#Thoughts on the Deportation of De-Facto Citizens

[sunlit-gully]

Hello! This is your friendly inquiry to answer this ask with whatever you'd like to talk about right now! Whether that be a story you're working on, something you're excited or worried about, or just something random you happen to know.

All the love,

~ toribookworm ❤️

Well I suppose I can spare some time to ramble about Lev, my first Jewish OC. literal bby boy

Brace yourself, it'll be one long long ramble.

Lev was born to Ilse Goldberg and Yitzhak Adler, a singer and a songwriter respectively, in Warsaw. This musical background means that Lev has an extensive knowledge of musicology, particularly of the violin. However, the family was rather dysfunctional despite their facade, so he grew up with deep-seated anger issues. As a child he loved gears, chocolate milk, balloons, and teasing his 2 little siblings (he was the Adler's second eldest kid).

Then the Holocaust happened, and Lev’s childhood came to a grisly end. His family, like most other Jewish families in 1939 Warsaw, was detained in the infamous ghetto. Extreme overcrowding, negligible rations and nonexistent sanitation killed his siblings, Ida and Henrik. The Ghetto Uprising killed his father, Aron. The Ravensbruck camp killed his mother, Ilse. The Warsaw Uprising was what drove his elder brother Jan away (who disappeared to the Aryan side of Warsaw after the uprising). Lev himself was supposed to be deported to Treblinka but managed to hide within the train station's sewage system and evade capture.

After the daring escape, he tagged alongside a nearby Soviet division as their unofficial scout, much to the chagrin of the commander and the commissar (the official title is not that but I don't care), Mykola. He often took on a no-nonsense attitude in the battlefield, readily resorting to violence should the need arise. As his Soviet comrades advanced and fought the last battles in Berlin, Lev bumped into Medea, who was working alongside the underground KPD, and gradually bonded with her over their shared horrors. During a clandestine meeting the Jewish boy arranged, Medea and Mykola saw each other and - surprise! - Mykola was reunited with his lover and saviour. Fortunately, all three lived to see Victory Day and Medea adopted him, officially turning the Jewish boy into a Soviet citizen.

In his second homeland, Lev threw himself into a new life - learning Russian, making friends, immersing himself in the day-to-day life in postwar USSR. As Mykola stepped into his life, Lev gradually gained a new father figure, one who genuinely thought of him as a son rather than a burden. The birth of Viktor, Rusudan, Lasha and Mykyta made him extremely protective of his little siblings - he had already known the pain once. But all in all, things seemed to be looking up…

…until Medea died from a mountain flood. The untimely death of his mother figure plunged Lev into an existential crisis. He often suffered from intense paranoia and incessant insomnia, occasionally flying into rages and always remaining emotionally constipated. All the while, he had to step into the role of de facto caretaker of his younger siblings. Of course, that did wonders to his mental health.

Lev ended up majoring in nuclear physics and had postgraduate training in Rosendorf. This was where he had a summer fling with Greta Fischer, daughter of his mentor, and unbeknownst to him, she became pregnant and kept the child. During her pregnancy, Greta defected to West Germany, changed her name to Klara Silberwald, and severed all ties to her old homeland - that's why Lev only knows about his daughter Ursula and her family in his 70s.

Some years later, Lev reconnected with his childhood sweetheart Ksenija Kavalyova, daughter of a comrade of Mykola. And by 'reconnected', I mean Lev almost got himself killed while attending an international physics conference by the hands of his long-lost older brother Jan, who was trying to murder Ksenija, operate a spy ring, and leak classified Soviet nuclear secrets to the Americans. They married, and third time's a charm: they had a daughter, Zoya, and a son, Avel. Kseniya passed away in peaceful old age, Avel passed away during the fight against Israeli occupiers in Palestine, and Zoya is happily married to a Cuban fellow doctor, Arturo. Lev, who is also living in Cuba with Zoya, spoils his grandson Miguel rotten. After the 2017 reunion, Lev also takes it upon himself to spoil Béla, Ilona, and Tivadar, his newfound grandchildren, just as rotten. He's got his priorities straight, and to be honest who am I to judge him?

Really, it's the least thing Fate can do to give this man a happy old age.

[rightsinexile]

Thoughts on the Deportation of De-Facto Citizens

The following article was submitted by Tom Clark and was initially posted to the Canadian Council for Refugees email list on 20 February 2018. It is reprinted here with permission.

In December 2017, I ended up as part of a small delegation in a general hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. What provoked the hearing was the concern of two lawyers I had worked with during my work-life in refugee affairs. They were concerned about the deportations of many persons with relatively minor criminal records to dangerous situations and with separation from families. The lawyers were concerned about the lack of any meaningful legal recourse. Since then I have thought more about this issue.

The deportation of de-facto citizens by Western countries has gone on since at least the mid 1990s. I refer to young people, mostly men, often in refugee families, brought to a country like Canada in their childhood, then deported on the basis of crimes committed at the end of adolescence to countries they hardly know – countries that cannot be held responsible in any way. It is taken for granted that such deportation is part of immigration management. The practice is a carry over from times when border authorities had freedom of action over “aliens.” Loosely used terms like “public safety” or “national security” are accepted without question as legitimate purposes. For any de-facto citizen whose core family members are living in Canada it just shouldn’t happen. For such, who have strong ties to Canada from living, being educated and working in Canada, deportation is far too easy. With respect to crime and exile de-facto citizens should be treated like formal citizens.

There are some limits on deportation established in international human rights law. Case law from the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN Committee against Torture and the UN Human Rights Committee has established that deportation would violate human rights treaties when there is a real risk of torture as a consequence or when the balance between violation of family rights and the seriousness of a crime committed would be “disproportionate.” These international standards could prevent many of the deportations from Canada. But problems with the deportation of de-facto citizens go deeper.

The slew of injustices attached to deporting de-facto citizens is topped by discrimination. The criminal justice system is the general tool for setting sentences for crimes and dealing with related issues of public safety. Deportation comes after the allotted sentence for any crime committed has been served. Deportation acts as a discriminatory additional sentence for non-citizens. It comes from legislation directed only at non-citizens. So far, the fact that deportation is a direct extension of criminal justice has only been acknowledged by the Inter-American human rights system.

In 2003 the UN issued a report on the human rights of non-citizens. That report built on changes following the UN Declaration on the rights of non-nationals in 1985. The report emphasised that the human rights regime brought in by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international treaties – the Covenants - intended non-discrimination for non-citizens to the extent possible. Indeed following the adoption of the 2003 report its emphasis on non-discrimination appeared in some subsequent jurisprudence of international human rights bodies. But that emphasis has yet to fully extend to deportation practices.

The special issues around the deportation of de-facto citizens became clear in the 1990s. There were cases around de-facto citizens in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that family rights could preclude deportation except in the case of the most serious crimes. But the issue of “second generation immigrants” – what I call “de-facto citizens” - were not addressed at that time. Concerns were strongly stated in a dissenting minority of three judges in the European Court of Human Rights case Boujlifa v France 1997. Those judges argue for a different approach for de facto citizen cases and they disagree with the majority ruling that allowed Boujlifa’s deportation.

Since then, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found that full criminal law standards of due process apply to deportation proceedings. Yet the full range of issues around deportation and de facto citizens has yet to be addressed.

There is some arbitrariness in these deportations. It is just a fluke of fate that many of the persons involved are not formal citizens in the first place. They often arrived as young children with parents. For example, in Boujilfa v France, Boujifla was 5 years old when he arrived in France. Some of the persons facing deportation are shocked to find out that they are not citizens. They were educated and learned their skills and developed their problems from their social context in the country where they lived. Siblings may be citizens. Their core family is usually in the adopted country. Some are married or living in stable relationships. Some do not know the language of the country from which they were brought as a small child.

There are reasons to take the fluke of fate and a de-facto citizenship seriously. In its Nottebaum Case from the 1950s, the International Court of Justice found that citizenship related to more than just a formality – there had to be some real attachment of the person to the country. In the case of the de-facto citizens, there is often an overwhelming attachment to the country that is seeking their deportation. There is little to no attachment to the country to which the person is being deported - beyond a formality of birth. So from an international law perspective it is not clear-cut what rights and obligations the deporting and receiving countries have in these situations. Certainty, it is hard to see why another country should inherit a person resulting from Canada’s perspective on crime and problems developed in Canada. In other words, hanging over this process is the possibility that it may be illegal in international law.

Moreover, the process brings other issues from international law. The role of the criminal justice system is viewed as rehabilitation of the offending person to society – in our case Canada’s society. If our law has done its job, the person is rehabilitated to Canada. After serving a sentence, the person goes back to society. The person was not rehabilitated for another country. Moreover, the criminal justice system normally deals with related public safety so that some of Canada’s most serious criminals (usually formal citizens) return to society eventually. The question of the purpose of deportation after a served sentence is important. Why is there a need to second-guess the criminal justice system in the case of de-facto citizens?

Deportation passes over Canada’s concerns plus a settlement obligation to the receiving country. The lack of support from family members and spouse or common law spouse after deportation can make resettlement particularly hard for the individual and the receiving country. A measure like deportation seems strangely unsuited to the context of the de facto citizen, today’s human rights world and fairness among nation states.

