Wall – Page 22 – immigrationcourtside.com

THERE IS INDEED A HUMAN RIGHTS CRISIS TO OUR SOUTH – But It Has Little To Do With Trump’s Lies, Nonsense, & Racist Ramblings & Certainly Won’t Be Solved By His Latest Round Of Contempt For Congress & Our Constitution!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/you-want-to-see-a-real-emergency-mr-president-visit-me-in-honduras/2019/02/16/4650383c-3151-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html

Amelia Frank-Vitale is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. She writes in the Washington Post:

Since I moved to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in September 2017 to do research for my doctoral dissertation, I’ve accompanied a 16-year-old with three bullet holes in his body to the hospital, only to find that there was no blood for transfusions. I’ve looked in the face of a young mother, anguished over whether she should try to make it the United States, because the gang that she used to be a part of but had left behind wanted to pull her back in. I’ve gotten tearful phone calls from a single mother and her two children, who have been told by a gang that they want her house — and she has nowhere else to go. I’ve talked to many families whose teenagers have been taken away by police, never to be seen again. And I’ve also talked to police officers who have given up on law enforcement here, as their superiors undermine honest work and reward corruption.

On Friday, President Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext to allow him to begin construction of a border wall. But the real national emergency is here, in Honduras.

I arrived shortly before a likely fraudulent election installed Juan Orlando Hernández in a second, unconstitutional term as president. Rather than protest irregularities in the vote-counting process, the Trump administration congratulated Hernández on his victory.

Honduras was already in bad shape: a devastating hurricane in 1998; a coup d’etat in 2009; becoming the world’s most homicidal nation in 2010; and a long history of U.S. intervention. In 2015, the ruling National party was implicated in stealing millions of dollars from the nation’s social security fund. Honduras is also on the primary route for cocaine trafficking to the United States. The Drug Enforcement Administration has arrested many alleged narcotraffickers, among them the president’s brother, Tony Hernández. The country ranks high in corruption, impunity, poverty and inequality. It ranks low for literacy, employment and life expectancy.

The 2017 election, though, brought things to a head. There were massive protests, the country was shut down for more than a month, and at least 31 protesters were killed. Honduras has erupted in moments of insurrection since then, though the most visible aftereffects of the election have been a crackdown on dissidents, especially the young and students, and the caravans heading for the United States. People had staked their hope for a better future in a different electoral outcome. When that was taken from them, they went back to leaving the country.

Honduran migration isn’t new; what is new is that they are doing it publicly, in large groups, and asking, collectively, for protection. The real humanitarian crisis is that, mostly, Hondurans are denied this protection and deported.

So many young Hondurans — especially the urban poor — feel like they have no future here. Eight out of 10 violent deaths here are of young people. A young man told me, at 21 years old, that he once had a dream but it’s over. He has no dreams now. He was recently deported from the United States after losing an asylum claim. Yet, back in Honduras, he has to hide in the trunk of a car to be able to visit his mother. The gang there would kill him if they saw him enter her house.

At least he came back alive.

A week ago, I went with a family to receive the remains of their 16-year-old son, who had been murdered in Mexico. He had traveled as part of a caravan and was killed in Tijuana. We picked up the small coffin at the San Pedro Sula airport and loaded the slight white box into the back of a borrowed, barely running pickup truck. As I drove to the airport with his grandmother that day, her eyes had filled with tears as she told me how his father used to paint his face and take him on the bus, performing simple clown routines, hoping to be given a few lempiras. She also told me how two of her three sons were murdered in their early 20s. The third one was disappeared. An unasked question hung in the air: whether her grandson would have lived to adulthood had he stayed in Honduras.

Human history is one of migration; we are exceptionally good at moving around when the conditions for life become tenuous. Neither walls nor deserts nor oceans have ever deterred us from seeking safer horizons and better opportunities for survival.

Under these circumstances, Hondurans’ drive to seek safety elsewhere is not an emergency; that there may be no place in the world where they are allowed to find refuge is the real crisis.

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I used to get folks from San Pedro Sula in Immigration Court. Horrible place! Most of them qualified for asylum, withholding of removal, or some other form of relief from removal. Or the DHS Assistant Chief Counsel, having better things to do, and actually not wanting to see decent folks get hurt, offered them prosecutorial discretion (“PD”).

Of course that was in the “pre-Trump days” when Immigration Judges were generally free to properly apply asylum law (if they chose to do so, which, sadly, not all did) and the ICE Chief Counsel in Arlington was taking a stab at working with the courts and the private bar to make the system operate as reasonably and humanely as it could under the circumstances. Not perfect by any means; but, a world away from the intentional cruelty, irrationality, lawlessness, and intentional bias that the Trump regime has used to destroy any semblance of justice, due process, and functionality in the Immigration Courts.

PWS

02-17-19

IEVA JUSIONYTE @ LA TIMES: Border Walls, Fences, & Barriers Are, At Best, Marginal To Real Law Enforcement – But, They Are Absolutely Guaranteed To Cause Fractures, Trauma, & Amputations For Refugees Fleeing Persecution & Other Desperate People Just Looking For A Better Life!

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jusionyte-border-emergency-responders-20190217-story.html

Jusionyte writes in the LA Times:

We found her in a ditch a few steps away from the rusted border fence on the east side of Nogales, Ariz., an inch-and-a-half laceration on her swollen forehead. She came from Guerrero, one of the most violent states in Mexico, and could not remember how she landed on the rugged surface after her grip on the top of the barrier failed and she fell.

Six firefighters carried her to the ambulance, which took her to a helicopter bound for the regional trauma center in Tucson. Captain Lopez recorded the incident in the logbook when we returned to the firehouse: “1107 Medic 2, Engine 2: Dead End Freeport — Jumper/Head Injury.” This was two lines below an entry logged earlier that morning, for a teenage boy who had come down with a 102-degree fever while locked in a cell at the Border Patrol station after agents apprehended him in the desert: “0951 Medic 2: 1500 West La Quinta Rd — High Fever.”

Emergency responders are the first on the scene in any life-threatening situation: car accidents, drug overdoses, heart attacks, shootings. In the southern United States, the list of routine trauma scenarios includes border-related injuries.

For more than a year, while I was volunteering as an EMT and paramedic in Arizona, I witnessed ambulances pick up wounded border crossers so frequently that some of my peers were casually referring to the cement ledge abutting the fence as “the ankle alley.”

Such reinforcements don’t contribute to national security. Instead, they erode the foundations of public safety in communities on both sides of the border.

From EMTs to emergency room doctors, medical professionals see firsthand how, as the design of the barrier changes, so do the patterns of injury: While the previous, shorter fence, built in the 1990s and made of sharp corrugated sheet metal, amputated the fingers of those who tried to scale it, the current 20-foot-tall bollard barrier causes orthopedic fractures and multi-system trauma.

Emergency responders also see that, no matter its design, the fence does not deter unauthorized migrants. Even more often than ambulances are dispatched to “the ankle alley,” they are sent to help those choosing the dangerous journey across what the Border Patrol calls “hostile terrain,” where enforcement is outsourced to the extreme environment.

Migrants rescued in the desert are often severely dehydrated and face a life with permanent kidney damage. Lucky ones, nevertheless: In the last two decades, more than 7,000 people have died crossing the increasingly militarized Southwest border region, some of them from head trauma suffered when they fell off the fence in Nogales.

The border fence, now enhanced by spools of concertina wire, is a key component of “tactical infrastructure,” a term Customs and Border Protection uses to refer to the assemblage of materials and technologies that regulate movement in the name of national security. CBP doesn’t have metrics to assess whether fencing contributes to their border enforcement operations, as the Government Accountability Office noted in a report released last year.

The ineffectiveness of current fences has nothing to do with their size or their length. Barriers along the border have doubled in height since the 1990s and now cover nearly 700 miles, or about one-third of the length of the U.S. Southwest border. But they have failed to stop unauthorized migrants or illegal drugs.

Still, as we can see from the ongoing debate on border security among lawmakers, there are no plans to abandon this brutal and ineffective enforcement strategy.

The stubborn focus on barriers is shortsighted, and it obscures how the deployment of tactical infrastructure harms and threatens the safety of communities that straddle the international boundary, such as Nogales. The same emergency responders who splint broken legs and give IV fluids to wounded border crossers depend on partnerships with fire departments in Mexico. Wildfires and flash floods, air pollution and toxic spills spread from one country to another without regard for borders. Walls don’t stop them.

