IMMIGRATION 2 REFUGEES
SEE IMMIGR 3 REFUGEE
4/17
capt 1/19
age of trump, promoted to primary
see baby jails, ICE, DHS
merkle in trouble b/c of refugees? alt rt neo-nazi grows in EU
see caravan
see hype fear
https://www.alternet.org/immigration/calling-me-liar-are-fighting-words-democratic-lawmaker-walks-out-dhs-sec-nielsen-after
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trump-ignores-the-law-in-naming-acting-homeland-security-secretary-after-nielsens-resignation/
After Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned Sunday, Donald Trump moved swiftly to announce her temporary replacement. But, characteristically for Trump, he ignored what the law says about that.
“I am pleased to announce that Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary,” Trump tweeted. The law, though, says that the deputy secretary would become acting secretary, and, because there’s currently no deputy secretary, the agency’s third-ranking position, the undersecretary for management, would take over. That would be Claire Grady.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jamie Dupree reports that Nielsen’s shift from resigning immediately on April 7 to staying in her role until April 10 is “a move which could give her the ability to help alter the chain of succession inside DHS.” It’s not exactly babies in cages, but it would be appropriate for Nielsen to end her tenure by taking one last chance to help Donald Trump do questionably legal things.
Confirmation hearings for anyone Trump nominates to replace Nielsen are likely to become a major showdown over Trump’s immigration and border policies.
basically fired when she told trump he was asking he to do crimes
Kirstjen Nielsen Steps Down as :{DHS:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Secretary
miller calling deputies to scream for not being tough enough
Nielsen’s rehabilitation tour has already begun
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President Donald Trump appeared in the Oval Office with the Secretary General of NATO Tuesday afternoon, and re-issued his threat to close the southern U.S. border to Mexico.
But it was his description of the situation – and what he sees as wholly acceptable goals – that was stunning.
The President of the United States repeatedly insisted that civil rights should be ignored and rescinded. Regardless out immigration or citizenship status, every person in the U.S. has constitutional rights that cannot be summarily dismissed.
“What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly, and make a deal,” Trump said to reporters. “I could do it in 45 minutes,” he claimed, which is false, given his track record.
“We need to get rid of chain migration, we need to get rid of catch and release, and visa lottery, and we have to do something with asylum, and to be honest with you – have to get rid of judges,” Trump said casually, not realizing – or not caring – that he is literally talking about taking away civil rights, the civil rights of people who are fleeing violence, gangs, drugs, and oppression.
“Every time you catch somebody that’s come illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court,” Trump railed, again attacking civil rights.
Many on social media expressed concern....
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trump-accused-of-manufacturing-crisis-by-slashing-aid-to-el-salvador-honduras-and-guatemala/
In a move that was immediately denounced as “cruel” and counterproductive, the Trump State Department on Saturday confirmed that it is cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
“Cutting foreign aid to Central America is the absolute last thing the Trump administration should do right now,” Vicki Gass, senior policy advisor for Central America and Mexico with Oxfam America, said in a statement. “Not only is it morally wrong, it also counters efforts to address the root causes behind migration.”
“Aid cuts would be devastating to the region and would only foster the same instability that is making people flee in the first place,” Gass added.
The decision to slash around $500 million in aid to the three Central American nations comes as President Donald Trump is threatening to “close” the U.S.-Mexico border.
Critics argued that Trump’s aid cuts to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala will worsen economic hardship in those nations and force more people to flee out of desperation.
“This will create more refugees. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing,” tweeted journalist Thor Benson.
Some observers accused the president of manufacturing a crisis at the border for political gain.
“Making desperate people even more desperate and less able to stay in their own countries… It’s almost as if Trump wants more asylum seekers at the U.S. border,” Andrew Stroehlein, European media director with Human Rights Watch, tweeted on Sunday. “As if he wants more media images that he will then twist for his fear-mongering.”
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100k this mo so border, 40% kids? deport 7 yo solo?!
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Trump cuts aid for Central American countries, threatens border shutdown
House Democrats called the move "entirely counterproductive."
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ew 319
UN Report: Extreme Weather Displaced 2 Million People in 2018
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2nd 5-4 ruling
a major blow for immigrant rights, the Supreme Court ruled the government can detain immigrants with past criminal records indefinitely and without due process—even decades after their convictions. The 5-4 ruling Tuesday in favor of the government centers around a 1996 law that allows immigration officials to take immigrants into custody after they are released from jail—but without specifying a time frame. The ACLU, which brought the case on behalf of immigrants affected by the law, said, “[T]he Supreme Court has endorsed the most extreme interpretation of immigration detention statutes, allowing mass incarceration of people without any hearing, simply because they are defending themselves against a deportation charge. We will continue to fight the gross overuse of detention in the immigration system.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012019/worldwide-threat-assessment-climate-change-intelligence-agencies-national-security
The nation's intelligence community warned in its annual assessment of worldwide threats that climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation pose risks to global stability because they are "likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond."
Released Tuesday, the Worldwide Threat Assessment prepared by the Director of National Intelligence added to a swelling chorus of scientific and national security voices in pointing out the ways climate change fuels widespread insecurity and erodes America's ability to respond to it.
"Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security," said the report, which represents the consensus view among top intelligence officials. "Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.
In just the past two weeks, the Pentagon sent a report to Congress describing extreme weather and climate risks to dozens of critical military installations. (House leaders on Wednesday asked for more details, including an assessment of the 10 bases in each service most vulnerable to climate change.) The Government Accountability Office also recommended the State Department resume providing guidance to U.S. diplomats about climate change and migration. Last week, ascientific paper concluded that drought driven by climate change and the subsequent fights over water resources increased the likelihood of armed conflict in the Middle East from 2011–2015, which in turn triggered waves refugees.
The United Nations Security Council also held a discussion on Friday devoted to understanding and responding to how climate change acts as a "threat multiplier" in countries where governance is already fragile and resources are sparse.
Robert Mardini, the permanent observer to the UN from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said his group's fieldwork confirms the "double impact" of climate change and war.
"Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequalities, especially in situations of armed conflict, where countries, communities and populations are the least prepared and the least able to protect themselves and adapt," Mardinitold the Security Council, according to his published remarks. "Conflicts harm the structures and systems that are necessary to facilitate adaptation to climate change."
In Contrast with the U.S. President
The formal threat assessment is also the latest federal survey of climate change to clash with President Donald Trump's adamant denial of the established consensus. In late November, the administration issued the Fourth National Climate Assessment, based on the work of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, which concluded that climate change threatened human life, ecosystems and the American economy. Trump dismissed the report, saying he did not believe its central findings.
Trump has pushed the message of climate denial through federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, mainly by working to halt rules and research to address climate change. But so far, the White House has not reined in the national security community when its leaders have acknowledged climate change or its agencies have explored its implications.
Further, members of Congress from both parties have provided the Pentagon, at least, with cover, instructing it in late 2017 to analyze the threats climate change poses to American military readiness.