The basis for deportation is questionable and also the rationale of public safety is tenuous. True, the systems dealing with non-citizens have accepted so far that serious crime and related public safety can be invoked as a basis for deportation. But in theory, before any court looks at whether the constraining of the person’s rights is disproportionate, as an international human rights body will do, it should examine and establish that there is indeed a legitimate purpose. To my mind, the international presumption should be that the sentence served and release of the person into society by the criminal justice system means that the person is rehabilitated and that any public danger is minimal – the assumption made for formal citizens. Time honoured assumptions about public safety and crimes committed sound plausible but need to be re-thought. I am not convinced that there is a purpose for deportation of de-facto citizens that could withstand serious scrutiny. Then, even if there is a clear purpose, is it necessary to deport the person to achieve that purpose? After all, this is not immigration. Canada is not choosing to bring anyone into Canada in these situations. The person was admitted long ago. The person has lived most of his or her life - and the formative part of it - in Canada. Finally, as part of the legitimacy and necessity of deportation, there is the question of whether Canada has the right to pass to another country a process which requires it to resettle one of Canada’s de-facto citizens as a result of Canada’s second guessing of its criminal law system because Canada’s immigration and refugee law says an immigration official may do so.

Beyond this, the decision-making in Canada’s law is questionable. It can be triggered or not by an official once a person has committed a crime with a prescribed maximum sentence and the person has served the actual sentence set by a criminal court judge. This means that when a government gets tough on crime and increases maximum sentences, a whole lot more non-citizens can qualify and face potential deportation. The actual sentence given can be very much less than the maximum established. In the ancient world, exile was the ultimate punishment. It is now banned as a punishment for citizens. But for de-facto citizens, exile is just an administrative matter in immigration law that an official may or may not choose to apply. For permanent residents in Canada there can be a fair trial process by a tribunal. But the presumptions current in the law will not default to those international human rights standards which discourage deportation. Certainly there is little chance of a re-examination of the fundamentals that this article is suggesting. And for non-citizens who are not permanent residents, there is only a “Humanitarian & Compassionate” application or a “Risk Assessment.” Indeed the practice of Canadian law has allowed non-citizens with serious humanitarian situations and plausible risks of torture to be deported. Some cases that went before international human rights bodies make the point. (Committee against Torture, CAT, Singh v Canada 2011; Human Rights Committee, HRC, Dauphin v Canada 2009; HRC Kaba v Canada 2010; HRC Choudhary v Canada 2013; HRC D.T. & son v Canada 2016.) Sometimes the international human rights bodies will ask Canada not to deport pending their examination because there is a plausible risk of torture. Canada may or may not honour such a request. (See CAT Sogi v Canada 2006; CAT Concluding Observations, Canada 2012; HRC AHG v Canada 2015 - the government said the authorities did not get the request in time; HRC Concluding Observations, Canada, 2015.)

Some domestic legal decisions reveal the problems. For example, see the 2006 Federal Court of Appeal Thanabalasingam case. In the case, a served sentence by a criminal court judge of 6 months that fit a “serious crime” definition in the law led to a deportation order for Thanabalasingam. He was from the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka that faces suspicion and risks of mistreatment. He had been in Canada for some 15 years.

Then, there is no meaningful appeal. There is access to the Federal Court but by leave. Then the best that can happen is that a lower court may raise a question with a higher court. This happened in the same Thanabalasingam case. In that case, the Federal Court of Appeal established that a court review defers to the original decision maker. The court considered only the question and so saw no problems with the deportation. The law was being followed. That was all that mattered.

In such ways national and international courts can limit themselves to avoid human rights determinations. It is true that the European Court of Human Rights has developed useful case law that aims to ensure that nobody will be deported to a serious risk of torture or cruel treatment. But it has otherwise limited itself to considering whether the violation of the right to family life is “disproportionate” given the seriousness of a crime. The dissenting judges in 1997 were right. A de-facto citizen begs wider questions.

It is worth adding that people remaining in Canada have rights limited by these deportations of de-facto citizens too. The family life of each of the remaining family members is diminished by having a grown child or sibling removed from Canada and barred from entering Canada. And there must always be some impairing of rights to security of the person. Few parents would be unaffected by the exile of their child. These effects are discounted in European case law.

In sum, de-facto citizens deserve a regime that better respects non-discrimination in criminal matters and their deep attachment to Canada, and the family rights that they and their family members are owed.

[arcticdementor]

At Free Beacon, Charles Fain Lehman reviews Reihan Salam's Melting Pot or Civil War?:

The key trick of Reihan Salam's new book, Melting Pot or Civil War?, is that it neatly bridges the yawning partisan gap on immigration using issues that concern both sides. We can have social equality and solidarity, Salam argues, or we can have immigration; we cannot possibly have both.

Salam's pedigree well-qualifies him to cross the chasm. On one hand, as the executive editor of National Review, he carries impeccable conservative credentials. On the other, being the son of Bengali immigrants who grew up speaking his parents' native tongue at home, he says many expect him to be something of an immigration dove. One suspects that it is this combination of views that leads to Salam's thoughtful, measured conclusion that America in the 21st century needs to rethink how many and what sort of people it lets cross its borders.

There are more immigrants in the United States today than at any previous point—43 million, about 13.5 percent of the population. That population has grown steadily since 1965, swelling through multiple attempts at reform.

This growth implies a rebalancing of the American economy. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the noncitizen resident population is substantially less-skilled than their native-born and naturalized counterparts.

…

It is this combination—the rising immigrant population and its low-skill skew—that concerns Salam. What happens, he asks, in a country with a large, low-skilled population, especially when that group is excluded from the rights and privileges of citizenship?

There are two answers. The first views the influx of low-skilled workers as an unqualified boon, with cheap labor increasing productivity and thus GDP. The natural conclusion is that totally open borders would allow the United States to pick up the unclaimed "trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk" made available by unencumbered migration of labor.

…

Salam is not so sure. Unlike other critics of unrestricted immigration, he does not focus on the adverse impacts of low-skilled arrivals on the least-educated of America's native-born citizens. Rather, he asks, what actually happens to our society when we try to make it rich off of cheap labor?

There are, he points out, countries that far more efficiently extract value from their immigrants than we do. Consider Qatar, where 74 percent of the population are foreign-born workers living as de facto slaves. Or Singapore—a mere 43 percent immigrant—where a noncitizen woman will be summarily deported if she gets pregnant. In both places, large immigrant workforces are used to create stable lifestyles for citizens at the expense of noncitizen labor.

Such conditions are a product of what Salam labels "extreme between-group inequality," in which "disadvantaged groups can justly claim unfair treatment, and advantaged groups are keen to protect their status." This is a natural byproduct of the bifurcation of society mass immigration facilitates. The skilled, powerful top half of the distribution benefits, while the bottom half is kept in servitude by their lack of skill and systematic disenfranchisement.

I’m reminded here of open borders advocate Nathan Smith on how the billion or so immigrants would transform America, with the current citizenry becoming “modern equivalents of the ancient Roman mob, privileged idlers demanding bread and circuses paid for by taxes” on “modern latifundia, worked… by voluntary immigrants… for pay rates that would strike native-born Americans as a form of slave labor,” maintained by the end of “the social safety net, one person, one vote, or non-discrimination in employment” and by walled communities guarded by private security companies or “universal conscription into some sort of national police force” to defend the “sovereignty” of the citizen minority “against a possible immigrant revolution”… only Smith considers it a good thing.

Salam thinks this configuration is unsustainable in America. This is especially because, while first-generation immigrants may be simply happy to make more than they did at home, their children will not be.

"As someone born and raised in neighborhoods transformed by low-skill immigration," he writes, "I can confirm that: ‘You're better off than you would have been had you been born in the Third World!' is not a satisfying riposte. ‘Gee, thanks. I also can't afford my rent.'"

The dissatisfaction of second-generation immigrants—and subsequent backlash from the entrenched native-born "upper" class—is what will lead to Salam's predicted "civil war."

The alternative, then, is the eponymous "melting pot." Salam's fundamental proposal is to curb immigration while simultaneously transitioning to a skills-based immigration system. (There are several other, wonkier ideas, but this is the basic thrust.)

…

Concerns about "extreme inequality" and creating a "more egalitarian economy" are strange to hear from a conservative commentator. But Salam's purpose is more than just preventing income inequality as an evil per se. Rather, he understands that inequality of the sort he describes eats away at social solidarity, driving society apart. It produces exactly the imbalances of power that he sees in nations like Singapore and Qatar and that he would like to avoid in the United States.

Inequality matters not because it is intrinsically unjust, but because an ethnically or socioeconomically unequal society can never be the kind of republic envisioned by the founders. Insofar as open immigration leads to bifurcation, Salam sees immigration restriction as a way to reempower the middle of American society, while simultaneously allowing the immigrants who are already here to slowly join it.

Economically, this would require a step back from welfare-state neoliberalism. No longer able to rely on the immigration engine to boost GDP, policymakers will need to ensure equitable growth through a different historical model, making sure workers' wages rise steadily (a shift that will be facilitated by fewer foreign-born competitors).

That Spottedtoad link is also worth a read.

[palmtreepalmtree]

Last week an anon asked me about my favorite little-known Supreme Court decision.  In continuing an indulgence of my nerdiness, I would like to share the first runner-up, which has been nagging at me to write about since I wrote that last post.

Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 US 206 (1953).

This case has everything.  National security threats.  A quote from Judge Learned Hand (that was seriously his name).  Reference to the “Iron Curtain.”  And two separate dissents from four different justices.  This case is legit.  

So what’s it about?  Here we go.

This is a case about a man who could not escape Ellis Island.

Mezei---referred to throughout the decision as the respondent since this case originated as an immigration proceeding---was a legal resident of the United States for twenty-five years beginning in 1923 and lived much of his life in Buffalo, New York.  He was born in Gibraltar (then and now a British territory) to Romanian and Hungarian parents.  In 1948, Mezei sailed for Hungary to visit his dying mother in Romania.  He never got there.