Arizona is downhill, downwind and downstream from the Mexican state of Sonora. Towns on both sides have their public utilities and transportation systems intermeshed. In Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora — together known as Ambos Nogales — an arroyo and a sewage pipeline cross the border through a drainage tunnel underneath the port of entry, where residents line up for passport control steps away from railcars carrying sulphuric acid. Aware of this intertwining, emergency managers and first responders have developed binational partnerships.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute »

The U.S. Forest Service and Mexico’s National Forestry Commission jointly fight wildfires within 10 miles of the border. Sister cities have mutual aid agreements, which allow them to share resources in cases of emergency on either side. While Americans push fire hoses through the gaps in the fence, supplying their peers in Mexico with water, Mexican volunteers come to the U.S. side to provide manpower in large structure fires and search-and-rescue operations. Such cooperation is more than a century old. It precedes the fence that divides the communities.

Building barriers undermines these achievements and imperils border residents. To speed up the construction of the wall after Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was authorized to waive more than 30 environmental and other federal laws, including regulations preserving clean air and clean water. Tactical infrastructure, deployed at any human, social or ecological cost, exacerbates the potentially disastrous consequences of natural phenomena.

We saw it happen a decade ago, when the CBP installed a 5-foot concrete barrier inside the drainage tunnel under Nogales. The barrier formed a bottleneck. With heavy rain, water pressure kept rising, until about 1,000 feet of the tunnel collapsed and inundated the city. Mexican authorities declared the area a disaster zone, citing damage to hundreds of homes, while the CBP recovered two bodies, suspecting the drowned were unauthorized migrants. Despite calls for investigations and reparations, the U.S. government’s only concession was an offer to lower the barrier by a foot and a half.

Such reinforcements don’t contribute to national security. Instead, they erode the foundations of public safety in communities on both sides of the border. As U.S. soldiers added more concertina wire to the fence in Nogales earlier this month, an EMT told me he dreads the day he may be called to help someone entangled in its razor-sharp coils.

Ieva Jusionyte is an assistant professor of anthropology and social studies at Harvard University and the author of “Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” She has volunteered as an emergency medical technician, paramedic and firefighter in Florida, Arizona and Massachusetts.

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On the “real border,” Trump’s lies and White Nationalist nonsense don’t just waste money and create artificial barrier to international cooperation; they actually harm folks on both sides every day. And, they most certainly bring us no closer to the rational solutions needed to manage a shared border and reasonably control and channel human migration.

PWS

02-18-19

“LIES, DAMN LIES, & (BOGUS) STATISTICS” — That Sums Up Trump’s White Nationalist Immigration Agenda — America Needs To Stand Up Against This Would-Be Fascist Tyrant Who Threatens Our Country, Our Constitution, & Our Precious Democratic Institutions!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-be-fooled-by-trumps-make-believe-crisis/2019/02/15/b66adc60-3158-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html

From the Washington Post Editorial Board:

IT IS hard to single out any single event in Donald Trump’s presidency as the most untethered from truth and reality. Still, Friday’s news conference, in which Mr. Trump tried to defend his end run around Congress based on a make-believe emergency at the southern border, was, to use the president’s own words, a “big con game.”

Mr. Trump’s technique is to spin fiction as fact, secure in the knowledge that minds will reel as fact-checkers labor to deconstruct his ziggurat of falsehoods. So let’s stick to one big, basic truth: There is no crisis at the southern border.

There is no crisis, and there is no justification to specifically and surgically contravene the will of Congress, which just weighed and dismissed Mr. Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall, opting instead to grant him $1.375 billion.

The evidence that no emergency exists rests on the following:

Fact: Illegal crossings between ports of entry, as measured by Border Patrol arrests along the Mexican border, have plummeted since the turn of the century, falling to just below 400,000 in the most recent fiscal year, from more than 1.6 million in 2000. That nose-dive in illegal crossings coincides with better economic conditions in Mexico and a major increase in Border Patrol agents, technology and infrastructure along the southwest frontier.

Fact: Most illegal drugs that enter the country from Mexico are discovered by authorities at legal crossing points, not in remote areas where a wall would serve as a deterrent. That was the case, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, for 90 percent of the heroin seized along the border. It’s not a Democratic talking point. Vice President Pence, in an opinion piece published last month in USA Today, noted that most seizures of illegal narcotics are “primarily at points of entry.”President Trump declares a national emergency at the U.S.- Mexico border during remarks about border security in the Rose Garden of the White House on Feb. 15. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post)

Fact: The number of illegal immigrants in the United States has been falling for more than a decade, and two-thirds of those who remain have been here for more than a decade. An estimated 10.7 million unauthorized migrants were in the country in 2016, about 1.5 million fewer than in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.

Moreover, among unauthorized migrants in fiscal 2017, about twice as many entered the United States legally — and overstayed their visas — as were apprehended at the southern border, according to government figures.

Fact: Mr. Trump, having conjured a nonexistent crisis, simply could not countenance his failure to persuade Congress to pay for his border wall. The source for this assertion is the president himself, who acknowledged in his news conference Friday that “I didn’t need to do this” and “I just want to do it faster.”

The emergency for Mr. Trump is purely political, impelled by expectations inflated by his campaign promises to build a border wall and force Mexico to pay. Having conflated a political crisis with a national one, Mr. Trump chooses to dodge, dissemble and lie. A self-respecting Congress would not let stand this manufactured emergency.

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We shouldn’t think that just because 1) the courts likely will stop Trump; and 2) even if they don’t, he’s too incompetent to build much wall anyway, no matter how long his regime lasts, everything “will be OK.”

The real tragedy and shameful disgrace is that with the time, money, and resources being squandered on “Trump’s fraud on America,” a competent “real” Administration could actually solve the problem in less time using current legal procedures.

A “real government” with those resources could:

Hire more Asylum Officers to do “credible fear” interviews;
Hire more U.S. Immigration Judges and Court staff to hear asylum cases in accordance with Due Process;
Provide lawyers for all asylum applicants; and
Hire more CBP Inspectors for Ports of Entry.

It’s not “rocket science;” it’s just using common sense to solve problems in accordance with the law, the (not alternative) facts, and without racist bias.

With competent apolitical professional management, which is undoubtedly available but unsought by this Administration, it could happen in the foreseeable future. And, unlike the “wall hoax,” a solution consistent with the law and due process actually would be as “durable” as anything can be in the 21st Century!

The 2020 elections will be a critical opportunity to use our existing democratic institutions to stop the perverted regime of this pathetic, yet dangerous, self-styled “Knockoff American Mussolini” and to end the “minority rule” that has allowed him and his party to assume power against the will and in disregard for the best interests of the majority of Americans. For the sake of our nation’s future and that of our world, we can’t afford to blow it!

PWS

02-16-19

COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-black-men-of-the-civil-war-were-americas-original-dreamers/2019/02/15/8c00088e-30a8-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html

Colby King writes in WashPost:

Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.

I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”

Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.

However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.

Like dreamers of today, those black soldiers and sailors also had families and attended churches; some were enrolled in schools. They could dream of a future, anchored in the rights and privileges that come with democracy. But they had no legal claim to an existence within America’s borders.

My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.

Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

And even then, they started their service to the United States one step behind.

In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.

Yet, serve they did.

As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”

Volunteering was a start. They still had something to prove.

According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .

King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.

The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.

It wasn’t until 1868 that the threat of removal from the United States was lifted by the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in this country, including former slaves.

The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.

For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.

That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.

That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.

While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”

It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

02-16-19

HE’S NO HADRIAN! – Actually, Trump Is A Terrible “Wall Builder!”

David Lauter writes for the LA Times:

With his decision to declare a national emergency on the border and seek to build a border wall by executive fiat, President Trump has guaranteed more high-profile battles and likely more defeats.

What he hasn’t gotten is more fence.

That’s a consistent pattern — Trump opts for fights over actual accomplishments. A year ago, congressional Democrats offered $25 billion for border fencing as part of a broader immigration deal. Trump balked after initially agreeing. Last fall, Senate Democrats approved $1.6 billion to avoid a government shutdown. Trump went for the shutdown instead.

He ended up with $1.375 billion.

TRUMP’S DECLARATION

Trump went back and forth on whether he would sign the spending bill or precipitate another government shutdown. In the end, he agreed to sign it, but only in conjunction with a national emergency declaration that he hopes to use to divert several billion dollars more.

As Noah Bierman wrote, it’s unclear how much additional fencingTrump will actually be able to build even if his emergency declaration survives court challenges. White House officials say they hope to free up about $6.6 billion which could build or upgrade about 234 miles of fencing. They declined to say how much of that would be new construction.

There’s not a lot Congress can immediately do to block the emergency declaration. As Sarah Wire wrote, Trump could veto any move to block it, and although several Republicans have said they oppose the move, enough will almost surely stand with Trump to prevent the two-thirds vote in both houses needed to overturn a veto.

Environmental laws aren’t much of an impediment, either. As Anna Phillips and Molly O’Toole wrote, the 2006 law which expanded the building of fences along the border explicitly allows the Homeland Security department to waive nearly any environmental law. The administration has aggressively used that power.

