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  1. #1
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    U.S. Illegally Denying Immigrants Their Right to Seek Asylum at the Mexican Border, A

    U.S. Illegally Denying Immigrants Their Right to Seek Asylum at the Mexican Border, According to Lawsuit


    Central American migrants seeking for asylum in the United States, walk to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Chaparral port of entry on Nov. 12, 2017, in Tijuana, Mexico.

    November 16 2017, 11:38 a.m.

    The Trump administration may be engaged in widespread violations of U.S. and international law at the southern U.S. border, according to new filings in a California lawsuit. The filings offer the latest piece of evidence of a systematic campaign aimed at turning away asylum-seekers, actions linked to the embrace of hard-line immigration enforcement policies at the heart of the president’s rise to power.

    On Tuesday, immigration attorneys in the Central District of California filed a motion for class-action certification that would allow six asylum-seekers from Mexico and Honduras to stand in for individuals affected by an alleged pattern of illegal practices on the part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The class-action suit would include all the immigrants who, since June 2016, have or will be denied their right to secure asylum in the U.S. because of the CBP practices.

    Building on a complaint filed in July, the suit argues CBP officials at numerous ports of entry, or POEs, throughout the southwest have displayed a similar set of “unlawful practices” designed to deny individuals their right under the law to apply for asylum.

    “Since at least June 2016,” the motion reads, “CBP officers at POEs along the U.S.-Mexico border have been consistently turning away — through an identifiable set of tactics including, misrepresentations about U.S. asylum law and the U.S. asylum process, threats and intimidation, verbal and physical abuse, and coercion — significant numbers of individuals who express an intent to apply for asylum or a fear of returning to their home countries.”

    There was no denying a shift in CBP practices over the last year, said Erika Pinheiro, director of policy and technology at Al Otro Lado, speaking to The Intercept from Tijuana, Mexico, where many asylum-seekers in the lawsuit have taken refuge in local shelters after being denied entry into the U.S. Al Otro Lado, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit legal services organization, first brought the legal challenge to the CBP policies.

    “There’s always been cases of individuals being turned away, but it was kind of the exception, not the rule,” Pinheiro explained. “It really changed when Trump was elected.”

    “It was almost as if they closed the southern border to asylum-seekers when Trump was elected, not even inaugurated, just elected,” Pinheiro said. “After November, it was incredibly difficult — even escorted by an attorney, we would see people turned away by CBP.”

    Multiple U.S. statutes
    and governing regulations, including due process rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment, grant noncitizens fleeing violence abroad the right to apply for asylum in the U.S.

    Meanwhile, international treaties prohibit the U.S. government from returning individuals to countries where they have a well-established fear of persecution or torture. Despite these protections, the suit brought by Al Otro Lado, in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Immigration Council, and the law firm Latham & Watkins LLP, offers multiple accounts of U.S. immigration officials preventing asylum-seekers from engaging in even the earliest stages of the process for asylum relief. The accounts are backed up by extensive media reports and broader human rights investigations into the alleged practices.

    Using pseudonyms out of a fear of retribution, the plaintiffs in the case — five women and one man —offered harrowing accounts of why they and their loved ones fled their home countries. They described the murder and decapitation of parents, repeated experiences of domestic and sexual violence, and unrelenting persecution by the most murderous criminal groups in the Western hemisphere.

    Their stories reflect a broader experience of terror that has gripped large swaths of Central America and Mexico, areas that have in recent years consistently ranked among the most violent in the world. Each of the plaintiffs detail how, upon arrival to a U.S. port of entry, they were met with hostility, intimidation, and outright lies regarding the obligations of American immigration authorities under the law.

    In their suit against the government, the immigration attorneys for the asylum-seekers identify several alleged CBP practices observed in their clients’ cases and others. Those misleading and unlawful practices are said to include CBP officials falsely telling arriving asylum-seekers that asylum is not available at that particular POE, and that they would need to try elsewhere; that they cannot apply for asylum because there is not enough space at the location; that they first need to check in with Mexican authorities before applying in the U.S.; or that the U.S. government has simply stopped granting asylum altogether. The suit also describes CBP officials using “threats and intimidation” to deter individuals from exercising their right to apply for asylum, including “threatening to separate parents from their children” and forcing asylum-seekers who have made it into a port of entry “to recant their fears or otherwise to withdraw their applications for admission to the U.S.”