Little did Mezei know he was about to enter travel hell.

Denied entry to Romania, Mezei became stuck in Hungary for 19 months for lack of an exit visa.  Eventually, he obtained a visa to return to the United States, by way of France.  He got on a ship, as people did back in the day, and he steamed for the United States.  Only when he got there, an immigration official was not too impressed with his papers.  In February of 1950 Mezei was temporarily excluded from the United States.  While he waited for a final decision, the government transferred him to Ellis Island.

A few months later, without any hearing at which to argue his fate, the Attorney General ordered that Mezei’s exclusion was to be made permanent.  He could not enter the United States.

So, Mezei tried to get the hell out of Ellis Island.  Only no one would take him.  This is how the Court describes the Kafkaesque position in which Mezei found himself:

Twice he shipped out to return whence he came; France and Great Britain refused him permission to land. The State Department has unsuccessfully negotiated with Hungary for his re-admission. Respondent personally applied for entry to about a dozen Latin-American countries but all turned him down.

Mezei was essentially stateless.  He was from nowhere.  

Trapped on Ellis Island for more than a year, Mezei sued for his release---he requested to pay a bond to free him while he continued trying to find another country that would accept him. 

So what the hell was wrong with Mezei and why didn’t anyone want him?   

That’s an excellent question, and it is not entirely clear.  The Court describes it this way:  

[The] determination rested on a finding that respondent's entry would be prejudicial to the public interest for security reasons.

Yada yada yada national security, right?  What the hell does that mean?  

That’s exactly what the lower court judge wanted to know.  In considering whether to issue the bond for his relief, the district court judge asked the government to produce evidence that Mezei was a danger to public safety.  The government refused.  They would not even show the judge their evidence in secret.  

Both the district court and the court of appeals thought that was totally bogus.  So they issued and upheld the bond.  The government appealed.

So what did the Supreme Court do?  Was Mezei ever going to be able to escape the hell of Ellis Island?

Well, this is where we come to the real question of this case:  Is a non-citizen protected by the Constitution when seeking entry into the United States?

If you have been paying attention at all to immigration law and policy over the last many months, you probably know the answer already:  Nope.  Not really.  A non-citizen does not have much, if any, constitutional protections when seeking entry into the United States.

There are a lot of questions being asked and answered in this decision:

Was Mezei actually admitted to the United States when he was moved to Ellis Island such that he was actually being deported instead of excluded?

Was Mezei a de facto prisoner on Ellis Island?

Was Mezei constitutionally guaranteed a hearing or proceeding at which he could view the evidence against him or argue on his own behalf?

What ends up being central to the Court’s decision here is the distinction between being excluded and being deported.  Once you have been admitted to the country, the Court acknowledges that you are owed constitutional protection that includes a due process right to some sort of process or proceeding to contest your removal.  But when you’re outside and wanting to enter, you are not owed those same rights.  

Suffice it to say, not all of the justices agreed.  Four of them about done lost their minds.  Here is Justice Black in his dissent, co-signed by Justice Douglas:

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON forcefully points out the danger in the Court's holding that Mezei's liberty is completely at the mercy of the unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General. I join MR. JUSTICE JACKSON in the belief that Mezei's continued imprisonment without a hearing violates due process of law.

No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. 

Note that Justice Black straight up refers to Mezei’s status on Ellis Island as “imprisonment,” while the Court’s decision refers to it merely as “exclusion.”

In Justice Jackson’s dissent, co-signed by Justice Frankfurter, he starts off with a bang:

Fortunately it still is startling, in this country, to find a person held indefinitely in executive custody without accusation of crime or judicial trial.

And then he runs through all the hits of history.  American oppression under British colonial rule, American slavery, communism, Nazism.  I could go on.  But in doing so Justice Jackson makes a passionate case for due process of law---generally and in the immigration process.  

Why is this case relevant?

If it isn’t apparent so far, let me lay it out for you.  The specter of a national security threat is doing heavy-lifting in the majority’s opinion in this case.  In distinguishing Mezei’s situation from others where immigrants have been treated more fairly, the Court points out that Mezei was “behind the Iron Curtain for 19 months.”  At this point, the Court has not seen any evidence about what threat to the public or national security Mezei represents.  The government has not produced any.  But the Court is still willing to look on Mezei’s months stuck in Hungary with suspicion.  

This case does not remain a strong legal precedent as it once was (take a look at Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 US 678 (2001) if you’re curious).  But much of it still holds, and more importantly, it follows a familiar, well-trodden path.

Throughout the history of our country, national security threats have been used to justify some of our most shameful acts---from Japanese internment to COINTELPRO and the House Un-American Activities Committee, just to name a handful.  Though time provides us with sufficient perspective to regret these dark moments, we seem doomed to repeat them.  

In his dissent, Justice Jackson concludes with these ever-relevant words:

Congress has ample power to determine whom we will admit to our shores and by what means it will effectuate its exclusion policy. The only limitation is that it may not do so by authorizing United States officers to take without due process of law the life, the liberty or the property of an alien who has come within our jurisdiction; and that means he must meet a fair hearing with fair notice of the charges.

It is inconceivable to me that this measure of simple justice and fair dealing would menace the security of this country. No one can make me believe that we are that far gone.

[jewish-privilege]

One September weekend in 1995, a few thousand people met at a convention center in Seattle to prepare for an apocalyptic standoff with the federal government. At the expo, you could sign up to defend yourself from the coming “political and economic collapse,” stock up on beef jerky, learn strategies for tax evasion, and browse titles by writers like Eustace Mullins, whose White nationalist classics include The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, published in 1952, and—from 1967—The Biological Jew.

The sixth annual Preparedness Expo made national papers that year because it served as a clearinghouse for the militia movement, a decentralized right-wing movement of armed, local, anti-government paramilitaries that had recently sparked its most notorious act of terror, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal courthouse by White nationalists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. A series of speakers told expo attendees the real story: the attack had been perpetrated by the government itself as an excuse to take citizens’ guns away.

Not a lot of Black folks show up at gatherings like the Preparedness Expo, one site in an extensive right-wing counterculture in which White nationalism is a constant, explosive presence. White nationalists argue that Whites are a biologically defined people and that, once the White revolutionary spirit awakens, they will take down the federal government, remove people of color, and build a state (maybe or maybe not still called the United States of America, depending on who you ask) of their own. As a Black man, I am regarded by White nationalists as a subhuman, dangerous beast. In the 1990s, I was the field organizer for the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, a six-state coalition working to reduce hate crimes and violence in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States region. We did a lot of primary research, often undercover. A cardinal rule of organizing is that you can’t ask people to do anything you haven’t done yourself; so I spent that weekend as I spent many—among people plotting to remove me from their ethnostate.

It helped that, despite its blood-curdling anti-Black racism, at least some factions of the White nationalist movement saw me as a potential ally against their true archenemy. At the expo that year, a guy warily asked me about myself. I told him that I had come on behalf of a few brothers in the city. We needed to resist the federal government and we were there to get educated. I said I hoped he wouldn’t take it personally, but I didn’t shake hands with White people. He smiled; he totally understood. “Brother McLamb,” he concurred, “says we have to start building broad coalitions.” Together we went to hear Jack McLamb, a retired Phoenix cop who ran an organization called Police Against the New World Order, make a case for temporary alliances with “the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Orientals” against the real enemy, the federal government controlled by an international conspiracy. He didn’t have to say who ran this conspiracy because it was obvious to all in attendance. And despite the widespread tendency to dismiss antisemitism, notwithstanding its daily presence across the country and the world, it is obvious to you, too.

From the time I documented my first White nationalist rally in 1990 until today, the movement has made its way from the margins of American political life to its center, and I’ve moved from doing antiracist organizing in small northwestern communities to fighting for inclusive democracy on a national level, as the Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program officer at the Ford Foundation until recently, and now as a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yet if I had to give a basic definition of the movement—something I’ve often been asked to do, formally and informally, by folks who’ve spent less time hanging out with Nazis than I have—my response today would not be much different than it was when I began to do this work nearly thirty years ago. American White nationalism, which emerged in the wake of the 1960s civil rights struggle and descends from White supremacism, is a revolutionary social movement committed to building a Whites-only nation, and antisemitism forms its theoretical core.

...The meteoric rise of White nationalism within national discourse over the course of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and freshman administration—through Trump’s barely coded speech at fascist-style rallies, his support from the internet-based “Alt Right,” and his placement of White nationalist popularizers in top positions—has produced a shock of revelation for people across a wide swath of the political spectrum. This shock, in turn, has been a source of frustration within communities of color and leftist circles, where White liberals are often accused of having kept their heads in the sand while more vulnerable populations sounded the alarm about the toll of economic crisis, mass incarceration, police violence, deportation, environmental devastation, and—despite and in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—the unending blare of everyday hate. This is an understandable reaction. It’s one I’ve often shared. But the fact that many of us have long recognized that the country we live in is not the one we are told exists doesn’t mean we always understand the one that does. Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today.

To recognize that antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought is important for at least two reasons. First, it allows us to identify the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia—as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear. White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism—inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South—had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? For that matter, how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts to Islam? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious.