But the emergency declaration itself will be vulnerable in court, as Trump said in a long, self-pitying riff during his Rose Garden news conference.

Opponents will almost surely sue, arguing that no emergency exists and that Trump is using the declaration in an unconstitutional effort to bypass Congress’ power to control spending. How that fight will be resolved — probably by the Supreme Court — is anyone’s guess.

In addition to those battles, any building project along the Texas border will involve long fights in court with angry landowners challenging efforts to take their land by eminent domain.

Don’t expect to see a “big, beautiful wall” along the border anytime soon.

But some White House advisors say that’s all beside the point. Trump’s core supporters, they argue, would like to see a wall built, but what they really care most about is seeing Trump fight for their priorities. In that analysis, the fight matters more than the outcome.

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Once a con-man, always a con-man. “Malicious incompetence” is the hallmark of the Trump Administration.

PWS

02-16-19

ACLU & SPLC SUE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ON “MIGRANT REJECTION PROTOCOLS!”

https://www.bustle.com/p/this-update-on-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-means-its-about-to-face-a-challenge-15956331

Kavitha George reports for Bustle:

Two weeks ago, immigration authorities began to enforce a new policy that requires some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are being processed. NPR and The Washington Post have already reported on migrant families being returned across the border by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials. But a new update on Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy means it’s about to face a legal challenge.

On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) teamed up, filing a lawsuit to address the matter in Northern California’s District Court. The suit names DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, as well as numerous Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Nielsen has described the policy, officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols as “a huge step forward in bringing order to chaotic migration flows, restoring the rule of law and the integrity of the United States immigration system.” Bustle has reached out to DHS and ICE for comment.

However, some civil rights organizations disagree with that characterization. “Immigration authorities are forcing asylum seekers at the southern border of the United States to return to Mexico — to regions experiencing record levels of violence,” the lawsuit reads. “By placing them in such danger, and under conditions that make if difficult if not impossible for them to prepare their cases, Defendants are depriving them of a meaningful opportunity to seek asylum.”

In its statement, the ACLU rejected the administration’s claims of an immigration crisis at the border.

Before the implementation of the new return policy, asylum-seekers would legally enter the country through a port of entry along the border, and remain in detention while they waited for a “credible fear” assessment. If they were approved, migrants could remain in the country until a future court hearing. However in 2018, CBS News reported, the Trump administration hit a record high in asylum denials, rejecting some 65 percent of applicants.

In a December statement, Nielsen described the “catch and return” policy as a way to prevent migrants trying to “game the system” by obtaining entry and then “disappear[ing] into the United States, where many skip their court dates.” In fact, according to the Department of Justice’s own data from the 2017 fiscal year, some 89 percent of asylum-seekers released into the country return for their court dates.

Under the new plan, CBS reported, migrants crossing at the San Ysidro checkpoint in San Diego, are processed and returned across the border to Tijuana with a toll-free phone number to check on their claim status. Immigration rights activists argue that this system defeats the purpose of an asylum claim for people trying to escape violence and political unrest in Central America.

“They’re just spending their time just trying to survive in Tijuana,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an analyst for the American Immigration Council, told CBS. “We know that there are people who have been turned away from the border who have then been kidnapped, raped. There are likely people who have been murdered.”

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Everybody expected this, including the Trumpsters. Stay tuned for the results.

One problem that I see right off the bat for the DHS is counsel. The immigration law guarantees individuals in removal proceedings the right to be represented by counsel of their own choice at no expense to the Government.

Not only did the Administration put these “Protocols” into operation without consulting with NGOs and pro bono groups on both sides of the border, but there have been credible reports of DHS actually harassing and impeding American lawyers going back and forth to Mexico in an attempt to provide the representation guaranteed by statute (and probably also by Due Process).

Additionally, contrary to Nielsen’s lies and misrepresentations, there really was no coordination with the Mexican Government of what steps would be taken to guarantee U.S. lawyers reasonable access to clients in Mexico. There have also been credible reports that the Mexican authorities have been uncooperative and have placed roadblocks in the way of attorneys representing asylum seekers. Add that to the fact that like Trump himself, Nielsen and DHS are well-known for lying, evading, and misrepresenting to Congress, the Federal Courts, the press, and the American people, and we have the makings for yet another in the series of “failed restrictionist initiatives” taken by the Trumpsters.

PWS

02-15-18

RADNOFSKY, PETERSON, & ANDREWS: The WSJ’s “Terrific Trio” Takes You Behind The Detention Stats In The “Deal” – It’s Somewhere Between 45,278 & 58,000 In The GOP’s “New American Gulag!”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/border-deal-doesnt-put-detention-questions-to-bed-11550012005?emailToken=e4d9f2903df6925fba0d7795cbe27f54IMR8XuU2eAzPC6wGnaQDljiBDM2JV3QgNqW//jtaX6Ic4r6VRI/10Hmv9RbvuGDwx/GCWiy7mPkYWpOuzZko/5pWA5CLAdmZkvCwIyYeISU=&reflink=article_email_share

By

Louise Radnofsky,

Kristina Peterson and

Natalie Andrews

Feb. 12, 2019 5:53 p.m. ET

Democrats largely came up short in their quest to limit the detention of immigrants as part of a bipartisan border deal reached this week, but the arcane math left lawmakers citing different numbers and activists on both sides crying foul.

The dispute over funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds emerged as a late sticking point in the negotiations, and its resolution was key to the deal. Democrats wanted fewer beds and sought limits designed to prioritize the detention of criminals over other immigrants, such as people who overstayed their visas. Republicans wanted more beds and no constraints on which immigrants ICE can detain.

The complications arise in part from the way funding for ICE detention facilities is determined. The formula includes the agency’s average daily population of detained immigrants, but ICE has also moved money around to fund the beds.

In the last fiscal year, Congress funded ICE’s average daily population at 40,520. Under the agreement reached by Democrats and Republicans this week, the administration will get funding for an average daily population of 45,274 in the current fiscal year, congressional aides say. ICE currently holds over 49,000 people in custody.

Democrats have pointed to the possibility that the negotiated number means ICE will have to reduce detention to make the new average work. Republicans have countered that ICE has the ability to transfer money, as it has been doing, to maintain a higher level of beds. Democrats aren’t disputing that they can transfer money, though they note that money will have to come from another account.

The complexities led to varying takes on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers disagreeing on whether the deal increased or decreased the number of detention beds.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R., S.D.) estimated that once ICE has transferred money, it could fund up to “58,000 or thereabouts” beds. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) argued the agreed-to number of beds was actually a reduction. “They are pretty much at 45,000 or so,” she said.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R., N.C.), a hard-liner on illegal immigration, made the GOP’s initial goal his baseline. Comparatively, “it’s less than that,” he said. “It’s about 7,000 beds less.”

Pro- and anti-immigration activists both saw problems with the deal. Sandra Cordero, director of Families Belong Together, said the deal would keep detention levels steady and was “funneling more money to agencies that ripped thousands of children from their parents’ arms.” Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the reduction in ICE detention capacity “more than cancels out any benefit from that small amount of extra fencing.

Others saw the result as more clear-cut.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the Senate majority leader, claimed victory on the issue and applauded Democrats for abandoning what he called “extreme positions,” including “the idea that we should impose a hard, statutory cap on ICE detainees.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), a member of the 17-lawmaker group that negotiated the border deal, said Tuesday the Democrats didn’t get everything they had hoped for on beds, a reflection of GOP control of the Senate and White House.

“We had hoped to not only stop the grand and glorious wall, paid for by Mexico, but also to deal with detention beds. I don’t know what the final wording is on this,” Mr. Durbin said, but “we wanted to address both, and it became more difficult when we realized the political reality.”

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I recognize that the Dems couldn’t solve this problem in these particular negotiations. That’s particularly true because, as aptly noted by Senator Durbin, the GOP holds power in two of the three political entitles of government.

However, let’s not forget that “behind the numbers” are real human beings, not just objects like “beds” or “bed numbers” — terms used to dehumanize the victims and obscure the true nasty nature of DHS “civil” detention. Most of them are not serious criminals and there might not be an “actual suspected terrorist” in DHS detention today. Indeed, it would probably be “gross negligence” to entrust a real suspected terrorist to DHS detention. If given a reasonable chance to get a lawyer, understand the system, and prepare a case, the vast majority of those now detained would appear for their Immigration Hearings, particularly if given an opportunity to be released on ankle monitors or other “alternatives to detention.”

While in the “Gulag,” these individuals have their rights to fairness and Due Process impaired, suffer from substandard conditions (while private contractors who run much of DHS detention profit), and are often duressed into giving up valuable rights and opportunities to apply for relief and “taking removal” just to escape from the intentionally coercive situation that DHS creates.