Regions to Watch for Climate-Related Risks
The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment echoes the findings of versions from previous years that highlight climate change as a threat to what's called "human security" in a list that includes terrorism, cyber crimes and weapons of mass destruction. Among the situations and places it cites as being of particular concern are:
- Urban coastal areas of South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere that could be battered by extreme weather and aggravated by rising sea levels. It says "damage to communication, energy, and transportation infrastructure could affect low-lying military bases, inflict economic costs, and cause human displacement and loss of life." (Last year, Hurricane Michael inflicted an estimated $5 billion in damage on Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.)
- Countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan and Iraq, which are at increasing risk of social unrest and cross-border tension because "changes in the frequency and variability of heat waves, droughts, and floods—combined with poor governance practices—are increasing water and food insecurity."
- The Arctic, where receding sea ice "may increase competition—particularly with Russia and China— over access to sea routes and natural resources."
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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-migration-2627183114.html
Given the oversize role that migration plays in our current political discourse, you'd think there would be more emphasis on the one factor military and security experts believe will affect future migration patterns more than any other: .
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan agency that analyzes and audits federal policy to ensure its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, isn't going to let the topic go unaddressed. In a report to Congress last week, the GAO criticized the manner in which the Trump administration has sought to remove any acknowledgement of climate change from our foreign policy and diplomatic strategies, keeping experts in the dark about an issue that's growing only more urgent as a shifting climate—and all that comes with it—displaces millions of people and disrupts societies across the globe.
In the European Union, where the stresses and strains associated with processing large numbers of migrants have already reached crisis proportions, experts predict that the annual stream of those seeking safety within its borders will triple by the end of the century due to climate-related migration. And a 2018 World Bank Group report estimates that the impacts of climate change in three of the world's most densely populated developing regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could result in the displacement and internal migration of more than 140 million people before 2050. That many people on the move could easily lead to massive political and economic strife and significantly stall development in those regions.
According to Steve Trent of the Environmental Justice Foundation, an organization based in the United Kingdom that advocates for environmental causes through a human rights lens, climate change "is the unpredictable ingredient that, when added to existing social, economic, and political tensions, has the potential to ignite violence and conflict with disastrous consequences." Policymakers and business leaders, he says, need to make it a top priority. In the United States, our own military leaders and foreign-policy experts agree, which is why they've worked over the years to incorporate an understanding of climate change and its geopolitical ramifications into our statecraft.
President Obama formally observed the relationship between climate change, migration, and instability in a 2016 Presidential Memorandum, *Climate Change and National Security*. That memo directed federal departments and agencies "to perform certain functions to ensure that climate change-related impacts are fully considered in the development of national security doctrine, policies, and plans." It also established a Climate and National Security Working Group, made up of representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and many others, whose purpose was to study the issue and make informed recommendations to the national security and intelligence communities.
By breaking climate change down into its component geophysical symptoms, the memo makes a strong case for treating it as a threat multiplier, with the potential to push vulnerable states past the tipping point into chaos. "Extended drought, more frequent and severe weather events, heat waves, warming and acidifying ocean waters, catastrophic wildfires, and rising sea levels all have compounding effects on people's health and well-being," it reads. "Flooding and water scarcity can negatively affect food and energy production. Energy infrastructure, essential for supporting other key sectors, is already vulnerable to extreme weather and may be further compromised." Also listed among the concerns are transportation disruptions, pest outbreaks, the spread of invasive species, and disease. All of these, in the words of the memo, "can lead to population migration within and across international borders, spur crises, and amplify or accelerate conflict in countries or regions already facing instability and fragility."
Obama's memo painted a dire picture. But it wasn't dire enough, apparently, to earn the respect of President Trump, who revoked it in March 2017 in a sweeping executive order that also rescinded a number of other Obama-era memos and executive orders related to climate change. In case anyone misunderstood his rationale for essentially stripping any and all mention of climate change from the executive branch, he spelled it out. "[I]t is the policy of the United States that executive departments and agencies . . . immediately review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the public interest or otherwise comply with the law."
Last Thursday the GAO weighed in on Trump's decision—and deemed it seriously shortsighted. At the end of its report, *Climate Change: Activities of Selected Agencies to Address Potential Impact on Global Migration*, it concludes that State Department missions are less likely now than they were before to recognize climate change "as a risk to their strategic objectives." It recommends reinstating guidance for diplomats and other foreign service workers "that clearly documents the department's process for climate change risk assessments for integrated country strategies." Or, to translate from the GAO's carefully calibrated nonpartisan language into plain English: Enough with the gag order, guys. You're putting our diplomatic corps at a strategic disadvantage and doing a real disservice to American interests abroad.
The sad yet predictable postscript to the report? According to the GAO, the State Department has grudgingly accepted its recommendation and says it will "update its integrated country strategy guidance by June 30" to inform missions that they have the option, at least, to talk about climate resilience officially without fear of punishment. But the administration couldn't let the GAO go without smacking it down for its insolence. In its response, the State Department also hinted that it was strongly considering rescinding yet another Obama-era executive order related to climate resilience and international development.
Meanwhile, new stories continue to come out every day—in Bangladesh, in Syria, in Mexico and Central America—that confirm the worst fears of security experts and foreign aid workers and reveal the administration's blasé attitude for what it actually is: a willful ignorance of the facts, mixed with an utter contempt for those who put facts before ideology.
Reposted with permission from our media associate onEarth.
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climate change climate refugees climate migration
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Judge Convicts “No More Deaths” Volunteers After They Left Water for Migrants
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19012019/migration-climate-change-trump-state-department-guidance-diplomats-gao-report
As the movement of refugees strains countries worldwide and becomes fuel for political clashes in the United States, the Trump administration has eliminated guidelines that the government once gave to American diplomats about how to plan for the impact of climate change on migration and global security.
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In a reportreleased Thursday, the Government Accountability Office recommended the State Department restore the guidelines so U.S. diplomats are prepared for major population shifts that could destabilize a country or region.
"Without clear guidance, State may miss opportunities to identify and address issues related to climate change as a potential driver of migration," the report said.
In the report, the GAO, an auditing and analysis arm of Congress, sought to assess the U.S. government's shifting response to human migration driven by climate change. It highlighted the impact of President Donald Trump's decision in March 2017 to revoke an Obama-era executive order and presidential memorandum that called on federal agencies to weigh the effects of climate change on international development decisions.
The GAO found that as a result of Trump's changes, the State Department no longer provides its diplomatic missions "with guidance on whether and how to include climate change risks" as they develop country strategies. The guidance is effectively a toolkit diplomats use to establish the priorities that the U.S. has in a given country and plans to best address them.
State Department's Response Raises Eyebrows
The State Department offered a contradictory response to the GAO's recommendation. It said it would "update" the guidelines, but did not go into detail as to how. At the same time, the State Department wrote that it will consider recommending that climate change be further scrubbed from its priorities, which would mean asking Trump to rescind yet another executive order.
The report's co-author, David Gootnick, said that such a response was unusual. "After the GAO put the spotlight on the fact that they've dropped two executive orders, their response is to say, 'Okay, we might drop the third,'" Gootnick said. "To drop this executive order would be a potentially controversial thing to do."
