalans. In Guatemala – the main source of migrants detained at the US border with Mexico – 71% of respondents cited “economic concerns” as their main motive.
Fleeing a hell the US helped create: why Central Americans journey north
Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a driver of migration – especially from areas in Central America’s “Dry Corridor” – as is political corruption.
“Over the last 20 years in Honduras, the poverty rate hasn’t fallen beneath 60%,” said Father Germán Calix, Honduras director of the Catholic Church’s charitable arm Caritas.
“The lack of policies and actions in favor of the poor has been such that people have lost confidence that this situation can ever be reversed from Honduras.”
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As folks die, are raped, kidnapped, extorted, and abused, as a result of DHS’s policies, Acting CBP Commish Mark Morgan touts how effective massive violations of legal, constitutional, and human rights are at deterring refugees seeking legal protection.
WASHINGTON — The number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border declined for the eighth month in a row in January, but Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday that in recent weeks the number of average daily apprehensions has risen.
In four of the past five years, apprehensions have begun to increase in February, according to CBP statistics. Morgan said he thinks there might be a spring surge in migrants from Mexico motivated in part by the country’s stagnant economy. The recent uptick is occurring despite tough limitations on asylum opportunities and more aggressive deportation policies.
Morgan noted that the majority of people crossing the border are now individual adults from Mexico, and said that the Trump administration was having success in dissuading Central American families from coming north.
Total apprehensions at the border were lower in January than in recent months, but during the month daily apprehensions began increasing. U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 29,200 individuals crossing at the Southwest border between ports of entry during January, CBP said Tuesday morning, a decrease from the 32,858 people apprehended in December and 33,511 in November.
Morgan touted the agency’s January successes, including the discovery of the longest cross-border tunnel used for smuggling in history and the seizure of more than 50,000 pounds of drugs on the Southwest border.
“We continue to see positive results because of the steps taken by the Trump Administration to control the border and uphold the rule of law,” said Morgan. “We’ve seen eight straight months of decline, but as we see from the seizure of the longest-ever tunnel between the U.S. and Mexico and significant drug seizures, much work remains.”
Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have decreased, said Morgan. He hailed the administration’s success in reducing numbers of apprehensions from these three countries, crediting security agreements with their governments. He noted that CBP has been promoting the message that if citizens from those countries come to the U.S., “They will be promptly removed and returned.”
The Trump administration has long sought to deter migrants, many of whom were Central American families, from making the journey to the U.S. southern border. Some of the administration’s policies at the border have stoked outrage over the treatment of migrants, such as the 2018 family separation policy that removed children as young as a few months old from their parents and kept them in separate detention facilities.
Last year, the administration implemented a policy to send many asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases play out. It recently began sending some asylum-seekers to Guatemala.
Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have said such policies violate migrants’ rights and further endanger them by making them wait in dangerous border towns or in one of the most violent countries in the world, which lacks a robust asylum system. A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this month highlighted the potentially deadly risks to Salvadorans in particular — many of whom are fleeing gang violence — when they are sent to wait in Mexico or deported to El Salvador.
Morgan was also asked about the detention of Iranian Americans on the Northern border in Washington state after the U.S. killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January. CBP denied there was any directive to agents in a tweet, but a memo surfaced weeks later showing the CBP Seattle Field Office had told much of the Northern border to conduct additional screenings of anyone with ties to Iran or Lebanon. He noted that while there was no national directive, the Seattle Field Office got “overzealous” in screening Iranian-Americans and headquarters immediately corrected the action.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who represents Seattle, said, “It’s deeply disturbing that it took my inquiries, a leaked memo and press reports for CBP to finally acknowledge that it inappropriately targeted Iranian Americans at the Washington State-Canada border.”
“We need to know how far-reaching the order was, who it came from and why it took so long for CBP to come clean.”
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The dead can’t speak. Those illegally deported to torture, rape, extortion, abuse, and exploitation often don’t want to.
In an era where the “truly courageous heroes of public service” are punished by Trump while his GOP sycophants cheer, Morgan is a shining example of the very worst and most disgraceful characteristics of those who falsely claim to be serving our national interests!
Obviously, in the age of extreme regime unaccountability, Congressional fecklessness, and Article III Judicial complicity, folks like Morgan literally can “get with murder.” How grotesque, and arrogantly immoral to tout the deadly results of dehumanization and degradation of some of the most vulnerable and needy human beings!
Also worth noting that until hard evidence to the contrary emerged, under Morgan CBP initially lied about detentions of U.S. citizens of Iranian descent at the border.All of this flagrant dishonesty, racism, and impunity was originally enabled and encouraged by the “head in the sand” approach to the regime’s dishonesty and gross violations of the Constitution in the “Travel Ban Cases” by the Supremes led by the “J.R. Five.” Remember that the next time J.R. fecklessly and disingenuously pontificates on the “loss of civility” in legal discourse. What about the loss of human lives due to your complicit performance, J.R.?
A note to future historians:Don’t forget the role played by Morgan and other regime toadies in what properly will be viewed as intentional “crimes against humanity” and attendant cover-ups and minimization of intentionally inflicted human misery and unnecessary suffering. And, certainly J.R. and his other GOP judicial enablers should be “outed” and held accountable for their role in destroying our democratic institutions, encouraging evil, and promoting injustice and dehumanization. They are enablers and knowing participants in “America’s Jim Crow Revival!”
Due Process Forever; Crimes Against Humanity & Toady Bureaucrats & Judges Never!