Yes, a much more limited amount of detention, 15% to 25% of the current number of “beds” (actually humans held in the “Gulag”) might be necessary to protect us from the relatively small number of dangerous individuals and those likely to abscond.

Nevertheless, the “New American Gulag” as now constituted by Trump and enthusiastically supported by the GOP is both unnecessary and a total disgrace to our national reputation and humanity. So, the Dems should “keep at it” for the next budget cycle and continue educating the American public about the useless cruelty, intentional dehumanization, wasted taxpayer money, and questionable contractual arrangements involved in promoting this human rights abomination. It’s also a massive (and expensive) failure as a “deterrent” which, for the most part, is its real purpose.

It’s possible that the Article III Courts eventually will step in. As noted previously in this blog, the Administration appears headed for a “big time” loss on the constitutionality of indefinite detention in the 9^thCircuit. However, unless Chief Justice Roberts “gets religion” and joins the liberals, the Supremes are likely to sell out the Constitution on this one. After all, none of the “Conservative Justices” are in unconstitutional indefinite “civil” detention right now. But, life being what it is, they might not want to be so smugly tone-deaf about caving to the Executive on issues affecting life and liberty. Who knows, maybe someday someone they are related to, know personally, or love will be arbitrarily tossed in the Gulag and have the keys thrown away.

Whether it happens now or long after I’m gone, history will judge the GOP and their enablers harshly for this intentional and thinly disguised racially motivated degradation of humanity. It will have adverse consequences for our country and the world for many generations to come.

Therefore, it’s important to continue “making the record” and never letting the GOP off the hook for what they are doing (although, I will concede that the Dems have also gone through periods of infatuation with the idea of “detention as a deterrent.” Won’t work, never has, never will.)

And, this is from someone, me, who spent part of my earlier career defending, with mixed results, the “Legacy INS’s” right to detain individuals, sometimes indefinitely.

PWS

02-14-19

GREG SARGENT @ WASHPOST: “Good Guys” Apparently Gaining Legislative Traction Against The Trump-Miller White Nationalist Cabal!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/12/with-new-border-deal-republicans-are-trying-negotiate-trumps-surrender/

Sargent writes:

At President Trump’s big rally in El Paso on Monday night, you could see signs everywhere that proclaimed: “Finish the wall.”

That’s some amusingly dishonest sleight of hand — it’s meant to create the impression that the wall is already being built, which is a lie Trump tells regularly. Thus, it substitutes an imaginary Trump win for a real one, since apparently support for Trump among his voters on such an important symbolic matter is too delicate to withstand the unbearable prospect of him losing without withering or shattering.

Now that negotiators have reached an agreement in principle for six months of spendingon the border, however, it’s once again clear that Trump’s win on the wall will remain firmly in the category of the imaginary.

It includes only $1.375 billion for new bollard fencing in targeted areas. That’s nothing like Trump’s wall — it’slimitedto the kind of fencing that has already been built for years— and it’s substantially short of the $5.7 billion Trump wants. It’s nothing remotely close to the wall that haunts the imagination of the president and his rally crowds. The $1.375 billion is slightly lessthan what Democrats had previously offered him. It can’t even be credibly sold as a down paymenton the wall.

Trump’s political and media allies are already in a rageover this point. And Trump may not accept the deal, or perhaps he’ll agree to it and try to find the wall money through executive action.

The compromise, to be clear, is a mixed bag for progressives. But on balance, based on what we are learning now, it’s plainly more of a victory than not.

The deal will include ‘substantial’ humanitarian spending

A House Democratic aide tells me that negotiators also agreed that the deal would include “substantial” expenditures to address the humanitarian plight of migrants arriving at the border.

Such money would go toward “medical care, more efficient transportation, food and other consumables,” to “upgrade conditions and services for migrants,” as the original Democratic proposalat the start of conference committee talks put it.Democrats had called for $500 millionfor this purpose. It’s not yet clear how much the final deal will include, as negotiations are ongoing, but it is likely to be in the hundreds of millions.

The details on this spending will matter greatly. But if structured well, it could be significant. The goal would be to upgrade current facilities where migrants are held before entering the system, which were not designed to cope with a new type of immigration: the arrival of asylum-seeking families and children, which has spikedeven as adults looking to sneak across illegally — the type Trump mostly rages about — is at historic lows.

Such an upgrade could address some terrible things we’ve seen: migrant families herded into tight conditions, and migrant children stacked up on concrete floorsand at medical riskdue to a lack of transportation out of remote areas, or proper screening and treatment.

Here’s the bad news

Unfortunately, Democrats backed down on a core demand: a cap on Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds. Democrats hoped this would force ICE to focusresources on dangerous undocumented immigrants, thus picking up fewer longtime noncriminal residents.

But Democrats instead agreed to fund 45,000 detention beds. To understand this, note that ICE is currently overspending against last year’s budget, by funding around 49,000 beds. So relative to that, Democrats are cutting the number of beds. But as Heidi Altman notes, what Democrats agreed to is higher than the actual number of beds legitimatelyfunded last year. So that’s a hike. And if there is no hard statutory cap on beds, ICE can find money elsewhere to fund extra beds, detaining more people than funding levels suggest. As one advocate told me, the deal “contains no new controls on ICE overspending.”

That’s a very serious problem. But overall, if the humanitarian money turns out to be real, the emerging agreement could prove to be a far-from-perfect but nonetheless decent one.

Some of Trump’s worst designs are getting frustrated

The larger context here is that Trump and top adviser Stephen Miller have pushed on many fronts to make our immigration system as cruel as possible. They’d hoped to use the first government shutdown to force Democrats to agree to changes in the law that would make it harder for migrant children to apply for asylum, and easier to deport migrant children and to detain migrant families indefinitely.

The overriding goal behind such changes is to reduce the numbers of immigrants in the United States — not just through deportations, but also through deterring people from trying to migrate and/or apply for asylum. That was the goal of Trump’s family separations, and after those were halted last year, he renewed the push for those other changes.

Trump’s first surrender three weeks ago temporarily conceded that he would not be able to make those things happen. Now the new compromise suggests Republicans want him to agree to reopen the government for far longer, without getting those legal changes orthe wall.

“We have yet to see the details in writing, but based on news reports, I’d say this deal is a huge loss for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller,” Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice, told me.

“This deal has no money for his concrete wall and less money for barriers than was on offer last December,” Sharry added. “Trump tried to use a shutdown to force through radical policy changes, and at this point, Republicans are saying, ‘Let’s keep the government open and move on.’”

Sharry conceded that the failure to get detention bed caps is a “real setback.” But he also noted that in six months, Democrats can renew the battle for caps, now that “a lot of lawmakers understand that ICE is detaining many more people than Congress funds. We live to fight another day.”

Trump and Republicans suffered an electoral wipeout in an election that Trump turned into a referendum on his xenophobic nativist nationalism. He then used a shutdown to try to force the new Democratic House to accept both his wall and radical legal changes that would have made our immigration system far more inhumane. He isn’t getting his wall or those changes, and it looks as though a lot of humanitarian money will be channeled to the border to address the actual crisis there.

In other words, the fake crisis that Trump invented — and with it, his broader immigration vision — is getting repudiated. The only question is whether Trump will agree to the surrender Republicans are trying to negotiate for him.

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Update:I’ve rewritten the section on detention beds to make it more accurate.

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Bad news for Trump on immigration is great news for America!

And, don’t forget how Trump’s devotion to himself, first, foremost, and always, as opposed to our country or even his White Nationalist restrictionist supporters played out at the DOJ. Trump’s concern for his own skin caused him to unceremoniously dump loyal White Nationalist acolyte former AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, the “role model” for Stephen Miller.

In fewer than two years on the job, Sessions managed to push for the White Nationalist restrictionist immigration agenda in every possible way. In a sea of ethically questionable behavior during his tenure at the DOJ, the “original sin,” in Trump’s eyes, was Sessions’s following DOJ ethical advice to recuse himself from the Mueller investigation. Ethics is a dirty word in the Trump world.

A “shout out” to my friend Heidi Altman over at the Heartland Alliance who apparently helped thwart a DHS sleight of hand on detention statistics.

PWS

02-13-19

TRUMP TAKES “LIEFEST” TO EL PASO BORDER — Many Protest Against His White Nationalist Baloney!

TRUMP TAKES “LIEFEST” TO EL PASO BORDER — Many Protest Against His White Nationalist Baloney!

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-beto-border-rallies-20190211-story.html

Eli Stokols & Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

President Trump falsely told a raucous rally in El Paso on Monday night that he is already building a wall on the adjacent border with Mexico, as a potential Democratic challenger assailed him at a large protest nearby and, in Washington, congressional negotiators announced a tentative funding deal without the billions he demanded for a wall.

