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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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"Sickening" And "Proof" Of Racism: DHS Officials Said Stephen Miller Must Go After His Emails Were Released

“Not that it wasn’t clear before — these emails just confirm what we all know," a DHS official said. "I’m disgusted that my venerable agency has turned into his personal tool for hate.”

By Hamed Aleaziz | Posted November 15, 2019, at 5:39 p.m. ET | BuzzFeed | Posted November 16, 2019 |

A cache of emails revealed this week in which White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, in the run-up to the 2016 election, shared articles and websites affiliated with white nationalism has disturbed officials working in the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department, who called the emails “sickening” and “proof” that Miller has been steering a racist immigration policy under President Trump.

The emails sent from Miller to editors of the far-right website Breitbart and obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center show Miller sharing a story from the white nationalist site VDare, pushing for Breitbart to write about a novel popular among white nationalists, and linking to a report detailing second-generation Muslims with the subject line “Huge Surge in US newborns named 'Mohammed.’”

The civil rights nonprofit said that after reviewing 900 emails, it was “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.” In one such email chain, the SPLC said Miller directed Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh, who supplied the emails to the group, to aggregate information from American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal, for a story on crimes committed by nonwhite people.

“It’s sickening to know that someone with these viewpoints held a position of trust for a United States Senator," said one DHS official, referring to former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions, "and now in the White House. Not that it wasn’t clear before — these emails just confirm what we all know. I’m disgusted that my venerable agency has turned into his personal tool for hate.”

BuzzFeed News spoke with nine DHS and DOJ officials for this story, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Miller’s influence in shaping a hardline immigration policy, including overhauling and restricting asylum to those seeking protection, is well known. Under the Trump administration, DHS has attempted to ban people from several Muslim-majority countries, bar asylum for those who traveled through Mexico or crossed the border without authorization, and force immigrants seeking protection to remain in Mexico for months while their cases proceed. At the same time, Trump has cut refugee levels to historically low numbers.

“Different people and different administrations can have different attitudes toward immigration, but to have someone with a vendetta against immigrants, and nonwhite immigrants in particular, in charge of this administration’s immigration agenda is beyond the pale,” said a DHS official.

A senior DHS official speaking about the emails said that “if true, he needs to go” and that regardless, “he should probably step down because his politics have become a distraction.”

Miller’s influence is part of a pattern within the administration of career officials and experts being “ignored while personal agendas are advanced,” a Justice Department official said.

“Cruel policies based on false ‘facts’ are replacing decades of progress,” said the official. “We career professionals see lasting damage if this continues unchecked.”

In an August email sent to all immigration court employees, the Justice Department included a link to an article posted on VDare’s website that attacked sitting immigration judges “with racial and ethnically tinged slurs,” drawing outrage from the judges and others. In the wake of the email, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News, the Justice Department decided not to renew its contract with the firm that provided the news summaries.

The report of the emails this week “grieved my heart and confirmed my fears that Stephen Miller has been given an enormous role in shaping immigration policy under the Trump administration and simply does not support the US treating all immigrants (and citizens for that matter) as equal,” said another DHS official. “His obvious disdain for minorities is apparent to anyone paying attention to the dismantling of the refugee program since Trump took office — a program that had bipartisan support before apparent white nationalists took the reins.”

Still, Miller has allies within the Department of Homeland Security who pushed back on the report and the emails.

“Miller has been under politically motivated attacks since day one of this administration by individuals and organizations opposed to the president’s policies in favor of open borders,” said one senior DHS official who supported Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration. “It’s incredibly unfortunate, yet not unexpected, that they would now seek to obstruct the administration’s historic progress containing the border crisis after months of humanitarian efforts and adherence to the rule of law.”

White House officials have also criticized the report, saying that Miller “hates bigotry in all forms,” while calling SPLC a “long-debunked far-left smear organization,” according to the Washington Post.

But to the individuals who have been tasked with carrying out policies at the border, the report was not overlooked. Asylum officers, whose jobs have been dramatically shifted under Trump and Miller’s direction, were dismayed.

“These emails are just further proof of Miller's racist policy. For example, Asylum Ban 2.0 [a policy that bars asylum for those who cross through Mexico] targeting only southern borderland entrants is clearly designed to limit only Central Americans, who Miller obviously views as undesirable,” said one officer.

Another asylum officer offered a similar sentiment.

“White supremacy is directing Trump’s Immigration policy,” the officer said. “It’s become something of a cliche to say that the Cruelty is the Point, but that is it.”

