Sessions’ ban on administrative closure means that husbands and wives of U.S. citizens awaiting permanent residency could be ripped away from their spouses before they can complete the process. It could mean people not mentally competent to participate in their deportation proceedings could be forced to move forward anyway. And unaccompanied children seeking special protective status could be sent back to dangerous situations before their backlogged visas are available.
The attorney general’s decision to wipe out administrative closure will also contribute to the already massive backlog of more than 700,000 immigration cases, further squeezing the courts and undercutting immigrants’ opportunities to fairly present their claims. Immigration courts are already overburdened and lack important procedural protections. But they have to make critical, sometimes life-or-death decisions about whether immigrants — many of them asylum seekers fleeing persecution or Dreamers with deep roots in their communities — will be admitted or exiled. As Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks has put it, immigration courts are already “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic-court setting.” But with this administration’s policy changes, even that traffic court is turning into a kangaroo court. Mistakes and due process violations will inevitably result.
…
This is just one of many changes Sessions is imposing to make immigration procedures less fair. He is planning to weigh in on an immigration case that could make it much harder to get a “continuance” — another important tool in immigration judges’ toolkit that allows immigrants more time to get a lawyer, prepare their case, or await the outcome of an immigration application. And earlier this year, Sessions’ Department of Justice announced that it would be putting in place ambitious case completion goals on immigration courts and imposing quotas on individual immigration judges.
More than 1,000 female activists marched through Washington Thursday to protest the separation of children from their immigration parents at the US-Mexico border.
US Capitol Police arrested approximately 575 individuals with unlawfully demonstrating, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington.
…
The protestors chanted “abolish ICE” as well as “where are the children?” as well as other chants that are hard to hear within the building.
The activists sat on the floor of the Senate building with emergency blankets to demand Congress act to end the Trump administration policies that criminalize and detain undocumented immigrants and separates their children from them.
Congress is set to leave town for a week-long recess without passing any legislation to address the situation at the US border. On Wednesday, the House failed to pass legislation that would have address in part several high-profile immigration-related policies including border wall funding and an eventual pathway to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
I have been beside myself about the emergence of child concentration camps so I want to give a shout out to all the immigration attorneys doing your respective deity’s work right now
How can the rest of us best support you? I know of RAICES and KIND, and am trying to find the best local legal services groups to donate to
Update, friends–
My law school just emailed alums a bunch of information if we’re interested in helping immigrant families who have been separated at the border.
Here’s the gist.
Opportunities to assist with family separation:
Immigration Justice Campaign (**for attorneys only** powered by the American Immigration Council and American Immigration Lawyers Association)
Donate to organizations that have hosted Pro Bono Caravans and/or In-House Pro Bono Projects and are assisting immigrant families and unaccompanied minors:
KIND – Kids in Need of Defense https://supportkind.org/ They are supporting kids directly at the border and beyond through legal and social services.
RAICES is a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas. Donate generally or specifically to the RAICES bond fund: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund
Dr. Michelle Martin is a researcher and professor at California State University, Fullerton. She has a Masters of Social Work, Masters in Global Policy, and a Ph.D. in Peace Studies (Political Science). She teaches Social Welfare Policy in the Master of Social Work program.
The following is her write-up on the separation of families at the border. She dispells a lot of common myths going around and provides sources which are linked. This might be helpful in your personal debates and discussions.
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There is so much misinformation out there about the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that requires criminal prosecution, which then warrants the separating of parents and children at the southern border. Before responding to a post defending this policy, please do your research…As a professor at a local Cal State, I research and write about these issues, so here, I wrote the following to make it easier for you:
Myth: This is not a new policy and was practiced under Obama and Clinton.
FALSE. The policy to separate parents and children is new and was instituted on 4/6/2018. It was the “brainchild” of John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration, and some allege to be used as a bargaining chip. The policy was approved by Trump, and adopted by Sessions. Prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit.
Myth: This is the only way to deter undocumented immigration.
FALSE. Annual trends show that arrests for undocumented entry are at a 46 year low, and undocumented crossings dropped in 2007, with a net loss (more people leaving than arriving). Deportations have increased steadily though (spiking in 1996 and more recently), because several laws that were passed since 1996 have made it more difficult to gain legal status for people already here, and thus increased their deportations (I address this later under the myth that it’s the Democrats’ fault). What we mostly have now are people crossing the border illegally because they’ve already been hired by a US company, or because they are seeking political asylum. Economic migrants come to this country because our country has kept the demand going. But again, many of these people impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy appear to be political asylum-seekers.
Myth: Most of the people coming across the border are just trying to take advantage of our country by taking our jobs.
