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Immigration: issues and policy

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#447

Trump v. New York Oral Argument

Chief Roberts
GENERAL, MY FIRST QUESTION GOES TO THE FIRST POINT YOU RAISED. WE EXPEDITED THIS CASE IN LIGHT OF THE DECEMBER 31 DEADLINE FOR THE SECRETARY TO TRANSMIT THE CENSUS TO THE PRESIDENT. IS THAT DATE STILL OPERATIVE? DO YOU STILL NEED A DECISION BY THAT DATE?

Solicitor General (for Trump)
PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM DATA. THE DATA THE PRESIDENT REQUESTED TO POTENTIALLY BACK OUT ILLEGAL ALIENS FROM THE APPORTIONMENT BASE. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: THE STANDING QUESTION, IF THE COURT DOES NOT INTERVENE NOW BEFORE THE SECRETARY TRANSMITS THE INFORMATION TO THE PRESIDENT, I DON’T KNOW WHEN THE COURT WOULD BE ABLE TO INTERVENE EVEN ALL THAT WOULD BE LEFT AFTER THAT TRANSMITTAL IS THE TRANSMITTAL BY THE PRESIDENT TO THE HOUSE. SO, IF THE INJURY CANNOT BE REDRESSED AT THIS POINT, WHEN COULD IT BE?

PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM DATA. THE DATA THE PRESIDENT REQUESTED TO POTENTIALLY BACK OUT ILLEGAL ALIENS FROM THE APPORTIONMENT BASE. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: THE STANDING QUESTION, IF THE COURT DOES NOT INTERVENE NOW BEFORE THE SECRETARY TRANSMITS THE INFORMATION TO THE PRESIDENT, I DON’T KNOW WHEN THE COURT WOULD BE ABLE TO INTERVENE EVEN ALL THAT WOULD BE LEFT AFTER THAT TRANSMITTAL IS THE TRANSMITTAL BY THE PRESIDENT TO THE HOUSE. SO, IF THE INJURY CANNOT BE REDRESSED AT THIS POINT, WHEN COULD IT BE?

back and forth General Solicitor with Justice Sotomayor asking how can you differentiate residents (anyone living in US) vs ICE, Illegal aliens, DACA etc

THEY ARE TRY TO GET THE CATEGORIES OF ILLEGAL ALIENS THAT YOU COULD IDENTIFY BASED ON THE RECORDS WE HAVE. FINAL ORDERS OF REMOVAL FOR INSTANCE, PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN REMOVED ARE FOUND AGAIN AND HAVE NOT BEEN GIVEN ANY LAWFUL STATUS. IT IS NOT THAT WE CAN PICK UP EVERYONE. THEY WILL BE SOME UNDETECTED ILLEGAL ALIENS WHO WE ARE NOT ATTENDING TO SCREEN FOR BECAUSE THEY WOULD NOT BE PICKED UP ANY RECORD. IT IS THE CATEGORIES THAT WOULD BE SHOWN BY SOME SORT OF RECORD WE HAVE. THE QUESTION IS HOW FEASIBLE IT WILL BE TO CAPTURE LARGE NUMBERS WITHIN THOSE CATEGORIES. UNFORTUNATELY, WE DON’T KNOW AT THIS POINT. IT IS A FEATURE NOT OF THE GOVERNMENT’S CONDUCT, BUT A FEATURE OF THE FACT THAT APPELLEES BROUGHT A PRE-APPORTIONMENT CHALLENGE ON THE BASIS OF THIS INJURY THAT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO CEASE IN THE PAST – CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR? JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: MR. WALL, AS I UNDERSTAND READING THE PRESIDENT’S MEMO, HE SAYS HE INTENDS TO EXCLUDE EVERY ALIEN WHO DOES NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO BE HERE IN THE UNITED STATES. YES, HE LIMITS THIS TO WHERE IT IS FEASIBLE TO IDENTIFY THAT. BUT RIGHT NOW, HIS POLICY IS, IF I CAN IDENTIFY THEM, NO MATTER WHAT THE REASON IS FOR THEM BEING AN ILLEGAL ALIEN, I WILL EXCLUDE THEM FROM THE CENSUS. FOLLOWING UP ON JUSTICE ALITO’S QUESTION, AREN’T THOSE THE VERY CATEGORIES THAT YOU ALREADY SAY WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT SOME OF THEM IN ICE WILL COME BY DECEMBER 31, AND THEN BY JANUARY 11, THE CENSUS BUREAU SAYS IT INTENDS TO PROVIDE THE PRESIDENT WITH THE INFORMATION "NECESSARY TO FULLY IMPLEMENT THE PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM." I AM QUOTING THE CENSUS BUREAU. SO, IF I TAKE THAT AT ITS FACE, IT MEANS THAT THE NUMBER IS NOT GOING TO BE 60,000. THE NUMBER INTENDED IS SUBSTANTIALLY LARGE. AND I THINK THAT WAS JUSTICE ALITO’S POINT, WHICH IS THE CENSUS BUREAU HAS BEEN COLLECTING DATA ABOUT UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS FROM OTHER AGENCIES FOR OVER A YEAR. I DON’T SEE HOW YOU CAN REPRESENT TO US THAT YOU DON’T THINK IT WILL BE A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER.