Beneath banners reading “Finish the Wall,” Trump hailed what he called a “big, beautiful wall right on the Rio Grande,” though no such construction is known to be underway. When supporters launched into a chant of “Build the wall!” — standard at his rallies for years — Trump corrected them: “You mean finish the wall.”

The president alluded to lawmakers’ announcement of a deal, which came moments before he took the stage, but did not give it his blessing. Nor did he disparage it though one of his foremost confidants, Fox News host Sean Hannity, came on the air midway through the president’s rally and condemned the reported agreement as “this garbage compromise.”

Without the president and Congress agreeing to a border security funding bill by midnight Friday, the government could be partially shuttered again, just three weeks after a shutdown that at 35 days was the longest ever. The “agreement in principle” called for $1.375 billion for 55 miles of new barrier on the 2,000-mile border — less than a quarter of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded.

He told the crowd that he hadn’t bothered to find out the particulars of the agreement because he was eager to take the stage. “I could have stayed in there and listened, or I could have come out to the people of El Paso, Texas,” he said. “I chose you.”

Outside the El Paso County Coliseum, thousands of protesters, bundled against the evening chill, marched along the Rio Grande to a nearby park. There, El Paso’s former congressman and a possible Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, joined other locals who spoke of El Paso and neighboring Juarez, Mexico, as one community and expressed indignation over Trump’s false characterization of their city as a violent one in last week’s State of the Union address.

“With the eyes of the entire country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand. Here in one of the safest cities in the United States of America — safe, not because of walls but in spite of walls,” O’Rourke said, in the sort of rousing speech that brought nationwide attention to his Senate race last year, though he lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Let’s own this moment and the future and show this country there’s nothing to be afraid of when it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border,” O’Rourke said to cheers. “Let’s make sure our laws, our leaders and our language reflect our values.”

Late Monday, the House-Senate committee bargaining over border security funding and trying to avert another shutdown reached an “agreement in principle,” according to Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Talks had stalled on the weekend, Republicans said, over Democrats’ demands to limit the detention of undocumented immigrants, many of them seeking asylum.

Should Congress pass a compromise, the onus would be on the president to accept it, or risk taking blame again for a partial federal shutdown. Before arriving in El Paso, Trump sought to preemptively shift blame to Democrats should the legislative effort ultimately fail. After the recent shutdown, polls showed the public put the blame squarely on him, and his approval rating slid.

With both his rally and the protest featuring O’Rourke receiving national coverage, the split-screen moment promised something of an audition of a hypothetical 2020 matchup, effectively creating a live debate between the president and a charismatic potential challenger on the issue that most animated Trump’s followers in 2016 and probably will again in his reelection bid.

Before leaving the White House, the president signaled that he too saw the dueling rallies as an early competition, with his familiar emphasis on crowd sizes. “We have a line that’s very long already,” Trump told reporters at the White House, referring to people waiting to enter his El Paso venue. He added, “I understand our competitor’s got a line too, but it’s a tiny little line.”

At his rally, Trump bragged that 10,000 supporters were inside the arena and 25,000 more were standing outside. According to the El Paso Fire Department, 6,500 people — the building’s capacity — were allowed inside, while at least 10,000 attended the protest rally. Organizers, however, had a slightly lower estimate.

“We have 35,000 people tonight and he has 200 people, 300 people,” Trump said. “Not too good. That may be the end of his presidential bid.”

While the border visit was intended as an opportunity for Trump to promote his signature issue, he wandered widely in his remarks — attacking Democrats repeatedly, including on abortion and on a so-called Green New Deal environmental platform that some are advocating, and mocking Virginia Democrats for controversies that have roiled the state’s government.

Trump’s drumbeat on immigration has yet to pay political dividends beyond his own supporters, and it has further galvanized his opponents. His fear-mongering during campaign rallies last fall over caravans of immigrants failed to prevent a Democratic wave that cost Republicans a net 40 seats and their majority in the House.

And during his State of the Union address, his incorrect portrayal of El Paso — he said it had “extremely high rates of violent crime” and was “one of our nation’s most dangerous cities” until the government built a “powerful barrier” there — touched a nerve among civic leaders and citizens.

The El Paso County Commissioners Court on Monday approved a resolution assailing the president and his administration for misinformation and lies about a “crisis situation” on the U.S.-Mexico border, and noting that the federal government said “no crisis exists” and that “fiscal year 2017 was the lowest year of illegal cross-border migration on record.”

Yet Trump, at the rally, denounced his critics and media fact-checkers who disputed his claims that existing border fencing had slashed crime rates in El Paso. “They’re full of crap when they say it doesn’t make a difference,” he said, suggesting that local officials tried to “pull the wool over everybody’s eyes” by reporting low crime rates.

Lyda Ness-Garcia, a lawyer and founder of the Women’s March of El Paso, said organizers of Monday night’s protest were motivated to counteract Trump’s “lies” about their city.

“There was a deep sense of anger in our community, from the left and the right. It’s the demonization of our border. It’s the misrepresentation that the wall made us safe when we were safe long before,” she said.

Referring to the Mexican city just over the border, Garcia added: “We’re connected to Juarez. People forget. We’re not separate. We’re one culture.”

In truth, violent crime dropped in El Paso after a peak in 1993. It was at historic lows before Congress authorized a fence along the Rio Grande in 2006. Crime began to rise again over the next four years, after the fencing went up.

The city’s Republican mayor, Dee Margo, admonished Trump after the State of the Union speech, saying during an appearance on CNN that the president’s depiction of El Paso is “not factually correct.”

Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, said organizers intended the march as a community celebration rather than an anti-Trump or pro-O’Rourke political event. “The administration, they didn’t believe our community would react, that people would get upset about the lies,” he said. “Our community spoke in numbers.”

Garcia noted that residents had seen the fallout from the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies firsthand, both in family separations and in asylum-seekers being turned away from border bridges and required to remain in Mexico while they await hearings.

In December, two Guatemalan migrant children died in Border Patrol custody in the El Paso area after seeking asylum.

“Trump has created policies and strategies that have created deep wounds in our region,” Garcia said. “We are not a violent city. We are not criminals. We are part of America and we deserve respect from this president.”

Although the protest event brought together roughly 50 local groups, O’Rourke’s political star power generated significant media coverage.

“If you’re Beto, there couldn’t be a better, more visual contrast,” said Jen Psaki, a former communications director to President Obama. “By leading a march, he gets back to his grass-roots origins and it allows him to stand toe to toe with the president of the United States and to echo a message that even local Republicans agree with. It gives him a platform and a megaphone at a beneficial time.”

Not willing to cede the moment completely to O’Rourke, Julian Castro — a former mayor of San Antonio, an Obama Cabinet member and already a declared presidential candidate — went Monday to the border checkpoint where his grandmother entered the United States as a young girl. He filmed a video denouncing the president and calling Trump’s visit to El Paso an effort “to create a circus of fear and paranoia” and “to tell lies about the border and about immigration.”

Speaking directly into the camera, Castro added, “Don’t take the bait.”

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Eli Stokols

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Eli Stokols is a White House reporter based in the Los Angeles Times Washington, D.C., bureau. He is a veteran of Politico and the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the 2016 presidential campaign and then the Trump White House. A native of Irvine, Stokols grew up in a Times household and is thrilled to report for what is still his family’s hometown paper. He is also a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske

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Molly Hennessy-Fiske has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times since 2006. She won a 2018 APME International Perspective Award;2015 Overseas Press Club award; 2014 Dart award from ColumbiaUniversity; and was a finalist for the Livingston Awards and Casey Medal. She completed a Thomson Reuters fellowship in Lebanon in 2006 and a Pew fellowship in Mexico in 2004. Hennessy-Fiske grew up in Upstate New York and graduated from Harvard College. She spent last year as Middle East bureau chief before returning to cover foreign/national news as Houston bureau chief.

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The racist lies about immigration just keep spewing forth from Trump and his White Nationalist support groups, including the “right wingnut” media.

We’re not being invaded by foreign criminals. Actually, we’re experiencing a quite predictable and potentially manageable influx of refugees seeking to exercise their legal rights to lawfully apply for asylum in the US. Not surprising, given that we have no viable refugee program in or near the Northern Triangle and have undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown of the rule of law and society in those “failed states.”

The idea that real criminals, terrorists, drug smugglers, or human traffickers will be stopped or even materially deterred by a Wall is beyond absurd. Walls generally “reroute migration” and kill more innocent people. Real threats to our security are laughing at Trump and his base while they view the diversion, wasted time and money, and the failure to beef up intelligence, undercover, and anti-smuggling operations as a free gift.

And, I’m sure they cheer the focus on “rounding up” and detaining asylum applicants who turn themselves in to apply for asylum (because Trump has intentionally disabled reasonable processing through legal ports of entry) instead of doing the real law enforcement work of breaking up criminal enterprises.