What is this arch-nemesis of the White race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews. Jews function for today’s White nationalists as they often have for antisemites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils. At the turn of the twentieth century, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—a forgery, first circulated by Czarist secret police in Russia in 1903, that purports to represent the minutes of a meeting of the international Jewish conspiracy—established the blueprint of antisemitic ideology in its modern form. It did this by recasting the shape-shifting, money-grubbing caricature of the Jew from a religious caricature to a racialized one. Upper-class Jews in Europe might have been assimilating and changing their names, but under the new regime of antisemitic thought, even a Jew who converted to Christianity would still be a Jew.

In 1920, Henry Ford brought the “Protocols” to the United States, printing half a million copies of an adaptation called “The International Jew,” and the text has had a presence in American life ever since. (Walmart stocked copies on its shelves and for a time refused calls to take them down—in 2004.) But it is over the past fifty years, not coincidentally the first period in U.S. history in which most American Jews have regarded themselves as White, that antisemitism has become integral to the architecture of American racism. Because modern antisemitic ideology traffics in fantasies of invisible power, it thrives precisely when its target would seem to be least vulnerable. Thus, in places where Jews were most assimilated—France at the time of the Dreyfus affair, Germany before Hitler came to power—they have functioned as a magic bullet to account for unaccountable contradictions at moments of national crisis. White supremacism through the collapse of Jim Crow was a conservative movement centered on a state-sanctioned anti-Blackness that sought to maintain a racist status quo. The White nationalist movement that evolved from it in the 1970s was a revolutionary movement that saw itself as the vanguard of a new, whites-only state. This latter movement, then and now, positions Jews as the absolute other, the driving force of white dispossession—which means the other channels of its hatred cannot be intercepted without directly taking on antisemitism.

This brings me to the second reason that White nationalist antisemitism must not be dismissed: at the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played. ... Contemporary antisemitism, then, does not just enable racism, it also is racism, for in the White nationalist imaginary Jews are a race—the race—that presents an existential threat to Whiteness. Moreover, if antisemitism exists in glaring form at the extreme edge of political discourse, it does not exist in a vacuum; as with every form of hateful ideology, what is explicit on the margins is implicit in the center, in ways we have not yet begun to unpack. 

...What I learned when I got to Oregon, as I began to log untold hours trying to understand White nationalists and their ideas, was that antisemitism was the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.

...The White nationalist movement that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century grew across the country. But it was Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming that neonazis in the 1980s carved out as the territorial boundaries of their future Whites-only state, a region that self-identified “Aryans” from around the country began to colonize with nothing short of White national sovereignty as their goal. “Ourselves alone willing,” declared White nationalist leader and Aryan Nations organizer Robert Miles, “we shall begin to form the new nation even while in the suffocating embrace of the ZOG.” In White nationalist parlance, the United States is the ZOG, or Zionist Occupied Government. It was in the Northwest that the nascent militia movement—notorious in the 1990s after standoffs between White nationalist compounds and the FBI in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas—declared war on their country loudly enough they could no longer be ignored.

...When folks ask me, skeptically, where the antisemitism in the White nationalist movement lies, it can feel like being asked to point out a large elephant in a small room. From the outset of my research on White nationalism all those years ago, it was clear that antisemitism in the movement is everywhere, and it is not hidden. “Life is uglier and uglier these days, more and more Jewish,” William Pierce wrote in The Turner Diaries. “No matter how long it takes us and no matter to what lengths we must go, we’ll demand a final settlement of the account between our two races,” the narrator promises at the book’s conclusion. “If the Organization survives this contest, no Jew will—anywhere. We’ll go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the last of Satan’s spawn.” White nationalism is a fractious countercultural social movement, and its factions often disagree with each other about basic questions of theory and practice. The movement does not take a single, unified position on the Jewish question. But antisemitism has been a throughline from the Posse Comitatus, which set itself against “anti-Christ Jewry”; to David Duke’s refurbished Ku Klux Klan, which abandoned anti-Catholicism in the 1970s in order to focus on “Jewish supremacism”; to the neonazi group The Order, inspired by The Turner Diaries, which in the mid-1980s went on a rampage of robberies and synagogue bombings in Washington state and murdered a Jewish radio talk show host in Denver; to evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson who denounced antisemitism but used its popularity among their followers to promote an implicitly White supremacist “Christian nationalism”; to the contemporary Alt Right named by White nationalist Richard Spencer, which has brought antisemitic thought and imagery to new audiences on the internet—and now at White House press conferences.

...Over years of speaking about White nationalism in the 1990s and early 2000s in the Northwest and then the Midwest and South, I found that audiences—whether white or of color, at synagogues or churches, universities or police trainings—generally had a relationship to white nationalism that, at least in one basic sense, was like my own. They knew the scope and seriousness of the movement from personal experience, and—if they didn’t take this for granted to begin with—they were not shocked to discover its antisemitic emphasis. The resistance I have encountered when I address antisemitism has primarily come since I moved to the Northeast seven years ago, and from the most established progressive antiracist leaders, organizations, coalitions, and foundations around the country. It is here that a well-meaning but counterproductive thicket of discourse has grown up insisting that Jews—of Ashkenazi descent, at least—are uncontestably White, and that to challenge this is to deny the workings of White privilege. In other words, when I’m asked, “Where is the antisemitism?,” what I am often really being asked is, “Why should we be talking about antisemitism?”

...I can answer this question as I have been doing and will continue to do: antisemitism fuels White nationalism, a genocidal movement now enthroned in the highest seats of American power, and fighting antisemitism cuts off that fuel for the sake of all marginalized communities under siege from the Trump regime and the social movement that helped raise it up. To refuse to deal with any ideology of domination, moreover, is to abet it. Contemporary social justice movements are quite clear that to refuse antiracism is an act of racism; to refuse feminism is an act of sexism. To refuse opposition to antisemitism, likewise, is an act of antisemitism. Arguably, not much more should need to be said than that. But I suspect that much more does need to be said. To the hovering question, why should we be talking about antisemitism, I reply, what is it we are afraid we will find out if we do? What historic and contemporary conflicts will be laid bare? And if we recognize that White privilege really is privilege, what will it mean for Jewish antiracists to give up the fantasy that they ever really had it to begin with?

...A central insistence of antiracist thought over the past several decades is that, as with any social category produced by regimes of power, you don’t choose race, power chooses it for you; it names you. This is why all the well-meaning identification in the world does not make a White person Black. Likewise, as much as I draw inspiration from the Jewish community, and as much as I adore my Jewish partner and friends, it was my organizing against antisemitism as a Black antiracist that first pulled me to the Jewish community, not the other way around. I developed an analysis of antisemitism because I wanted to smash White supremacy; because I wanted to be free. If we acknowledge that White nationalism clearly and forcefully names Jews as non-white, and did so in the very fiber of its emergence as a post-civil rights right-wing revolutionary movement, then we are forced to recognize our own ignorance about the country  we thought we lived in. It is time to have that conversation.

Read Eric K. Ward’s full article at Political Research Associates. It is long but amazing and important.

[justsimplylovely]