THREE QUICK POINTS. FIRST, I DON’T THINK THAT IS ACTUALLY AN ACCURATE STATEMENT AS A MEMORANDUM. YOU ARE RIGHT THAT IS THE POLICY BUT THERE ARE TWO BUILT-IN LIMITATIONS. ONE IS WHETHER IT IS FEASIBLE AND THE SECOND IS IF THE PRESIDENT DECIDES HE HAS THE LEGAL DISCRETION TO EXCLUDE THESE SUBSETS PAYMENT SUBSETS MAY HAVE DIFFERENT LEGAL ANALYSIS DEPENDING ON THE TIES THEY HAVE OR THE TYPE OF STATUS THEY HAVE. JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: MR. WALL, I AM A LITTLE BIT QUESTIONING OF THAT FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS. THE CENSUS BUREAU ALREADY DEFINES WHAT RESIDENCY IS. WHERE YOU ARE LIVING, AS A SNAPSHOT OF APRIL 1, 2020. WHETHER YOU ARE IN A PRISON, IN ICE DETENTION, WE ARE TOLD BY ONE OF OUR PEOPLE THAT 50% PEOPLE IN THE TENSION WILL EVENTUALLY BE RELEASED IN THE UNITED STATES EITHER THROUGH ASYLUM OR ANOTHER MECHANISM. SO I’M NOT SURE HOW YOU CAN IDENTIFY ANY CLASS OF IMMIGRANTS THAT IS NOT LIVING HERE AND IS TRADITIONAL SETTING. THIS IS WHERE THEY ARE, THIS IS WHERE THEY WERE UNABLE FIRST – ON APRIL 1, AND WHERE THEY INTEND TO STAY IF THEY CAN DO IT.

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#448

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing federal authorities over their alleged use of cellphone location data — particularly in immigration enforcement.

The nonprofit organization today filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to force the agencies to release records about purchasing cellphone location data for immigration enforcement and other purposes. The lawsuit follows multiple news reports earlier this year about the Trump administration buying access to commercial databases that track cellphone locations and then using that data to detect people who might be entering the country illegally.

“It’s critical we uncover how federal agencies are accessing bulk databases of Americans’ location data and why,” Nathan Freed Wessler, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. “There can be no accountability without transparency.”

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#449

DACA restored. A very good step in the right direction…Keeping our promise.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children are immediately eligible to apply for an Obama-era program that grants them work permits, a federal judge in New York ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis in Brooklyn said he was fully restoring the eight-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to the days before the Trump administration tried to end it in September 2017. He ordered the Department of Homeland Security to post a public notice by Monday to accept first-time applications and ensure that work permits are valid for two years.

Acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf had issued a memo in July reducing DACA recipients’ work permits to one year, but Garaufis ruled last month that Wolf had unlawfully ascended to the agency’s top job and vacated the memo.

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#450

This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

#451
#452

Time to re-open the Immigration thread again.

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Day 1456
#453

Watchdog: DOJ bungled ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy

Rosenstein: Zero tolerance immigration policy ‘never should have been proposed or implemented’

Sessions, top DOJ officials knew ‘zero tolerance’ would separate families, watchdog finds

Report: Management of Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy failed

Leadership fails to manage rules and fallout of the short-lived Trump policy that separated 3,000 families.

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#454

From zero tolerance to loving tolerance is a glorious shift.