“Numbers” aren’t everything, particularly when the majority of the apprehensions have little to do with criminals or other “bad guys. But, it’s easier to “chalk up big numbers” and support a bogus White Nationalist narrative about “loss of border security” by apprehending asylum applicants who are in search of ever more elusive justice in the U.S.

Unfortunately, outright fibs and bogus racist narratives seem to work for our “Lier-in-Chief!” Here is an article from today’s NY Times by native Texan Richard Parker actually suggesting that Trump succeeds because Texans are as addicted to “Tall Tales” as Trump is to “Big Lies!” In other words, a “match made in Heaven.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/el-paso-trump-beto.html

Rather an unhappy commentary, if true. Who am I as a “mere Badger” to say, but I would suspect that these tall tales of fake invasions and bogus fear mongering directed mostly at the growing Latino community appeal more to some Texans than to others.

Just shows the importance of the work of the New Due Process Army (“NDPA”) in defending our laws and Constitution! Also illustrates the importance of committing ourselves to “regime change” in 2020. The immigration nonsense from Trump and his supporters and the intentional divisiveness, chaos, and anarchy that flow from it is an existential threat to our national existence — much greater than his mostly fake “border emergency.”

PWS

02-12-19

POLITICS: SHUTDOWN COUNTDOWN: Legislators Say They Have A Deal – No Details!

Emily Cochrane & Glenn Thrush report for the NYT:

WASHINGTON — Top House and Senate negotiators said late Monday that they had reached an “agreement in principle” on border security that would avoid a second government shutdown that would begin this weekend. Lawmakers declined to offer details, but seemed confident that the agreement — if supported by leadership and signed by President Trump — could resolve an immigration dispute and allow the government to keep operating. It was unclear if Mr. Trump would go along with the deal, the specifics of which must still be worked by congressional staff members. The president has already accepted, reluctantly, far less money than he wanted for repairs and extensions of existing border barriers — and no new wall. Progress on the deal had been stalled by an impasse over Mr. Trump’s roundups and detention of undocumented immigrants. Yet, as the negotiations continued, but before the deal was announced, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the top member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said both he and Mr. Shelby thought it was preferable to find a resolution by the end of the night and not let the impasse languish. “We’re trying to be legislators,” he said. A specific point of contention has been the number of detention beds under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Aides in both parties had warned that a final deal might leave the number of detention slots — or “interior beds” — unchanged, not reduced as Democrats want and not increased as Mr. Trump wants. House Democrats, urged on by immigration rights group, have pushed hard, hoping to leverage White House fears of another damaging shutdown into a softening of the president’s hard-line immigration policies that they say have torn apart families, wrenched productive citizens from the communities they have lived in for years and infused a heartlessness into official American immigration policy. The Democrats’ tool: limit the number of beds that ICE has to hold undocumented immigrants in custody to 16,500 from around 20,700. The Democrats’ ultimate goal is to cut the overall number of detention beds, including those occupied by asylum seekers and people caught at the border, from its current level of around 49,000 to 34,000, the number funded during the Obama administration, Democratic aides said. That, they say, would end sweeps and roundups, and force ICE to focus on pursuing hardened criminals. Last year, the Trump administration requested funding for 52,000. With their number, Democrats say they can seize the initiative on immigration from a president who has staked his political fortunes on the issue. “We started at zero on the wall, and we compromised a lot after that, and we are now asking them to change, too,” said Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California and a member of the 17-member House and Senate conference committee tasked with hammering out a compromise. Mr. Trump was catching on. When Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, presented him with the Democrats’ demand, he rejected it quickly, according to two people briefed on the exchange. “These are people coming into our country that we are holding and we don’t want in our country,” the president told reporters at the White House late Monday. “That’s why they don’t want to give us what we call ‘the beds.’ It’s much more complicated than beds, but we call them from ‘the beds.’” In private, Republicans responded with a plan that would exempt many detained immigrants from the cap, including those people either charged with or convicted of crimes, including misdemeanor drug offenses and violent felonies. That, in turn, was rejected by Democrats. “You have ICE agents picking up mothers and fathers and children in their own neighborhoods. That’s why the beds issue is so much more important than the wall,” said Ms. Roybal-Allard, whose Los Angeles-area district is 85 percent Hispanic, the highest percentage of any district in the country. The number of beds occupied by detainees fluctuates over time, influenced by a variety of factors, including ICE enforcement policies and the flow of migrants at the border with Mexico. The rate of that flow is unpredictable and determined by factors such as the performance of the economies north and south of the border, crime, gang activity and the business practices of coyotes paid to transport migrants from Mexico and Central America to California and the Southwest. The number of monthly apprehensions of migrants at the border has averaged 25,000 to 40,000 for most of the past decade, but has risen to about 50,000 over the past several months, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security. If ICE does not have enough room to place individuals and family members they detain, they must loosen their enforcement actions, creating a powerful motive for new migrants to enter the country illegally, Trump administration officials say. “You cannot have border security, without strong interior enforcement, whether there is a wall there or not,” said Matt Albence, the deputy director of ICE, on Monday in a conference call with reporters. Republicans closed ranks to blast the plan. “This is a poison pill that no administration, not this one, not the previous one, should ever accept,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said on the Senate floor. “Imagine the absurdity of this: House Democrats want to set a limit on how many criminal aliens our government can detain.” Earlier Monday, Democratic leadership aides said that there would be no deal without some concession on the bed issue — in part because immigrants rights groups and party liberals would revolt if they agreed to extend border barriers without getting something tangible in return. Last Friday, when word of a possible deal first leaked out, advocates for immigrants reached out to Democratic leadership offices, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, to say that they would oppose any deal that did not address their concerns about ICE. “For the last two years, we have been trying to limit the bad. We have taken a defensive approach, but now House Democrats have the power to start doing some good,” said Lorella Praeli, the deputy national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that has pressed the Democratic leaders, Ms. Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, to reject any deal that does not include steps to reduce aggressive immigration enforcement. “It’s time for them to show that they are fighting for us,” Ms. Praeli added. “It means you have to do something more than a floor speech or a tweet supporting immigrants. It’s time to actually do something.”

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I hope it happens. But, as I always say, “the devil is in the details,” and we don’t have any yet. Stay tuned.

PWS

02-11-19

THE HILL: Nolan’s Take On Intelligence Report

Family Pictures

Nolan writes:

On January 29, 2019, Coats presented the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The assessment is based on the collective insights of the intelligence community.

Although Coats arguably contradicted President Donald Trump in some areas, such as the state of North Korea’s nuclear program, he supported Trump’s claim that the flood of migrants from Central America is causing a security crisis. The assessment includes migration from Central America as one of the threats to national security.

This is not the first time the intelligence community has identified migration from Central America as a security threat. The same finding was included in the Worldwide Threat Assessment that former DNI James R. Clapper’s presented to congress in 2016, which was during the Obama Administration.

Read more at https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/428316-intelligence-community-views-migration-from-central-america-as-threat-to

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For a different take on the intelligence directors’ report and Congressional testimony see my recent post from WashPost. http://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/01/30/a-presidency-without-intelligence-is-a-threat-to-our-national-security-by-contrast-individuals-seeking-asylum-through-our-legal-system-our-southern-border-are-no-such-thing-none-of-the/

PWS

02-09-19

“COURTSIDE” POLITICS: A HOLLOW SPEECH FROM AN EMPTY SUIT!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/state-of-the-union-trump-rhyme-women-usa.html

Jim Newell writes @ Slate:

Donald Trump turned to the most lethal of oratorical tools in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address: the rhyme. To summarize his argument that Democratic investigations into his administration could imperil America’s economic gains, he said: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” And then—copying directly from the prepared text here—the follow-up: “It just doesn’t work that way!”

In political speechwriting, flat attempts at cleverness are often made to paper over a total lack of substance, and this little rhyming number was no exception. Democrats in the chamber laughed at the line, just as they did when President Trump said, “If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion”—in my opinion!—“be in a major war with North Korea with potentially millions of people killed.”

The Democrats’ laughter wasn’t the over-the-top, fake guffaw that parties might prepare ahead of time for risible talking points. It was the sort of chuckling you do when you’re scrolling through your phone and only casually paying attention—exactly what many Democrats were doing throughout the speech—and hear something truly out of left field. It’s the way you might respond to someone who has nothing much to say, and no new tricks to force you to take him seriously.