Hundreds of migrants from Africa are stuck in Tapachula because of Mexico’s willingness to bow to Trump and stem the flow of migrants African migrants protest outside the Siglo XXI migrants detention center, demanding Mexican authorities to speed up visas that would enable them to cross Mexico to the US. Photograph: Isaac Guzman/AFP/Getty ImagesNeh knew she was taking a risk when she got involved with English-language activists in mostly-Francophone Cameroon.She had no way of know that her decision would eventually force her to flee her country, fly halfway across the world and then set out on a 4,000-mile trek through dense jungle and across seven borders – only to leave her stranded in southern Mexico, where her hopes of finding safety in the US were blocked by the Mexican government’s efforts to placate Donald Trump’s anti-migrant rage.“It is just too much,” sobbed Neh,at a protest camp set up by migrants from across Africa outside the main immigration offices in the sweltering southern city of Tapachula. “We thought our suffering was almost over. And now we’re stuck here, treated like the lowest citizens on earth.”Not that long ago, Neh worked as a microfinance officer and lived with her husband and three children in a small town in the West of Cameroon. Earlier this year, she joined a group campaigning for anglophone independence. She insists her activism was peaceful and that she never supported rebel groups, but amid spiralling violence, she was arrested, beaten, and raped by soldiers. One night, an officer took her from her cell and told her to start running. She imagined she was about to die – but instead she ran into the arms of her husband who had paid a bribe for her freedom.Hustled into hiding, Neh was then put on a plane to Quito where she joined the growing number of migrants from around the world using Ecuador as the jumping off point for the passage north. mapThe harrowing journey requires crossing the the lawless jungles of Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, where migrants risk wild animals, raging rivers and predatory robbers .For seven days, the 37-year-old hauled herself up and down mountain slopes, hanging on tree roots. Crossing a river, she was almost swept away by the current; an insect bite paralyzed her arm. And each day, her group passed the bloated and half-eaten corpses of others who had died on the same trail.The next stage of her odyssey was more straightforward. With the help of bribes and official paperwork, Neh travelled by bus across Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. She began to dream of a new life in the US, reunited with the three children she had left behind.And then, in Mexico, everything ground to an halt. She joined hundreds of migrants from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Eritrea, Mauritania, and a smattering of other African countries who are stuck in Tapachula because of Mexico’s willingness to bow to Trump and stem the flow of migrants.Until recently, African migrants were waved through Mexico by immigration officials who had no interest in stopping them. Photograph: Isaac Guzman/AFP/Getty ImagesTrump’s main target has always Central Americans who account for most of the migrant flow through Mexico. But the crackdown has caught up travelers from all around the world.Their situation has only been exacerbated by US policies. Earlier this month the US supreme court ruled that the US authorities could deny asylum to anybody who passed through another country to get there.Meanwhile, US officials have pressured Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to accept asylum seekers from third countries, even though they are among the most dangerous countries in the world. “We have been taken hostage. We want our freedom,” said José Pelé Messa, a TV presenter who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010 – first for Angola, and then Brazil, which he had left earlier this year when the security situation there made life untenable.Around him, the inhabitants of the protest camp were gearing up for another day of boredom, under the watchful eye of a group of National Guard officers in riot gear.Railings were draped with blankets and clothes sodden in the previous night’s downpour. Migrants – grouped by nationality or language – pored over documents in Spanish that they couldn’t read or scanned their phones for news from home. A pregnant woman prepared soup on a small wooden burner outside her tent. A couple of toddlers were using discarded plastic bottles as drums.Pelé gestured at the desultory scene: “I took my children through the jungle for this? I’m a corpse. I just haven’t started rotting yet.”Until recently, African migrants were waved through Mexico by immigration officials who had no interest in stopping them.But after Trump’s threat of trade tariffs in May, Mexico’s government scrambled to clamp down: flooding the south of the country with law enforcement, and stepping up cooperation with the US policy of sending asylum seekers back into northern Mexico while their cases are processed.For migrants from countries in Africa, who are much harder to repatriate, it has meant being kept in limbo. Photograph: Isaac Guzman/AFP/Getty ImagesFor Central Americans trying to get through southern Mexico the crackdown has brought more raids, record numbers of deportations, and greater vulnerability to criminal attacks as they are pushed into less visible routes.For migrants from countries in Africa, who are much harder to repatriate, it has meant being kept in limbo.Previously, Mexican immigration authorities had typically issued African migrants with documents ordering them to sort out their status or leave the country within 21 days. Now these documents, which had previously served as de facto transit visas, order them to leave by the southern border. “Mexico is using us as an instrument of politics to please Donald Trump,” said Serge, 21, who also fled the conflict in Cameroon. “This is creating a lot of anger among us.”Frustration in the camp has bubbled over several times, leading to some scuffles with the authorities. This weekend a small group of desperate Africa temporarily blocked a car carrying Filippo Grandi, the head of UNHCR who was visiting Tapachula. One pregnant woman threw herself in front of the car’s wheels crying and pleading for help.Migrants are particularly angered by the perception that they are being coerced into applying for asylum in Mexico – where few feel safe and almost none want to stay.“Mexico is playing games with us,” said a 36-year-old engineer from Eritrea who identified himself as Mr Testahiwet. “This is the way to get to America and we want to go to America. Mexico is the wrong place to ask for asylum.”Some are so desperate they have begun looking for ways to get through Mexico undetected – though their skin colour and their lack of Spanish makes this hard to do.One recent dawn, at a major crossing point on the Suchiate river, not far from Tapachula, around 10 Cameroonians clambered onto a raft made of huge inner tubes and headed towards the Guatemalan side. The migrants sat in a glum and nervous silence as they were punted across, and then piled into cars with blackened windows, presumably driven by people smugglers who had promised to get them through Mexico by another route.Back at the camp, Kelly, another English-speaking refugee from Cameroon, said she hadn’t been able to speak to her children for weeks. Back home, she had been a physics teacher, but she fled her job and her home when the rebels enforced a school boycott on pain of death.“You leave when you can’t take it anymore. You start running, and you keep running until you can stop,” she said. “We are not looking for greener pastures – we are looking for safety.”

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[kacydeneen]

Mexico-US Tariff Deal: Questions, Concerns for Migration

As Washington and Mexico City both took victory laps Saturday over a deal that headed off threatened tariffs on Mexican imports, it remained to be seen how effective it may be and migration experts raised concerns over what it could mean for people fleeing poverty and violence in Central America.

Other than a vague reiteration of a joint commitment to promote development, security and growth in Central America, the agreement focuses almost exclusively on enforcement and says little about the root causes driving the surge in migrants seen in recent months.

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"My sense is overall the Mexican government got out of this better than they thought. The agreement though leaves a lot of big question marks," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. "It's good that the two sides reached an agreement which allows both of them to save face, but it's not clear how easy it is to implement."

The deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops appears to be the key commitment in what was described as "unprecedented steps" by Mexico to ramp up enforcement, though Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero said that had already been planned and was not a result of external pressure.

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"I have said before, migration into Mexico also has to be regulated ... orderly, legal and safe," Sánchez Cordero told The Associated Press. "So the National Guard that we were going to deploy anyway, we're going to deploy. It's not because they tell us to, but rather because we're going to do it anyway."

Mexico was already increasing enforcement such as detentions, deportations and checkpoints. In recent weeks it broke up the latest migrant caravan, snuffing out most appetite for traveling in large, visible groups.

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If Mexico does more as promised, it's likely to be seen in intensifications of those same efforts, experts said — raids on hotels where migrants stay or on bus companies transporting them north to the U.S. border. The two countries also agreed to collaborate to share information on and disrupt people-smuggling networks, a new focus seen earlier this week when Mexico arrested two migration activists and froze accounts of over two dozen people alleged to have organized caravans.

A concern is that even more aggressive enforcement could put migrants with legitimate asylum claims at risk of being deported from Mexico to the dangers they fled in the first place. Also, Mexican security forces are known for often being corrupt and shaking migrants down for bribes. A renewed crackdown is seen as making migration through Mexico more difficult and more dangerous, but doing little to discourage Central Americans desperate to escape poverty, hunger and violence.

"People are fleeing their homes regardless of what the journey might mean and regardless of what chance they may have for seeking protections in Mexico or in the United States," said Maureen Meyer, an immigration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, "simply because they need to leave."

"It seems like in all these discussions (over tariffs and immigration) the human reality of these people and why they're leaving Central America was lost," she continued. "It was 'what can we do to stop them,' and not 'what can we really do to create the conditions in their home countries so that people don't have to leave.'"

Another key element of the deal is that the United States will expand a program known as the Migrant Protection Protocol, or MPP. According to Mexican immigration authorities, since January there have been 10,393 returns by migrants to Mexico while their cases wend their way through U.S. courts.

MPP has been plagued by glitches and so far has been introduced only in California and El Paso, Texas, and Selee said there are logistical hurdles to further expansion. Right now the MPP figure of 10,000 or so represents "a drop in the bucket" compared to overall migration, he added.

Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who led the negotiations, said the agreement does not include any quotas.

If MPP does roll out on a mass scale along the United States' entire southern border, it could overwhelm Mexican border cities. Mexico promised to offer jobs, health care and education for returnees, but has little infrastructure to do so. Currently most shelters and support programs are run by the likes of NGOs and the Roman Catholic Church.

And if the program were to include places like Tamaulipas, the Gulf coast state where cartels and gangs control large swaths of territory, migrants could be at even greater risk.

"You know this is an area that the U.S. government considers that it's not safe for any American citizen," Meyer said, referring to the State Department's highest-level warning against all travel to Tamaulipas due to crime and kidnappings. "And yet it's OK for us to send people back there?"

Still, the deal was hailed by many in Mexican industry and politics.

Arturo Rocha, a Foreign Relations Department spokesman, tweeted late Friday that it was "an unquestionable triumph for Mexico." Avoiding tariffs sends a calming message to ratings agencies worried about a possible trade war, he said, adding that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's government had won U.S. recommitment to Central American development and resisted "safe third country" designation, a concession sought by Washington that would have required asylum seekers to apply first in Mexico.

However Abdel Camargo, an anthropologist at the Frontera Sur College in southern Mexico, said that by accepting MPP returnees, "Mexico does not become a safe third country but de facto is going to act as one."

Some such as ex-President Felipe Calderón of the conservative opposition National Action Party questioned whether Mexico was truly master of its own migratory policy. But José Antonio Meade, a five-time Cabinet minister who lost last year's election to López Obrador, praised Ebrard for avoiding damaging tariffs "in the face of very complex conditions."

In San Jose del Cabo for a summit of North American mayors, Juan Manuel Gastelum of Tijuana, across from San Diego, said he's fine with more migrants being returned to his city as long as the federal government invests in caring for them. He added that the threat of tariffs may have been necessary to force his country's hand.

"How else was Mexico going to understand that it is not right to leave migration uncontrolled?" said Gastelum, who is also a member of National Action.

Meanwhile, a rally later Saturday in Tijuana that López Obrador called to defend Mexican pride and dignity was expected to take on more of a festive atmosphere.

"It was (originally supposed to be) a meeting to show support for the incoming governor ... that turned into a demand for peace and respect on the tariffs issue," local restaurateur and businessman Francisco Villegas said. "But since the tariffs issue was sorted out by having Marcelo Ebrard and his team up there, it is now turning into a celebration."

Associated Press writer María Verza contributed.

Photo Credit: Gregory Bull/AP Mexico-US Tariff Deal: Questions, Concerns for Migration published first on Miami News

[jennymanrique]

Immigrants could spend even more years in limbo as court backlog gets worse under Trump

Immigrants released from detention by federal officials pending the outcome of immigration cases waited to get their bus tickets at the bus station in McAllen on June 10. Photo: Nathan Hunsinger/DMN

GianCarlo Franco thought he had a hard deadline for his 16-year-old Salvadoran client: The immigration attorney had to file a brief by June explaining why the teen should be allowed to stay in the U.S. On July 3, a judge in Dallas would decide whether she should be deported or given asylum because she said her family had been targeted by violent gangs.

For Franco, this would be made more difficult by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recent declaration that gang violence was no reason to grant asylum. A week before his brief was due, a worried Franco sought an extension to deal with this new complication.