The GAO plans to monitor the State Department's work over the next four years to see if it complies with the report's recommendation.
State Department spokesman James Dewey said he could not "offer an official response at the moment due to the partial shutdown." At the root of the government shutdown is a dispute over a wall to keep migrants out.
Migration Has Risen Around the World
Estimates vary considerably of how many people are migrating because of climate change-fueled events or might be displaced in the future, because of the lack consistent data. Still, the decisions by the State Department to stop providing climate guidance have occurred as migration has risen worldwide. Globally, about 244 million people are international migrants, and an additional 740 million people are migrants within their home countries, according to theInternational Organization for Migration's 2018 World Report.
Further, the IOM found that since 2008, an average of 25.3 million people have been newly displaced annually, the vast majority due to disasters rather than violence. In 2016, 97 percent of people fled their homes because of "disasters triggered by climate and weather-related hazards," the IOM said.
In the U.S., the national security apparatus has described climate change for years as a "threat multiplier"—the extra pressure that could destabilize countries where resources such as water and arable land are limited and governance is weak. In a 2015 report to Congress, the Pentagon pointed to the Syrian civil war as an example of how climate change can aggravate the fragility of a nation already beset by tensions and unpopular leaders.
Researchers are now looking into how drought and higher temperatures fueled by climate change might be driving the migration of thousands of people from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua northward to Mexico and the United States. The migration has become a political flashpoint in the U.S., as President Trump's insistence on funding for a controversial border wall to deter migrants has led to the longest government shutdown in American history.
A Global Challenge & National Security Threat
The GAO has written in past reports that climate change exposes the U.S. to profound fiscal risks. In February 2017, it recommended a "cohesive strategic approach" to planning for climate risks across the federal government.
In its new report on climate change and migration, it focused on the work of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Defense Department because of their roles in promoting national interests, development and stability overseas. The report was written at the request of five Democratic senators, including Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who voiced concern this week about the findings.
"Our diplomats lack the clear guidance they need to deal with climate change," Markey said, in a written statement. "Because climate change is a global challenge and a national security threat, the United States needs to prepare and take preemptive measures for an uncertain future instead of just waiting to address unforeseen consequences."
The report said that the Obama administration did not focus on climate change as a driver of migration. But it did take steps to ensure federal agencies factored climate change into strategic planning by issuing executive orders on international development, requiring federal agencies to gather and disseminate information on climate preparedness, and issuing a 2016 Presidential Memo on "Climate Change and National Security."
In March 2017, Trump signed his own executive order nullifying all but the international development order. The White House described them at the time as an undue "burden" on the development of fossil fuels.
Besides getting rid of guidance for diplomats to better plan for country-level threats from climate change, the administration has also cut foreign aid to developing nations and international organizations that would help address climate risks.
The joint strategic plan between the State Department and USAID in 2015 described climate change as "an urgent and growing threat to U.S. national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows and conflicts over basic resources like food and water." The 2017 joint plan does not take climate change into account, the report said.
The U.S. has also pulled back from multinational collaboration on climate risks, beyond its withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate accord. The report noted that there is a UN Global Compact for Migration that would work in part to mitigate the impact that climate change could have on migration and a Platform on Disaster Displacement to address the needs of people displaced by climate-driven disasters. The U.S. has declined to participate in both initiatives.
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If the idea that the nation is currently shut down over “a wall” or “steel slats” or “a barrier” didn’t already seem idiotic enough, the truth is far, far worse than it seems. As the New York Times reports, there was never any actual factual basis for the wall. Instead, the whole idea was created by advisers looking to package immigration in a way that made it simple for even Donald Trump to remember.
As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.
No one looked at statistics. No one considered alternatives. No one had a study, or a plan, or even a theory about how this would solve America’s immigration problems.
What they had was a need to create a term short enough, and an idea simple enough, that it could be repeated night after night, without Trump wandering off into discussions of how much he’d like to date his daughter, or how he’d like some chocolate cake. The entire idea of the wall—the entire idea—isn’t Trump’s. It’s not even a real strategy. It was just something his advisers fed him to keep him on topic.
“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled telling Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser. “We’re going to get him to talk about he’s going to build a wall.”
The world’s greatest nation is being sidelined over a mnemonic aid.
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181 nations just voted to help refugees — except the far-right United States and Hungary
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no lnx
The Washington Post
‘These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas.’
A migrant girl from Honduras, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America, cries after running away from tear gas thrown by U.S. border agents. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)]
By Tim Elfrink and
Fred Barbash November 26 at 6:09 AM
A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents.
A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spreads.
The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 men, women and children, pictured in a wider-angle photo fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the images, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with President Trump’s portrayal of the caravan migrants as “criminals” and “gang members.”
Trump officials said that authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing “projectiles” at Customs and Border Protection personnel.
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The chaos erupted Sunday around the bustling San Ysidro border crossing, which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said was closed “to ensure public safety in response to large numbers of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.”
But Democratic leaders, human rights advocates and others focused on the images of the two children in particular. Many pointed to the children left gagging from the gas attack as evidence that Trump’s push against a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America had gone too far.
“Shooting tear gas at children is not who we are as Americans,” tweeted Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Seeking asylum is not a crime. We must be better than this.”
[Why tear gas, lobbed at migrants on the southern border, is banned in warfare]
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, argued that images of kids sprinting from tear gas run counter to American ideals.
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“These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas,” he tweeted. “Women and children who left their lives behind — seeking peace and asylum — were met with violence and fear. That’s not my America. We’re a land ofrefuge. Of hope. Of freedom. And we will not stand for this.”
Others, such as Democratic Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, noted that the families at the border crossing were fleeing violent conditions in Central America and had the right to seek asylum.
Asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime.
It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany.
It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rwanda.
It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria.
And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America. https://t.co/qhv7Rr1itn
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 25, 2018
Unlike the relatively bipartisan criticism of Trump’s now-abandoned family-separation method of deterring migrants, the initial outrage at the tear-gassing of children appeared to come primarily from Democrats and critics of the president.
Some on the right expressed the view that the migrants could avoid getting tear-gassed by not hurling projectiles or by not attempting to cross the border “illegally.”
If you don’t want to be hit with tear gas when entering a country illegally then don’t enter the country illegally
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— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 26, 2018
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Trump’s response in an early-morning tweet on Monday was to call for Mexico to return the migrants to their home countries, and to again threaten to “close the border permanently.”
That’s never been done, and experts interviewed by The Washington Post on Sunday night knew of no provision explicitly allowing Trump to permanently close the borders. Most of the border, with the exception of designated crossings, is already closed, which doesn’t stop migrants from entering.
[Borderline: Navigating the invisible boundary and physical barriers that define the U.S.-Mexico border]
So it probably would not solve Trump’s problems with asylum seekers, who, by law, must be allowed to present their claims if in fact they are able to cross the border anywhere.
