Tag: Wall

What The DAG SHOULD Have Said To New U.S. Immigration Judges (But, Of Course Didn’t) . . .

WELCOME: DUE PROCESS IS YOUR ONLY MISSION

Congratulations on your appointment as U.S. Immigration Judges. It’s a difficult and important judicial position under the best of circumstances. Given the many controversies surrounding immigration today your job is even more challenging.

You face an overwhelming backlog resulting from factors largely beyond your control. Rather than being consumed or demoralized by that backlog, your job is to guarantee fairness and due process in each individual case coming before you. This requires you to act independently and resist pressures, from any quarter, to “cut corners” or otherwise compromise your constitutional duty to act impartially, fairly, and professionally toward each individual appearing before you.

While you occupy an unusual position as quasi-judicial officers who are also employed by Department of Justice, the Department regulations charge you with exercising your “independent judgment and discretion and . . . [taking] any action consistent with [your] authorities under the Act and regulations that is appropriate and necessary for the disposition of such cases.”

Indeed, the United States Supreme Court in the landmark case U.S. ex rel. Accardi v. Shaughnessy, 347 U.S. 260 (1954) stated with respect to your similarly situated judicial colleagues on the Board of Immigration Appeals that each administrative judge serving under these regulations “must exercise his authority according to his own understanding and conscience. This applies with equal force to the Board and the Attorney General. In short, as long as the regulations remain operative, the Attorney General denies himself the right to sidestep the Board or dictate its decision in any manner.”

Consequently, although as a cabinet officer the Attorney General might sometimes take certain positions or advocate certain policies, you must consider only the facts, the statutes, the regulations, and any precedent decisions directly relevant to your particular case in reaching your decisions. And, you must always treat the Department of Homeland Security as a separate party, with the same respect and consideration that you will give to individuals coming before you and their attorneys. That you are all employees of the same Government should not entitle DHS to special or preferable treatment or deference not afforded to other parties coming before your courts.

The motto of the Department of Justice, basically refers to one “who prosecutes in the name of justice.” Thus, our Department stands alone in incorporating a moral principle — the requirement of doing justice — into its mission. As that great American Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Some of the most vulnerable individuals entitled to due process under our Constitution will come before you in your courts. Your awesome and solemn responsibility is to insure that they receive due process and fairness — in other words justice — no matter how difficult their individual circumstances might be or any handicaps under which you might be operating.

Many of those arriving in the United States today are applying for asylum under our laws. Those fleeing persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion are eligible for protection. In INS v.Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S 421 (1987) our Supreme Court instructed us to apply the asylum standard in a generous manner. Others who face torture at the hands of, or with the “willful blindness” of, their governments, are entitled to protection without having to establish that the torture results from one of the foregoing “protected grounds.” An important part of your job will be insure that those who qualify for protection under our laws are given a full and fair chance to prepare their cases, to be represented by counsel of their choice, receive fair and reasoned decisions, and are not unfairly returned to harm in the countries they fled.

For my part, I pledge that during the time I remain with the Department of Justice I will do everything in my power to protect your quasi-judicial independence from improper influence, to allow you to manage your own dockets and develop “best practices” without bureaucratic interference,  and to secure for you the resources you need to do your critically important jobs. I trust that my successor will do likewise.

The vision of our Immigration Courts is “through teamwork and innovation become the world’s best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Your challenge is to do everything within your power to make that vision a reality each day you are on the bench.

Congratulations again on your selection and on choosing to serve our country in these important judicial positions at this critical juncture in our history. I thank you in advance for your future service and commitment to insuring equal justice for all. Good luck, do great things, and make due process for all your daily goal.

 

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

Someday, we will once again have an Attorney General and a DAG who truly respect Constitutional Due Process, don’t fear independent judicial decision-making, and have the courage and backbone to “just say no” to White Nationalist restricitionist agendas that conflict with our Constitution, our statutes, our international obligations, common human decency, and what were once almost universally considered “true American values.”

Until then, it will be up to the “New Due Process Army” and their allies to keep Due Process and fairness for all of us alive during what will go down as one of the darkest and most evil periods in modern American history.

PWS

08-18-19

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

DAG ROSENSTEIN INADVERTENTLY MAKES COMPELLING ARGUMENT FOR INDEPENDENT ARTICLE I U.S. IMMIGRATION COURT IN SPEECH TO NEW JUDGES — Places Emphasis On Executive, Fealty To Attorney General, Not Independence. Impartiality, & Insuring Due Process! — REAL “Courts” Don’t Answer to Prosecutors!

https://links.govdelivery.com/track?type=click&enid=ZWFzPTEmbXNpZD0mYXVpZD0mbWFpbGluZ2lkPTIwMTkwMzE1LjMyNjAxNDEmbWVzc2FnZWlkPU1EQi1QUkQtQlVMLTIwMTkwMzE1LjMyNjAxNDEmZGF0YWJhc2VpZD0xMDAxJnNlcmlhbD0xODQ4OTEzNiZlbWFpbGlkPWRrb3dhbHNraUBkYXZpZC13YXJlLmNvbSZ1c2VyaWQ9ZGtvd2Fsc2tpQGRhdmlkLXdhcmUuY29tJnRhcmdldGlkPSZmbD0mZXh0cmE9TXVsdGl2YXJpYXRlSWQ9JiYm&&&101&&&https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/deputy-attorney-general-rod-j-rosenstein-delivers-opening-remarks-investiture-31-newly

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein Delivers Opening Remarks at Investiture of 31 Newly Appointed Immigration Judges
Washington, DC

~

Friday, March 15, 2019

Thank you, James, for that kind introduction. I appreciate your devoted service to the Department of Justice.

I also want to thank Deputy Chief Judges Santoro and Cheng, and Assistant Chief Judges Doolittle, Owen, Mart, and Weiss.

I am grateful to Marcia Lee-Sullivan and Karen Manna for helping to plan this event.

Above all, I want to congratulate our 31 new immigration judges for joining the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and welcome the family members and friends who are with us today.

I took my first oath as a Department of Justice employee in 1990. I hope it is as meaningful to you as it is to me. They have sworn me in several more times over the past three decades. But they never swear you out.

The oath obligates you to support and defend the Constitution. Our nation was not united by race, ethnicity, religion, or even national origin. The founders’ goal of bringing peoples of the world together in a single nation is reflected in the motto adopted at the founding of our Republic: e pluribus unum: from the many, one. Our one nation is unified by our shared commitment to the principles of the United States Constitution.  The preamble sets forth, among its primary goals, to “establish Justice.” Justice – or the fair application of the rule of law – is the essence of America.

The right to live and work in America is a tremendous privilege. It is a valuable privilege. It is a privilege that has meaning only if we exercise our right and duty to protect it by setting rules for people who seek to acquire the privilege.

It is right and proper for us to insist that people who desire to join our nation – people who want themselves and their children to join the privileged group who define ourselves as “we, the people” – start by following the rules governing admission and citizenship.

The duties imposed by your oath of office include faithfully enforcing those rules.

America’s immigration laws are generous and welcoming, but they are intended to protect the rights and advance the interests of current and future citizens.

More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt remarked that “[t]he average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.” Roosevelt did not limit his remarks to birthright citizens. He said, “We must in every way possible encourage the immigrant to rise …. We must in turn insist upon his showing the same standard of fealty to this country and to join with us in raising the level of our common American citizenship.”

Obeying the law when seeking entry to the United States is an essential component of “fealty to this country.”

Estimates suggest that there are more than 44 million people in our country who were not American citizens at birth. That is almost 14 percent of our population, the largest share in more than a century.  America’s foreign-born population exceeds the total population of California, our most populous state, and it is larger than the entire population of Argentina.

Those numbers continue to grow. Every year, we generously extend lawful permanent resident status to more than one million people, and we allot hundreds of thousands of student visas and temporary work visas.

It is no surprise that so many people want to join us. According to the World Bank, nearly half of the world lives on less than $5.50 per day. According to a recent Gallup poll, 150 million people around the world want to immigrate to the United States. We cannot take them all.

For our system to be fair, it must be carried out faithfully and equitably. It must be fair to all who desire to come here — whether they live south of our border or an ocean away.

Immigration judges appointed by the Attorney General and supervised by the Executive Office for Immigration Review are not only judges. First, you are not only judges because you are also employees of the United States Department of Justice. It is a great honor to serve in this Department. In the courtyard just outside the entrance to this Great Hall, high up on the interior wall of the Main Justice building, there is a depiction of the scales of justice and an inscription that reads, “Privilegium Obligatio.” It means that when you accept a privilege, you incur an obligation. In this Department, our duty is in our name. We are the only cabinet agency with a name that articulates a moral value.

Justice is not measured by statistics. Our employees learn from day one that their duty is to gather the facts, seek the truth, apply the law, and respect the policies and principles of the Department of Justice.

The second reason that you are not only judges is that in addition to your adjudicative function – finding facts and applying laws – you are a member of the executive branch. You follow lawful instructions from the Attorney General, and you share a duty to enforce the law.

You take office at a critical time. The number of immigration cases filed each year is rapidly increasing. In February, the Department of Homeland Security apprehended 66,000 aliens who unlawfully entered our country between ports of entry along the southwest border. On average, our colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security encounter about 3,000 aliens every day along the southern border.

Most of them cross the border unlawfully, between points of entry. They chose not to follow the law. Because they do not follow the law, many of them expose themselves and their children to exploitation and abuse. Many pay criminal smugglers because they know that they might not be allowed to enter lawfully. Nonetheless, our legal system protects them.

The massive influx of aliens who arrive in America illegally and invoke due process rights under our law creates a staggering volume of immigration cases that require resolution.

The primary factor driving the increasing backlog is the significant increase in asylum applications. Asylum applications have more than tripled in less than five years.

Our asylum system was established in the aftermath of World War II. America seemed to have limitless space at that time, and the goal was to protect minority groups from persecution by foreign states, the kind of persecution that the world witnessed during World War II and which was prevalent at that time in the purges conducted by our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union.

The law authorizes asylum only for victims who suffered persecution or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or because of their political opinion.

Other reasons for seeking to immigrate may be rational and even laudable. We certainly understand why foreigners wish to come to America in search of better opportunities for themselves and their children. America is a great nation that does not need walls to keep its citizens from leaving, like the Soviet Union. We build walls only to protect ourselves and enforce our rules.