The extension was denied, Franco said, because he no longer needed it. Unbeknownst to him, the teen’s hearing had already been pushed back to 2022 — eight years after she arrived in the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor. That’s because another recent Trump administration change had directed judges to handle newer immigration cases fastest, pushing older cases back in line.

The girl’s case illustrates how rapid changes in the administration’s crackdown on immigration have put additional strains on the nation’s overburdened immigration courts. An ever-expanding list of changes to this stepchild of the justice system has increased the case backlog 32 percent since Donald Trump became president.

The heap of cases now tops off at more than 714,000 through May, according to a Syracuse University nonprofit that tracks cases in the U.S. justice system. The average case is now about 2 years old, according to TRAC.

About 204,000 immigration cases were resolved last year, while about 269,000 new cases were added to the backlog.

Immigration courts are not part of an independent judiciary as regular criminal courts are. They instead lie within the Department of Justice, answering directly to the U.S. attorney general. That makes it far easier for the administration to change the way they work.

Among the policy changes under Trump: Revising acceptable asylum arguments. Speeding up the completion of cases by setting a goal of 700 cases per judge per year in judges’ performance reviews. Changing the priorities for when cases will be heard.

Some immigration attorneys say the administration’s changes have bogged down the courts even more.

“We still have people who got to the country in 2014 who haven’t even had their first hearing,” said Irving attorney Arvin Saenz, who's juggling over a dozen asylum cases for children or families who arrived around that year.

About two-thirds of the cases in the backlog are those of immigrants still waiting for their initial hearing, according to TRAC.

Immigrants released from detention by federal officials pending the outcome of immigration cases waited to get their bus tickets at the bus station in McAllen on June 10.(Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer) Immigrants released from detention by federal officials pending the outcome of immigration cases waited to get their bus tickets at the bus station in McAllen on June 10. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer) Immigration attorneys in North Texas say they see the problem only getting worse — although at least one former immigration judge believes the pain is temporary and the system will be turned around with the addition of more judges and policies that quicken the pace in the courts.

Long stays in the U.S. as cases wind their way through the system are “de facto amnesty,” said Art Arthur, a former immigration judge and government prosecutor. He now works with the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative research group advocating immigration restrictions.

“If you are limited in the time you can stay in the U.S., you are not going to pay $7,000 to $10,000 to a smuggler,” Arthur said. “Eventually, that cuts into the backlog.”

In the courtrooms

Migrant children slept in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville in 2014. Photo: Eric Gay/AP

On Tuesday, it was a typically busy day in the Dallas immigration courts at the Earle Cabell Federal Building. Cases old and new were going before the judges.

In one courtroom, about 20 migrant children as young as 5 — most were between 16 and 18 — listened to a legal orientation. Leslye Arauz of Catholic Charities used several posters to explain legal procedures to the children waiting to see the judge. She advised them on how to face him politely and call him “your honor.” She explained the types of visas and other relief they could seek.

“You need to be aware that your case will not be resolved today,” she said in Spanish. “But you will have more chances of winning if you go to every court hearing, don’t get in trouble and keep attending school.”

Then they waited until, one by one, they went before Judge Richard R. Ozmun to tell him their name, age and birthplace, all through an interpreter.

Many of the teens crossed the border without a parent in 2016 or earlier. Most now had a sponsor, relative or foster care parent at their side. Ozmun emphasized to each one the need to get a lawyer. Only three had an attorney present.

But in another court down the hall, Judge Deitrich H. Sims sat behind his bench in a mostly empty room, staring at a TV screen as he heard cases by videoconference with a room full of adult men in blue and orange jumpsuits at a detention center in Oklahoma. Many were accused of the civil offense of unlawful entry into the U.S. just within the last few months.

The Justice Department decision to hear the cases of recent immigration arrivals sooner has caused docket reshuffling that has intensified the court backlog, said Dana Leigh Marks, a San Francisco immigration judge.

Since 2017, Sessions has said he wants to show unauthorized immigrants that they can't slip into the country and then go free for years waiting for their cases to be heard, a process known as "catch and release."

“We must not let attempts to undermine our lawful immigration system deter the progress,” James McHenry, director of the immigration court agency, said in May.

Reprioritizing cases has been tried before. So-called “rocket dockets” prioritized the cases of unaccompanied minors in 2014, as the Obama administration hoped closing those cases quicker — and deporting the children to their native countries — would be a deterrent as an alarming surge of children swept across the border.

Most sitting judges would not comment on the record about the Trump-era changes, but at least some appear to resent losing their discretion on setting priorities.

“We strongly believe one of the quintessential skills of a judge is docket management,” said Marks, speaking as the president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

“Our ability to manage our dockets in that very granular way is being taken from us by the current administration just as it was by the Obama administration.”

“There are very few courts that are able to accomodate a new priority without pushing back cases already in the system. There are just not enough hours in the day for judges to hear those cases.”

Other changes are causing angst.

Attorney Natalia Darancou cited a decision by Sessions this year to limit immigration judges’ discretion to suspend or “administratively close” certain cases. These would have been taken off the books for special reasons, but the judges are no longer allowed to do so.

For example, Darancou said, she has clients who planned to apply for a provisional waiver of unlawful presence. The federal government can grant some unauthorized immigrants such a waiver if they can show that if they aren’t allowed into the U.S. to join a spouse or parent who is already a permanent resident or U.S. citizen, that relative would suffer “extreme hardship.”

People in removal proceedings cannot apply for the waiver, but previously, judges could put cases on hold so immigrants with qualifying circumstances could pursue that option, Darancou said.

“We had a lot of other options before that reduced the caseload for the courts, and [Sessions has] taken away those options,” Darancou said.

In a decision issued in May, Sessions said that suspending cases rather than seeing them through created a backlog of its own and left immigrants in limbo.

“This process — where immigration court cases were put ‘out of sight, out of mind’ — effectively resulted in illegal aliens remaining indefinitely in the United States without any formal legal status,” said Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley.

Wait times

Sessions and officials within the agency that administers the courts say their mission is to tackle the “overwhelming backlog.” Other measures have ranged from streamlining the lengthy process of hiring judges to increasing the use of video teleconferencing and sending immigration judges to the border in 2017.

To this date, the immigration courts agency still relies on a paper-based case management system that officials described as “inefficient, cumbersome and outdated.”

“The use of paper files also adds additional time to hearings as [immigration judges] are forced to constantly flip through files to track evidence during testimony,” the agency said in a February budget report requesting money from Congress for a “modernization program.”  

Immigrant attorneys say that not all delays are a bad thing.  Due process takes time, attorney Joshua Turin said. While noting that “judges are drowned in work and they are not acting in bad faith,” he added that he has cases that have been reset to 2021.

“No court operates in 24 hours,” he said. “Some of the delay is natural. So if they’re three years behind now, only some of that is due to bad policies. Some of it is due, to be fair to the government, to the fact that there’s a lot of people in the country illegally, and therefore there’s a lot of hearings going on.”

The delays can give immigration attorneys more time to prepare, but they can also work against their cases, said Franco, the attorney representing the Salvadoran teen with a hearing in 2022.

“It’s great that the client gets more time here because if they get married, something could change” in the case, said Franco, who works for the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. “But it’s really difficult to prove a case that happened a long time ago in 2022, with kids that aren’t going to remember everything. Evidence is already hard to get in our country; imagine to try to get it in El Salvador and these other places.”

Hiring more judges

One solution to many of the courts' problems is to hire more judges. Most conservatives and liberals agree that more immigration judges and court resources would reduce the backlog. It’s one of the few immigration issues of general consensus.

There are about 340 immigration judges nationwide. In Dallas, there are seven, up from five a few years ago.

Marks said the federal government has set aside money to hire more than 100 more judges.

A hiring bout “is the most significant improvement that can be made to bring the backlog down,” said Arthur, the former immigration judge.

But on Thursday, Trump called into question the need for those hires.

“Tell the people ‘OUT,’ and they must leave, just as they would if they were standing on your front lawn,” he tweeted. “Hiring thousands of ‘judges’ does not work and is not acceptable - only Country in the World that does this!”

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here 

[newsvomit-blog]

The Supreme Court immigration ruling formalizes terror against Latinos

The U.S.Supreme Court ruling in Jennings v.Rodriguez on Tuesday is a bizarre and dark new development in the American experiment.

Not only because it’s a breakdown of the court’s ability to properly interpret the constitution (as they formally institutionalize a de facto second class of citizens), but because it’s a dereliction of the court’s duty as a part of a system of checks and balances designed to protect the constitutional rights of people in this country, regardless of country of origin, from a tyrannical government that would subvert our founding document for political or racist ends.This ruling only formalizes what many of us in the Latinx community have known for generations: that the perpetuation of systems and laws that instill fear in immigrants (detained or not) is a form of state-sponsored terror.Now the court is complicit and part of that terror.And as pathways to legal status for immigrants come under attack by the current administration, this kind of terror is increasingly designed to incarcerate people for no other reason than for their inability to access pathways toward legal status — which is how this ruling will likely be used by this current administration.The court ruled in Jennings v.

Rodriguez that all immigrants, even those with protected legal status or asylum seekers, do not have a right to periodic bond hearing after detention, which makes it possible for them to be detained indefinitely.The defendant, Alejandro Rodriguez, who was brought to the United States from Mexico as an infant and became a permanent legal resident, was detained for three years for joy riding and possession of a controlled substance; the ACLU was fighting for his right to a hearing.It comes a day after another Supreme Court decision not to rule on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which in effect leaves that program safe for at least another year.But while the ruling on DACA might give the impression of an impartial system of courts, the latter development undermines that illusion by giving this discriminatory Trump administration its seal of approval in the name of the law.All three branches are now in sync with their consensus to terrorize detained immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.