    A spokesperson for CBP declined to answer questions for this article, saying the agency does not comment on pending litigation. In a July article for The Intercept, published when the initial lawsuit was filed, the agency said it had “not changed any policies affecting asylum procedures” and that CBP “adheres to law and policy on processing asylum claims and does not tolerate abuse of these policies.”


    Central American migrants seeking for asylum in the United States, walk to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Chaparral port of entry on Nov. 12, 2017, in
    Tijuana, Mexico. Photo: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images

    Immigration advocates on the border see clear ties between the nativist polices of the Trump administration and the allegedly unlawful practices of CBP officers working the nation’s southern ports of entry.

    In the motion filed Tuesday, Diego Iniguez-Lopez, a legal services associate working out of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, recalled an incident following last year’s election.

    An asylum-seeking mother had presented her foreign identification documents to a CBP officer at the Hidalgo/McAllen land crossing between Mexico and Texas. According to Iniguez-Lopez, the officer “started singing Donald Trump’s name and saying that there was no more asylum for immigrants. The same officer reportedly laughed as he sang and then told her that Donald Trump had signed a new law saying that there was no asylum for anyone.” Iniguez-Lopez added, “Another mother reported that a CBP officer told her that asylum was not available because the new president had given them orders.”
    “They were telling us stories of how CBP officers were singing the national anthem and taunting them.”

    Speaking to The Intercept, Iniguez-Lopez said the first sign of a change in attitude among immigration officials at the Texas family detention center came a week after Trump’s election, from individuals held in so-called hieleras, or ice boxes, the freezing-cold rooms where U.S. authorities house asylum-seeking families and other undocumented immigrants. “They were telling us stories of how CBP officers were singing the national anthem and taunting them,” Iniguez-Lopez said, “and telling them that they’re going to be deported back to their country and to tell their family not to come.”

    Iniguez-Lopez went on to say that the practice of turning asylum-seekers away at ports of entry in his area of the country appeared to begin in early December. One of the first of those incidents, he explained, involved a mother from Central America seeking asylum with her family. The immigration officer who met with the family at the port of entry “said that under the orders of Donald Trump, there’s no more asylum for mothers with children, and the response of the mother was to say the Trump administration, they’re not even in power, they haven’t been inaugurated. So she knew more government 101 than the officer himself,” Iniguez-Lopez said.

    Iniguez-Lopez and other advocates gleaned from the emerging accounts that “even without any administrative change, CBP officers on the ground had the impression that their candidate won, that they had the ability to ‘do the job,’ and that some of the things that they might otherwise want to do, they now could do.”

    Allowing immigration officials — whether CBP, Border Patrol or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — to “do the job,” as Iniguez-Lopez put it, has been a consistent theme of the Trump administration. Prior reporting has indicated a shift in practices that began before Trump assumed office. Four days before Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post published a story citing advocates and migrants who described “hundreds or perhaps thousands of foreigners who have been blocked in recent months from reaching U.S. asylum officials along the border.” Following Trump’s inauguration, human rights groups continued to document incidents of people stopped by U.S. officials from beginning the asylum process, with Amnesty International’s Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas arguing that the U.S. and its government partners in Mexico were “brewing up a burgeoning human rights catastrophe.”

    In Tuesday’s filing, attorney Brantley Shaw Drake, a former fellow with the Refugee Protection team at Human Rights First, an organization that has documented the alleged prevention of individuals from entering the asylum process, documented several dire consequences of the practice. Directors of migrant shelters described to Drake how asylum-seekers clustered near ports of entry south of the border have become easy kidnapping targets for organized crime — with one shelter director describing hundreds of asylum-seekers held for ransom in large homes around Reynosa, Mexico, and another claiming she “had received 30 escapees from kidnapping in the last 30 days.”