The duty of our immigration judges is to honestly find the facts and faithfully apply the laws, so that people obtain asylum only if they qualify for it under the statute.

We are taking steps to address the massive influx of cases. We are hiring more judges; we are holding more hearings; and we are completing more cases, more quickly.

Since President Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice has hired more immigration judges than in the previous seven years combined. We now employ the largest number of immigration judges in history. There are 48 percent more immigration judges than three years ago, and 71 percent more than five years ago.

And we are finding innovative ways to become more efficient. For example, the Department has had great success using video teleconference technology, which enables judges to share the case burden with one another across the country.

We will look for other ways to become more efficient and more effective. But ultimately we are depending upon you, both to perform your duties expeditiously, and to let us know when you identify opportunities for improvement.

One of my favorite management parables is about a child who watches her mother prepare a roast beef.  The mother cuts the ends off the roast before she puts it in the oven.  The child asks why. The mother says that she learned it from her mother. So the child asks her grandmother. The grandmother explains, “When your mother was a child, I cut the ends off because my pan was too small to fit the whole roast beef.”

The moral is that the solutions of the past are not necessarily the right solutions today.  Circumstances change.  Sometimes we need to reconsider assumptions and realign our practices to achieve our goals.  The movie “Moneyball,” based on a book by Michael Lewis, summarizes the lesson in three words borrowed from Charles Darwin: “Adapt or die.” Some of the best ideas to enhance efficiency come from relatively new employees who are not accustomed to existing bureaucratic rules. If you think you know a better way to accomplish our mission, please speak up and let us know.

Our challenges are daunting.  But you can be part of the solution.

Whether the immigration backlog continues to grow depends in large part on how immigration judges discharge their duties.

We chose you because of your qualifications, your legal skills, and your personal integrity. We believe that you are ready for this challenge.

Thank you for your willingness to serve, and welcome to the Department of Justice.

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

There were a few good things about Rosenstein’s presentation:

  • As I had predicted would happen under Barr, he improved the tone by ditching the overt appeals to White Nationalism, racist dog whistles, and misogyny present in most of Sessions’s rhetoric:
  • He also dropped the vicious, disingenuous attacks on the private bar that were a staple of Sessions’s anti-immigrant screeds;
  • He at least acknowledges that immigrants are a large permanent part of our society, although downplaying the truth that, contrary to Stephen Miller and other Trump restrictionists, we are, in fact, a “nation of immigrants;”
  • He acknowledges the obligation to be “fair to all who desire to come here — whether they live south of our border or an ocean away;”
  • He at least grudgingly recognizes that all who come here are entitled to certain protections under our legal system regardless of the circumstances of entry (something that the DOJ and the Administration actually have failed to respect in practice);
  • He also recognizes another truth that his Department often chooses to ignore — “Justice is not measured by statistics.” — Indeed, it is not — so why have mindless “quotas” that nobody working in or familiar with the system would have recommended? Why cite largely meaningless statistics about the number of individuals who would like to come here but never will?

But, there was also lots NOT to like:

  • Rosenstein mangles the oath of office; federal employees like Immigration Judges swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic — they DON’T swear to uphold or carry out the policies of the Attorney General (many of which have actually been found in violation of the law);
  • He creates a bogus “test” of “legal entry” as a demonstration of “fealty to our country;” there is no such equivalency or “second class citizenship.” — Although our system understandably often favors those who enter legally, there are a number of provisions that allow individuals who did not do so to eventually be granted citizenship, including those who are granted asylum; I am aware of no information that shows that manner of entry into the U.S. has any effect on one’s “fealty” or performance as a citizen; indeed, as a “native born U.S. citizen,” Rosenstein, like many of us, did nothing whatsoever personally to show his “fealty” or “earn” his citizenship — he was just lucky like we were;
  • Rosenstein keeps referring to “enforcement;” but Immigration Judges are NOT “law enforcement officers;” they are supposed to be fair and impartial quasi-judicial adjudicators; “enforcement” is the job of DHS and other parts of the DOJ (a glaring conflict of interest);
  • DHS officials are not the Immigration Judges’ “colleagues” to any greater extent than are lawyers in private practice or the individuals coming before the Immigration Courts; DHS is a “party” before the court and should be treated as such;
  • Rosenstein mis-states the history of our refugee laws. While the 1951 Convention was a response to World War II, the U.S. never became a party. We did sign the 1967 Protocol which was intended to update and expand the Convention and refugee law and move it beyond the immediate post-WWII aftermath. Our first codification of refugee and asylum law, the Refugee Act of 1980, was specifically intended to eliminate the types of ideological and geographical biases that had previously been a facet of our law; Rosenstein wrongfully implies that judges should interpret  refugee law with a focus on a bygone era rather than considering refugee law, in the dynamic, protection-oriented manner it was intended, in the contexts of today’s world, where persecution based on gender is one of the major refugee producing factors;
  • Rosenstein cites televideo as a helpful “innovation;” televideo is hardly new; but the often inept way in which it has been implemented and used by EOIR means that it often has actually fueled, rather than solved, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” as shown in this very recent report from Beth Fertig at WNYC: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/03/15/beth-fertig-the-gothamist-mismanaged-immigration-courts-failed-technology-results-in-cancelled-hearings-more-aimless-docket-reshuffling-that-needlessly-impedes-due-process-ad/ Most of us who have actually worked in the system would say that while better televideo and a corps of “senior” and “reserve” judges might prove useful in many circumstances, they are least suitable and helpful for contested merits asylum cases;
  • Rosenstein neglects to mention the glaring failure of DOJ/EOIR to deliver on an even more important piece of technology for both the judges and the parties: e-filing which has been under development for nearly two decades without producing a functional product — a stunning piece of administrative incompetence by any standard and one that has helped contribute to the “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” that plagues this dysfunctional system;
  • Rosenstein use of the term “generous” to describe legal immigration policy under Trump is outrageous; in a time of a growing worldwide refugee crisis, this Administration has cruelly and irrationally reduced refugee admissions to the lowest rate since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, while discouraging and placing bureaucratic roadblocks to discourage other forms of legal immigration, and intentionally misconstruing and perverting the law to make it more difficult for abused women from Central America to qualify;
  • Rosenstein fails to acknowledge that “forced migrants” are just that; they often enter illegally because they have little other choice, particularly when the Administration intentionally “slow walks” the applications of those who apply at legal ports of entry, forces those who have shown “credible fear” to remain in dangerous conditions in Mexico, and encourages smugglers to “turn in” individuals between ports of entry to avoid the Trump Administration’s short-sighted and arguably illegal policies;
  • Walls are not a symbol of strength as posited by Rosenstein; they are symbols of fear and loathing; in the USSR’s case it was directed at their own citizens; for the Trump Administration, walls are symbols of fear of Mexico, Mexicans, other Latin Americans, immigrants generally, and inferentially the real target — Hispanic citizens and all people of color in the U.S.;
  • Rosenstein’s final piece of jaw-dropping hypocrisy is to solicit solutions from the “new judges” to problems thrust on them by his Department’s malicious incompetence. Gimme a break, Rod! This Administration, like the last several, has made a point of ignoring any solutions generated from those who actually hear the cases in favor of those imposed to meet political goals that often undermine due process and judicial efficiency. Just ask the NAIJ how “receptive” the Trump DOJ has been to constructive suggestions. Ask almost any Immigration Judge about the idiotic and demeaning “case quotas” imposed on them over their objections. Moreover, this Administration has been “outed” in FOIA requests and court cases for  ignoring well-supported fact-biased recommendations of career civil servants with expertise in various fields in favor of a preconceived racist, White Nationalist, restrictionist political agenda. Save your breath and ideas folks, for a future time after we get some much-needed “regime change” and the return of rational, unbiased, solution-oriented administration of justice instead of ideologues and their apologists like Rosenstein.

Rosenstein is on his way out the door at the DOJ.  He’ll leave behind a mixed legacy. He’ll deserve great credit for protecting the Mueller investigation from Trump’s various attempts to interfere and compromise it. On the other hand, he drafted the infamous “pretext memo” which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to cover up Trump’s real real reason for firing FBI Director Jim Comey.

His failure to stand up for judicial independence, fairness, and due process for vulnerable individuals coming before our U.S. Immigration Courts and his continuing defense of the Administration’s indefensible and harmful White Nationalist immigration agenda will go down as one of his lesser moments.

America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court where judges act fairly and impartially and owe allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, not the Attorney General or any other political official.

PWS

03-18-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. What The DAG SHOULD Have Said To New U.S. Immigration Judges (But, Of Course Didn’t) . . .
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

NQRFPT: Due Process, Administrative Competence, Common Sense MIA From Initial “Return to Mexico” Hearings, Forcing Frustrated Judge Into A Round Of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling!”

NQRFPT = “Not Quite Ready For Prime Time”

MIA = “Missing in Action”

ADR = “Aimless Docket Reshuffling”

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-remain-in-mexico-hearings-20190314-story.html

Kate Morrissey reports for the San Diego Union Tribune:

Two of the three asylum seekers who were supposed to show up for the first immigration court hearings under the “Remain in Mexico” policy did not make it across the border on Thursday to appear.

After the Homeland Security Secretary announced what she called a “historic” program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, in December, many wondered — and worried — about the logistics of shuttling migrants back and forth across the border for court hearings.At least one of the people who had been returned to Tijuana after asking for asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry missed the court hearings because of what Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Rico Bartolomei called a “glitch” in the scheduling system.

Court cases for the program were supposed to start next Tuesday, but somehow cases got scheduled for this Thursday, Bartolomei explained. At first, the court tried to reschedule those hearings for Tuesday but realized it wouldn’t have a way to communicate that effectively with the asylum seekers in Mexico.

The issue was that when the court rescheduled to March 19, anyone who called its toll-free number to check for court date updates thought that the hearings would be on March 19. That happened in the case of one Honduran woman who had Los Angeles-based attorney Olga Badilla representing her.

Badilla explained to the judge that she had only learned the day before that the hearing had moved back to March 14 and that her client hadn’t found out in time to be at the port of entry at 9 a.m. She arrived a couple of hours later, but Customs and Border Protection officers wouldn’t let her into the U.S. for her hearing.

“She’s present at the port of entry and ready to come in,” Badilla told the judge, asking for the court’s help. “It’s an unusual situation given the circumstances.”

Aguilar said the judge should order the woman deported in her absence.