Trump didn’t move Congress any closer to a deal on immigration, the most pressing matter currently facing Congress. (The expectations were so low, though, that negotiators were just happy he didn’t blow everything up.) If he was trying to get a border wall agreement—and he really didn’t seem like he was trying that hard—it wasn’t by putting something new on the table, a real concession that Democrats might consider. He resorted to the same scary warnings about the “tremendous onslaught” of “caravans” approaching the border (another chuckle line for Democrats) and once again used grieving families who’d lost loved ones as pawns in his insinuation that undocumented immigrants are naturally inclined to violence. In an ad-lib to satisfy his itch for hyperbole, he stated that he wanted legal immigrants “in the largest numbers ever” to come to the country, when in reality his administration turned down an offer in the last Congress to fund his entire wall because it didn’t cut legal immigration enough.

Anyway, it was all just words. They don’t mean anything, they haven’t worked in the past, they won’t work in the next 10 days. And everyone in the room knew it.

Trump seemed to think that he was skewering the Democrats by boldly declaring that he is prepared to stop socialism in its tracks, as if it had gotten particularly far along. “We are born free, and we will stay free,” he said. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Was this supposed to be a dig at New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Judging from the look on her face and the chatter she was making with members around her, she was asking the same question. So she laughed. Whatever. It wasn’t worth the effort to get particularly mad at anything this guy said.

The only break from this yawning rendition of the Same Old Thing was when Democrats decided to hold a dance party in the middle of the speech. When Trump, in the prelude to a short section introducing the “first-ever government-wide initiative focused on economic empowerment for women in developing countries,” mentioned that “we have more women in the workforce than ever before,” Democrats decided to take over the room. The 89 House Democratic women, all dressed in white, and their male counterparts started cheering, high-fiving, and in the case of one New Hampshire Rep. Annie Kuster, raising the roof.

Trump played along, telling them not to sit down just yet, and then delivered a line about how “we also have more women serving in the Congress than ever before.” The celebration continued, eventually transitioning into a bipartisan chant of “U-S-A!”

During the extended cheering, no one seemed to be thinking about Trump at all. They were celebrating amongst themselves. Trump was just a piece of furniture along the wall of a room, a fact of life that didn’t need their gratification or their outrage. He was just … there.

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

Lies, alternative facts, White Nationalist myths, racist “dog whistles.” IOW, same old same old from a parody of a leader who demonstrates his breathtaking ignorance, inherent meanness, lack of empathy, and spectacular lack of qualifications for the position he occupies without filling.

And the GOP sycophants who nodded, applauded, and refuse to stand up for America against this dangerous clown showed why progress for our future will depend on their being removed from office in large numbers.

Vladimir must have enjoyed last night. Just like he had it scripted.

PWS

02-07-19

AOC & CO. ARE RIGHT TO SPEAK OUT ON INEFFECTIVE, INHUMANE, WASTEFUL, OFTEN ILLEGAL DHS POLICIES DRIVEN BY A WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA – But, They Might Be Better Served By Holding Their Fire For Meaningful Oversight & The Next Budget Cycle – Like It Or Not, DHS Is Here & Isn’t Going Anywhere & We Do Need An Orderly System For Controlling Migration & Processing Refugees At Our Border!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberals-urge-democrats-to-take-a-hard-line-on-border-11549323945

Kristina Peterson & Louise Radnofsky report for the WSJ:

WASHINGTON—House Democratic leaders held firm through the five-week government shutdown that ended last month. Still, the party’s liberal wing is keeping up pressure on leadership as negotiations over a border-security deal heat up.

A group of liberal House Democrats and advocacy groups are urging Democrats in a bipartisan negotiating committee to refuse further funding for the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the border with Mexico. The group’s 17 lawmakers have less than two weeks to reach a deal before government funding expires again.

President Trump has said several times he is pessimistic lawmakers can reach a deal that he would accept, and he has threatened to take action to build his long-promised border wall on his own, including possibly declaring a national emergency.

Congressional leaders have been optimistic the group of House and Senate lawmakers can reach an agreement, but any bipartisan deal is unlikely to appease some in the party’s left wing.

A letter to House Democrats, written by freshman Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and signed by at least three others, criticizes Homeland Security for practices including prosecution and detention of immigrants.

The department and its frontline enforcement units—Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection—have become high-profile targets as they implement the Trump administration’s attempts to step up deportations and the zero-tolerance policy that last year resulted in family separations at the border.

“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate—not strategy,” the lawmakers wrote. They argue that the agencies’ ability to shift funds makes it impossible to prevent money from being used for policies that Democrats generally oppose.

Refusing funding for the agency housing the president’s top political priority isn’t going to draw Republican support, a House Democratic aide said, which the committee would need to produce a deal.

“It’s totally unrealistic,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), who is in the negotiating group, said of the Democratic letter. “That basically says you don’t want to secure the border.”

Democrats overall say they favor border security, just not Mr. Trump’s border wall, and immigration advocates said their task is to counter the president.

. . . .

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

Read the complete WSJ report from these “emerging stars on the immigration beat.”

There hasn’t been any meaningful oversight of DHS or the mess DOJ politicos have created at EOIR in two years. So, while there certainly should not be additional funding for DHS’s already overused and abused detention system, for now, Democrats should probably work with DHS as the “only game in town” on the Southern Border.

Over the next year, DHS and DOJ politicos should be required to testify and should be held accountable for the absolute, largely avoidable, chaos and inefficiency they have intentionally, incompetently, or maliciously created in immigration enforcement, our Immigration Courts, the refugee and asylum system, and the system for granting immigration benefits.

Then, based on the record, make rational, fact-based proposals for needed improvements in immigration enforcement, administration, and adjudication for the next budget cycle.

PWS

02-05-19

DENNIS ROMERO @ NBC NEWS WITH A MORE NUANCED LOOK AT A BORDER WALL — It’s Highly Effective At “Re-Routing” Migrants, But Causes More Deaths, Enriches Smugglers, & Is Ineffective Against Drug Smuggling — Bottom Line: “[E]ffective at deterring crowds of migrants that will ultimately be undeterred.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-says-san-diego-s-border-barrier-works-it-pushes-n965681

Dennis Romero reports for NBC News from San Diego:

When President Trump argues that the United States needs a wall along the southern border, he likes to point to San Diego’s success.

There, double and triple barriers fortify the westernmost stretch of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border as U.S. Border Patrol agents drive SUVs along frontage roads and hover overhead in helicopters.

The militarized border touching the communities of Imperial Beach, San Ysidro and Otay Mesa contributed to a 75 percent decline in crossings in the years immediately after fencing was installed in the 1990s, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

The decline mirrors a border-wide decrease.Apprehensions of those suspected of illegally crossing the entire Southwest border experienced an uptick in 2018 over 2017 to nearly 467,000 but remained at less than half their peak in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Border Patrol racked up 1 to 1.6 million apprehensions.

President Donald Trump, who’s in a protracted battle to secure congressional funding for his campaign promise to build a wall along the entire length of the Southern border, on Thursday pointed to San Diego’s Mexican neighbor, Tijuana, as an example of what can happen with and without a barrier.

Trump’s proposed wall, based on one of eight prototypes in San Diego, is yet to be authorized by Congress.

“If you go to Tijuana and you take down that wall, you will have so many people coming into our country that Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall,” he said from the Oval Office. “She will be begging for a wall. She will say, ‘Mr. President, please, please give us a wall.'”

While it seems unlikely the House speaker would ever beg for a wall, the president has a valid point about fencing’s impact on the border region. Although San Diego’s barrier may stem illegal crossings, its impact is more complicated than Trump’s statement that “walls work” suggests.

From the 1980s to the early 1990s the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector was overrun with people illegally crossing the border. Hundreds of migrants would gather on a Tijuana River levee known as “El Bordo” and, much like the climactic border crossing scene in 1987’s “Born in East L.A.,” rush the few Border Patrol agents brave enough to try to stop them.

In the 1980s, about 40 percent of the Southwest’s illegal border crossings took place at San Diego, said Victor Clark-Alfaro of San Diego State University’s Center for Latin American Studies. The peak year for border apprehensions in the San Diego sector was 1986, when 628,000 migrants were nabbed.

“Tijuana was like a fiesta,” Clark-Alfaro said. “On a single day on a weekend at El Bordo you could find about 1,000 migrants ready to cross to the U.S. side. There was liquor, marijuana, human smugglers, street vendors.”

The defunct bureaucracy known as the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, since replaced by three agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, built fencing along the border at San Diego in 1990, but it was no match for desperate Mexicans.

The migrants created a huge wave of south-of-the-border crossings into the U.S. that was addressed by Republican Pete Wilson, a onetime San Diego mayor who won re-election as California governor in 1994 based on a Trump-like platform of deterring illegal immigration.

“Bill Clinton had to respond,” said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego’s master’s program in international relations.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton initiated Operation Gatekeeper, a crackdown at the border, and Congress followed up two years later with 14 miles of “triple-layered fence,” according to congressional records. Some of those first fences were made from Vietnam War-era landing mats intended for makeshift helicopter airstrips.

