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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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 Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 2:59 pm Post subject: Immigration |
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As a way to attack California, and again rant about “illegal immigration”, Techno has posted a link to a study by Spenser P. Morrison, claiming [Illegal immigrants and their children cost the State of California a net $30.29 billion per year. This equates to $7,352 per illegal alien, or roughly 17.7 percent of California’s state budget.[/quote]
Morrison is a lawyer and historian of ancient history, and the editor of a far right web site that reinforces the biases of folks like Techno. His credibility and journalistic credentials are more than a bit suspect. Various right wing “scare tanks” have published whacky claims about the costs of immigration. They have been debunked just as regularly.
I’ll give you just two. https://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/cost-of-illegal-immigrants/
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/fact-check/2018/06/26/paul-gosar-how-much-do-undocumented-immigrants-cost-economy/691997002/
Pants on fire. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | By
Nick Miroff and
Matt Zapotosky
Jan. 14, 2021 at 1:05 p.m. PST
Add to list
The Trump administration and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions barreled forward with their “zero tolerance” border crackdown in 2018 knowing that the policy would separate migrant children from their parents and despite warnings that the government was ill-prepared to deal with the consequences, according to a long-awaited report issued Thursday by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General.
The report called the Justice Department and the attorney general’s office a “driving force” in making sure the Department of Homeland Security aggressively prosecuted adults arriving with children, findings that cast doubt on statements made by Sessions that the government “never really intended” to separate families.
The bureaucratic chaos and trauma for families that resulted from the policy were not unanticipated consequences, the inspector general found. “DOJ officials were aware of many of these challenges prior to issuing the zero tolerance policy, but they did not attempt to address them until after the policy was issued,” the report states.
AD
While DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other federal entities have issued autopsy reports assessing the failings of the zero-tolerance policy, the internal Justice Department findings provide new details about Sessions’s lead role in pushing for the crackdown, despite numerous red flags.
Once the policy was underway, Sessions at one point told U.S. attorneys along the border that “we need to take children away,” according to the report, even as the Trump administration publicly claimed that it did not have a policy that called for separating families.
Sessions declined to be interviewed for the report by the inspector general’s office. A representative for Sessions had no immediate comment.
Former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein, who also pushed for the prosecutions, expressed contrition in a statement issued through a spokesman after the publication of the report. |
The Trump administration has always had contempt for the rule of law. And cruelty has been there ongoing signature. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2021 7:04 pm Post subject: |
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What has characterized the efforts of Trump and Stephen Miller his immigration advisor has been an incredible level of cruelty. Not merely the separation of children--with no records or concerns for their well-being--but in contravention of the 1951 Convention that requires the US to recognize bona-fide asylum claims, and the 1997 Flores settlement. Sarah Tillman has an article in the February 8, 2021, detailing the secrecy in which Miller did much of his work--and the wrecked lives and deaths that resulted. She details the story of Camila Diaz Cordova, who was killed when she was returned to San Salvador. She details the story of "Sam", a translator for US forces in Iraq, still hiding in Cairo, waiting for asylum. I'll clip in the story of Maria, which might eventually have a happier ending.
| Quote: | As Hannah Flamm dug into the case of Maria, the fourteen-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras, she realized how many Trump-era changes had affected the girl’s life. I tallied at least half a dozen, upon reviewing hundreds of pages of legal records. “If Maria had reached the border before Trump came to office, there’s no question she’d be an asylee today,” Flamm told me. “She’d be a high schooler with legal status. And she would never have been separated from her mother.”