Biden plans early legislation to offer legal status to 11 million immigrants without it

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#455





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#456

This is why McConnell was so fixated on judges; one of Trump’s horrible appointees has blocked Trump’s deportation freeze, despite the fact that the president is entirely within his rights to do so.

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#457

Families Separated At Border Hope Biden Reunites Them, Bringing Deported Parents Back

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#458
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#459

ICE’s union can basically veto any Biden immigration plan — thanks to Ken Cuccinelli

WITH THE stroke of a pen on Jan. 19, the day before President Biden took office, employees of the federal government’s main deportation agency were empowered to thwart the new administration’s policies. The union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, a longtime ally of former president Donald Trump, was handed what amounts to a veto over the White House thanks to the machinations of one man: Ken Cuccinelli, then-acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner, schemed during the outgoing administration’s final days to fix in place its deportation policies and stymie those of Mr. Biden. A former Republican attorney general of Virginia once fond of bashing Democrats’ pro-labor policies, he signed a deal with the union representing ICE agents and employees that may be among the most pro-labor agreements ever reached by the federal government.

In a series of memorandums of understanding reported by the New York Times, Mr. Cuccinelli, whose own appointment had been deemed legally questionable, agreed with ICE’s union that the federal government would be forbidden from making any “modifications whatsoever concerning the policies, hours, functions, alternate work schedules, resources, tools, compensation and the like” affecting the agency and roughly 7,500 agents and employees — without the explicit written consent of union officials.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s intervention, which also included signing pro-union measures that may cost taxpayers millions of dollars annually, was reported by an anonymous whistleblower whose lawyer, David Z. Seide, called it a shocking abuse of authority. It is also an anti-democratic attempt, by an unelected bureaucrat, to grant a public employee union stunning power to pursue its own immigration agenda and ignore that of a duly elected president.

The Biden administration agenda includes the new president’s campaign promise to suspend most deportations during his first 100 days in office and broadly reprioritize them thereafter, to focus on migrants guilty of violent crimes and those deemed a threat to national security. No doubt, some or many ICE agents privately disagree with that policy. Under the president’s executive authority, however, it is — or should be — their duty to implement it. Now, if the Biden administration is to challenge the agreements signed by Mr. Cuccinelli and the ICE union, it may face a protracted fight in the Federal Labor Relations Authority, to which the union is entitled to appeal.

For now, also thanks to Mr. Cuccinelli’s mischief, deportation policy is unsettled. On Jan. 8, he signed an agreement with Texas committing the federal government to give that state 180 days’ notice before shifting the federal government’s deportation policy — an extraordinary concession and perhaps one at odds with the Constitution’s supremacy clause. Based on that, Texas sued to block the new administration’s 100-day pause on deportations, and a Trump-appointed judge granted a nationwide restraining order blocking it for the time being. In the past week, ICE has deported several hundred undocumented migrants to Central America and dozens to Haiti, including a woman who had agreed to testify as a witness against the gunman accused of killing 23 people in the 2019 massacre at an El Paso Walmart, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Cuccinelli is now out of government; the damage he has done may endure.

US suspends Haiti deportation flights as Biden administration tries to control Ice

Halt came after activists and staffers called homeland security secretary’s office but it is unclear how long it will last

ICE Cancels Controversial Deportation Flight to Cameroon

The stalled deportation of 60 Black immigrants shows that the Biden administration can choose not to send asylum seekers back home.

ICE Cancels Controversial Deportation Flight to Cameroon

The stalled deportation of 60 Black immigrants shows that the Biden administration can choose not to send asylum seekers back home.

ICE Deports Black New York Man to Haiti, a Country He Wasn’t Born in and Had Never Been To

New claims of migrant abuse as Ice defies Biden to continue deportations

Ice condemned as ‘rogue agency’ after rights groups allege torture by agents and man deported to Haiti who had never been there

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#460

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-politics-immigration-coronavirus-pandemic-d83309628f757732c57a260ea99a48b1?utm_medium=AP&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter
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#461

Biden administration will let migrant families separated under Trump reunite inside U.S.

Attorneys for the families had asked the Biden administration to let parents deported without their children come back to the U.S. to reunify the families.

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#462
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#463

A story likely to have major implications, including for refugees.