And the explicit message of this ruling against Rodriguez is that, no matter your legal status, the constitution does not work for you if you’re an immigrant.You can be extracted from the American fabric for seemingly arbitrary reasons, by virtue of that now-institutionalized second class status.What we’ve seen is the majority of this court, our last branch of un-bought government, actively buying out of the idea of America as a melting pot, as a nation of immigrants who deserve certain unalienable rights, not unlike life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.This should be a wake-up call to anyone who thought (maybe still thinks) that they have nothing to fear because they are documented, or that they have nothing to fear because they’re not Latinx, or that they have nothing to fear because they are another type of immigrant, or they have nothing to fear because they’ve done nothing wrong.The ruling makes it possible to target, criminalize and then indefinitely detain someone for no other offense than being systematically denied a pathway toward legal status in the first place — or even if they did.If we’ve learned anything from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s that this country has ways of creating probable cause when it seeks to dispose of you.

And in a country that incarcerates more if its population — by number and percentage — than any other place in the world and in era where private prisons are in rapid expansion, it’s reasonable to ask whether if immigrants are the target today,who else might be tomorrow.In the context of the historical terrorization of the Latinx community (and not just the Latinx immigrant community) through workplace documentation audits, workplace raids, deportation proceedings and traffic stops, it’s hard to see this ruling as anything but unhinged new turn that will have a chilling effect on public dissent among America’s immigrant and Latinx population, effectively undermining the first amendment of the constitution — free speech (which seems oddly appropriate for the post-truth era).We have to be vigilant about dismantling our immigrant class — already consigned to second-class status — while maintaining the rights of those who have been legally condemned to that class.Under this administration, it’s not a given that citizens won’t fall prey to these same systems being put into place to remove from America the people some conservatives have declared racially undesirable, especially now that all three branches of our government are in-step and moving toward a common fate.Daniel Peña is the author of “Bang: A Novel.” He lives in Houston, Texas. Source: NBC News.

The Supreme Court immigration ruling formalizes terror against Latinos was originally published on NewsVomit

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Public attitudes on immigration are softening but Amber Rudd is stuck in the past

By Russell Hargrave

Just for a moment there, it felt like October was going to be a good month. But then along came Amber Rudd and spoiled it all.

First, we had some heartening news about public attitudes to immigration. The pollsters at Ipsos MORI released data showing that the proportion of people who view immigration as a good thing is on the up.

And this wasn't public opinion nudging gently in one direction or another, which is so often what polls generally offer us. It was a significant shift in how many people hold positive views of immigration, which jumped from 35% to 46% in the eighteen months between February 2015 and October 2016. This was mirrored in a drop among people who thought immigration was bad for the country, from 46% to 34%.

Ipsos also saw "a bigger change taking place after the EU referendum", explained their managing director Bobby Duffy. This may be the most remarkable news of all, that amid a bad-tempered, sometimes downright xenophobic Brexit campaign, the public's approach to newcomers actually grew more sympathetic.

It is a useful reminder that most ordinary Brits aren't that hard-line on immigration, no matter how it might sometimes seem.

It also suggests that it may be time to move the debate on from Brexit. If the referendum did indeed 'lance the boil' on anti-migrant feeling, as some suggest, now is the time to make the case for a whole new debate about the issues at stake: why immigration matters, its pros and cons, how to better integrate new neighbours and colleagues.

One person already making the case this month was Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader and UN high representative to Bosnia (that country's "de-facto leader", as The Guardian once called him). Speaking before a think tank event to commemorate the often-forgotten 400,000 Indian Muslim soldiers who fought for the British army in World War One, Ashdown argued that the army already led the way on how integration worked in practice.

The military "is probably an organisation where that kind of sense of integration [between faiths] is as good as most other places, and better than a lot," he said. This is as true now as it was in 1914. "In active service you depend on the man next to you, whatever their creed, religion or colour is. If you ain't integrated, you ain't going to survive."

Ashdown, a poetry-quoting former Royal Marine who speaks six languages, reaches places that other liberal commentators can't. We would do well to listen to him. If pro-immigration voices haven't tapped into institutions like the military to make our arguments, it is probably time to start. As Sunder Katwala, who chaired the event, said: "The army a hundred years ago looked very like the Britain of 2017."  

So far, so much positive stuff to chew over. Until you opened The Observer this weekend to find the Home Office threatening EU nationals.

Home secretary Amber Rudd has put her name to a letter sent to a Romanian in a UK detention centre, to tell them that the best way to avoid destitution was to return to Romania. As one charity rightly told the paper, the chilling thing was the tone: "Effectively telling a detainee to go home or go to another European country."

We have seen all this before. The government's approach to European citizens is hardening even as public views on immigration may be starting to soften. We have had the Hostile Environment 2.0. There is still no meaningful guarantee that the three million EU nationals already living here will be allowed to get on with their lives in the UK. As The Observer piece notes, the number of Europeans stuck in immigration detention has gone up.

A great Whitehall trope, repeated for decades now, is that ministers will listen to public concerns. But officials are deaf to signs that people are turning away from the grimmer policies coming out of government.

It is ministers, with their threatening letters and deportation orders, who don't want to move on from the Brexit vote. The hard-liners are in the Home Office and they aren't listening at all.

Russell Hargrave is a writer and reporter with a special interest in immigration, development and government. He has written for platforms including politics.co.uk, The Guardian, Reuters and The Tablet, and has worked as a comms specialist in the charity sector.

[lostchildein]

AUTISM QUEST

A Tiny Tiny Quip-filled Campaign about Einhander’s Life in Montreal

  Prelude:

        Back in May 2017, I was anticipating the end of my pre-university student life. The people who I’ve spent the majority of my time with in those days suggested for us all to play a session of Dungeons and Dragons. At first, I wished to play with my friends in a campaign. The only person who wanted to be a Dungeon Master was, unfortunately, someone who was not well-liked by my community. Because of that, I switched my interests towards becoming a Dungeon Master myself. The Dungeons and Dragons party was not set in place yet, but I still wanted to get some practice in writing a game scenario.

        When I thought what my campaign should be about, I concentrated on fun scenarios and choices for the players to pick. I drew inspiration from the setting that I found myself in at the moment of writing it. I tried my best to emulate the college we all attended as if it were a huge barracks in a medieval setting. Rather than come up with something new, I just re-imagined my surroundings and took into account the convenient locations of shops, bridges, the lakes, and of course the college itself.

        Unfortunately, the Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Party with my college community never occurred. That did not stop me from having written enough scenarios for me to keep around when I did become a Dungeon Master. It was fun to write these scenarios, so I wasn’t too disheartened about the whole cancellation.

        In one of my classes, I was required to write eight journal entries that revolved around me observing the nature of my nearby environment. I looked deeply into these journal entries and realized that they were all viable as RPG-like events and areas. At this point, I realized how much I’ve experienced and learned as a person. I reflected on my life, and more importantly on Montreal, through the same lens I use to play video games. Doing this made me feel incredibly happy. As I looked at life, I had been doing my best to weed out the bad and discover the fun and interesting.

        These moments where I write down these ideas are happy. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t writing an assignment or to vent frustration. The latter was something I had done many times. This time, it’s fun. And I’m going to keep at it until it no longer is.

  What are you writing about, Ein?:

        In my first written scenarios, I rewrote past events that occurred in my college so that my friends could find the scenarios relatable and fun to revisit in a different context.

        Currently, I am attempting to turn the world I inhabit into a world for players to explore. The world in question is Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I’m a bit biased when I say that I believe that Montreal is an incredibly unique world with its issues and history. This bias comes from the fact that I’ve lived here my whole life. However, I hope that I can show you in my scenario section just how interesting Montreal truly is.

        Of course, I can’t really call the world I’m building “Montreal”. Instead, I’m going to name that world “Reasborough”, set in the Kingdom of “Anon”. Reasborough is an island of cities that encompasses a combination of Montreal’s history and settings, as well as my experiences, thoughts, fears, and ideals.

  Ein’s History as a Montreal Citizen:

        If you thought your Province/State has complicated history, then I hope I can persuade you otherwise. Quebec’s first known citizens were the Aboriginals, or the First Nations of Quebec. Like most of North America, European settlers appeared. It was in Quebec that had the French settlers occupying territory. They would continue to expand, eventually naming their territory New-France. Unfortunately, the British would claim these lands for themselves.

At this point, you would be asking where these French settlers would go. I’m not too familiar with the history at this point, but the French settlers were not moved anywhere. The British probably didn’t want to deport millions of French settlers out of their newly acquired territory. The French would mostly mingle around present-day Quebec, while the British settlers would expand all the way West-ward, creating modern-day Canada.

        That’s the gist of Quebec’s past history. It is a territory shuffled around by three major nations; the First Nations, the French, and the British. Quebec would become a predominantly French province within a majority English country.

        Modern history of Montreal is a little tough to pinpoint, so I’ll just explain what living in it is like.

        Despite Quebec’s high taxes, its living costs are exceptionally low compared to everywhere else in Canada. I guess that was why my family lived here and not anywhere else. I was born from a family of immigrants, and I was raised in a neighborhood that shared my nationality. Before I became teenager, I lived under the belief that Caucasian races were the minority in Montreal. Obviously, I was wrong. It just so happen that Montreal is a popular immigration spot for prospective Canadians.