    The similarities in the accounts of CBP actions provided by plaintiffs, journalists, and human rights investigators — and the reported fallout from those practices — have immigration attorneys hopeful that the California case will receive class-action certification, meaning its outcomes would apply beyond those who came forward with their individual experiences. “This is the evidence that says these practices are systematic, they’re happening all along the border,” Caroline Walters, a staff attorney at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept. “And not only have they been happening, they’re continuing to happen — which is why we’re asking the judge to certify a class that would insure that the relief that could be obtained through the lawsuit would not just apply to the individuals who were brave and brought the suit, but also to others that had or will experience those practices.”

    If the suit is successful in securing both declarative and injunctive relief, Walters explained, it would mean that the judge in the case both declared the alleged CBP practices unlawful, and that they should be considered unlawful going forward. In other words, Walters said, it would mean “[CBP] cannot prevent asylum-seekers from gaining access to the asylum process through the tactics we describe in the lawsuit or any others,” while laying the groundwork for officers who engage in those practices in the future to be held accountable.

    The next hearing in the suit is scheduled for December 11, but any resolution in the case is a long way off. For now, immigration attorneys on the border continue to work to see that individuals fleeing violence and persecution have their legal right to apply for asylum upheld. Pinheiro, of Al Otro Lado, was fresh off a trip to the border when she spoke to The Intercept from Tijuana on Tuesday.

    Recently, she explained, advocates have taken to accompanying asylum-seekers in caravans to U.S. ports of entry in hopes that their presence will deter U.S. immigration officials from breaking the law. “It’s just to have as much attention on the issue as possible, to ensure that people are actually accepted,” Pinheiro said. “We shouldn’t have to do that, but that’s kind of what we’ve come to.”

    https://theintercept.com/2017/11/16/...entry-lawsuit/


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  2. #2
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    NO PAPERS, NO RIGHTS...TURN THEM RIGHT BACK AROUND

    WE CANNOT TAKE IN 3 BILLION "DREAMERS"!

    LET MEXICO GIVE THEM CITIZENSHIP!

    WE HAVE VIOLENCE IN CHICAGO, BALTIMORE, L.A., OAKLAND, NEW ORLEANS! DO WE DUMP OUR PEOPLE ON CANADA???
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

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    Refugees Do Not Have U.S. Rights!

    Multiple U.S. statutes and governing regulations, including due process rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment, grant noncitizens fleeing violence abroad the right to apply for asylum in the U.S.
    Funny, I don't see "noncitizens" mentioned in the Fifth Amendment!

    Because they arrive at the border does not mean they have rights under our Constitution before we allow then into this country. Screw international law!

  4. #4
    Senior Member southBronx's Avatar
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    No refugees don't have any right at all . trump ship every one of them back home

  5. #5
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    Isn’t it funny how all theses illegal aliens suddenly can understand and speak English?


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  6. #6
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    Trump administration terminates program that united thousands of families fleeing violence in Central America

    Thursday, November 09 2017
    ABC News Radio




    • fpdress/iStock/Thinkstock



    (WASHINGTON) -- At midnight Friday morning, the Trump administration will end another immigration program -- one that reunited children from Central America with their parents here legally in the U.S.

    The Central American Minors, or CAM, refugee program allowed certain parents who were lawfully present in the U.S. to request a refugee resettlement interview for their children and other family members from three Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

    The other family members who qualified only included the child's other parent or caregiver or the child's own child, the parent's grandchild.

    After 11:59 pm ET Thursday night, the State Department will not accept any new applications to the CAM program. Those who have already applied will continue to be processed, undergoing all the necessary screening such as DNA testing, security checks, and medical examinations and given entry if they meet the requirements.

    The program was started in December 2014 by the Obama administration after the enormous influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and families from Central America seeking asylum in the U.S.

    Since then, the program has received over 14,000 applications. About 8,000 of those have been processed, with 3,238 children and family members admitted, as refugees and parolees. The other 6,000 individuals remain in the pipeline and could still be given entry.

    While the Department of Homeland Security announced in August that it would terminate the program, critics blasted the administration for the short notice, as well as what they called the cruelty of the decision.

    "Terminating the entire CAM program will neither promote safety for these children nor help our government regulate migration," said Bishop Joe Vasquez, the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration. "We continue to pray and express our support for parents who endure anxiety and emotional hardship knowing their children will continue to languish in violence; and to the children themselves, who will not be able to reunite and embrace their parents."