A court case rocks the president of Honduras

Juan Orlando Hernández has been accused in New York of taking bribes

JUAN ORLANDO HERNÁNDEZ has had a tricky few weeks. A trial in New York of Geovanny Fuentes, an alleged drug-trafficker, included accusations that JOH, as the president of Honduras is known, accepted bribes in exchange for helping cocaine reach the United States. On March 16th a witness said he saw Mr Hernández take two bribes in 2013, before he became president. A few days earlier a former cartel leader testified that he paid Mr Hernández $250,000 for protection from arrest. In documents filed by US prosecutors, who do not name Mr Hernández but refer to details which identify the Honduran president, he was quoted as saying he wanted to “shove the drugs up the noses of the gringos”. (Mr Hernández has not been charged and denies all allegations against him.)

It is not the first time Mr Hernández has been allegedly linked to narco crimes. In a trial in 2019 that convicted his brother Tony Hernández, a former lawmaker, of drug trafficking, he was mentioned and accused of taking at least $1m from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a notorious Mexican drug lord. (His brother is due to be sentenced on March 23rd in the United States; prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment.) But these new allegations come at a volatile time. In November voters will elect Mr Hernández’s successor and 128 members of congress. Debates about corruption and drug money will dominate the campaign, thinks Lester Ramírez of the Association for a More Just Society, a non-profit.

Some of those likely to emerge as presidential candidates from primaries on March 14th, for which results are still pending, look little better. Yani Rosenthal, the likely nominee for the main opposition Liberal Party, recently finished a three-year jail term in the United States for laundering cash for the cartel from which Mr Hernández allegedly accepted bribes. Nasry Asfura, the mayor of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, and the favourite for the ruling National Party, is facing a preliminary hearing for charges of abuse of authority, fraud, embezzlement of public funds, falsification of documents and money-laundering. Meanwhile Libre, a left-wing party, is likely to field Xiomara Castro, the wife of Manuel Zelaya, a former president. He has also been accused of accepting bribes in the trial of Mr Fuentes. (He too denies the charges against him.)

According to Hugo Noé Pino, a former finance minister, drug money and corruption have infiltrated every level of Honduran politics. “It is not just people paying others but those linked to drug dealers and organised crime participating in elections,” says Mr Ramírez. Last year Mr Hernández failed to revive an anti-corruption body after it investigated some lawmakers. He and his allies have a majority in congress and he holds sway over the Supreme Court and the election body.

Hondurans are getting fed up. The country of 10m can hardly afford bad governance on top of endemic violence and poverty, plus the devastation caused by the pandemic and two hurricanes last year. Many people have already fled the country, hoping to get to the United States; more are likely to follow. Those who remain deserve a better roster of politicians.

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#464

“Is Stephen Miller still in charge?”: Biden’s first immigration court appointees are all Trump picks

“This is a list I would have expected out of Bill Barr or Jeff Sessions,” says former longtime immigration judge

The Cesspool That Gave Rise to Stephen Miller

David Horowitz, the radical leftist turned fire-breathing Trumpist who mentored Stephen Miller, also found an admirer in anti-immigration pioneer and white supremacist John Tanton.

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#465

Sec. Mayorakas has taken action against the two facilities where immigrant women were being sterilized:

ICE to stop detaining immigrants at two county jails under federal investigation

The Biden administration has decided to stop detaining immigrants in a pair of county jails facing federal probes in Georgia and Massachusetts, calling the decision an “important first step” in a broader review of the nation’s sprawling network of immigration jails.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to immediately terminate its contract with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office in Massachusetts and to transfer the few remaining detainees elsewhere, according to documents provided to The Washington Post. He also directed ICE to rescind an agreement with the sheriff’s office, which trained deputies to screen inmates arrested for crimes to see if they are also eligible for deportation.

Mayorkas also directed ICE to “as soon as possible” sever its contracts with the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia, a more complicated endeavor because the facility is county-owned but run by a private contractor.

Federal officials chose the two facilities mainly because their detention rosters have shrunk and they are “no longer operationally necessary,” said a DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s deliberations. Bristol is holding seven detainees out of nearly 200 beds; Irwin has 114 detainees out of almost 1,000 beds.

Both county jails are also under federal investigation for complaints of abuses against immigrants — allegations that remain open and unresolved — and those factored into Mayorkas’s decision, the official said.

In a memo to ICE directing the changes Thursday, Mayorkas said his “foundational principle” is that “we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention.”