        Quebec’s official language is French, unlike Canada who officially recognizes itself as bilingual. I, on the other hand, live as an Anglophone in Montreal. Technically, I am bilingual. However, it’s tough for me to speak proper French. I have no issues living in Montreal as an Anglophone. In fact, I sometimes speak in “franglais/frenglish”

         The island of Montreal is dense in population. Despite that, the provincial government is very much in favor of French speakers. Quebec’s law dictates that the French language must come first, and so many bills have been introduced that seek to hinder Anglophones as much as possible. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to list all of them. If I had to give one proper example, however, it would be the following.

        French schools in Quebec don’t have “History” class. They have “Quebec History” Class. They also decreased the number of English Second Language classes in their curriculum in favor of increasing “Quebec History” Class.

        Furthermore, a Quebec citizen can only attend an English school in Quebec if and only if their parents had English education themselves. This goes up until high school, afterwards the students are allowed to choose which language their post-high school college will be.

        Through these facts, I hope I can show how protective the French community is of their language and culture. In the game world that I am writing, I hope to convey the feeling of being sandwiched by so many different cultures and those who wish to uphold them. But most of all, I want to be able to write about the people whose identities rely on those cultures as well.

              Ein’s Reasborough:

        Reasborough is a reflection of my life within the context of Montreal. It borrows heavily on its culture, issues, history, technology, and how it all contextualizes into an imperfect world worth living in.

·       Much like how Montreal is one of Canada’s oldest cities, I’ve decided to make Reasborough as lore-rich as possible.

·       In the time of the game’s current setting, Reasborough is a part of the Kingdom of Anon.

·       In its past, Reasborough was the original Kingdom of Anon.

·       The Kingdom of Anon would expand larger, requiring its ruler to change its base of operation. The Kingdom’s capital would change, leaving behind the little island it once inhabited.

·       Reasborough would be handled and taken care of by those who stayed.

·       The little island would be later annexed into the Kingdom proper, but with those who stayed being granted de-facto leadership and influence among the populace.

·       The population of Reasborough will be a mixture of something similar found in Montreal:

o  Anon Citizens

o  Rean Citizens

o  The “Originals” (I’ll explain later)

o  Immigrants

[This is only some of what I’ve written down, I will be adding more and more.]

Scenarios:

[Here is the section where I drop examples of events that I’ve written for the game]

Example #1: The Oka Crisis, Revisiting History

        Idea: One of the most cliché scenario to be found in many role-playing games is that of a bridge being blocked or broken. It’s meant to be a roadblock for the player, trapping them in the local area until a certain plot-point is resolved by the play. In this scenario, a bridge is also a

        History: The Mayor of the City of Oka, Quebec wanted to expand one of its popular golf courses. Unfortunately, the area chosen for construction was considered a reserved land by the local Mohawk Aboriginals. Despite protests, the Mayor pushed onward. This resulted in the Mohawks creating a blockade to keep construction workers out. This would result in a shootout between the Mohawk’s Warriors and Quebec’s Provincial Police. Only a single casualty was reported, that of an officer.

Later within this crisis, a nearby Canadian Forces regiment was called to monitor and ensure that the Mohawks do not cause any more violence. The Royal 22nd Regiment’s job was to ensure that the Mohawks would be contained within the blockade they had set up.

Elsewhere, Mohawks showed signs of solidarity by blockading the Mercier Bridge, keeping Quebec citizens stranded from their homes and jobs. This move caused the image of Mohawks to sour for those who are need of the bridge.

        Rough concept: The player enters town, hoping to talk to the Mayor. The mood of the town is that of bitterness and anger. Pubs are occupied in huge numbers and people are complaining about being in town at all.

        The player’s meeting with the Mayor goes as planned as they complete the player’s wishes due to the current crisis. However, the player soon finds out that they are actually stranded. In the mayor’s words, the “Originals” have taken hold of a prominent bridge that connects this town to the next one the player needs to reach. The only alternative way through is by taking the dangerous path of the forest. However, the Originals are based there.

        The player’s goal in the game is to resolve the bridge situation. They must go through the forest and confront the chief of the Originals.

        Of course, the Originals will give the player a reasonable explanation for their actions. Though, the player can tell them of how the bridge blockade is effectively the same as a temper tantrum.

Through investigations, the player can find out that the Mayor lied about the Originals “starting” the fight. In the end, the Mayor and the Chief reach an agreement.

The ones in charge of blocking the bridge, however, are unable to accept the agreement so easily. The player must engage against the Originals at the bridge to end the scenario, ending the blockade.

  [More Scenarios to be added, I just wanted to add at least one for now]

  Setting and Story:

        Rough Plot: Princess Rea has come of age, and she has been instructed by her father, the King, to begin her journey of leadership training. The King gives full jurisdiction and ruling power of Reasborough to her daughter. Reasborough, however, has been unofficially ruled by the local Noblemen. The sudden shift in power comes as a shock to the Rean nobles. To prepare the city of the Princess’ arrival, Nobleman Shepard is sent over early to ensure that Reasborough is ready to accept the Princess as their new young ruler.

[socialistperpective]

Not regretting a Donald Trump presidency

Going more in depth into Donald Trump’s reign I feel the need to reiterate why I did not vote for Hillary Clinton. Trump is showing his true stripes and now that we see them his supporters no longer have an excuse to come to his defense. Though there are people like Alex Jones who will fight for him no matter what, or on the AltRight who crave his xenophobia being enacted into policy, most of his voters are beginning to realize he played them for a con. One of the only reasons he won was due to Democrats choosing Clinton as their de facto nominee. Someone with years of experience may seem to be the perfect candidate for any position but when it comes to running the country the electorate is tired of the establishment and status quo. Many of the people in former factory towns who saw their lives destroyed due to NAFTA remember her support for it while her husband signed the trade deal into law. Trump sensed the zeitgeist and that the populace was sick of the status quo, fully embodied in Hillary Clinton.

Trump was a wildcard and seeing some of the egregious ways he got reactions from his crowd, I could tell he was a demagogue, something that’ disingenuous and spells trouble. But I already knew who Hillary Clinton was. She voted for the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, and was secretary of state at a time Obama expanded our wars into seven. Libya was her most notable foray in that position. The country became a failed state and terrorist haven after the United States deposed Gaddafi. She lauded his death while the news anchor laughed along. Why would I want to see someone like her in power? With the situation in Syria during the campaign she repeatedly talked about the need to institute a No-Fly Zone. Not only would this go after the Syrian army (the main fighter of the terrorist rebels), but we would have to confront Russia. She was eager to start World War III. Why would anyone want to see that? The United States has gone on one failed military venture after another and now we would have to go to war with another nuclear power? On one of her first public appearances after failing to win the presidency she said Trump should have engaged in more bombing. She’s clearly a war hawk who no true liberal or progressive could support.

I understand why Trump voters were sick of her. Not just them but many in the rest of the country. She’s the least liked politicians next to Donald Trump. The Democrats made a mistake by anointing her the nominee, they are the ones to blame for giving us Trump, not people who didn’t vote for Hillary. Proving how the Clintons run the DNC they rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders to make Clinton the automatic candidate. In Washington D.C., she may have looked like a shoe-in to become president of the United States but around the country no one can stand her. It isn’t purely sexism, most White women voted for Donald Trump, but the fact people were willing to try something new. We’re sick of the system and don’t want to vote for someone who embodies it.

She has returned with the Super Pac Onward Together, an organization that may look like a resistance to Donald Trump but is a money laundering scheme for the Democratic Party. Taking not only money from corporations and the banks but asking for donations from the commoners. I know that this organization does not represent me or other American citizens but is meant to empower the already powerful. Though Clinton may sit in her smug elite circle surrounded by fellow elitists she doesn’t fool the rest of the American people. Onward Together is her way to maintain Wall Street’s control of the Democratic Party and make sure it doesn’t directly address the needs and concerns of its constituents. Causes like single-payer health care are not on the agenda. Instead they will work with the rest of the Democratic Party to defend the incremental reform Obamacare. They’ll play the games of identity politics but won’t talk about class issues. Again, they’re part of an elite circle who doesn’t know about the needs of the American people and doesn’t care.

Yes, Donald Trump and the Republicans are already instituting or introducing policies that will have a negative impact on me and many others. But it doesn’t mean I wish Hillary Clinton had won the presidency. She was the lesser evil, what Chris Hedges called “Mitt Romney in drag”. Instead of giving us a $15 minimum wage or living wage, she would hand us $12 an hour, if she could manage to get it through a Republican-controlled Congress. Hillary Clinton represents the status quo and though she may have been slightly better than Trump it wouldn’t change the negative trajectory our country has been heading on since the 2008 financial crash. She wouldn’t have stopped the wars. Wouldn’t roll back the national security state. Wouldn’t have stopped deporting immigrants (a trend that was expanded under Obama), she wouldn’t have given us universal health care, universal college, or any other policies demanded by progressives. We would not have been transformed into a social democracy. We’d still be a failing neoliberal state.

It annoys me seeing people say “If Hillary were president…”, not as if voters would be saying “If Donald were president” if he had lost. We’re unable to see better alternatives and always hoping for the least bad outcome from a presidential candidate or politicians in general. By voting for the Green Party I found a cause I believed in and a candidate who was authentic and would fight for a better country. One that had social democracy, wasn’t constantly at war, and was switching to renewable energy immediately. Politics has become so base the ruling class keeps us in fear of the worst outcome to make us accept crumbs and not demand real change. That is why I do not regret voting for a third candidate instead of Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is in power and is doing his best to be the most hated politician in history but we won’t be pacified by the thought he was the lesser evil.