“This is yet another of several Trump attempts to change what he disparagingly calls the policy of ‘catch and release’ without or against legal authority,” said Yale Law School’s Harold Hongju Koh, legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama administration. “All have been blocked. What he does not understand,” Koh said in an email, “is that everyone crossing our Southern border is not illegally present. Those with valid asylum claims have a legal right to assert those claims and remain.”
Closing the border “permanently” or otherwise would conflict with the asylum laws, agreed Peter S. Margulies, an immigration law expert at Roger Williams University School of Law.
Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries. Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A. We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2018
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Had the migrants made it to the border and presented themselves as asylum seekers, U.S. officials would have been required by federal law to consider their claim before sending them back to Mexico. Indeed, they are required to do so whether the migrants cross at a designated point of entry or anywhere else.
U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar forcefully reminded Trump of that law last week when he issued a nationwide restraining order against the president’s plan to consider asylum requests only from migrants who cross at legal checkpoints. It was Tigar’s ruling that prompted Trump to lash out last week against the “Obama judge” and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which in turn brought a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Trump’s legal options appear limited. “The border is very long,” Margulies told The Post. But if the administration can “stop people just short of the border, there’s a better argument that those people are not entitled to asylum. I think it would be terrible policy and I think it would be morally repugnant,” he said, “but the administration would be on better legal footing.”
Attempting to stop them short of the border appears to be just what Trump may be planning.
The Post’s Joshua Partlow and Nick Miroff, citing Mexican officials and senior members of President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s transition team, reported that the administration is working with the incoming government of Mexico on a plan that would require asylum seekers to wait in that country while their claims moved through U.S. courts.
While Trump hinted at such a possibility in a tweet Saturday, he did not offer any detail. He could try to invoke an exception to the law called “safe third country,” which permits the government to keep asylum seekers in another country, in this case Mexico, under a bilateral agreement while their claims are being considered in the United States.
However, there are several catches to that provision, American Civil Liberties Union immigration attorney Lee Gelernt told The Post on Sunday night. If and when an agreement is worked out, the law says, “there needs to be an assurance that individuals waiting on the Mexican side are safe, not just from the Mexican government but from gangs” and others.
"We believe it would be impossible for the U.S.” to make that assurance, he added.
Tim Elfrink joined The Washington Post in 2018
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https://www.alternet.org/isnt-first-time-white-supremacists-have-tried-cancel-birthright-citizenship
In the latest in a long string of attacks on immigration, this week Trump declared he would issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship. Established by the 14th amendment to grant citizenship to freed slaves, the idea that all people born in the United States are U.S. citizens, regardless of race or where their parents came from, has long been upheld by the courts and the Constitution. But this is not the first time White supremacists have tried to restrict the rights of citizenship along racial lines.
This story first appeared at YES! Magazine.
In a little-known episode from World War II, nativist agitators who had led earlier efforts to exclude Asian immigrant communities—and paved the way for Japanese American incarceration—attempted to strip U.S.-born Nisei of citizenship, claiming their “racial characteristics” made them “unfit for American citizenship.” The legal fight that ensued is both a reminder that we’ve been here before and an example of our long history of resisting attacks on our right to call this place home.
....[china 1880's]
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baby jail reboot right BEFORE midterms?!
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https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-migrant-caravan-coverage-spectacularly-backfires-panel-independent-voters-rejects-blatant
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ginni 2013 pix
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ginni-thomas-caravan-fake-meme
...
invasion thank gof for trump"
...BVut sharing extremist right-wing content is not a new thing for Thomas, a conservative activist who has made frequent use of social media. Earlier this year, she shared posts attacking the Parkland kids and praising the "#WalkAway" movement, a fake campaign of Russian trolls pretending to be people of color leaving the Democratic Party.
The migrant caravan, which consists of thousands of men, women, and children fleeing civil strife in Central America and heading toward the United States, is not actually anything new or unusual; similar groups of migrants have routinely formed over the last 20 years, and there is no evidence anyone in the group poses a danger. But it has still become the fear du jour in the Republican Party, particularly among those hoping to gin up enough fear among President Donald Trump's core voters to turn them out to the polls and counteract a blue wave.
Trump has claimed with no evidence that "unknown Middle Easterners" are traveling with the caravan. And last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) theorized that left-wing Jewish billionaire George Soros is secretly funding the caravan, in the hope that it will somehow disrupt the midterm election in favor of Democrats.
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https://www.alternet.org/laura-ingrahams-demographic-changes-rant-not-matter-law-and-order-its-rallying-cry-trumps-base
digby
The big earthquake of the 2018 primary season so far has been the unseating of powerful Democratic House leader Joe Crowley by 28-year-old democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez in New York. This isn't a common occurrence, needless to say, but it does happen from time to time, most recently four years ago when an obscure economics professor named David Brat unseated GOP House leader and "young gun" Eric Cantor in Virginia. At that time, much of the chattering class chalked the defeat up to "all politics is local," saying that Cantor had neglected his district. That analysis was wrong. Brat won because of one very hot issue that was boiling over in the right-wing media: immigration.
The right-wing star most responsible for pushing that issue into the GOP mainstream was talk radio host Laura Ingraham.
Before her promotion to Fox News primetime host, Ingraham used her talk radio show to stump for Brat and rail against Cantor. She even went to the district to campaign for Brat, solely on the basis of his hardcore stance against the unaccompanied minors from Central America who were in the news at the time gathering at the border seeking asylum. Ingraham was on a tear during that crisis, ranting daily about the ungrateful little wretches coming to our sacred borders asking for an undeserved handout. When she heard that some of these refugees weren't taking to the food in their detention centers she described them as spoiled whiners and mocked them by playing an old TV commercial with the slogan "yo qiero Taco Bell?". She made this declaration to the kids themselves:
Oh no you won't. This is our country... Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No you won't.
During this period Donald Trump was seriously considering jumping into the presidential election and he had his friend Roger Stone's hired hand, Sam Nunberg, listen to thousands of hours of talk radio and report back to him about what they were talking about. He didn't have any strong feelings about immigration at the timebut when he got a strong response at the conservative CPAC gathering that year for saying “we either have borders or we don’t,” he was all in. He rode that anti-immigration wave all the way to the White House.
Meanwhile, the Republican establishment had been trying to tamp down this growing xenophobia because their 2012 presidential campaign "autopsy" made it very clear that the GOP was in grave danger of becoming an all-white party in a country that was becoming less and less white. The lesson that the activists like Ingraham took from that was to try to reverse the trend and rid the country of as many people of color as possible. And they were joined by a faction in the US Congress led by the man who would become one of Trump's earliest supporters, Senator Jeff Sessions.
In 2015, he and his aide, now Senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, drafted a documentthat laid out a plan to end not only illegal immigration but put a stop to all legal immigration as well, arguing that the country could not "absorb" any more people from other cultures. It pointed to the 1924 Immigration Act, which curbed immigration of most non-whites, Catholics, Jews, Arabs, southern Italians for several decades, as its model. From the moment Sessions signed on with Trump (and subsequently submitted to Trump's ongoing ritual humiliation of him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation), it has been clear that he did so because he saw the best opportunity he's ever had to advance this nativist and racist agenda.