Bartolomei denied that motion, saying that the woman had received “insufficient notice” of the hearing. Instead, he scheduled a future date with Badilla to turn in the woman’s asylum application.

Though the woman was given another chance to show up for court, she ran into more problems down at the border. Her permit to stay in Mexico was on the verge of expiring in anticipation of her crossing into the U.S. for court. If she had crossed and returned again, she would likely get a new one. Without entering the U.S., she was about to become deportable from Mexico.

When court ended for the day, Badilla went to try to help her client.

The other person who didn’t show up for court, a 24-year-old man from Honduras, had also had his case rescheduled through the court’s glitch.

ICE attorney Aguilar again moved to have the man ordered deported.

Bartolomei pushed the ICE attorney about whether it made sense to order someone deported from the U.S. while they are still in Mexico. He asked if it made more sense to consider the person’s application for admission withdrawn.

According to immigration attorney Tammy Lin, a withdrawal would limit potential restrictions on the man’s ability to come to the U.S. in the future. A deportation order would make it much more difficult for the man to come to the U.S.

During the conversation, Bartolomei sighed audibly, weighing the options before him.

Then he decided to reschedule his case for the 19th to see if the man showed up then. Since he didn’t have an address to send the new hearing notice to, he gave it to the Department of Homeland Security to pass on to the man.

The one person who did show up did not have an attorney. Also from Honduras, the man arrived at El Chaparral plaza outside the port of entry well before 9 a.m. A volunteer from a legal services organization that supports migrants in the plaza every morning before they ask for asylum saw him and escorted him to the gate inside the port that marks the entry to the U.S.

He waited in line, shuffling down the spiral walkway in a mix of commuters, shoppers and friends returning from trips abroad. When he got to the front of the line, a Customs and Border Protection official held him to the side to wait for the other two who were supposed to come.

He was nervous, he said.

A few minutes after 9 a.m., several CBP officers and two plainclothes officials took him into the U.S. Officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement transported him from the port of entry to the office building in downtown San Diego that houses the immigration court.

He arrived at the court before noon and sat in a corner of the back row of benches, head bowed.

When it was his turn to face the judge, he spoke softly into the microphone and watched attentively as Bartolomei explained each of the documents he had received.

Bartolomei asked him if he wanted more time to find an attorney.

Yes, the man replied.

The judge granted him another month to try to find someone to help him and told him he would likely be taken back to Mexico again.

“I know it will be difficult to try to get an attorney from there,” Bartolomei told him, urging him to try his best to find a lawyer to take his case.

When his turn was over, ICE officers quickly whisked him away, back to the port of entry.

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

Notice will continue to be an issue in this ill-designed process. It actually appears that it will be impossible to properly serve anyone at a “last known address” in Mexico. Thus, any in absentia hearings should ultimately be vacated for lack of notice and will have to be re-started. That’s what “ADR” is all about.

The ICE Attorney was both unhelpful and probably unethical when he insisted on frivolously moving for an “in absentia” order given the obvious scheduling and notice issues attributable to his agency’s choice of this “historically” goofed up and perhaps illegal method of proceeding. Unwillingness to assume any responsibility for their own frequent screw ups and predictably bad policy choices is certainly a “hallmark” of the Trump Administration!

Once of the things that made the Arlington Immigration Court run as well as it did during my tenure was the sense of justice, common sense, practicality, and overall cooperation and helpfulness of the ICE Chief Counsel’s Office in working with the Immigration Judges and private bar to “keeping the ball moving down the field.” Apparently deprived of such a professional approach by the mindless “due process and common sense be damned policies” of this Administration, today’s Immigration Judges face additional roadblocks in promoting efficiency and fairness in accordance with the law. No wonder the backlogs are growing exponentially even with more Immigration Judges on the bench!

Here’s how might a “due process and efficiency-oriented system” could have dealt with the same issues:

  • Work with the private sector to obtain local counsel for individuals who have passed the “credible fear” process;
  • Find out how long it will take the lawyer to prepare the application for asylum for filing with the Immigration Court;
  • Choose a compatable date for filing at the “Initial Master” from a computerized list of  “available first Master dates” on Judge Bartolomei’s calendar made available by EOIR;
  • Release the applicant to a local nonprofit who will help insure that he or she understands the system and the importance of keeping attorney meetings and appearing before the Immigration Court as scheduled;
  • At the first Master, the attorney files the completed asylum application with Judge Bartolomei, and he assigns an Individual Hearing date;
  • Presto! A system that works, uses court and judicial time wisely, and promotes fair and efficient results.

Contrast that with the mindless system described above. The key: under the current system everybody has wasted time and effort, particularly Judge Bartholomei, but without getting any closer to assigning an actual Individual Hearing date than on the day the applicant passed “credible fear.”

That’s how Government-created “bogus emergencies” happen. It’s really important that folks like Kate keep reporting on the “nitty gritty” of the Trump Administration’s “malicious incompetence” and how it is destroying and degrading our immigration and justice systems on a daily basis.

Undoubtedly, this Administration will attempt to shift blame for its own predictable failures to the victims — asylum seekers, their lawyers, and Immigration Judges. It’s important that the Trump Administration be held fully accountable, both in the present and for history, for the consequences of their terrible White Nationalist restrictionist agenda.

PWS

03-16-19

 

Related posts:

  1. U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE JONATHEN SCOTT SIMPSON EXPRESSES FRUSTRATION WITH FECKLESS “COURT” SYSTEM THAT KOWTOWS TO DHS ENFORCEMENT’S “STAY IN MEXICO PROGRAM” — DOJ’s “Captive Courts” Expected To Assist DHS In Misusing Asylum Laws To Discourage & Punish Asylum Seekers”
  2. 9TH CIRCUIT JUDGES COMPLICIT IN HUMAN RIGHTS & LEGAL VIOLATIONS INFLICTED ON TERRIFIED TEEN ASYLUM APPLICANTS: Reuters Study Exposes How Disingenuous Article III Judges Are Letting Trump Administration “Get Away With Potential Murder” Under Clearly Illegal, Unconstitutional, & Incompetently Administered “Remain In Mexico” Abomination!
  3. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

DORIS MEISSNER @ MPI: Administration’s Failed Border Enforcement Policies Anchored In Past & Distorted By Xenophobia — Most Of Today’s Arriving Migrants Seek & Deserve Safety & Protection Unavailable In “Failed States” Of Northern Triangle!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/14/real-border-problem-is-us-is-trying-stop-wrong-kind-migrants/

Doris writes in the Washington Post:

No matter what happens with Thursday’s vote on President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, the real root of the difficulties at the U.S.-Mexico border won’t be addressed.

The whole approach the U.S. government takes at the border is geared to yesterday’s problem: Our border security system was designed to keep single, young Mexican men from crossing into the United States to work. Every day, more evidence mounts that it’s not set up to deal with the families and unaccompanied children now arriving from Central America — in search not just of jobs, but also of refuge. The mismatch is creating intolerable humanitarian conditions and undermining the effectiveness of border enforcement.

From the 1960s to the early 2000s, the reality of illegal immigration at the southwest border was overwhelmingly economic migration from Mexico. The U.S. responded, especially once the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted tighter security everywhere, by building up a well-resourced, modernized, hardened border enforcement infrastructure, with more staff and more sophisticated strategies. Successive Congresses and administrations under the leadership of both Democrats and Republicans have supported major investments in border security as an urgent national priority. About $14 billion was allocated in fiscal year 2017 for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a steep rise from $9.5 billion a decade earlier.

From a peak of 1.6 million apprehensions in fiscal 2000 — with 98 percent of those apprehended Mexicans — border apprehensions have fallen by about three-quarters, to 397,000 last year. More Mexicans now return to Mexico annually than enter the United States. The turnaround has been dramatic and is due to the combined effects of economic growth, falling fertility rates and improved education and job prospects in Mexico; job losses in the United States surrounding the 2008-2009 recession; and significant border enforcement successes.

At the same time, an entirely different type of migration became more common. Beginning in 2012, the number of unaccompanied minorsfrom Central America — principally El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — crossing the border illegally jumped sharply. Modest numbers of such migrants had been arriving for many years. However, by 2014, the arrival of unaccompanied children spiked to more than 67,000 and, for the first time, the number of non-Mexican apprehensions exceeded those of Mexicans.

By 2016, the Central American flows became predominantly families with young children. Some were fleeing their countries in search of economic opportunity, but many were seeking safety and protection from widespread violence and gang activity that especially targets young people approaching or already in their teens.

Last year, 40 percent of border apprehensions were either of migrant families or unaccompanied minors, as compared to 10 percent in 2012. The proportion has risen to 60 percent in recent months, and just-released numbers show 66,450 apprehensions last month, the highest February total in a decade.

The important story, however, is not so much the numbers, which remain well below earlier peaks, as it is the change in the character of the flow. Today’s migrants include especially vulnerable populations, a large share of whom are seeking safety. As my organization reported recently, more than one in three border crossers today is an unaccompanied child or asylum seeker, up from approximately one in 100 a decade ago.

Yet the U.S. government’s posture has not been recalibrated, remaining pointed toward an illegal immigration pattern that has largely waned.

[Trump isn’t trying to solve border problems. He’s trying to make them look worse.]

Today, many people who cross the border illegally actively seek out and turn themselves in to enforcement officials so they can apply for asylum. Others have been presenting themselves at ports of entry, seeking protection. Ground sensors, camera towers and similar surveillance technology and infrastructure are less helpful as a result.

Border Patrol facilities are designed for holding people only for short periods because that used to be all they needed to do: Most Mexicans who are apprehended are processed and returned across the border within hours. The same is not the case for Central Americans and others from noncontiguous countries, increasing numbers of whom are arriving exhausted and in ill health after lengthy, arduous journeys. They can’t simply be driven back to Mexico, because they’re not from there in the first place.

Border Patrol stations are ill-suited for dealing with these vulnerable populations, as the tragedy of the two young children who died recently in Border Patrol custody sadly illustrates. The situation has been further taxed by the increasing numbers of what the Border Patrol refers to as large-group arrivals: In the first five months of this fiscal year, the Border Patrol encountered 70 groups of more than 100 migrants crossing illegally, up from 13 last year and two the year before.