In 2006, Congress authorized “double-layered fencing” along at least 700 miles of border. The full length has yet to be covered with fencing because of delays in acquiring private property, often through court battles. But the San Diego sector received fresh fencing in the mid-1990s and again in the late-2000s.

Experts, many critical of Trump’s overall stand on border security, acknowledge the San Diego barriers, now made of steel bollards and surplus military landing mats, have more or less done their job. The sector went from being the top location for border crossings to a relative ghost town with 26,086 apprehensions in fiscal year 2017, according to the Border Patrol.

A migrant from Honduras passes a child to her father after he jumped the border fence to get into the U.S. side to San Diego, Calif., from Tijuana, Mexico on Jan. 3, 2019.Daniel Ochoa de Olza / AP file

The hardened border, however, pushed migrants to remote areas that have few man-made impediments and are often just World War II-style vehicle barriers known as Normandy fencing, Clark-Alfaro said. Arizona has become a hotbed of crossings, but migrants often die of dehydration. The mountains east of San Diego have also become a crossing zone, where migrants have died from hypothermia.

Some migrants head for the cold Pacific and end up dead or arrested.

“Our beach was invaded by people on pangas, boogie boards,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, adding that the fortified fencing “didn’t stop the tunnels” used by cartels to ship drugs into California and beyond.

The San Diego-area border security measures have also enticed cartels to dive deeper into smuggling because the barriers drive up prices for guides or coyotes, experts say. Prices have gone from as little as $75 in the 1990s to as much as $7,000 today, said San Diego State’s Clark-Alfaro.

“We’ve made it more profitable for human traffickers along the border,” added Shirk, of the University of San Diego.

However, narcotics continue to make it across the Southwest border, with seizures of heroin in the San Diego sector increasing 59 percentfrom 2016 to 2017, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The San Diego sector was the top target along the southwest border for heroin smuggling outside points of entry, the DEA said. Eighty-five percent of the synthetic opioid fentanyl that crossed in 2017 entered through the San Diego area, according to DEA data.

Experts argue that one of the biggest influences on border crossings has been the Mexican economy, which has improved enough that many workers would rather just stay home. In Tijuana, home to a booming appliance and TV manufacturing sector, thousands of jobs are up for grabs.

And many of the immigrants from that huge wave in the 1980s and 1990s settled in the United States rather than crossing back and forth for seasonal work, experts say. In effect, they were walled in by the increased border security and are now staying put.

The boosted federal presence along the border also includes an exponential increase in the number of Border Patrol agents since 1990 to more than 20,000 today. At least 85 percent are stationed along the border, according to Shirk’s research.

Much of that increase in personnel came in the years following 9/11, when the Department of Homeland Security was created and crossing the border legitimately became much less casual, Shirk said. Passports are now required for travel in both directions.

The new border-crossing population comes mostly from Central America, where migrants have formed caravans to travel north. People fleeing murderous gangs — some, like MS-13, were born in the U.S. — have mostly sought asylum in the United States legally, although the Border Patrol U.S. Customs and Border Protection says groups of Central Americans have recently tried to rush into the country illegally.

The bottom line on San Diego’s beefed up border, some of which is slated for replacement, is a mixed bag effective at deterring crowds of migrants that will ultimately be undeterred.

“It’s effective at re-routing people,” said John Fanestil, a Methodist minister who has offered communion on the United States side of the fence. “We made it harder to cross the border illegally — more deadly, more costly. But when circumstances are as extreme as they are in Central America, people will demonstrate great determination to cross the border.”

Dennis Romero

Dennis Romero writes for NBC News and is based in Los Angeles.

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

As we used to say at the Arlington Immigration Court, “Desperate people do desperate things.” Or, as I have said on “Courtside,” “We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration.”

What would actually help:

Technology, intelligence, undercover resources to combat drug smuggling;
More appropriate and generous application of our existing refugee and asylum laws at the border and in or near the Northern Triangle;
More resources for processing asylum applications at the Ports of Entry;
Expanded legal immigration opportunities, particularly for needed workers, that would more accurately reflect market forces driving today’s “extralegal immigration system;”
Working more closely with the UNHCR, Mexico, and other countries in the Hemisphere to solve the humanitarian problems driving refugee flows.

Why not “get smart” instead of continuing to “play dumb” on migration issues?

PWS

02-02-19

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.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/never-mind-wall-theres-more-important-question-we-need-answer/

Waldman writes:

As immigration policy hangs over the ongoing conflict over whether the government is going to remain open, there’s something missing from this discussion, something so fundamental that it’s quite remarkable that we all seem to have forgotten to even ask about it. The president is demanding his border wall, Democrats are fighting against him, and occasionally we bring up issues like the fate of the Dreamers and those here under Temporary Protected Status.

But what nobody asks is this: What kind of immigration system do we actually want?

Not what might happen in the next negotiation or what each side would be willing to give up, but what does each side see as the ultimate goal they’re working toward? If they could look forward ten or twenty years and say “This is where we should get to,” what would that look like?

It’s a vital question, because whatever we’re doing at the moment should be guided by our long-term goals. Once we understand what those goals are, we can think more clearly about where we should go after we get this whole shutdown ridiculousness behind us. And we all ought to be able to agree that there is some future we’re trying to arrive at, a point at which we have a system that works to our satisfaction and immigration isn’t something we’re constantly at each other’s throats about.

That may not be possible, but I’ll start with what liberals would like to see. There are certainly disagreements not just on the left generally but among immigration advocates as well, but there is a basic vision one can identify.

The first thing they want, of course, is to take the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who are in the country now and give them a path to citizenship. That’s something even some Republicans agree with, and if you put requirements like learning English and paying back taxes on it, support becomes nearly universal.

Second, liberals would like to see an expansion of the legal immigration system, which is a consistent source of frustration and a driver of illegal immigration. When it can take decades to get approved to move to the United States, of course many people are going to opt for the illegal route, even if it can be dangerous and uncertain. If the legal immigration works, people will go through it and not around it.

And if you have a well-functioning legal system, you can make illegal immigration less attractive, with things like an E-Verify process that makes it harder to find work if you’re undocumented. There may always be some kind of black market for workers, but if you’re simultaneously offering people a legal path — both toward permanent residency and with temporary work visas for people who are looking only to make some money and then return to their home countries — it will be much smaller problem.

So in the liberal vision, we might end up with about the same number of immigrants coming into the country as we have now, it’s just that the overwhelming majority would be coming legally. We’d have security at the border, but we wouldn’t need ICE breaking down doors and tearing parents from their children’s arms. We’d have a robust system to evaluate asylum claims so we wouldn’t have to be throwing people in cages. We certainly wouldn’t pretend that one day there will be no more demand in the labor market for immigrant workers.

There are many Republicans who could be okay with that future, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. But the conservative vision is complicated. For years, we heard Republican politicians say, “I’m for legal immigration. I’m against illegal immigration.” They may not usually have been advocating significant increases in legal immigration, but it’s important to remember that the current venomous hostility toward immigrants was not always the standard Republican position. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both far friendlier toward immigrants than Donald Trump is.

Conservatives might disagree with this characterization, but as I see it, their ultimate goal is a system in which coming into the country illegally is utterly impossible, but levels of legal immigration don’t change much. In other words, we still have immigration, but the flow slows to a trickle. And the Trump administration is making attempts to drastically reduce legal immigration. With the president’s enthusiastic support, domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is driving a nationalist agenda that seeks to drastically reduce the inflow of immigrants to the country and even looks for every possible means to deport both legal and undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve been living here for years or decades.

That’s a somewhat extreme position even within the Republican Party, but it does reflect a discomfort with immigration that is common on the right. It’s the cultural problem, the fact that many people just don’t like having contact with people who don’t look like them or don’t speak the same language they do or eat the same foods they do. Trump very skillfully played to that discomfort by essentially telling voters he could wind back the clock to the time when they were young, before all this disconcerting change happened. His targets were the people who say “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” and when he said he would make America great again, “great again” meant “like things were when you were young.”

That’s a demand that can never be satisfied, even if it’s only a portion of the Republican electorate that really dreams of an America where there are almost no new immigrants and most of those who are already here just disappear. Unfortunately, that portion currently not only controls the White House but exercises a veto over any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, because the rest of the GOP is so terrified of them.

Which is why it’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.

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

Right on, Paul! You “nailed” it! Pretty much what I’ve been saying on “Courtside” all along!

However, the unlikelihood of achieving “comprehensive immigration reform” in the “Age of Trump” shouldn’t prevent the parties from working together in a bipartisan manner on “smaller fixes” such as that relating to child marriage suggested by Nolan Rappaport, posted earlier this week. See https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3Hu

Progress is progress, even by “small steps.”

PWS

02-01-19

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