The Attorney General has no greater supporter in that effort than Laura Ingraham who caused some big ripples again this week with a xenophobic rant on her Fox News show in which she attacked both legal and illegal immigration as "The left's effort to remake America":
She went on to describe lurid details of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in much the same language President Trump commonly uses to paint them as deviant and subhuman. And then she asked the president to give an address to the nation from the Oval Office:
The president can be so persuasive, so give us the whole truth, Mr. President, the good, the bad, and yes, the uncomfortable. This is a national emergency and he must demand that Congress act now. There is something slipping away in this country and it's not about race or ethnicity. It's what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.
After another round of widespread backlash in reaction to her rant, Ingraham returned to Fox News on Thursday to insist that "despite what some may be contending – I made explicitly clear that my commentary had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe, and her citizens safe and prosperous.”
First, it is not a national emergency. Border crossings are far below what they were a decade ago. And this president is the last person on earth to make a case for the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution since he demonstrates on a daily basis that he has no respect for the first or even a rudimentary understanding of the second.
Nonetheless, this policy is being implemented. The Muslim ban, ICE deportations and the horrifying separation of families at the border are just the beginning. NBC News reported this week that Trump's unctuous factotum Stephen Miller has written a proposal to "make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare." The purpose is to reduce the number of immigrants who obtain citizenship and, therefore, the right to vote. That's what's known as a "win-win" in the Trump administration.
Yesterday it was announced thatMelania Trump's parents got in just under the wire. Sponsored by their daughter and her husband under the much-maligned "family migration" system they became US citizens. It's unknown just what "merit" the president believes they have that qualifies them under his new proposals but one can't help but notice that they are Caucasian. So Laura Ingraham no doubt has little concern that they will be polluting our precious American culture like those little children at the border.
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With the rise of President Donald Trump, Fox News has drifted toward advocating even more explicitly for a white supremacist ideology. In her latest tirade against immigration Wednesday night, host Laura Ingraham delivered one of the most patently anti-immigrant and racist screeds from the network yet.
"It does seem like the America we know and love doesn't exist anymore," she said. "Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people. And they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and legal immigration, that of course progressives love."
While it's true that the size of the immigrant population in the United States has grown in recent decades, there's simply no evidence that it's causing the kinds of problems Republicans like to imagine and stir up outage about with their fear-mongering. And a large immigrant population is nothing new in American history — the country had similar levels of immigration in the late 19th century. And despite Ingraham's claims to the contrary, most Americans have no problem with the level of immigration in the country. According to Pew Research Center, 38 percent of Americans want to see immigration continue at present levels, while 32 percent actually want to see immigration increased.
Only 24 percent of Americans desire less immigration to the U.S. — down from 53 percent in 2001.
Of course, that's not what Ingraham and her ilk would like you to think. They'd like you to think everyone is as terrified of immigrants as they are.
And despite what you hear from politicians like Trump, unauthorized entry into the country is not a growing problem. There are fewer undocumented immigrants in the United States now than there were in 2009, and the rate of net illegal immigration has been about zero for a decade.
"Fox used to just be sort of the country club style of racism, which is extremely awful....but they've crossed the threshold now. Just straight up white nationalism every single night," tweeted Andrew Lawrence, a senior researcher for Media Matters who first discovered the clip.
Watch the clip below:
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https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-revoking-birthright-citizenship-rights-next-battlecry-and-what-you-can-do-protect-it
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1911-report-set-america-on-path-screening-out-undesirable-immigrants-180969636/
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As the Movement to Abolish ICE Gains Mainstream Support, Fox News Goes into Attack Mode
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants.
By Bobby Lewis / Media Matters June 30, 2018, 5:41 AM GMT
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Fox News is scrambling in response to the grass-roots movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has begun seeping into mainstream progressive and Democratic politics. On the evening of June 28, all three of the network’s prime-time shows aired segments attacking the Abolish ICE movement, as did Fox & Friends the next morning.
As the Trump administration is stepping up mass deportations, separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and interning immigrant children in cages, calls to abolish ICE have spread from a grass-roots Twitter phenomenon to the political mainstream. Multiple candidates for prominent elected positions have endorsed the movement, including New York congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who ran on the issue leading up to her upset primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY). Elected Democrats are also beginning to endorse the movement. In the House, three Democrats support abolishing ICE and a fourth, Rep. Mark Pocan (WI), introduced legislation to abolish ICE and investigate possibilities for “a humane immigration enforcement system.” And in the Senate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) endorsed abolishing ICE, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” Even some ICE agents themselves have called for the agency to be dissolved.
Meanwhile, on Fox, the network’s stars were allied in their defense of ICE. After a brief update on the June 28 mass shooting at an Annapolis, MD, newspaper, Tucker Carlson -- who uses his platform to promote white nationalism -- opened his show by denouncing #AbolishICE as an “ideological revolution on the left” and fearmongering about the criminals and drugs that he claimed would flood the country without ICE.
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Sean Hannity suggested that members of “the left” are attacking ICE because special counsel Robert Mueller has produced “literally zero evidence that the president ever did anything wrong” in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, causing progressives to “unravel.”
Laura Ingraham complained that “Occupy ICE protesters want to, again, make it impossible for our immigration investigators to do their jobs.” And she ridiculed protesters in Washington, D.C., who were calling for abolishment of ICE as “Jiffy Pop” on account of the “tin foil robes” they wore, which were intended to resemblethe foil blankets ICE is giving detained children.
And Acting ICE Director Tom Homan appeared on Fox & Friends, his favorite safe space, using the Annapolis shooting to argue that anti-ICE protesters “should be respecting law enforcement across the board,” including ICE agents. Homan also said the protesters “need to educate themselves” about ICE’s activities and that they are seeking “better rules for illegal alien families than we have for U.S. citizen families.”
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants. (ICE also mislabels some immigrants as gang members in order to deport them.) Along with the hosts’ efforts, guests on the network lie and mislead about immigration issues to defend the agency’s critical role in President Donald Trump’s agenda of implementing mass deportations.
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PVTization
AN msnbc
STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): In today's money, power, politics: private prisons. They are cashing in on President Trump's get-tough policies at the border. Since 1997, the Federal Bureau of Prison has paid private companies to build and operate prisons to ease capacity at government-run facilities. The share of federal prisoners nationwide held in private prisons has surged from just 3 percent in the late 90's to more than 20 percent today. The biggest factor fueling growth is, you guessed it, immigration detention centers.
Who are these companies? CoreCivic, also known as CCA; Management and Training Corporation, known as MTC; and the GEO Group are three of the biggest players in the private prison business. Together, they operate some 14 federal facilities nationwide, providing 27,000 beds for federal inmates, and that is growing.
That growth was under threat when the Obama administration attempted to phase out all contracts with private prisons. The big three players decided to take action, and theyspent big on the 2016 campaign. Guess how. GEO donated $1.1 million to Republican candidates and political action committees. CoreCivic spent another $1.1 million on lobbying efforts. And MTC spent nearly half a million bucks to do the same. And those efforts, they certainly paid off.