Asylum officers and immigration judges, not Border Patrol and port-of-entry inspectors, make the decisions in asylum cases. The asylum and immigration court systems don’t have anywhere near the sustained funding spent on border enforcement programs. As larger shares of migrants have arrived claiming asylum, workloads have ballooned into huge backlogs as a result. And even in cases where resources have been provided, they are not always used: Congress has allocated funding for 534 immigration judges, and yet only 427 are serving. Children and families are vulnerable to physical and emotional health dangers that argue for minimal detention periods, but their cases can take months or years to decide. And policies that precipitated the separation of more than 2,700 children from their parents have only added to the trauma.

These and other factors point to the need for dramatically different border management policies and budget decisions from those made in the past, largely successfully, to deter illegal inflows from Mexico.

Testifying in Congress last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the situation at the border has reached a “breaking point.” There is a crisis, but it is a crisis of an asylum system that is severely overburdened by the major uptick in humanitarian protection claims.

The asylum system can only work effectively with timely, fair decisions about who is eligible for protection — and who is not, and therefore must be returned to their country of origin. More broadly, just as improved conditions in Mexico have been key to reducing illegal crossings of Mexicans, the best way to prevent Central Americans from fleeing their native countries must include attacking the violence, corruption and poverty driving them to leave home.

Yet the Trump administration has curtailed access to asylum and ended a program allowing some Central Americans to apply for protection from within the region to keep pressure off the border. Most recently, the administration rolled out a new policy that forces some asylum seekers to stay in Mexico in highly uncertain conditions to await asylum decisions, which they are told may take up to a year. Such measures seem only to be spurring on prospective migrants to journey to the U.S. before policies get even more restrictive.

This is not to say there are easy answers. Dealing with mixed flows is a challenge not only for the United States but for other major migrant destinations in Europe and beyond. Building systems that can sift through mixed flows to fairly and efficiently provide protection to those who truly qualify and identify and remove those who don’t is difficult.

[Trump is right: There is a crisis at the border. But he’s causing it.]

But course corrections are well past due.

Steps that could be taken now include devoting money and applying new strategies to the asylum and immigration court systems so they can effectively handle a burgeoning caseload, rather than greatly narrowing who can access them. Building suitable Border Patrol facilities for receiving children and families and training agents and other staff to spot and act upon medical and other emergencies would also be required. The government could foster networks of community-based monitoring and case management programs with legal representation that provide alternatives to detention so migrants are detained for minimal periods, at less overall expense and are treated more humanely, but still appear for their asylum interviews and deportation hearings.

Ramped-up anti-smuggling initiatives and intelligence cooperation with neighboring countries are a must. Affected communities on both sides of the border need support and new partnerships with government actors, especially in the face of caravans, a method of movement on the rise among Central Americans to gain safety in numbers but posing new logistical and political difficulties for governments. And U.S. policies must give greater priority to our geographic neighborhood in developing longer-term solutions with Mexico and Central America that are in our joint national interests.

Rather than unproductive political fights over walls and national emergency declarations, these steps would go a long way to restoring order at the border. It is past time for policymakers and the public to recognize there are no quick fixes but that, even with migrant arrivals on the rise, the border can be managed through an array of proven policy initiatives.

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

It’s no surprise to me that an Administration committed to a racist, White Nationalist political agenda, rather than governing in the public interest, will consistently fail to solve problems and will govern incompetently.

Families who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol at the first opportunity to apply for asylum are by no stretch of the imagination “law enforcement issues” except to the extent that Trump’s inappropriate unwillingness to process them fairly at ports of entry and to establish a robust refugee program for the Northern Triangle has created a misdirection of law enforcement resources.  To claim otherwise is totally disingenuous.

PWS

03-15-19

Related posts:

  1. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  2. SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!
  3. EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: KID KILLERS ON THE LOOSE: “Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.”
  4. AMEN: A PRAYER IN THE TIME OF KAKISTOCRACY!

ADAM R. TAYLOR @ SOJOURNERS: Trump’s Immoral Budget!

https://sojo.net/articles/misplaced-moral-priorities-trumps-2020-budget-proposal

Adam R. Taylor writes in Sojourners:

COMMENTARY

By Adam R. Taylor3-14-2019

Print

Budgets are moral documents: They signal what and who we prioritize and seek to protect or uplift. As Christians we can disagree on many issues, but it should be hard to argue that there is an overriding call in the Bible to demonstrate a particular concern for the poor and prioritize the welfare of the vulnerable. This is the moral test by which we must evaluate every budget, perhaps most importantly the federal budget. Based on this test, the Trump administration’s proposed budget priorities for Fiscal Year 2020 fail miserably and must be rejected.

While the president’s budget proposal is increasingly not much more than a messaging document, it represents the first important salvo in the budgetary process, a process that will result in profound, and in some cases life and death, implications for people and communities across the country and world.

That is why we are asking you to join us in sending a clear and resounding message to every member of Congress that they must reject the deeply misguided and unjust priorities in the president’s budget and instead support a moral budget.

Though many media reports will gloss over this or avoid saying so, Trump’s budget priorities will disproportionately hurt the poor and communities of color, which will simply reinforce structural racism and exacerbate economic hardship..

The reason given for the draconian cuts being contemplated to programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is reducing the annual budget deficit. At the same time, taxes are as low as they’ve been in decades for the richest 1 percent, and the Trump proposes increasing the defense budget to $750 billion next year. The only place to find deficit reduction then, if cutting defense spending or raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations is off the table, is to decimate the ability of the non-defense part of the government to operate effectively and provide a social safety net. That non-defense spending already is only about 15 percent of the federal budget — a historically low level of 3.2 percent of GDP. It is from this already tiny pool that Trump’s budget proposal wants to extract the vast majority of its deficit reduction.

Here are a few of the most concrete ways the budget harms those already at risk and comforts the comfortable:

  • The budget includes a request for $8.6 billion in additional funding for Trump’s immoral border wall, a monument to xenophobia and racism.
  • The budget calls for using an accounting gimmick to get around caps on defense spending by more than doubling the size of a slush fund presidents from both parties have used to fund our ongoing foreign wars (or “overseas contingency operations” as they are euphemistically called). The increase in defense spending also increases the size of the cuts the administration wants to make everywhere else.
  • The budget envisions cutting SNAP by $220 billion over 10 years, and impose work requirements on many safety net programs, which a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences said “are least as likely to increase as to decrease poverty.”
  • This budget would also cut the international affairs budget by 23 percent and the humanitarian budget by 30 percent. Even the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)— a government program dedicated to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic overseas that has enjoyed longstanding bipartisan support — would be cut by a devastating 22 percent. Taken together these cuts exemplify the administration’s isolationism and disregard for the non-military aspects of foreign policy.
  • The budget calls for a significant slowdown in spending and a dramatic restructuring of Medicaid, a program primarily designed to provide access to health care for people in poverty.
  • The budget calls for extending permanently the 2017 tax cut, which gives more dollars to white households in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent of households of all races. This budget would perpetuate our nation’s racial income inequity.

The immorality of the president’s budget goes beyond exacerbating income and wealth inequality. It also envisions radical reductions in spending on agencies that protect the environment and provide housing to the urban poor, to the tune of a 31 percent reduction in discretionary funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and an 18 percent reduction for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others.

TAKE ACTION: Reject Trump’s Immoral Budget Proposal

It’s very reasonable to ask: What would a just budget look like? Sojourners is a proud co-founder and co-chair of the Circle of Protection, a group of religious leaders who head Christian denominations and organizations from all major branches of Christianity, unprecedented in its theological breadth. The group was founded in 2011 around the principle that the nation and world’s most vulnerable people, particularly the poor and hungry, must be served and protected by the United States government’s budget. The Circle recently sent a letter to Capitol Hill urging members of Congress in both parties to work together to pass a just budget while also working to end poverty and increase opportunity for all of God’s children. That letter reads in part:

We urge you to pass a bipartisan budget agreement that both reverses harmful sequestration cuts and expands investments in critical programs serving people in poverty—both in the U.S. and around the world. We further urge you to prioritize funding for program areas targeted to help low-income individuals afford the essentials, such as low-income housing assistance, child care, and poverty-focused international assistance. It is not enough to simply prevent cuts to domestic and international anti-poverty programs. We call for additional investments in these programs.

Sojourners, along with our partners in the Circle of Protection, believe that we must focus our persuasion efforts on Congress in the year to come both because that is the branch that authorizes and appropriates government spending, and because this White House continues to display a callous disregard for the economically disadvantaged at every turn — with this week’s budget proposal marking the latest stark example.

On one hand, few of these proposals are new or unique to President Trump. His budget represents a wish-list that might be crafted by any number of right-wing politicians in this country. But at a certain point it’s necessary to point out that regardless of stated intent, the practical effect of many of these policies is to make life better for people who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy while making it more difficult for low-income people, who are disproportionately people of color. If we believe budgets are moral documents that reveal our priorities, this budget reveals an administration determined to protect a deeply inequitable status quo. Join us in resisting and transforming this status quo into a budget that reflects our most deeply held values and priorities.

Adam R. Taylor

 Rev. Adam R. Taylor is executive director of Sojourners. He previously led the Faith Initiative at the World Bank Group.

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

Amen. That some so-called “faith groups” continue to blindly back the most immoral and dishonest President in U.S. history is most perplexing.

PWS

03-14-19

 

Related posts:

  1. THE HILL: Welcoming Refugees & Other Immigrants Makes Countries Happier!
  2. JIM WALLIS @ SOJOURNERS: Things Will Get Worse Under Trump; Moral Resistance Is Essential: “[Trump] almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.“
  3. 🤮NO PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TOWARD MEN (WOMEN, OR ESPECIALLY CHILDREN) FROM REGIME OF “BAD SANTAS” 🦹🏿‍♂️🎅🏻— Illegally Separated Families Continue To Suffer Irreparable Trauma, 😰 Volunteer Groups 😇🗽⚖️ Left To Pick Up Pieces — A Reminder That Defeated Regime Has Mocked, Disparaged, & Trashed Christ’s Values & Assaulted Humanity Over Four Christmases!🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️👎🏻
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

“DUE PROCESS FOREVER, XENOPHOBIA NEVER!” — Here’s An Inspirational Creation By The Courageous Students Of Professor Claire Thomas Of NY Law School, Stalwart Members Of The New Due Process Army!

This is derived from the closing lines of my speech to the 2019 FBA New York Asylum and Immigration Law Conference at NY Law School last Friday, March 8!