    The International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid group that works with refugees, called the decision "particularly brutal – even in light of a year of cruelty toward refugees, like these minors, and immigrants."

    Trump has said that refugees pose a potential threat to U.S. national security, warning of ISIS, al Qaeda, or other terror groups infiltrating their ranks to carry out attacks -- though refugee advocates refute that idea, citing the years refugees have to wait and the amount of screening they must first pass.

    That was the administration's reasoning for curtailing the regular refugee admissions program in September, setting the lowest cap in the program's history at 45,000 refugees. But the government has not warned about any specific terror threat from these Central American countries, and State Department officials would not say specifically why it was shutting down the program.

    "This decision was taken as part of the overall U.S. government review of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for FY 2018," a State Department official said in an emailed statement. Another official said the termination was "to make sure our refugee program is doing what we want it to do," but would not say what that was.

    Critics of the program under the Obama administration, however, charged that it did not work because many of the applicants did not legally meet the definition of a refugee because they were fleeing violent conflict, but not persecution of some kind -- something Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security disagreed with, calling the program "an alternative, safe, and legal path to the United States for children seeking protection from harm or persecution in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras" in July 2016.

    The end of the program comes three days after the Department of Homeland Security announced the end of Temporary Protected Status for Nicaraguans in the U.S. -- another immigration program that gives special immigration status to people from a foreign country where the U.S. determines that conditions in that home country prevent them from returning safely or where the country is unable to handle their return adequately.

    Some 2,500 Nicaraguans living in the U.S. -- many of whom have been here for years and had children in the U.S. -- now must leave before January 2019 or face deportation then.

    The administration punted on whether to do the same for Hondurans with Temporary Protected Status, extending the program by six months, but they have terminated several others, including for Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Temporary Protected Status will expire soon for Haiti and El Salvador, but the White House has not said what it will decide.

    http://www.wbal.com/article/275837/1...entral-america

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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  7. #7
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    Their country can "promote" SAFETY for them!

    Deport the whole family out of here!

    We are not the ATM machine or dumping ground for the World.

    We have our own gangs, drugs, crime, murder, rape and VIOLENCE to take care of!
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

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    Seems it needs to go back further to gw's reauthorizing the act that makes us take in central american youths saying fear at the border. gw opened the border wide to mexicans & before he left office signed the act to flood us with central americans. The numbers are staggering - read 1/3 of salvadorans now live in the USA plus the hondorans, costa ricans guatemalans, etc.
    The Central American Minors, or CAM, refugee program allowed certain parents who were lawfully present in the U.S. to request a refugee resettlement interview for their children and other family members from three Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

    The other family members who qualified only included the child's other parent or caregiver or the child's own child, the parent's grandchild.

    After 11:59 pm ET Thursday night, the State Department will not accept any new applications to the CAM program. Those who have already applied will continue to be processed, undergoing all the necessary screening such as DNA testing, security checks, and medical examinations and given entry if they meet the requirements.
    Now that is a bad joke - obama took our border patrol and drove the "youths" by the tens of thousands to any location in the USA & placed often times with ILLEGALS. plus $1500 a month, smart phone, schooling, healthcare. And jeh johnson did no checking at all.
    Those who have already applied will continue to be processed, undergoing all the necessary screening such as DNA testing, security checks, and medical examinations and given entry if they meet the requirements.
    So now they will do this checking for the last applicants - NONE OF THIS HAS BEEN DONE FOR THE TENS OF THOUSANDS HERE ALREADY & ON THE DOLE! How can you do security checks on them? They claim fleeing a country of violence, their gov't is able to furnish records? They could use any name, they don't have ID. I don't think obama did any checking at all just escorted them to wherever they wanted to go to a so called uncle, aunt, illegals too so they could get their monthly check $$$. Glad cam is over but they need to undo the act that forces us to take them in in the first place. This asylum claim thing is getting very tired.
    [QUOTE]"Terminating the entire CAM program will neither promote safety for these children nor help our government regulate migration," said Bishop Joe Vasquez[/QUOTE] We do not want "migration" period.

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