When President Trump reversed the phase out decision early in his administration, that is despite a2014 lawsuit accusing GEO of forcing immigration detainees to work for little or no pay by threatening them with solitary confinement. Sounds like slavery, doesn't it?Critics say the private business model encourages cost-cutting and even slavery to boost its bottom line profits. And guess what? It's working.
Since President Trump's election, shares for GEO have shot up 25 percent, while CoreCivic stock is 12 percent higher. MTC is not publicly traded, but its revenues are said to be robust. I want to point out some of the larger shareholders, if you want to check your 401(k), BlackRock and Vanguard, and granted, they may own them as part of an index, but they choose to do them.
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https://www.alternet.org/behind-criminal-immigration-law-eugenics-and-white-supremacy
many lnx
Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy
The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.
By Ian MacDougal / Pro Publica June 20, 2018, 2:16 AM GMT
Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.
The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)
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On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the wails of migrant children as young as 4. Liberals and conservatives alike have condemned the policy, calling it “cruel,” an “atrocity,” and “inconsistent with our American values.”
Top Trump administration officials have held their ground. “We are enforcing the laws passed by Congress,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen asserted Monday. Her message echoed one Sessions had delivered to law enforcement officers in Indiana last week. “If you violate the law, you subject yourself to prosecution,” he said.
The federal law they say they are enforcing makes it a crime for foreign citizens to cross (or attempt to cross) the border into the U.S. anywhere other than an official port of entry. A first offense is a misdemeanor; a second unlawful entry is a felony.
The law’s ancestry dates back to World War I. Till that point, U.S. immigration laws had tended to be all or nothing: either no limits at all — or blanket bans for certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Others were free to enter provided they weren’t “lunatics,” polygamists, prostitutes, “suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease,” or so on.
The result was floods of immigrants: Between 1901 and 1910, for example, close to 9 million came to the U.S. As that happened, anti-immigrant attitudes mounted, with mass influxes from parts of Europe associated in the popular imagination with a litany of social problems, like urban poverty and squalor.
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In May 1918, after the U.S. had entered World War I, Congress passed a statute called the Passport Act that gave the president the power to restrict the comings and goings of foreign citizens during wartime. A few months later, however, the war ended — and with it, the restrictions on border crossings.
Federal officials saw potential in the criminal provisions of the Passport Act — a maximum 20-year sentence — as a tool for deterring immigration. So prosecutors ignored the expiration of the law and continued to indict migrants under the Passport Act for unlawful entry into the U.S.
Anti-immigration sentiment continued to climb and the rhetoric of the era has resonance today. One anti-immigration group at the time claimed that immigrants tended to be “vicious and criminal” — the “bootleggers, gangsters, and racketeers of large cities.” The war, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai has written, “raised nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment to a high pitch.”
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In response, Congress began clamping down. With the Immigration Act of 1924, it capped the flow at about 165,000 people a year, a small fraction of previous levels The statute’s quotas curtailed migration from southern and eastern Europe severely. Another 1924 law — the Oriental Exclusion Act — banned most immigration from Asia. At the same time, Congress made it easier to deport non-citizens for immigration violations.
In 1925, a federal appeals court put a halt to the practice of indicting migrants under the Passport Act outside wartime. But immigration officials liked what they’d seen, and by 1927, they were working on a replacement.
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Two men spearheaded the effort that would lead Congress to criminalize unlawful entry into the United States. They were motivated by eugenics and white supremacy.
The first was James Davis, who was Secretary of Labor from 1921 to 1930. A Republican originally appointed by President Warren Harding, Davis was himself an immigrant from Wales who went by “Puddler Jim,” a reference to his job as a youthful worker in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. At the time, the Department of Labor oversaw immigration, and Davis had grown disturbed by what he’d seen.
Davis was a committed eugenicist, and he believed principles of eugenics should guide immigration policy, according to The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot by the historian Hans Vought. It was necessary to draw a distinction, Davis had written in 1923, between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.”
In November 1927, Davis proposed a set of immigration reforms in the pages of the New York Times. Among his goals: “the definite lessening and possibly, in time, the complete checking of the degenerate and the bearer of degenerates.” One “phase of the immigration problem,” Davis wrote, was the “surreptitious entry of aliens” into the United States in numbers that “cannot even be approximately estimated.”
Deportation alone wasn’t enough to deter illegal immigration, Davis wrote. There was nothing disincentivizing the migrant from turning around and trying again. “Endeavoring to stop this law violation” by deportation only, he wrote, “is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying ‘You have no right here; see that you don’t come in again.’”
An immigrant who enters the country unlawfully, he concluded, “should be treated as a law violator and punished effectively.”
To bring his vision to fruition, Davis teamed up with a senator from South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat, was “a proud and unreconstructed white supremacist,” UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2017 book City of Inmates.
Migrants from Mexico were one group whose numbers the increasingly powerful nativist elements in Congress hadn’t managed to restrict. Mexican workers were key to the booming economy of the southwest. Regional employers, particularly in the agricultural sector, had successfully lobbied Congress to block any bill that would choke off their primary source of inexpensive labor. As a result, migration from Mexico soared, with many Mexicans making illegal border crossings to avoid the cost and inconvenience of customs stations.
Blease saw in Davis’s proposal for criminal penalties a way to advance his vision of a white America, and he believed it would bridge the gap between the nativists clamoring for quotas and southwestern congressmen resisting them. Large-scale farmers didn’t mind criminal penalties, Hernández writes, so long as the law was enforced once the harvest was over.
The legislation wasn’t without its opponents, as the UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly documented in a 2010 study of immigration prosecutions. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill. The ACLU felt it was unfair and unlikely to deter migration. An immigrant “may be quite ignorant of this law before he starts on his journey,” the group told Congress.
Despite the ACLU’s objections, a Republican-controlled Congress passed Davis and Blease’s bill in 1929. A Republican president, Herbert Hoover, signed it into law.
The law made it a crime to enter the United States unlawfully and, in so doing, “created the criminalization of the border,” Eagly said.
The statute was swiftly put to use. Between July 1929 and June 1930, according to a Department of Labor report, prosecutors brought more than 6,000 unlawful entry cases. “It is believed that it will prove an effective deterrent,” the report’s author wrote. (In his recent memo, Sessions made similar claims about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.)
But the law didn’t reduce migration. By 1933, the Labor Department concluded that its rosy outlook had been wrong. The 1929 law “does not seem to have the deterrent effect expected,” noted a Labor Department report published that year.
It blamed budget limitations and judges wary of meting out serious sentences if a defendant was going to be deported anyway.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression achieved what prosecutions and deportations had not. Immigration plunged as the labor market in the United States dried up. Prosecutions for unlawful entry dropped to about 5,000 a year, according to a 2012 examination of the law by Doug Keller in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.
A shortage of labor during World War II prompted the U.S. to reverse course and encourage migration of temporary workers from Mexico through what it called the Bracero program. (The word refers to manual laborers in Spanish.)