Despite the release of the emails, some within DHS feared it wouldn’t result in consequences for Miller.

“If the reasons for Miller's not being at the White House weren't already patently clear to anyone, I don't see how this is going to change any minds,” said one DHS official. “What would have spelled doom five years ago now has a news cycle of less than 24 hours.”

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US Border Officials Pressured Asylum Officers To Deny Entry To Immigrants Seeking Protection, A Report Finds

A DHS report obtained by BuzzFeed News found the controversial Trump program to keep asylum-seekers in Mexico has caused significant issues at the border.

By Hamed Aleaziz | Last updated Nov. 15, 2019, 10:43 a.m. ET | BuzzFeed | Posted November 16, 2019 |

A team of senior Department of Homeland Security officials who examined a controversial Trump administration program to keep asylum-seekers in Mexico found that US border officials apparently pressured asylum officers to deny immigrants entry into the US, according to a draft government report obtained by BuzzFeed News recommending significant and wide-ranging improvements to the program.

The report’s existence comes after months of consistent claims from immigrant advocates of irregularities and problems with the Trump administration’s Migration Protection Protocols program, which was implemented earlier this year and has forced more than 50,000 people to remain in Mexico as their cases move through US immigration courts.

The Trump administration has repeatedly cited the program as an achievement that has helped reduce the number of border crossings. On Thursday, Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection, told reporters at the White House that it has “absolutely been successful.”

But a group of senior DHS officials — who were not involved with MPP but were organized by Kevin McAleenan, the recently departed acting secretary, to review the implementation of the program — made a number of recommendations that suggest the program has created significant issues at the border. In a memo from McAleenan prior to his departure, the former acting secretary called on DHS subagencies to deliver a plan within a month to address the recommendations and three months to implement the changes.

“The big takeaway from it is that MPP is not working,” said a former DHS official. “This seems to align with every criticism you hear of MPP. Some of these recommendations are phrased mildly but suggest they found serious problems that need to be remedied.”

DHS spokesperson Heather Swift told BuzzFeed News that the MPP "has been successful at every metric, improving the asylum process for more than 55,000 individuals, and the Department is committed to continually strengthening the program. The former acting secretary requested this independent, internal review of MPP because it has been such an effective program and will continue to be for the long term.

"The department is committed to the integrity of MPP and will continue to assess and improve the program if and when necessary. Successful organizations continually audit and review their programs to develop best practices and seek ways to improve effectiveness and efficiency, which is why this report was requested," Swift said. "The independent group was composed of officers from the offices of privacy and civil rights and civil liberties, and lawyers who were not involved in the creation of the program. We thank the independent team for their recommendations and look forward to the review and response by the subject matter experts."

The “Red Team” recommendations call on agencies within DHS, including CBP, to provide immigration court hearing notices in multiple languages, improve language access for immigrants and ensure that they understand the “questions asked and can make informed decisions,” standardize procedures for screening vulnerable populations like children and people with disabilities, and clarify the role of CBP officers in the process.

To that end, the program requires immigrants to affirmatively tell CBP officers that they fear for their safety in Mexico in order to have a chance of avoiding being returned to the country. In those cases, CBP officers should refer immigrants to be interviewed by US Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers.

The recommendations, however, indicate that asylum-seekers have not been allowed to be interviewed by those officers, who have faced pressure to rule against those seeking protection.

“Modify fear screening process protocols to clarify the role of CBP officers and agents versus USCIS officers in making determinations on MPP amenability based on the migrant's claimed fear of persecution or torture in Mexico,” the recommendation reads. “At some locations, CBP uses a pre-screening process that preempts or prevents a role for USCIS to make its determination. Interviewees also indicated that some CBP officials pressure USCIS to arrive at negative outcomes when interviewing migrants on their claim of fear of persecution or torture,” read the report.

Immigrant advocates, the ACLU, and even asylum officers have said the process is flawed because immigrants don’t know that they can express the specific fear, are too intimidated to bring it up, and don’t find out that they are being forced back to Mexico until it’s too late.

The report calls for CBP to create guidelines that spell out the “appropriate use of restraints during the interviews,” ensure that the biometric information of those who have proven a fear of being persecuted in Mexico is not shared with Mexico, facilitate access to attorneys, and significantly improve communication with the immigrants sent back to Mexico.