“Practicing what they preach,” Professor Claire Thomas of NY Law School and her courageous, smart, and dedicated students are now at the Southern Border saving lives and making a historical record of the cruel, ineffective, illegal, and bias-driven policies of the Trump Administration.

Thanks again to Professor Thomas, who was also one of the primary organizers of the “sold-out” Conference, and her inspiring students for all they are doing to preserve America and our system of justice against the attacks on the rule of law, our Constitution, and simple human decency by the scofflaw and incompetent Trump Administration.

Here’s the amazing Professor Thomas:

 

Due Process Forever, Xenophobia Never!

PWS

03-11-19

Related posts:

  1. THE ART OF SOCIAL JUSTICE — HON. POLLY WEBBER’S TRIPTYCH “REFUGEE DILEMMA” HITS THE ROAD!
  2. TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!

THE ART OF SOCIAL JUSTICE — HON. POLLY WEBBER’S TRIPTYCH “REFUGEE DILEMMA” HITS THE ROAD!

 

  1.  a) “Fleeing From Persecution;” b) “Caught in the Covfefe;” c) “Safe Haven;”
  2. The stories behold each rug by the artist, Hon. Polly Webber;
  3. Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase & Hon. Polly Webber admiring “Caught in the Covfefe” during a break at the 2019 FBA New York Asylum & Immigration Law Conference at NY Law School on March 8, 2019;
  4. Closeup of “Caught in the Covfefe.”

Art powerfully expresses the overwhelming need to fight for social justice and human dignity in the age of Trump’s unabashed cruelty, racism, and White Nationalism.

It’s even more powerful when the artist is Retired U.S. Immigration Judge Polly Webber (a proud member of “Our Gang” of retired judges) who has spent her life promoting Due Process, fundamental fairness, justice, and the rule of law in American immigration. She has served as an immigration attorney, former President of AILA, U.S. Immigration Judge, and now amazing textile artist bringing her full and rich life and deeply held humane values to the forefront of her art.

Thanks, Polly, for using your many talents to inspire a new generation of the “New Due Process Army!”

I’m only sorry that my photos don’t do justice to Polly’s art. Hopefully, the “real deal” will come to a venue near you in the future!

PWS

03-10-19

 

 

Related posts:

  1. NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!
  2. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”

TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=d85e48a2-1a59-4182-854b-dfd9a146177c

TThe numbers are sobering. The federal government reported Tuesday that immigration agents apprehended 76,000 people — most of them families or unaccompanied minors — at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, twice the level of the previous year and the highest for February in 11 years. The increase continues a trend that began in the fall, and offers direct evidence that President Trump’s strategy of maximal enforcement at the border is not reducing the flow of migrants.

And no, the answer is not “a big, beautiful wall.” Most of those apprehended weren’t trying to sneak past border agents; instead, they sought out agents once they reached the border and turned themselves in, hoping to receive permission to stay.

Furthermore, the situation isn’t a national security emergency, as he has declared in an effort to spend more on his border wall than Congress provided. It’s a complex humanitarian crisis that appears to be worsening, and it’s going to take creative analytical minds to address.

For instance, the vast majority of the families flowing north in recent months come from poor regions of Guatemala, where food insecurity and local conflicts over land rights and environmental protections are pushing more people off their farms and into even deeper poverty, according to human rights observers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Just months earlier, gang violence in urbanized areas were pushing people north to the United States; increasingly now, it’s economics.

But Trump’s rhetoric may be playing a role too. The more he threatens draconian enforcement and cutbacks in legal immigration, the more people contemplating moving north are pushed to go sooner, before it gets even harder to reach the U.S. Similarly, more migrants are arriving at more treacherous and remote stretches of the border to avoid getting stuck in Tijuana or other border cities where the U.S. government has reduced the number of asylum seekers it will allow in, claiming an inability to process the requests.

The system is overwhelmed. But the solution isn’t to build a wall, incarcerate more people, separate children from their parents or deny people their legal right to seek asylum. The solution is to improve the efficiency and capacity of the system to deal with the changed migrant demographics. A decade ago, about 1 in 100 border crossers was an unaccompanied minor or asylum seeker; now about a third are.

More judges and support staffs are necessary for the immigration court system, as the Trump administration has sought from Congress. Yet the case backlog there has continued to grow — in part because the increase in enforcement actions, in part because the Justice Department ordered the courts to reopen cases that had been closed administratively without deportations, often because the migrant was in the process of obtaining a visa. A faster and fair process would give those deserving asylum the answer they need sooner, cutting back on the years they spend in limbo, while no longer incentivizing those unqualified for asylum to try anyway.

The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, has suggested one partial fix. Currently, migrants claiming asylum have a near-immediate initial “credible fear” hearing with an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who determines whether the migrant has a significant potential to make a successful asylum claim. Most migrants pass that low threshold and are then directed to the immigration courts to make the formal case, a more involved process that can take years. Keeping those cases within the citizenship and immigration branch for an administrative hearing instead of sending them to immigration court could lead to faster decisions for the deserving at a lower cost — a single asylum agent is cheaper than a court staff — while preserving legal rights by giving those denied asylum a chance to appeal to the immigration courts. That’s a process worth contemplating.

More fundamentally, the current system hasn’t worked for years, and under Trump’s enforcement strategy it has gotten worse. It’s a big ask, but Congress and the president need to work together to develop a more capable system that manages the many different aspects of immigration in the best interests of the nation while accommodating the rights of the persecuted to seek asylum.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1cbd9b3d-f2d0-4249-b602-37223ff3f407

The U.S. government is reportedly compiling dossiers on journalists, lawyers and activists at the border.

ASan Diego television station recently obtained some troubling documents that seem to show that the U.S. government, working with Mexican officials under a program called Operation Secure Line, has created and shared dossiers on journalists, immigrant rights lawyers and activists covering or involved with the so-called caravans of migrants moving from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Worse yet, the government then detained some of these people for questioning (one photojournalist was held for 13 hours), barred some of them from crossing the border and interfered with their legitimate efforts to do their jobs. NBC 7 also received a copy of a purported government dossier on lawyer Nicole Ramos, refugee program director for a migrant rights group, that included a description of her car, her mother’s name, and details on her work and travel history. That’s not border security, that’s an intelligence operation and, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, “an outrageous violation of the First Amendment.”

The ACLU noted correctly that it is impermissible for the government to use “the pretext of the border to target activists critical of its policies, lawyers providing legal representation, or journalists simply doing their jobs.”

It’s unclear when the intelligence gathering began, or how widespread it is, but the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in October that U.S. border agents, using the broad power the law gives them to question people entering the country, seemingly singled out journalists for in-depth examinations, including searching their phones, laptops and cameras — all without warrants, because they’re generally not required at the border. These are troubling developments deserving of close scrutiny by Congress and, if warranted, the courts.

The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for controlling the flow of people across U.S. borders and has broad and court-recognized authority to search for contraband. But the government should not use that authority as a pretext to try to gain information to which it would not otherwise be entitled. And it certainly doesn’t give it a framework for harassing or maintaining secret files on journalists, lawyers and activists who are covering, representing or working with activists.

Homeland Security defended the targeting by linking the intelligence operation to the agency’s investigation of efforts this winter by some Central American migrants to cross the wall near San Ysidro, Calif. It said also that all the people entered into the database had witnessed border violence. That sounds an awful lot like a criminal investigation, not a border security operation.

The name of the report leaked to NBC 7 was “Migrant Caravan FY-2019: Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators, and Media.” The only thing suspect here is the government’s actions.

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

Unfortunately, the second editorial on the “enemies list” shows why the first one on solving the Central American forced migration issue in a sensible, legal, and humanitarian manner simply isn’t in the cards without “regime change.”

First, the Trump Administration simply lacks the competence, professionalism, and expertise to solve real problems. The absolutely stunning incompetence of Nielsen and the rest of the politicos who supposedly run immigration and national security policy these days was on full display this week. America’s “real” enemies must have been watching with glee at this public demonstration of lack of competence and concern for any of the actual national security issues facing our nation.

Career civil servants who have the knowledge, expertise, motivation, and ability to solve migration problems have been forced out, buried in make-work “hallwalker jobs” deep in the bowls of the bureaucracy, or simply silenced and ignored. The Administration has also declared war on facts, knowledge, human decency and scorns the humanitarian expertise available in the private and NGO sectors.

Second, there is zip motivation within the Trump Kakistocracy to solve to the problem. As long as neo-Nazi Stephen Miller is in charge of immigration policy, we’ll get nothing but White Nationalist, racist nonsense. Miller and the White Nationalist restrictionists (like Trump & Sessions) have no motivation to solve immigration problems in a practical, humane, legal manner.

No, the White Nationalist agenda is to use lies, intentionally false narratives, racial and ethnic stereotypes, bogus statistics, and outright attacks on our legal system to further an agenda of hate, intolerance, and division in America intended to enfranchise a largely White GOP kakistocracy while disenfranchising everyone else. It plays to a certain unhappy and ill-informed political “base” that has enabled a minority who cares not a whit about the common good to seize control of our country.

While the forces of evil, division, and Constitutional nihilism can be resisted in the courts, the press, and now the House of Representatives, the reign of “malicious incompetence” can only be ended at the ballot box. If it doesn’t happen in 2020, and there is certainly no guarantee that it will, it might well be too late for the future of our republic.

PWS

03-07-19

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  3. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  4. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

“RETURN TO MEXICO” GIVES DHS A CHANCE TO HARASS IMMIGRATION LAWYERS AND ACTIVISTS AT BORDER!

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/u-s-officials-made-list-reporters-lawyers-activists-question-border-n980301

Julia Ainsley

Julia Edwards Ainsley reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Customs and Border Protection has compiled a list of 59 mostly American reporters, attorneys and activists for border agents to stop for questioning when crossing the U.S-Mexican border at San Diego-area checkpoints, and agents have questioned or arrested at least 21 of them, according to documents obtained by NBC station KNSD-TV and interviews with people on the list.

Several people on the list confirmed to NBC News that they had been pulled aside at the border after the date the list was compiled and were told they were being questioned as part of a “national security investigation.”

CBP told NBC News the names on the list are people who were present during violence that broke out at the border with Tijuana in November and they were being questioned so that the agency could learn more about what started it.

The list, dated Jan. 9, 2019, is titled “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019 Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators, and Media” and includes pictures of the 59 individuals who are to be stopped. The people on the list were to be pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection agents for questioning when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to meet with or aid migrants from the Honduran caravan waiting on the Mexican side of the border.