Despite the earlier lessons, federal prosecutors began to focus their attention on bringing unlawful entry cases against Mexican migrants to deter workers from going around the Bracero program. By 1951, there were 15,000 illegal entry and re-entry prosecutions a year.
At the same time, Congress was working to overhaul American immigration law. The effort was spearheaded by two Democrats: Sen. Patrick McCarran and Rep. Francis Walter. Both were staunch anti-Communists who saw immigration — particularly from Eastern Europe and Asia — as posing a risk that Soviet or Maoist agents would infiltrate the country.
Their law is best known for preserving a quota system that meant about 85 percent of immigration visas annually went to people from northern and western Europe. But it also made a crucial change in the unlawful entry law.
In a counterintuitive move, Congress decided to reduce the penalties for unlawful entry — to a maximum of six months in prison. (It also added a felony provision for any additional illegal entry convictions.)
The change wasn’t driven by compassion or a shift away from criminalizing unlawful immigration. Rather, it anticipated the creation of federal magistrate courts that would handle the cases, according to Eagly, the UCLA law professor. A defendant facing a misdemeanor charge punishable by six months or less generally doesn’t have a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial. Once Congress established federal magistrate courts, prosecutors could bring criminal charges against far larger numbers of defendants.
A Democratic-controlled Congress passed the law in 1952, but it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. His veto message decried “carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law.” Congress was unmoved and overrode his veto. (In this sense, Trump is correct that Democrats bear some responsibility for the unlawful entry law that underlies his administration’s new immigration policy.)
The unlawful entry statute has remained largely unchanged since 1952. In 1968, however, Congress finally passed a law establishing federal magistrate courts, allowing for a major expansion of charges under the unlawful entry law. Without the need to go through the grand jury process or deal with potential jury trials, immigration prosecutions — almost all for unlawful entry — shot up, Eagly found in her 2010 study: from 2,536 cases nationwide in 1968 to 17,858 in 1974.
The trend culminated in programs like Operation Streamline during the George W. Bush administration, in which magistrate judges along the border took simultaneous mass guilty pleas for unlawful entry. (An appeals court ended the practice in 2009.)
The use of the law hasn’t been a partisan matter. The number of such cases spiked to nearly 50,000 in the last year of the Bush administration, and it stayed in that range for most of the Obama administration, according to federal government data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By 2016, the number had fallen to about 35,000 — still higher than all but the last year of the Bush administration.
But the number of unlawful entry cases fell, the TRAC data shows, during Trump’s first year in office, to 27,000. (It had begun to rise again in recent months, however, even before Sessions announced the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.) Convictions for immigration crimes now account for more than half of all federal criminal convictions.
Filed under:
Immigration
The Trump Administration
ProPublica
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breaking up family looks like tipping pt? s sanders, fox calls for end of WH breifing? she will bail?
https://www.alternet.org/cnn-panel-derails-after-rick-santorum-defends-trumps-barbaric-immigration-policy-and-promptly
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storming the wall, izzy award
https://www.amazon.com/Storming-Wall-Migration-Homeland-Security-ebook/dp/B06VY1R3FL
https://vimeo.com/243715264 sonali
poorest 48 country? will have 5x kia than rich
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tucker-carlson-unleashes-racist-broadside-fox-news-against-latino-immigrants
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https://www.alternet.org/environment/global-crisis-thats-creating-215-million-refugees-each-year
...he menhid momentarily as a Mexican army truck with masked, heavily armed soldiers drove by. Given Washington’s**pressure**on Mexico to fortify its southern border, U.S. Border Patrol agents might have trained those very soldiers. As soon as they were gone, the Hondurans told me that they had been stuck here for six long days. The night before, they had tried to jump on La Bestia, but it was moving too fast.
When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.
For Central America, this was not an anomaly. Not only had the region been experiencing increasing mid-summer droughts, but also, as the best climate forecasting models predict, a “much greater occurrence of very dry seasons” lies in its future. Central America is, in fact, “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, as University of Arizona hydrology and atmospheric sciences professor Chris Castro told me. And on that isthmus, the scrambling of the seasons, an increasingly deadly combination of drenching hurricanes and parching droughts, will hit people already living in the most precarious economic and political situations. Across Honduras, for example, more than76% of the population lives in conditions of acute poverty. The coming climate breakdowns will only worsen that or will, as Castro put it, be part of a global situation in which “the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”
Talking with those farmers in the Tenosique train yard felt, in a way, like a scene from a sequel to the movie The Road in which a father and son walk across a post-apocalyptic North America devastated by an unknown cataclysm. In reality, though, I was just in a typical border zone of the Anthropocene, the proposed new geologic era characterized by human activity as the dominant force on the climate and environment. And these young, unarmed farmers with failing harvests are now facing the only welcome this planet presently has to offer for such victims of climate change: expanding border regimes of surveillance, razor-wire walls, guns, and incarceration centers.
As they keep heading north, they will have to be on guard against ever more army and police patrols, while enduring hunger and thirst as well as painful separations from their families. They will have to evade endless roadside checkpoints, which Fray Tomás Tómas González Castillo, director of a nearby shelter for migrants in Tenosique, told me were almost “impossible” to avoid, at a time when, he noted, “organized crime” controlled the trains.
Such a predicament is hardly unique to the Mexico-Guatemalan border region or even the U.S.-Mexican version of the same. Think of the maritime divide between North Africa and the European Union or the Jordanian border where patrols now reportedly shoot at “anything that moves” coming from Syria -- or so a Jordanian official who prefers to remain anonymous told me. And Syria was just one of the places where the ever-increasing impacts of climate change, migration, and tightly enforced border zones intersected.
Now, homeland security regimes are increasingly unleashing their wrath on the world’s growing numbers of displaced people, sharpening the divide between the secure and the dispossessed. Whether in Mexico or on the Mediterranean Sea, as ever more human beings find themselves uprooted from their homes and desperate, such dynamics will only intensify in the decades to come. In the process, the geopolitics and potentially the very geography of the globe will be reshaped. It’s not just Donald Trump. Everywhere on Planet Earth, we seem to be entering the era of the wall.
The Displaced
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the “impact and threat of climate-related hazards” displaced an average of 21.5 million people annually between 2008 and 2015. The growing impact of the Anthropocene -- of intensifying droughts, rising seas, and mega-storms -- is already adding to a host of other factors, including poverty, war, and persecution, that in these years have unsettled record numbers of people. While many of the climate-displaced stay close to home, hoping to salvage both their lives and livelihoods, ever more are crossing international borders in what many are now calling a “refugee crisis.”
“Catastrophic convergence” is the term sociologist Christian Parenti uses to describe this twenty-first-century turmoil, since many of these factors combine to displace staggering numbers of people. As Camila Minerva of Oxfam puts it, “The poorest and the most marginalized are five times more likely to be displaced and to remain so for a longer time than people in higher income countries and it is increasing with climate change.”
