And now they are back claiming it was a “glitch” and not a soul believes them because twitter doesn’t work that way.
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US Officials Involved in Policy of Family Separation Must Be Investigated
Are more Trump-era family separations coming to California’s immigrant communities?
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article246486095.html
More than 54,000 U.S.-born children in California have Salvadoran and Honduran parents who are in the country under, Temporary Protected Status, a program in limbo as the Trump administration seeks to end it.
Families facing uncertainty worry what will happen to their children if parents are deported, according to attorneys who spoke with The Bee.
“A logical consequence for these kids is that they will be separated from their parents because the loss of status opens you up for the possibility of deportation,” Almas Sayeed, deputy director of programs for the California Immigrant Policy Center, said during a recent interview. “Overwhelmingly, that is actually going to be what happens to these children.”
White House killed deal to pay for mental health care for migrant families separated at border
Sources said the White House counsel’s office said no after checking with Trump adviser Stephen Miller. A White House official denied Miller had a role.
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ICE knew a judge was about to rule they couldn’t expel 33 immigrant children back to Guatemala, so they did it before the ruling could come down.
The plane was in the air as it did.
ICE Expelled 33 Immigrant Children Back To Guatemala After A Judge Said They Couldn’t
“It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” one immigration analyst said.
The Trump administration expelled 33 children who came to the US without a parent back to Guatemala after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the controversial practice that same day.
The injunction was issued Wednesday by US Judge Emmet Sullivan minutes before an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight left for Guatemala City with the 33 children.
An ICE official confirmed that the flight left “shortly before ICE was informed of the court’s injunction” against Title 42, the public health provision used by the Trump administration to expel people from the US citing the coronavirus pandemic.
The official said that ICE officers on the ground did not become aware of the judge’s order until the flight had landed and Guatemalan authorities were greeting the children, who remained in Guatemala as of Tuesday.
“We are aware of the situation and are looking into it. Hopefully, no child is being denied the benefit of the ruling,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who led the lawsuit that resulted in the preliminary injunction blocking the policy.
The expulsion of the 33 children happening on the same day of Sullivan’s order could force the agency to bring back the children because it violated the judge’s decision, legal experts said.
“It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Even if the flight took off before ICE officials knew, she added, “the expulsion is not only putting kids on the plane and taking off, it is also placing them in another country.”
Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, said ICE’s repeated issues in court under the Trump administration could play a factor in this case if Sullivan assesses whether they violated his order. Federal court judges have complained that they were lied to by officials in cases involving immigration policy during the Trump administration.
“It is not out of the power of the district court, if someone could raise the matter, to order ICE to return the children that it removed on that flight,” he said, noting that ICE officials will likely say that there will be practical difficulties in tracking down and locating the 33 children.
The Trump administration has argued that the current policy is necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the United States.
“If the Title 42 order were to be undone by the court or the next administration, especially in the midst of a surging pandemic, ICE will be obligated to increase transportation operations, conducting the escorts of individuals and unaccompanied children using commercial airlines and ground transportation, as appropriate,” the ICE official said. “This poses an increased risk to the general public aboard commercial airlines as the Title 42 order was enacted to mitigate the public health risks of aliens attempting to unlawfully enter the United States in the midst of the pandemic.”
Critics said the government was using public health orders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an excuse to violate federal laws that govern the processing of unaccompanied children at the border.
BuzzFeed News previously reported that the Department of Homeland Security has expelled unaccompanied immigrant children from the US border more than 13,000 times since March.
Before the pandemic, unaccompanied children picked up by Border Patrol agents would be sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they would be housed in shelters as they started applying for asylum and waited to be reunited with family members in the US.
The ORR referral process was created by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by then-president George W. Bush in 2008. Under the law, Customs and Border Protection officials are generally required to refer the children within 72 hours to the US refugee agency. But those referrals dropped precipitously after the CDC’s coronavirus order.
Instead, unaccompanied children at the border are turned back immediately to Mexico or held in detention facilities until a flight can get them out of the country.
In late June, US District Judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, blocked the deportation of a 16-year-old Honduran boy under the CDC’s order. While the ruling did not void the policy altogether, it was seen as a blow to the administration. Since then, the government has said it was no longer seeking to use the CDC’s order to remove the boy from the country.
ICE officials said four of the children on the flight to Guatemala had tested positive for COVID-19.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Families Separated At Border Hope Biden Reunites Them, Bringing Deported Parents Back
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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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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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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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