“We have an obligation to make lasting improvements to our civil immigration detention system,” Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday. “This marks an important first step to realizing that goal. DHS detention facilities and the treatment of individuals in those facilities will be held to our health and safety standards. Where we discover they fall short, we will continue to take action as we are doing today.”

Officials said the moves are part of the Biden administration’s broader plan to overhaul the nation’s network of more than 200 county jails and detention centers housing civil immigration detainees in deportation proceedings. More changes could come as Mayorkas conducts a sweeping review of detention facilities in the coming weeks.

President Biden has pledged to end for-profit immigration detention and reverse former president Donald Trump’s push to detain as many immigrants as possible. He warned Congress last week that it is “long past time” for lawmakers to pass a bill that would allow millions of undocumented immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship.

And his changes are having measurable impacts: Immigration arrests in the interior of the United States have plunged by more than half, records show. Jails that were holding more than 50,000 detainees a day under Trump are detaining approximately 20,000 now.

The Biden administration has been under increasing pressure from left-leaning lawmakers and advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union to close detention facilities.

The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office came under state and federal investigation a year ago when staff members deployed pepper balls, a flash-bang grenade, and canines against immigrant detainees amid a dispute over coronavirus testing. Irwin is facing federal investigations after a former nurse filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that women held at the facility were subjected to unwanted gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies; the doctor who treated them has denied wrongdoing.

Mayorkas said in the memo that the Bristol facility southeast of Boston “is of minimal operational significance to the agency” and there is “ample evidence that the Detention Center’s treatment of detained individuals and the conditions of detention are unacceptable.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) faulted Sheriff Thomas D. Hodgson and his staff for a May 1, 2020, incident at the jail, and urged DHS to terminate its agreements with Bristol, according to a December report. She said some detainees who had refused to submit to coronavirus testing and isolation, partly because of fear of catching the disease, threw plastic chairs at staff members, smashed walls and attempted to barricade the unit with tables, trash bins and appliances.

Healey said she did not condone the detainees’ behavior, but she said they had largely quieted when officers attacked with pepper spray and other materials. Three detainees had to be taken to the hospital and a fourth had to be revived by chest compressions, but she said he was not taken to the emergency room. Healey concluded that the sheriff’s office violated the detainees’ civil rights via “a series of institutional failures and poor decisions.”

Bristol also faced a class-action lawsuit last year alleging unsafe conditions during the pandemic that led to the release of dozens of detainees. U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan nominee, barred Bristol from accepting new detainees. But he also said in a May 2020 ruling that the jail’s staff had “admirably taken significant steps toward protecting the detainees” from covid-19.

Hodgson — an outspoken Trump supporter who once offered to dispatch jail inmates to build the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — criticized the judge’s rulings and disputed the attorney general’s findings, saying the DHS Office of Inspector General is still investigating the incident.

“I’d love to show everyone the security footage from the incident that night, because it shows my staff did everything right and by the book, and dispels many of the false claims being peddled by the political activist attorneys/publicists,” Hodgson wrote in a letter to the editor of the Sun Chronicle, a local newspaper.

Mayorkas did not detail in the memo to ICE acting director Tae Johnson his reasoning for closing the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., almost 200 miles south of Atlanta. But he said the agency should relocate staff, release or transfer detainees, and preserve evidence and witnesses needed for ongoing investigations.

The DHS inspector general’s office and the FBI are investigating allegations that surfaced last year when a former nurse at the Irwin facility filed a whistleblower complaint saying that a doctor — later identified as Mahendra Amin — was performing hysterectomies and other unwanted procedures on female detainees. Amin has denied wrongdoing, and no charges have been filed. Prism reported the FBI investigation earlier this month.

Irwin no longer houses women at the facility; many have been released as the investigation is ongoing, and some have been deported.

Mayorkas said in the memo he would schedule a meeting next week to lay out the plan to close Irwin and to “discuss my concerns with other federal immigration detention centers” across the United States.

Johnson, the acting ICE director, has said that the agency will continue to arrest immigrants who match the new administration’s criteria.

“ICE will continue to ensure it has sufficient detention space to hold noncitizens as appropriate,” Johnson said in a statement Thursday. “Withdrawing from the Bristol agreement, and planning to close the Irwin facility, will not impair or in any way diminish ICE operations.”

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#466

Illinois Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth is unveiling a legislative package Thursday that would protect from deportation military servicemembers and veterans who don’t have U.S. citizenship, as part of a new effort to reverse Trump-era policies.

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