FALSE. Most of the parents who have been impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have presented themselves as political asylum-seekers at a U.S. port-of-entry, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than processing their claims, according to witness accounts, it appears as though they have been taken into custody on the spot and had their children ripped from their arms. The ACLU alleges that this practice violates the US Asylum Act, and the UN asserts that it violates the UN Treaty on the State of Refugees, one of the few treaties the US has ratified. The ACLU asserts that this policy is an illegal act on the part of the United States government, not to mention morally and ethically reprehensible.
Myth: We’re a country that respects the Rule of Law, and if people break the law, this is what they get.
FALSE. We are a country that has an above-ground system of immigration and an underground system. Our government (under both parties) has always been aware that US companies recruit workers in the poorest parts of Mexico for cheap labor, and ICE (and its predecessor INS) has looked the other way because this underground economy benefits our country to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Thus, even though many of the people crossing the border now are asylum-seekers, those who are economic migrants (migrant workers) likely have been recruited here to do jobs Americans will not do.
Myth: The children have to be separated from their parents because the parents must be arrested and it would be cruel to put children in jail with their parents.
FALSE. First, in the case of economic migrants crossing the border illegally, criminal prosecution has not been the legal norm, and families have historically been kept together at all cost. Also, crossing the border without documentation is typically a misdemeanor not requiring arrest, but rather has been handled in a civil proceeding. Additionally, parents who have been detained have historically been detained with their children in ICE “family residential centers,” again, for civil processing. The Trump administration’s shift in policy is for political purposes only, not legal ones.
Myth: We have rampant fraud in our asylum process, the proof of which is the significant increase we have in the number of people applying for asylum.
FALSE. The increase in asylum seekers is a direct result of the increase in civil conflict and violence across the globe. While some people may believe that we shouldn’t allow any refugees into our country because “it’s not our problem,” neither our current asylum law, nor our ideological foundation as a country support such an isolationist approach. There is very little evidence to support Sessions’ claim that abuse of our asylum-seeking policies is rampant. Also, what Sessions failed to mention is that the majority of asylum seekers are from China, not South of the border.
Here is a very fair and balanced assessment of his statements: [ source ]
Myth: The Democrats caused this, “it’s their law.“
FALSE. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats caused this, the Trump administration did (although the Republicans could fix this today, and have refused). I believe what this myth refers to is the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which were both passed under Clinton in 1996. These laws essentially made unauthorized entry into the US a crime (typically a misdemeanor for first-time offenders), but under both Republicans and Democrats, these cases were handled through civil deportation proceedings, not a criminal proceeding, which did not require separation. And again, even in cases where detainment was required, families were always kept together in family residential centers, unless the parents were deemed unfit (as mentioned above). Thus, Trump’s assertion that he hates this policy but has no choice but to separate the parents from their children, because the Democrats “gave us this law” is false and nothing more than propaganda designed to compel negotiation on bad policy.
Myth: The parents and children will be reunited shortly, once the parents’ court cases are finalized.
FALSE. Criminal court is a vastly different beast than civil court proceedings. Also, the children are being processed as unaccompanied minors (“unaccompanied alien children”), which typically means they are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Under normal circumstances when a child enters the country without his or her parent, ORR attempts to locate a family member within a few weeks, and the child is then released to a family member, or if a family member cannot be located, the child is placed in a residential center (anywhere in the country), or in some cases, foster care. Prior to Trump’s new policy, ORR was operating at 95% capacity, and they simply cannot effectively manage the influx of 2000+ children, some as young as 4 months old. Also, keep in mind, these are not unaccompanied minor children, they have parents. There is great legal ambiguity on how and even whether the parents will get their children back because we are in uncharted territory right now. According to the ACLU lawsuit (see below), there is currently no easy vehicle for reuniting parents with their children. Additionally, according to a May 2018 report, numerous cases of verbal, physical and sexual abuse were found to have occurred in these residential centers.
LIKELY FALSE. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on 5/6/18, and a recent court ruling denied the government’s motion to dismiss the suit. The judge deciding the case stated that the Trump Administration’s policy is “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.” The case is moving forward because it was deemed to have legal merit.
The Trump administration is not only doing everything it can to discourage immigration of all sorts, it intends to launch an effort to identify naturalized American citizens it believes cheated the naturalization process and strip them of their American citizenship. The extraordinary process of denaturalizing an American citizen has occurred very rarely, with the Justice Department filing an estimated 300 civil denaturalization cases since 1990. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna, however, told the Associated Press that the agency is ramping up its efforts to identify citizens who, for instance, assumed new identities in order to avoid deportation and claim a green card or citizenship.
Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of suspected fraud. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
While there is certainly a legitimate government interest in not allowing people into the country under assumed identities—previously this effort targeted literal Nazis and suspected war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities—the potential for the effort to be used as a means of intimidation and to find small discrepancies or errors in an individual’s naturalization paperwork is problematic. The Trump administration says it does not plan on pursuing deportations based on technicalities, but this is also an administration that is savagely separating families at the border as a form of deterrence to would-be undocumented immigrants.