A sample of names and photos from the list. KNSD blurred the names and photos of individuals who haven't given permission to publish their information.
A sample of names and photos from the list. KNSD blurred the names and photos of individuals who haven’t given permission to publish their information.Obtained by KNSD

The list includes 10 journalists, seven of them U.S. citizens, a U.S.-based attorney and others labeled as organizers and “instigators,” 31 of whom are American. Symbols on the list show that by the time it was compiled 12 of the individuals had already been through additional questioning during border crossings and nine had been arrested.

Click here to read KNSD’s story about the list

In some cases, CBP had also compiled dossiers on the individuals with the help of intelligence from Mexican officials, according to the materials obtained by KNSD.

The cover of the list includes a seal with both the American and Mexican flags and was compiled shortly after the arrival of nearly 5,000 Honduran immigrants at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border, which is in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector.

On Nov. 25, unrest broke out as some immigrants attempted to run through border checkpoints or scale the barriers after growing frustrated with the long wait to enter the country. CBP officers responded with tear gas, bringing attention to the worsening tension between CBP and the frustrated migrants in Tijuana.

In response to a KNSD question about the list, a spokesman for CBP said it is protocol to “collect evidence that might be needed for future legal actions.”

“To determine if the event was orchestrated…CBP and our law enforcement partners evaluate these incidents, follow all leads garnered from information collected, conduct interviews and investigations, in preparation for, and often to prevent future incidents that could cause further harm to the public, our agents, and our economy,” the spokesman told KNSD.

FEARS CONFIRMED

The documents confirm what many people who report on immigration or provide humanitarian aid and legal counsel to asylum seekers at the southern border have reported anecdotally. They say that CBP is focused on them and increasingly pulling them aside for what is known as a “secondary screening.”

During that screening, journalists and lawyers describe being told that they are being interviewed as part of a national security investigation and that they must give officers access to their cell phones. Many do not know their rights as American citizens to refuse to answer such questions or request a lawyer.

One lawyer from the list who was recently stopped at a San Diego-area crossing, Nicole Ramos, refugee director for Al Otro Lado, a law center for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, learned from NBC News that CBP had compiled a dossier of information on her. The dossier included personal details such as her mother’s name, her social media pictures, the car she drives and her work and travel history.

“The document…appears to prove what we have assumed for some time, which is that we are on a law enforcement list designed to retaliate against human rights defenders who work with asylum seekers and who are critical of CBP practices that violate the rights of asylum seekers,” Ramos said.

Two other immigration lawyers who frequently travel to northern Mexico to help asylum seekers attempting to cross into the U.S. say the practice is starting to scare away would-be volunteers.

“It has a real chilling effect on people who might go down there. I was going to go this week, but I had to worry about whether I could get back in [to the U.S.],” one lawyer speaking on the condition of anonymity told NBC News.

Other immigration lawyers told NBC News they have been stopped and questioned in places far from San Diego. In Juarez, an attorney was stopped and accused of being a human smuggler. She was released only after the officers took her contacts and data from her phone. She was also asked what she was telling asylum seekers to say to U.S. authorities, according to another lawyer speaking on her behalf.

A former senior DHS official said it is against U.S. policy to target travelers based on their profession.

“It would be highly inappropriate and questionable from a legal perspective,” the former official said.

“While it is true that CBP has broad authority to interview and search anyone crossing the border, if there is no reasonable suspicion that you are involved in criminal activity, then they have no right to detain you,” the former official added.

Julia Ainsley

Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.

*****************************************
I was a guest lecturer at the University of District of Columbia David Clarke School of Law Immigration Clinic this week.  One of the students asked what the Administration was doing to facilitate legal representation of those caught up in the “Return to Mexico” program.
I said to my knowledge, nothing.  Quite the opposite, Nielsen actually came up with bogus reasons for not even allowing lawyers to be present during the credible fear process and there were “reliable reports” that lawyers trying to assist individuals waiting in Mexico were harassed and actively discouraged by DHS. Turns out that was “right on.”
This is a tragedy. Legal representation is probably the single most important and cost-effective thing that could be done to facilitate processing, insure fair decisions consistent with Due Process, prevent the mistakes that are prevalent in an overloaded and inherently biased system, and insure appearance at future hearings. For a fraction of the cost of the various “built to fail” and often illegal enforcement schemes this Administration crooks up, they could actually take a big step toward resolving the problem with universal representation.
Kakistocracy has its costs, both human and fiscal.
Join the New Due Process Army and fight the Trump Kakistocracy every day!
PWS
03-07-19

Related posts:

  1. Julia Edwards Ainsley @ NBC: DHS Set To Launch “Wait in Mexico” Program For Asylum Seekers — Expect Another Disaster!
  2. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. TRUMP’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE IS THE REAL “SOUTHERN BORDER CRISIS” — AND, A GENUINE HUMAN TRAGEDY — The Legal Tools To Address The Crisis In The Northern Triangle Causing A Refugee Flow Exist; This Administration Stubbornly Refuses To Use Them!

GOVERNMENT BY MALICIOUS INCOMPETENTS: Trump Administration’s Latest “Backlog Reduction Plan” — Slow Down Hiring Of U.S. Immigration Judges & Support Staff — Abandon E-Filing (Again) — Barr Wins His First “Five Clown” Rating In Record Time! 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/hamedaleaziz/trump-administration-immigration-judges-hiring-pause?__twitter_impression=true

Hamed Aleaziz reports for BuzzFeed News:

The Trump administration will pause its hiring of immigration judges, slow its procuring of support staff, and cancel a training conference, dealing a setback to the government’s efforts to cut down on a crushing backlog of cases, according to a Justice Department email obtained by BuzzFeed News.

James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, notified immigration court staff in an email Wednesday morning, advising that the timing of the 2019 budget process has left them “considerably short of being able to fulfill all of our current operational needs.”

McHenry cited increases in costs related to transcriptions, operational needs, and interpreters.

“This challenging budget situation has led us to a position where difficult financial decisions need to be made,” wrote McHenry.

As a result of the funding issues, McHenry said, the court does not “anticipate” it will be able to hire additional judges after an already scheduled class of judges is brought on board in April. The budget costs will also impact the court’s hiring of 250 attorneys needed to support immigration judges.

The pause on hiring delivers a blow to an administration that has long complained that the immigration court backlog, which has increased in recent years to more than 800,000 cases, has led to wait times stretching months and years.

The budget signed by President Trump this year had been described as a way for the immigration court to hire an additional 75 immigration judge teams.

A Department of Justice official, Steven Stafford, disputed the notion it would freeze hiring, arguing that it was simply not continuing to hire judges at the same pace. McHenry noted that the administration had hired 174 new immigration judges in the last two years and now has more than 400 judges on staff.

Rebecca Blackwell / AP

A migrant family enters the US near Imperial Beach, Calif., after squeezing through a small hole under the border wall.

The news comes a day before McHenry is set to speak before the House Appropriations Committee and as the court withstands criticisms from the union that represents immigration judges and moves to increase productivity, including quotas.

In recent months, many judges, who oversee asylum claims and deportation cases, have retired or resigned citing interference in how they were handling cases.

“This administration has justified so many of their more draconian policies in terms of ‘we have got to lower the backlog’ and then all of a sudden they don’t have the funds to hire more immigration judges,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge. “If their true goal is to provide fair adjudications more quickly, then this is inconsistent with that. More people will wait longer.”

The nationwide rollout of a new online filing system, meant to help improve efficiency, will be frozen, McHenry said, and additional delays on new court spaces will also be possible this year.

“We are doing our best at headquarters to ensure that our funds are spent in the most fiscally responsible manner possible,” he said in the email to staff, “while consistently meeting the needs and mission of the agency.”

***************************************
Quick takes:
  • Duh! Who would have thought that hiring more judges would require more interpreters, transcripts, and “operational support.” Certainly not the geniuses at DOJ/EOIR;
  • After 18 years of fruitless effort, DOJ/EOIR fail yet again to deliver on e-filing (in and of itself enough reason to get this out of DOJ and “can” the EOIR ineffective management structure);
  • Apparently, building largely useless walls and wasting money on troops at the border are more important “priorities” for reducing the backlog than actually hearing and deciding cases;
  • Court morale is already at an all time low — this ought to send it even lower;
  • Count on this touching off yet another round of EOIR’s renowned “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and more vicious and disingenuous “Victim Blame Shaming;”
  • Bad start for new AG Bill Barr — Sessions “set the bar on the ground,” but you still might not get over it;
  • On the bright side, since in the “wacky incompetent world” of DOJ/EOIR more judges actually = more backlog, perhaps fewer judges will = less backlog.

The Immigration Court system is a farce, and EOIR doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to fix it (nor does anyone else in the Trump Kaksitocracy for that matter). Unfortunately, lives are at stake here. To quote Casey Stengel again: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

TODAY’S FIVE CLOWN AWARD GOES TO RECENTLY APPOINTED AG BILL BARR — SELDOM HAS SOMEONE LOOKED SO STUPID WITHIN SUCH A SHORT TIME OF TAKING AN OFFICE (THAT HE PREVIOUSLY HELD):

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

PWS

03-07-19

Related posts:

  1. MOLLY HENNESSEY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: As DHS Disintegrates Under Trump, Volunteers Pick Up The Pieces & Save Lives!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  4. 😎👍🏼🥂SHEEEEEEE’S BACK! TAL KOPAN @ SF CHRON RETURNS TO THE “IMMIGRATION BEAT” WITH A POWERFUL IN-DEPTH LOOK AT HOW AMERICA’S MOST DYSFUNCTIONAL “COURT SYSTEM” PREDICTABLY SCREWED UP THE COVID-19 RESPONSE WHILE DEEPENING HUMAN MISERY INFLICTED ON THE “BACKLOGGED” — “’There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t mass chaos behind this veil of business as usual,’ said Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.”

HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST: ADMINISTRATION’S LATEST IMMORAL GIMMICK — A “REGIONAL REPRESSION COMPACT” — FURTHERS PERSECUTION WITHOUT ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES OF REFUGEE FLOW FROM NORTHERN TRIANGLE!

