Thread: Trump Nominates Son of Cuban Immigrants ( La Raza, MALDEF, LULAC Endorse)

Who Is Alexander Acosta? Trump Labor Nominee Supports Amnesty, Cheap Foreign Labor


by NEIL MUNRO

February 16, 2017


President Donald Trump’s new nominee to run the Department of Labor is an accomplished lawyer and a rising star in the GOP’s Hispanic and pro-diversity wing.

The nominee, Alexander Acosta, is a Harvard graduate and a former senior justice department official under George W. Bush. From 2005, he served as a federal attorney in Florida, where he successfully prosecuted a series of high-profile cases and is now a university dean.


If confirmed by the Senate to run the Department of Labor, Acosta will play an important role in overseeing and regulating the annual inflow of roughly 1 million contract workers. Those contract workers fill white-collar and blue-collar jobs throughout the economy and they also lower wages for American graduates and unskilled workers.


However, he’s likely to clash with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a populist who is expected to push for reduced use of foreign workers. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump called for reforms of the contract-worker programs, including the H-1B program, and declared his policy would be to “Buy American, Hire American.”


On Wednesday, Jan 15, Trump’s first nominee for the job was withdrawn after a few GOP Senators said they would not vote for him in the closely divided Senate. The first nominee, restaurant CEO Anthony Puzder, was damaged by his pre-nomination support for cheap-labor immigration.


Acosta has worked in multiple legal jobs


He was appointed by Bush to the five-member National Labor Relations Board from December 2002 to August 2003. Next, he served as assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division until June 2005, and then became U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida until 2009. He then moved to become dean of Florida International University’s College of Law.


Acosta successfully prosecuted multiple high-profile cases in South Florida


According to Acosta’s resume posted at his law school;

While Dean Acosta served as U.S. Attorney, the Southern District prosecuted a number of high-profile defendants, including Jack Abramoff for fraud, Jose Padilla for terrorism, Charles “Chuckie” Taylor Jr. for torture, (the first torture case of its kind in the U.S.), and the Cali Cartel founders Miguel and Gilberto Rodriquez-Orejuela for the importation of 200,000 kilos of cocaine, which resulted in a $2.1 billion forfeiture. The District also targeted white collar crime, prosecuting several bank-related cases, including one against Swiss Bank UBS. The case resulted in UBS paying $780 million in fines, and for the first time in history, the bank provided the United States with the names of individuals who were using secret Swiss bank accounts to avoid U.S. taxes. Under Dean Acosta’s leadership, the District also focused on health care fraud and because the top district in the nation in health care fraud prosecution, charged more than 700 individuals responsible for more than $2 billion in fraud.

Acosta supports amnesty for illegals and a continued inflow of foreign workers


In January 2012, at an event organized by former Gov. Jeb Bush’s Hispanic Leadership Network, Acosta urged politicians to create “a pathway to legal immigration” despite strong public opposition.

He said:

They [the illegal aliens] go nowhere. As the Secretary said, they’re not meant to go anywhere. We need a solution. Several individuals here on the panel were involved in finding a solution several years ago under President [George W.] Bush, and we need someone who’s going to say, we have to enact immigration solutions. Part of that means figuring out what we do with all the individuals that are already in our nation. We need them here. They provide construction jobs. They provide agricultural jobs. We need to figure out a way to address that. We need to figure out a way to then have the pathway to further future legal immigration. If we do not take it all at once, we’re not going to solve it. You cannot solve part of it without solving the other part. You cannot address immigration without answering, what do you do with the individuals that are already in the United States? So let’s just get it done, and let’s get it done quickly.

View the video here.


Under current rules, the federal government annually provides work permits to roughly 1 million contract workers and Green Cards to roughly one million immigrants each year, just as four million young Americans join the workforce. The high level of immigration has been supported by the GOP’s business wing, including President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.


Acosta worked with pro-amnesty progressives at the American Bar Association


Acosta joined a bar association panel called the Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities, which included the heads of the ACLU and of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The commission then produced a report which condemned public opposition to illegal immigration, saying:

The role of elected officials in furthering a discourse of antipathy towards immigrants, including out-of-status immigrants, often underlies these state legislative efforts, and arguably provides legitimacy to the increased hostility towards Latinos, and the marginalization of Latino communities. Apparent public support for these legislative efforts have made Latinos feel vulnerable and has also significantly impacted Latinos’ perceptions of fairness … the [2012 DACA mini-amnesty] policy does not grant any substantive right, and does not provide a long-term solution to the immigration system problems, which can only be addressed through appropriate immigration reform.

The report was titled “Latinos in the United States: Overcoming Legal Obstacles, Engaging in Civic Life.” The report cited support from several Latino radicals, including the president of the National Council of La Raza ethnic advocacy group. Acosta currently chairs the 11-member panel, which also includes the president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a Latino advocacy group.