DHS officials found that some immigrants have had to give up their shelter space in Mexico when they depart for the US for a court hearing and are then left without an address to follow up on their cases. The officials recommend CBP create a “reliable method of communication” so immigrants can be reached during their wait. This will allow, they said, access to counsel and communication between migrant families — including cases when family members were not processed at the same time or when children are separated.

According to the report, CBP officers have also placed Mexican nationals into the program, a group that is supposed to be explicitly excluded. CBP officers, the recommendations say, need to “address situations where families are placed in MPP and returned to Mexico despite having at least one immediate family member who is Mexican (e.g. the child was born in Mexico to a non-Mexican mother).”

The procedures currently in place at the border appear to be the cause of the issues.

“At some locations, DHS sends pregnant women back to Mexico under MPP. It’s unclear how DHS will treat families who claim fear of persecution or torture in Mexico when they return to the US with a child who was born in Mexico (and may have Mexican citizenship),” the recommendation reads.

The report also calls on DHS to establish measures of effectiveness of the program, such as tracking the movements of immigrants pushed into the program, recording the number of proceedings missed due to people who did not show up, maintaining a count of the number of individuals asserting fear at the border, and those who have had to remain overnight in the US, among other items.

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jackson38toh · 6 years

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Is ‘Gypsy’ a slur?

Q: In the quilting world, there’s a popular design named “Gypsy Wife.” When a woman recently posted a photo of a nice one she made to a Facebook page, she was lambasted for using the term “Gypsy.” Because of the complaints, she removed the photo. Is “Gypsy” a slur?

A: This is a complicated and sensitive question.

Some people who identify themselves as ethnically Roma (also called Romani or Romany) are offended by “Gypsy,” and most standard dictionaries have reservations about using it to mean Roma. On the other hand, some Roma people don’t mind being called “Gypsies” and others even embrace the term.

What’s more, the uncapitalized “gypsy” has meanings that are ultimately derived from the original sense but no longer have ethnic or racial associations. And those uses are not regarded as pejorative, at least in dictionaries.

Our conclusions are that that “Gypsy” (with a capital “G”) is offensive to some people, and should be used with caution. Meanwhile, the non-ethnic uses of “gypsy” (with a lowercase “g”) should not be condemned. Here’s a summary of the word’s history.

The earliest form of the word in English, which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to the 1530s, was “Gipcyan,” an abbreviated version of “Egyptian.” At that time, as John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins (2011), “it was widely thought that the Romany people originated in Egypt.”

They didn’t, as we now know. A genome study in Current Biology, December 2012, shows that the founding population of the Roma people originated in northern India 1,500 years ago and rapidly migrated into Europe through the Balkans, with some genetic input along the way from the Near or Middle East. The Romani language is descended from Sanskrit, in which romá is the plural of rom (man or husband).

So the “Gypsies” were mislabeled from the start, since they didn’t come from Egypt. And many early appearances of “Gypsy” in English were highly pejorative because, as OED citations show, these itinerant foreigners were often viewed with contempt and mistrust, suspected of crimes, and driven away. Here are the OED’s earliest examples:

“The Kinges Maiestie aboute a twelfmoneth past gave a pardonne to a company of lewde personnes within this Realme calling themselves Gipcyans for a most Shamfull and detestable murder.” (From a letter written by Thomas Cromwell on Dec. 5, 1537.)

“It is ordayned agaynste people callynge themselves Egypcyans, that no such persons be suffred to come within this realme.” (From The Newe Boke of Justyces of the Peas, 1538, by the judge and legal scholar Anthony Fitzherbert.)

“Hee wandring … in the manner of a Gipson … was taken, and trust vp for a roge [trussed up for a rogue].” (From Martins Months Minde, 1589, an attack by an unknown writer on the pseudonymous pamphleteer known as Martin Marprelate.)

The OED defines this ethnic sense of “Gypsy” as “a member of a wandering race (by themselves called Romany), of Hindu origin, which first appeared in England about the beginning of the 16th cent. and was then believed to have come from Egypt.”

But the word very soon acquired transferred meanings, the OED says. In the 1600s it was used to mean a man who was “a cunning rogue,” the dictionary says, and for a woman who was “cunning, deceitful, fickle, or the like.”

In later use, Oxford adds, “gypsy” (by this time lowercased) was used playfully rather than contemptuously for a woman, “and applied esp. to a brunette.” All those uses have died out.

But since then “gypsy” (also spelled “gipsy”) has acquired several more meanings, none of them pejorative. Most date from around the mid-20th century, and here we’ll paraphrase the many definitions in standard dictionaries:

(1) Someone who’s free-spirited or doesn’t live in one place for long.