February 21, 2019

Homeland Security Regional Compact Plan Won’t Address Root Causes of Refugee Crisis

New York City—In response to today’s announcement that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is discussing the development of a regional compact plan with Central American countries in the northern triangle, Human Rights First’s Eleanor Acer issued the following statement:

The so-called compact announced today sounds like a short-sighted and heavy-handed attempt to stop people in desperate need of safety from finding it in the United States, rather than an actual commitment to address underlying human rights violations in the region. It is yet another move from an administration that has spent the past two years dismantling the systems put in place to protect the world’s most vulnerable people.

This announcement does not reflect any commitment to address the actual root causes pushing people to seek protection—political repression, gender-based persecution, brutal murders, and other human rights violations.

The Trump Administration is enlisting the very countries that people are fleeing to prevent the escape of individuals plagued by this persecution and violence. The United States should certainly work with countries in the region to counter and prosecute smugglers and traffickers who prey on migrants and asylum seekers. This plan, however, aims to stop asylum seekers who do not employ smugglers but travel with other people for safety through dangerous territories.

Human Rights First urges the Trump Administration to implement regional strategies that strengthen the rule of law and human rights conditions in Central America, strengthen refugee protection in Mexico and other countries, and stop its efforts to block refugees from asylum in the United States.

For more information or to speak with Acer contact Corinne Duffy at DuffyC@humanrightsfirst.org or 202-370-3319

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

It’s “Kakistocracy in Action” — malicious incompetence institutionalized. Certainly, Nielsen has to be the worst excuse ever for a DHS Secretary. Indeed, those who actually might threaten our security must be “licking their chops” at her continuous display of idiotic Trump sycophancy and White Nationalist lies and obsessions with bedraggled families seeking refuge while smugglers, drug traffickers, cartels, and gangs reap profits from her failed policies and take delight in her inability and unwillingness to address the real security problems.

While real human rights crises are unfolding, and real human lives are in danger, the Trump Administration dawdles away time and resources on endless “designed to fail” White Nationalist gimmicks that appear intended to enable and encourage persecution rather than addressing the problems that cause forced migration.

The Obama Administration did a genuinely lousy job of addressing the refugee and human rights issues in the Northern Triangle. But, Trump, Nielsen, and McAleenan are making to Obama group look like humanitarian geniuses by comparison.

As the great Casey Stengel once said while attempting to manage the 1962 NY Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Sadly, in the case of the Trump Administration, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Bad things happen to countries that allow themselves to be run by malicious incompetents (that is, a Kakistocracy).

As I have said before, “We Are diminishing ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration.”

Join the New Due Process Army and help restore humanity, Due Process, competence, and good government to America before it’s too late!

PWS

03-07-19

Related posts:

  1. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!
  4. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!

FORGET THE SHAMELESS LIES, EVASIONS, & VICTIM BLAMING BY NIELSEN AND MCALEENAN BEFORE CONGRESS – Vox’s Dara Lind Tells You Everything You REALLY Need To Know About What’s Happening At The Southern Border In 500 Words!

https://apple.news/A3s8h4IozRDGHLo1SJ6rPtg

Dara Lind reports in Vox News

In February 2019, 66,450 migrants crossed the US/Mexico border between official border crossings and were apprehended by US Border Patrol agents, committing the misdemeanor of illegal entry.

It’s a sharp increase from January and marks an 11-year high. But the number reflects an ongoing trend: record numbers of families coming to the US without papers.

The Trump administration reported that 76,103 people tried to enter the US without valid papers in February. That number combines people who came to official border crossings and migrants who were caught by Border Patrol after crossing illegally.

The total has alarmed conservatives; President Donald Trump has taken it as validation of his decision to declare a national emergency and appropriate more funding to build “a wall” along the border. (Construction of the wall would take months or years.)

But while current apprehension levels are higher than they’ve been in the last decade, they’re still way below pre-recession levels.

What is truly unprecedented is who the migrants are.

Almost two-thirds of Border Patrol apprehensions are of parents and their children. While we don’t have complete historical data, it seems likely that more families are coming to the US without papers than ever before. Additionally, a large share of migrants (both families and single adults) are expressing a desire to seek asylum.

Both groups are overwhelmingly coming from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The US immigration enforcement system was designed to swiftly detain and deport migrants who attempted to sneak into the US illegally. Asylum-seekers and families don’t fit that mold.

Border Patrol agents aren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families who travel through Mexico by bus and then turn themselves in at the border. This has arguably contributed to the deaths of multiple children in Border Patrol custody in recent months, and spurred Customs and Border Protection to expand medical care.

There are strict limits on how long immigrant children and families can be held in immigration custody; in practice, officials release most families pending an immigration hearing. Asylum seekers can’t be deported without a screening interview, and those who pass (by meeting a deliberately generous standard) are often eligible for release from detention while their cases are resolved.

Some of those migrants, either intentionally or accidentally, do not complete the asylum process or lose their cases, and live in the US as unauthorized immigrants. For many Trump officials, this is the heart of the crisis. Officials have spent the last year working on regulations and pushing Congress to expand family detention and reduce asylum protections.

Trump critics continue to insist that migration isn’t at crisis levels. To them, the more urgent issue is the administration’s treatment of families, children, and asylum seekers. They are urging the administration to allow more asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry legally. They are calling attention to the conditions in which migrants are being held in custody.

Asylum seekers cannot be barred from entry. The question is whether they should be treated as vulnerable migrants who the US is obligated to treat with kindness, or as deportable migrants until (if at all) they win legal status.

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

It’s really a question of whether we honor our legal and international obligations by fairly processing refugees, or choose to dehumanize and further victimize them. The totally disingenuous performance by Administration officials testifying before Congress on Tuesday tells you all you really need to know. This Administration has shown a slavish devotion to failed policies, dumb gimmicks, and just downright cruelty in a vain attempt to stop people from fleeing danger zones. Not surprisingly, their “built to fail” policies, scofflaw behavior,  and malicious incompetence has made things worse rather than better.

What if we had an honest Administration that admitted that this is a refugee flow that we had a significant role in creating? What if we used the existing law and legal mechanisms to take as many refugees as we could and worked with the UNHCR and the international community to help the others find viable resettlement alternatives? Wow, that would be making government work for the common good. something that’s just not in the “White Nationalist playbook.”

PWS

03-07-19

Related posts:

  1. FOUR TODDLERS RESCUED BY PRO BONO LAWYERS FROM DEADLY SITUATION IN CBP CUSTODY — Putrid, Unsanitary, Repressive Conditions Causing Lifetime Harm To Other Traumatized Kids — But, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost Wants You To Know That She’s Not Taking Responsibility For The Humanitarian Disaster Intentionally Engineered On Her Watch!
  2. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  3. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM: GOOD NEWS: Migration Is Good For The World, Sending & Receiving Countries Benefit, & The Oft-Repeated Myths Of Fiscal Burdens & Wage Depression For “Host Countries” Are False — BAD NEWS: Countries With Nationalistic Leaders Who Are “Invested In The Myths” Are Unlikely To Realize The Full Potential Of Migration

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-compact-opposition-migration-development-by-mahmoud-mohieldin-and-dilip-ratha-2019-02

On December 19, 2018, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, with 152 votes in favor, five votes against, and 12 abstentions. Supporters hailed the Compact as a step toward more humane and orderly management of migration, yet opposition remains formidable.

The Compact is not a legally binding treaty, nor does it guarantee new rights for migrants. In fact, the Compact’s 23 objectives were drafted on the basis of two years of inclusive discussions and six rounds of negotiations, focused specifically on creating a framework for international cooperation that would not interfere excessively in countries’ domestic affairs.

Because of misunderstandings about the Compact, it is worth taking a closer look at the migration challenge – and the vast benefits that a well-managed system can bring to host countries and home countries alike.

Migration is motivated, first and foremost, by lack of economic opportunities at home. With the average income level in high-income countries more than 70 times higher than in low-income countries, it is not surprising that many in the developing world feel compelled to try their luck elsewhere.

This trend is reinforced by demographic shifts. As high-income countries face population aging, many lower-income countries have burgeoning working-age and youth populations. Technological disruption is also putting pressure on labor markets. Moreover, climate change, as indicated by a recent World Bank report, will accelerate the trend, by driving an estimated 140 million people from their homes in the coming decades.

But, contrary to popular belief, nearly half of all migrants do not move from developing to developed countries. Rather, they migrate among developing countries, often within the same neighborhood.

Moreover, return migration is increasing, a fact that is often overlooked, often because migrants were denied entry into the labor market or their work contracts ended. For example, the number of newly registered South Asian workers in the Gulf states declined significantly – by anywhere from 12% to 41% – over the last two years. Between 2011 and 2017, the number of potential returnees in Europe – asylum-seekers whose applications were rejected or who were found to be undocumented – increased fourfold, reaching 5.5 million. Over the same period, the number of potential returnees in the United States more than doubled, to over three million. Return migration from Saudi Arabia and South Africa has increased as well.

Those migrants who remain in their host countries make substantial contributions. Although the world’s estimated 266 million migrants comprise only about 3.4% of the global population, they contribute more that 9% of GDP.

To achieve this, migrants must overcome high barriers to economic success. For example, unskilled workers, especially those from poor countries, often pay very high fees – which can exceed an entire year’s income for a migrant worker in some destination countries – to unscrupulous labor agents to find employment outside their own countries. That is why the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a target to reduce recruitment costs.

Migration also delivers major economic benefits to home countries. While migrants spend most of their wages in their host countries – boosting demand there – they also tend to send money to support families back home. Such remittances have been known to exceed official development assistance. Last year, remittances to low- and middle-income countries increased by 11%, reaching $528 billion, exceeding those countries’ inflows of foreign direct investment.

Globally, the largest recipient of remittances is India ($80 billion), followed by China, the Philippines, Mexico, and Egypt. As a share of GDP, the largest recipients were Tonga, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Nepal. The increase in remittances during 2018 was due to improvement in the labor market in the US and the recovery of flows from Russia and the Gulf States.

But the potential of remittances to support sustainable development is not being met. A major obstacle is the high cost of transferring money.

Migrants sending money home pay, on average, 7% of the total of the transfer itself, owing to weak competition in the market for remittance services – a result of stringent regulations intended to combat financial crimes like money laundering – as well as reliance on inefficient technology. Achieving the SDG target of reducing transfer costs below 3% – which would support progress toward the target of increasing the total volume of remittances – will require countries to address these weaknesses.