Acosta Supported Pro-Diversity Federal Mandates


From 2003 to 2005, he was Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where he supported lawsuits that imposed social diversity on cohesive American communities. His wins include a court decision ending a schoolroom ban on Islamic hijabs, and an anti-discrimination case which forced a community to permit housing for imported contract workers. According to his resume posted at Harvard;

Alexander serves on the Florida Supreme Court’s Commission on Professionalism, on the Florida Innocence Commission and the American Bar Association’s Commission on Diversity in the Education Pipeline. He has received several professional recognitions, including the American Bar Association’s Council on Legal Education’s Legacy Award for efforts on diversity; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Excellence in Government Award and the D.C. Hispanic Bar Association’s Hugh A. Johnson Jr. Memorial Award.

In 2016, he advocated for cops to give Miranda warnings in the home languages of immigrant suspects who don’t speak English.

He told NPR in August that:

There are many ways that this can be done, and we have the technology now so that we can have apps, we can have iPhones. And I should say, you know, this isn’t just an issue for Spanish with modern technology. You can do this for so many languages and really take the responsibility and the obligation away from the police officer to have to look through various translation cards and read in a language that they don’t speak Miranda warnings to individuals when they are arrested.

In 2011, he testified at a Senate hearing for policies that would treat Islam as if it were a religion which separates church and state, as does Christiniary and Judaism. He also defended Bush’s sympathetic outreach to Islamist political groups in the United States.



http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...artment-labor/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 2004

WWW.USDOJ.GOV



JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REACHES SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT WITH OKLAHOMA SCHOOL DISTRICT IN MUSLIM STUDENT HEADSCARF CASE

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Department of Justice today announced the settlement of a lawsuit alleging that the Muskogee, Oklahoma Public School District had violated the constitutional rights of a sixth-grade Muslim girl when it barred her from wearing a Muslim headscarf, or hijab. Under the consent agreement signed by the parties, the school district will allow the girl to wear the headscarf and will revise its student dress code policy to accommodate exceptions for bona fide religious reasons.


“This settlement reaffirms the principle that public schools cannot require students to check their faith at the school house door,” said R. Alexander Acosta, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. “The Department of Justice will not tolerate discrimination against Muslims or any other religious group. As the President and the Attorney General have made clear repeatedly, such intolerance is un-American, and is morally despicable.”


The Justice Department intervened in this case in March 2004, after an investigation revealed that the school district prohibited the student, Nashala Hearn, from wearing her hijab at Benjamin Franklin Science Academy, a public middle school in Muskogee. The investigation further uncovered that while Hearn was prohibited from wearing her hijab, the school district allowed certain other students to wear head coverings for non-religious purposes. During the 2003-04 school year, the school district twice suspended Nashala Hearn for wearing the hijab. Later, she was permitted her to wear the hijab pending the outcome of the suit.


The parties today signed a proposed consent decree, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, resolving the lawsuit. Under the six-year agreement, which remains subject to court approval, the school district will amend its dress code to permit head coverings for bona fide religious reasons and will allow Hearn to wear her hijab while attending the Muskogee Public Schools. The district will also implement a training program for all teachers and administrators regarding the amended dress code, publicize the revised dress code policy to students and parents and certify its compliance with the terms of the order for a four-year period.
The Civil Rights Division is involved in a number of ongoing religious liberty cases in schools and many other contexts.

More information about these cases may be found at www.usdoj.gov/crt/religdisc/religdisc.html.
###
04-343

R. Alexander Acosta


Chair of the ABA Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities and Dean, College of Law, at Florida International University.


Acosta focused his remarks on education, an issue that “undergirds many other issues” in the Latino community, he said. Florida International University College of Law graduates the highest percentage of Latinos of any ranked law school in the country, and is housed at a university that is almost 80 percent Latino, Acosta noted. Latino law students face many challenges, including a lack of role models, a lack of sophistication about the educational system, and a lack of knowledge about how to prepare for law school.


Cultural factors can influence Latino students as well, Acosta said. The centrality of family to many Latinos sometimes causes students or recent graduates to curtail career opportunities. Often students must drop out or suspend their studies in order to work to support the family, Acosta said. In addition, recent graduates sometimes hesitate to accept excellent jobs or clerkships if they require them to leave their family’s geographic area. The percentage of Latino law grads is actually declining, Acosta noted. “When you’re not advancing as a group, you’re retrogressing,” he said, which means “we need to start thinking about these issues.”


Acosta also spoke about challenges facing Latino students at the secondary school level. Latinos, who make up about 25 percent of public school students nationwide, are over-represented in the public school system relative to their numbers in the population, he said. Latino dropout rates are very high. In South Florida, historically, for example, 21 percent of all high school students—many of them Latino—drop out after ninth grade. Only 50 percent of entering freshmen end up graduating from public high school. Some join gangs, but Acosta said, prosecuting gang members is not the answer. For every two gang members that are convicted “you get four more” because so many young people are out of school. But, Acosta said, “the school to prison pipeline is just part of the problem...If you don’t solve the educational problem you are going to have all sorts of problems in terms of socioeconomic status...housing, and other issues. These are fundamental problems that need to be solved because they lead to all the secondary issues we’re talking about,” Acosta said.


From the ABA Spring 2016


http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/rl_sprin...