Though the numbers are often debated, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees suggests that climate breakdowns will displace 250 million people by 2050. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre suggests that those numbers could actually range from 150 million to a staggering 350 million by that year. In reporting on how climate change is already affecting Mexico City, Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of the New York Times, cited a report suggesting that the number may be far higher than that, possibly reaching 700 million -- and that, by 2050, 10% percent of all Mexicans between 15 and 65 might be heading north, thanks to rising temperatures, droughts, and floods.
“Although the exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain,” wrote the authors of the report In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.” And here’s the sad reality of our moment: for such developments, the world is remarkably unprepared. There isn’t even a legal framework for dealing with climate refugees, either in international law or the laws of specific countries. The only possible exception: New Zealand’s “special refugee visas” for small numbers of Pacific Islanders displaced by rising seas.
The only real preparations for such a world are grim ones: walls and the surveillance technology that goes with them. Most climate-displaced people traveling internationally without authorization will sooner or later run up against those walls and the armed border guards meant to turn them back. And if the United States or the European Union is their destination, any possible doors such migrants might enter will be slammed shut by countries that, historically, are the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluters and so most implicated in climate change. (Between 1850 and 2011, the United States was responsible for 27% of the world’s emissions and the countries of the European Union, 25%.)...
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agw refugees: https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/The_Grapes_of_Wrath#Migration.2FHomelessness
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https://www.propublica.org/article/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported
...The previous year, Arias had been mowing the median of Highway 59 just over the Alabama line when his riding lawnmower hit a hole, throwing him into the air. He slammed back in his seat, landing hard on his lower back.
Arias received pain medication, physical therapy and steroid injections through his employer’s workers’ compensation insurance. But the pain in his back made even walking or sitting a struggle. So his doctor recommended an expensive surgery to implant a device that sends electrical pulses to the spinal cord to relieve chronic pain. Six days after that appointment, the insurance company suddenly discovered that Arias had been using a deceased man’s Social Security number and rejected not only the surgery, but all of his past and future care.
Desperate, Arias hired an attorney to help him pursue the injury benefits that Florida law says all employees, including unauthorized immigrants, are entitled to receive. Then one morning after he dropped two of his boys off at school, Arias was pulled over and arrested, while his toddler watched from his car seat.
Arias was charged with using a false Social Security number to get a job and to file for workers’ comp. The state insurance fraud unit had been tipped off by a private investigator hired by his employer’s insurance company.
With his back still in pain from three herniated or damaged discs, Arias spent a year and a half in jail and immigration detention before he was deported
...
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- Ralph talks to historian James Whitman about how the Nazis in the thirties modeled a lot of their racial policies on our very own Jim Crow laws and what that means for us today*
hitler used US immigr law as model (more then eugenics?_
https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-26-2017/
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*http://www.alternet.org/environment/many-native-communities-are-being-forced-relocate-due-climate-change
*
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https://www.numbersusa.com/content/elections/candidates/republican/tim-griffin.html
scorecard
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TP:
lthough Ike Skelton, the long-time representative in Missouri’s fourth congressional district, was far from a supporter of LGBT equality, Vicky Hartzler, the Republican who defeated him in this year’s election, has based her political career on supporting discrimination against gays and lesbians.
A former state legislator, she was the spokeswomanand public face of the Coalition to Protect Marriage in Missouri, which successfully amended the state Constitution to include a ban same-sex marriage (which was already banned by statute) in 2004. The New York Times writes that her group used “church functions, yard signs and a ‘marriage chain’ of rallies across the state,” and Hartzler “said she hoped that the outcome would send a loud message to the rest of the country: ‘Here in the heartland we have a heart for families, and this is how deeply we feel about marriage.'”
Her work helped her receive praise from Religious Right leaders like Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, andPenny Nanceof Concerned Women PAC.
Mother Jones positedthat Hartzler might be the “most anti-gay candidate in America”– she believes that repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will “put us at risk,” maintains that sexual orientation is a choice and therefore gay people aren’t entitled to civil rights, and dubbed hate crimes legislation one of the “the extreme agenda items of the gay movement.”
Paul Guequierre of the Human Rights Campaign told Mother Jones that while “Ike Skelton has not been a friend of the LGBT community,” unlike Hartzler, “he does not wake up in the morning thinking about what he can do to harm the LGBT community.”
A staunch anti-choice activist, Hartzler supported legislation which “would have allowed for prosecutors to charge women who obtained late-term abortions with murder” and “also have permitted second-degree murder charges to be filed against doctors who performed such procedures.” She was also the chief sponsor of a billthat would pressure women seeking an abortion to view their sonograms. Throughout her career in the State House, she consistently receivedperfect ratings from the right-wingMissouri Family Network.
Hartzler wrote a book for Christian activists running for office called “Running God’s Way: Step by Step to a Successful Political Campaign,” which “discusseshow to run a political campaign by using events and stories in the Bible as a guide.” Phyllis Schlafly gave her alaudatory introduction at an Eagle Forum event, calling her book “a manual for action.”
In a profileby the American Family Association, Hartzler said that she found inspiration from God to run for public office at the age of nine, and her book maintains that “Christians must become more active in politics if they are to have the impact God calls them to have.” Hartzler said that her book provides Christian candidates with “the tools and inspiration they need to bring God’s light in a darkening world.”
According to one sympathetic reviewin a local newspaper, Hartzler’s book “praises Absalom — a rebellious son of King David, God’s anointed leader for Israel and according to Christian theology an early example of divinely ordained rule prefiguring that of Jesus Christ — as being the ‘first politician’ and an example for modern political leaders. In Hartzler’s words, ‘Absalom won over the hearts of the people of Israel using time-tested campaign strategies. We, too, can campaign successfully following these same guidelines.'”
A climate change denier, Hartzler assertedthat she does not believe in climate change since she read “some articles that [said] it’s actually decreasing, that we have climates getting colder…and certainly, I don’t believe that if there is a climate change that man has a very significant role in that.”
Hartzler ran an ugly
against Ike Skelton, in which she claimed that by voting to reauthorizethe Children’s Health Insurance Program Skelton supported “welfare benefits” for “illegal immigrants,” and criticized him for opposing a measure that would prohibit illegal immigrants from attending public schools as “giving illegal immigrants free education.”
She appealed to Tea Partiers by slamming government spending, as she blastedCongress’s spending plans and said that “we just want the government to leave us alone here in Missouri’s 4th.” However, according to the Kansas City Star, Hartzler’s“farm has received $774,325 in federal subsidies from 1995 to 2009.” She defended the government farm subsidies as a “national defense issue,” and claimed that she would not support cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or defense.
In an editorial board interview, she couldn’t name any programs she would cut funding to other than “the Lady Bird Highway Beautification projects. She indicated that garden clubs could do some of this work along the highways, saving public funds.”
However, Hartzler does appear to support spending money to expand the role of the Navy in Missouri– she arguedthat under Skelton’s watch the landlocked state has “the smallest Navy here that we have had since the early 1960s.”
Hartzler blended her Tea Party lip service and Religious Right advocacy to topple one of the most powerful members of the House, and will now bring her years of experience in anti-equality and anti-choice activism to become a prominent voice of the Far Right in the GOP-led House.
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