(2) A person with a career or way of life that’s itinerant or unconventional, especially a part-time or temporary college faculty member or a performer in the chorus line of a theatrical production.

(3) An unlicensed, nonunionized, or independent operator, particularly a trucker or cab driver but also including plumber and other trades.

We don’t think any of those four senses of “gypsy” are offensive, though undoubtedly some could be used in a dismissive manner. At any rate, dictionaries attach no such warning labels to them.

Dictionaries also include without a caution the use of the lowercased term for a member of a traditionally itinerant group that’s unrelated to the Roma. This definition would include people known as “Travelers” in Ireland, Scotland, and the US, who are not descended from the Roma and do not speak Romani.

However, the original, ethnic meaning of “Gypsy” is another matter. Nowhere does the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, label “Gypsy” as offensive or contemptuous. But many standard dictionaries do have reservations about the term.

American Heritage labels “Gypsy” as “often offensive” in only one sense, when it means “Romani.” Merriam-Webster labels it “sometimes offensive.” And Webster’s New World says it’s “now often considered offensive, the word Rom (pl., Roma) or Romani being preferred.”

As for the online standard British dictionaries, Oxford and Cambridge have no reservations. Macmillan labels the term “offensive” when it means “a Romany.” Longman says “most” Gypsies and Collins says “some” prefer to be called Romanies.

So the apparent consensus among lexicographers is that as an ethnic term, “Gypsy” should be used with caution if at all.

Even the use of the lowercase “gypsy” to refer to theatrical performers came under attack last year, according to an article in the New York Times.

The writer, Michael Paulson, noted that the use of “gypsy” to refer to the performers in a chorus line apparently derives from “the fact that until the early 20th century, many American actors proudly earned a living by traveling from city to city” (April 20, 2018).

“To many,” he wrote, the word “is pejorative, no matter the context.” He quoted Carol Silverman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon, as saying, “It is an ethnic slur.”

He also quoted Petra Gelbart, a curator at RomArchive, a digital archive: “The fact that the term Gypsy is so often used to denote free-spirited or traveling lifestyles has real-life repercussions for actual Romany people,” reducing them to “ridiculous stereotypes that can make it difficult to find employment or social acceptance.”

On the other side, Paulson cited Laurence Maslon, a professor at New York University and author of the book Broadway to Main Street (2018), as saying that to stage performers, “It was a badge of honor, not a badge of shame, that you were itinerant.”

And Tom Viola, executive director of the nonprofit organization Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, said, “In our theatrical community, ‘the gypsy’ is beloved.” He said the organization is sticking with “Gypsy of the Year” as the name of its annual fund-raising performance.

As you may know, the issue of Gypsy persecution is much more prominent in Europe than in the US. In a 2012 report, the Roma and Travelers division of the Council of Europe had this to say about terminology:

“The term ‘Roma/Gypsies’ was used for many years by the Council of Europe, before the decision was taken to no longer use it in official texts in 2005.” The move was made principally because of objections by international Roma associations, the Council says, who regarded it as “an alien term, linked with negative, paternalistic stereotypes which still pursue them in Europe.”

But the report added that “in some countries, the term ‘Gypsies’ or its national equivalent has no negative connotations, is accepted by the people concerned and may occasionally be more appropriate.”

One organization that is not fazed by the term “Gypsy” is the 130-year-old Gypsy Lore Society, founded in Britain in the 19th century and now headquartered in the US.

The society publishes books, a newsletter, and the scholarly journal Romani Studies, which features articles on “the cultures of groups traditionally known as Gypsies as well as Travelers and other peripatetic groups.”

“Much of the material published on Gypsies and Travelers on the Internet,” the society cautions on its website, “is misleading due either to stereotyping, antiquated perspectives on ethnicity or culture, poor scholarship, excessive political correctness or other biases and, in some cases, outright fabrication.”

As for the striking quilt pattern called “Gypsy Wife,” there’s no special significance to the name, according to its creator, the Australian quilt designer Jen Kingwell.

In an interview at a quilt show in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 21, 2015, she said, “I have no idea why it’s called that. I find naming quilt patterns about the hardest thing ever.”

Personally, we think it’s an imaginative name and we find no offense in it. The design is certainly free-spirited and unconventional, though not unlicensed (it’s copyrighted).

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from Blog – Grammarphobia https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2019/03/gypsy.html

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