Maria grew up in La Ceiba, a port city in Honduras. Her family called her Chicken Wing, for her favorite food. Her mother, Gabriela, volunteered in politics. Her father, a shopkeeper, worried that his wife’s work would provoke the ire of local criminal groups, and insisted that political recruiters leave his family alone. Gabriela later denounced the politicians, earning enemies on all sides. One December morning in 2016, Maria’s father stepped out for his morning cigar, and a gunman in a car opened fire. Maria ran outside to find her mother cradling her father on the porch, as he bled to death. Two years later, Maria’s teen-age sister, Paulina, a grocery-store clerk, was kidnapped and sexually tortured by a group of men. A Honduran police officer sat on the bed and watched. The men flashed photographs of Maria and Gabriela, threatening that they would be next. After Paulina’s escape, Gabriela knew that she had to go North with her girls. “I didn’t know what else to do to save my daughters,” she told me.
On September 15, 2019, they reached the southern border. Because Paulina was eighteen, she was sent to a detention facility and then swiftly deported to Honduras. Maria and her mother were shuttled into the Migrant Protection Protocols. The program, engineered in part by Stephen Miller, rerouted asylum seekers to makeshift camps in Mexican border cities, many of which are controlled by cartels. Maria and Gabriela went to Matamoros, where a dirt plot was crowded with tents. The State Department has ranked the security of Tamaulipas, where Matamoros is located, as comparable to that of wartime Syria, and Human Rights First has documented more than thirteen hundred incidents of rape, kidnapping, and other attacks against families waiting in the program. During Donald Trump’s Presidency, an estimated seventy thousand people were pushed into the Migrant Protection Protocols.
The camp was so crowded that some mothers slept sitting up, their children in their laps. “One Honduran woman saw us crying and offered us a spot of soil under her palm tree,” Gabriela recalled. The stranger showed her how to forage through the trash for cardboard boxes to convert into beds. At night, cartel operatives circled the camp, looking for migrants to kidnap for ransom. “The food is ready!” they shouted, pretending to be aide workers. Desperate to find a safer place to stay, Gabriela and Maria rented a cheap apartment in Matamoros, though, Gabriela told me, “the gangs sell drugs and girls there like caramels.” One evening, two men followed Maria and Gabriela to a grocery store. They hid in an aisle of boxed milk and tortillas until the men left.
Hes much happier now that Im working remotely and always at home.
“He’s much happier now that I’m working remotely and always at home.”
Cartoon by Edward Koren
After four months, Maria and Gabriela arrived, at 5 a.m., at a border checkpoint, where officials escorted them to an asylum hearing. The immigration judge, Shelly Schools, a recent Trump appointee, appeared on a video screen. She questioned Gabriela for two hours, according to a recording, then took a recess to “look at the law.” When Schools returned, she said, “If there was some legal way I could provide you protection in the United States, I certainly would try.” But granting asylum had grown more difficult. Trump’s Justice Department had aggressively used a strategy known as “self-referral” to take back cases from the Board of Immigration Appeals and issue alternative rulings. In a case called Matter of A.B., Attorney General Jeff Sessions overruled a well-established decision affirming the ability of gender-based-violence survivors and gang victims to win asylum; he deemed their suffering to be “private violence,” rarely meriting protection.
Gabriela noted that a police officer had been involved in Paulina’s assault, another detail that strengthened their case for asylum, but Trump’s Board of Immigration Appeals had narrowed this protection, too.
“Do you know if this officer was involved in sexually assaulting your daughter personally?” the judge asked.
“He was watching as she was being raped,” Gabriela replied.
“Do you know if the police officer ever touched your daughter himself?” the judge asked.
“He only watched,” Gabriela said.
The judge said that her hands were tied. “The death of your husband and the kidnapping of your daughter are certainly serious events,” Schools said. “However, the harm did not occur to either of you.” In any case, Maria and Gabriela had passed through Guatemala and Mexico on their way to the U.S. A Trump-era policy, called the “transit bar,” required them to request asylum in those countries first, making them ineligible in the U.S. “I’m very sorry for what has happened to your family,” Schools said. “I hope you can find a safe place to live.” Gabriela feared that Maria wouldn’t survive in Matamoros. One morning, at 3 a.m., she led Maria to a bridge that crosses the Rio Grande into Texas. “It’s O.K., Chicken Wing,” she said. Then Maria walked across. |
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