We are closely monitoring these often-overlooked ways that migration can support development, owing to their links to SDG indicators. But recent research busts other migration myths as well, showing, for example, that migrants neither impose a significant fiscal burden on host countries nor depress wages for lower-skill native workers.

Migration flows are increasing – a trend that is set to continue. Fragmented migration policies shaped by popular myths cannot manage this process effectively, much less seize the opportunities to spur development that migration creates. Only a coordinated approach, as envisioned in the Global Compact, can do that.

Written by

Mahmoud Mohieldin, Corporate Secretary, World Bank

Dilip Ratha, Manager of Migration and Remittances, Development Prospects Group of the World Bank

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Needless to say, the Trump Administration has rejected the Global Compact out of hand, as an “infringement on sovereignty,” and takes a unilateral “America first, last, and always, who cares about anyone else” approach to migration issues.

These authors speak a “core truth:”

Migration flows are increasing – a trend that is set to continue. Fragmented migration policies shaped by popular myths cannot manage this process effectively, much less seize the opportunities to spur development that migration creates. Only a coordinated approach, as envisioned in the Global Compact, can do that.

That’s why “regime change” will be essential for the U.S. to take full advantage of the benefits of migration and for our country to regain its leadership role on the world stage.

PWS

03-06-19

 

Related posts:

  1. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
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  3. ROQUE PLANAS @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP’S BOGUS CARAVAN THREAT MIGHT BE HIS MOST OUTRAGEOUS SCAM YET! — GOP’S Racist Commercial So Vile That Even Fox Pulls It!
  4. PAUL WALDMAN @ WASHPOST: Why True Bipartisan Immigration Reform In Our National Interest Will Require “Regime Change:” “[I]t’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.”

REP. DON BEYER (D-VA) IN THE HILL: There Are Strategies To Constructively Address Human Rights Problems In The Northern Triangle — A Wall Isn’t One Of Them

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/431757-rep-beyer-what-i-learned-in-central-america

Rep. Breyer writes:

Last week I traveled with colleagues to Central America’s Northern Triangle — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — where we spent five days meeting with heads of state, law enforcement, business leaders, U.S. ambassadors and diplomatic staff, USAID officials, and working people.

The trip, organized by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, was highly informative, particularly given the ongoing debate over immigration policy, temporary protected status (TPS), trade, and other related issues.

I think my fellow travelers – Sens. Carper and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Reps. Lisa Blunt Rochester (Del.), Lou Correa (Calif.), and Donald Norcross (N.J.) – would agree that what we saw and heard was both depressing and encouraging.

It is clear that the top mission of our U.S. presence in these countries is changing the conditions which drive irregular migration attempts to the United States. We are attacking the corruption, especially within the governments, which undermines citizen confidence that their countries will progress.  We are training police forces to deal with both gang violence and narcotics trafficking, with significant reductions in the murder rates in all three countries.  And we are investing in the conditions necessary for economic growth, especially the training of young people for jobs that pay much more than the minimum wage.

Our top concern was the decline in presidential support for U.S. initiatives to support economic growth and improved security in the region, and the naive idea that a wall on a border more than a thousand miles north will be any disincentive for jobless people living in fear of violence. The notion that a wall would magically solve the complex problems which cause people to flee to the United States was not borne out by what we saw.

Instead, we saw again and again that when we help create conditions of the most modest prosperity, when we reduce the fear of imminent violence, and when folks believe things will get better, it greatly reduces people’s desire to emigrate to the United States.

The most effective way for us to deal with unwanted immigration is to address the root causes in the developing economies of the Northern Triangle. We have already made a significant difference, but there is so much more we can and must do.

We should begin by shifting the useless waste of taxpayer funds in a silly border wall into greater investment into the Alliance for Prosperity, into our law enforcement efforts, and into diplomacy which will ensure ever less corrupt and more responsive governments.

My colleagues and I will be sharing these lessons with our colleagues this week, as Congress takes up a measure to reject the president’s fake national emergency, and beyond it as we look for humane, practical solutions to improve our immigration system and our relationships with these nations.

Beyer represents Virginia’s 8th District.

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There are many other things that we could do, both internationally and domestically, to address the current humanitarian situation in the Northern Triangle. The money that the Trump Administration is happy to waste on a wall, unnecessary and inhumane detention, and the unneeded stationing of troops on the border could actually support much more reasonable and effective approaches that would comply with the law, rather stretching and often breaking it.

We need a better government by better people. Join the New Due Process Army and help end the Trump Kakistocracy.

NOTE:  Don Beyer is our Representative.

PWS

03-06-19

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  3. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  4. SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!

REFUGEES ARRIVE IN INCREASING NUMBERS AS TRUMP’S UNILATERAL “ENFORCEMENT ONLY” POLICIES FAIL: “Deterrents” Don’t Work, But DHS Officials Request More Authority To Abuse Refugees — With An Administration That Refuses To Recognize The Reality Of The Situation In The “Failed States” Of The Northern Triangle & To Work Cooperatively With Refugee NGOs, The International Human Rights Community, & Lawyers, No Solution On Horizon!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/03/04/feature/after-cold-busy-month-at-border-illegal-crossings-expected-to-surge-again/

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

In a dusty lot along the U.S.-Mexico border fence, a single Border Patrol agent was stuck with few options and falling temperatures.

A group of 64 parents and children had waded through a shallow bend in the Rio Grande to turn themselves in to the agent on the U.S. side. He radioed for a van driver, but there were none available. By 2 a.m., the temperature was 44 degrees.

The agent handed out plastic space blankets. The group would have to wait.

Groups like this arrived again and again in February, one of the coldest and busiest months along the southern border in years. U.S. authorities detained more than 70,000 migrants last month, according to preliminary figures, up from 58,000 in January. The majority were Central American parents with children who arrived, again, in unprecedented numbers.

During a month when the border debate was dominated by the fight over President Trump’s push for a wall, unauthorized migration in fiscal 2019 is on pace to reach its highest level in a decade. Department of Homeland Security officials say they expect the influx to swell in March and April, months that historically see large increases in illegal crossings as U.S. seasonal labor demand rises.

Migrant families wait for a Border Patrol van to take them to a holding facility in El Paso on Feb. 22. It was cold and windy that night, so a border agent distributed plastic blankets to the group.

The number of migrants taken into custody last year jumped 39 percent from February to March, and a similar increase this month would push levels to 100,000 detentions or more.

It was a surge in the border numbers in March 2018 that infuriatedPresident Trump and launched his administration’s attempt to deter families by separating children from their parents. Trump stopped the separations six weeks later to quell public outrage. But the controversy the policy generated — and its widely publicized reversal — is now viewed by U.S. agents as the moment that opened the floodgates of family migration even wider, worsening the problem it was meant to fix.

While arrests along the border fell in recent years to their lowest levels in half a century, they are now returning to levels not seen since the George W. Bush administration, driven by the record surge in the arrival of Central American families.

For U.S. border agents, the strain has grown more acute, as they struggle to care for children using an enforcement infrastructure made in an era when the vast majority of migrants were Mexican adults who could be quickly booked and deported. The Central American families — called “give-ups” because they surrender instead of trying to sneak in — have left frustrated U.S. agents viewing their own role as little more than the facilitators for the last stage of the migrants’ journey. They are rescuing families with small children from river currents, irrigation canals, medical emergencies and freezing winter temperatures.

“We’re so cold,” said Marlen Moya, who had left Guatemala with her sons six weeks earlier and crossed the Rio Grande with the group of 64.

Moya’s son Gael, 6, was sick with a fever and moaning, his face streaked with tears. “In Juarez, we were shoved and yelled at,” she said, looking back across the river to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. “We slept on the street.”

Asked why she didn’t cross during the day, when temperatures were mild, Moya said she worried that Mexican police would stop them. “We’ve already come this far,” she said.

Marlen Moya, who had left Guatemala with her sons six weeks earlier, holds Gael, 6, as they wait along with Anderson, 8. Moya said she fled Guatemala City after being threatened and robbed at gunpoint at her beauty salon.

Much of the attention last fall was focused on caravan groups, mostly from Honduras, as they reached Tijuana, Mexico, not far from San Diego. Then concern shifted to Arizona and New Mexico, where groups of rural Guatemalan families began showing up at remote border outposts. Two Guatemalan children died in December after being taken into U.S. custody, as Homeland Security officials declared a humanitarian and national security crisis.

The border deal Trump and Democrats reached last month includes $415 million to improve detention conditions for migrant families, including funds to potentially open a new processing center in El Paso. But in the meantime, families continue to arrive in groups large and small, in faraway rural areas and right in downtown El Paso.

“The numbers are staggering, and we’re incredibly worried that we will see another huge increase in March,” said a Homeland Security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unpublished figures.

The lone U.S. agent with the group was the only one available along that span. Drug smugglers have been using the groups as a diversion, so the agent couldn’t leave the riverbank.

No vans or buses arrived to pick up the families. Other agents were busy at the nearby processing center because so many groups had arrived in El Paso that night, and still others were at the hospital, where they were helping parents and children receive treatment for severe flu symptoms.

Homeland Security officials have been urging lawmakers to grant them broader powers to detain and quickly deport families in a search for deterrent measures. Their attempts to crack down using executive actions have been blocked repeatedly in federal court.

The migrants travel by van to a holding facility in El Paso.

The Trump administration has begun sending some asylum-seeking Central Americans back to Mexico to wait while their claims are processed, but so far that experiment has been limited to California’s San Ysidro port of entry.

About 150 migrants were sent back across the border in February, according to Mexican authorities, but that is a small fraction of the more than 2,000 unauthorized migrants coming into U.S. custody on an average day.

Homeland Security officials said Friday that the pilot program, which they call Migrant Protection Protocols, will expand to El Paso and potentially other locations in coming weeks, predicting that the number of Central Americans sent back would grow “exponentially.” Some of the cities where they will wait are among the most dangerous in Mexico.

Mexican officials are cooperating by providing general assistance and job placement for those sent back to wait, but privately they have warned the Americans that their capacity to take parents with children is extremely limited, especially families that need welfare assistance and enrollment in already-crowded public schools.

Migrants at the border hold tight to the blankets and move about the area to stay warm while they wait for the van.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the above link.
As long  as the Trump Administration insists on dealing unilaterally with a humanitarian refugee situation as a fake law enforcement problem, there will be no resolution; just more pain, needless suffering, and scofflaw gimmicks by an inhumane and incompetent Administration.
PWS
03-04-19

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