This is a piece about the new “policy” of separating parents from their children after they are picked up crossing the border. I put in the scare quotes because this is not a policy. It’s atrocity. It is a massive human rights violation being carried out every day in this country and it is ongoing because, I must assume, too many Americans think it matters that the people this is happening to are “illegals.” It does not matter. These are people who have fled their own countries because they are afraid their children will be killed there, and who come to the US to apply for asylum only to have their children taken from them. Then, they are pressured into pleading guilty to entering the country illegally, in hopes that they will then be reunited with their children. It is not clear that that’s what’s actually happening. Here’s a photo of one of the court proceedings at which this happens:
Caption:
A mass immigration trial in April at the Lucius D. Bunton federal courthouse in Pecos, Texas. (Obtained by Debbie Nathan for the Intercept)
This is not due process. This is not how any nation calling itself a democracy or claiming to be living under the rule of law should handle any court proceeding.
As with a lot of these pieces, the focus is on the agony the parents go through over the separation and the uncertainty. This practice would certainly be an atrocity for that reason and that reason alone. I mean do I have to explain that this is, in itself, torture? Even if you don’t have children, can you imagine? Here in the US we are conditioned as parents not to even let our kids walk down the street to buy a sandwich without us and we are, ROUTINELY, taking children away from their their parents at the border, incarcerating the parents, and letting them just wonder when or whether they will ever see their children again.
What nobody is talking about yet, for legitimate reasons in a way since some of this is in the future and some of it is probably already happening but can’t be verified yet, it that this will almost certainly lead to the neglect, abuse, and death of some of these children.
Because history has shown that when you put a large number of children into a facility run by adults who know that they will never be held accountable for what they do, and when on top of that you prevent those children’s parents or families from finding out what’s happening to them, that is what you always get. Neglect, abuse, and when one or both has gone on too long or been pushed too far, death.
This happens in all kinds of institutions, throughout history, all over the world. If it not already happening in the facilities where these children are now being held, well, it will. This policy will kill children. Nobody seems comfortable saying that in the mainstream media, but I do not see how this can go on for long without that consequence.
There is no need to do this. Nobody in Buttercup’s administration is pretending that there is. Sessions has been quite clear about the fact that this is supposed to be a ‘deterrent,’ which means that it is intentionally punitive. There is no stated objective to this so-called ‘policy’ apart from punishing the parents. They don’t seem to want to talk as much about how this is punishing the children–except for Buttercup, who is happy to call them all MS-13 gang members. But it is. And it will get worse.
As
you’re trying to process the daily firehose of Trump on your
various feeds, you have to remember that Trumpisanabuser.
I’m
not talking about how it’s morally important to remember
that fact, although it is. I’m saying the current rush of news makes more sense when you remember some recognizable
patterns in the way abusers think and act:
Abusers
like to hurt people and they do not like to experience consequences
for it. They know how to choose victims who are more vulnerable than
they are.
They
often enable others who share their enjoyment of cruelty.
They
lie, manipulate, and gaslight others. This helps them get away with
misconduct, but it’s also a power trip that they enjoy for its own
sake.
When
they are threatened or injured, they lash out wildly in order to
externalize their feelings of weakness.
Those
patterns provide a useful framework to make sense of what seem to be
the two dominant news stories of the last couple of weeks.
Additionally,
Trump gets some short-term tactical benefits from it.
Spewing the racist venom his base loves intensifies their devotion to
him at a politically dangerous time for him. Saying and doing evil
shit also helps him overload and wear down the rest of us. The press
reports on it because it is actually important that children are
being abused in our names, which leaves less time and attention for
the potentially damaging stuff turning up in the investigations.
He’s
hurting people because he likes it and because, for the moment, he
feels like it’s helping him. He’s doing this because he’s an
abuser. He’s lying frantically because he’s an abuser. These
stories fit into the same framework.
Lastly, understanding these stories together is a small way to deny Trump something he wants. His abuse of vulnerable
people is his attempt to look and feel strong because he feels
defensive and weak about the Russia investigations. He indulges in
lawlessness by proxy with ICE because he feels good cops breathing
down his neck. His desperate tantrums should be understood for what
they are. That means acknowledging the real pain he is causing and remembering that he is lashing out in craven
terror because his bad actions are catching up to him.
WHAT
YOU CAN DO:
If
you have the time, there will be demonstrations over the next couple
of weeks in support of immigrant families. If you have the resources, you can donate.
Doing
what you can to support vulnerable immigrants is worth doing because they’re
human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion.
It is also a concrete, if indirect, way to stand up to the
abuser-in-chief and his illegitimate regime. What these fucking
people want is for us to give up on each other and let them decide
who is human and what is American. Fuck them.
Hearseeno 