Judge blocks sweeping Trump administration asylum rule

The federal judge said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, lacked the authority to impose the new asylum restriction. File Photo by Justin Hamel/UPI | License Photo

Jan. 9 (UPI) -- A federal judge has blocked a new Trump administration rule that tightens standards by which immigration judges are allowed to grant asylum.

The Thursday order came three days before the amended rule was set to go into effect.

District Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California took issue with the proposed rule's "truncated" public comment period of 30 days. He also sided with plaintiffs -- immigration advocacy groups -- who said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, lacked the authority to implement the rule.

Wolf has been serving as acting head of homeland security department since November 2019, replacing former acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

The Government Accountability Office in August said Wolf wasn't legally entitled to hold his position because he assumed the job under a succession plan crafted by McAleenan, who himself had no authority to hold his job under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Trump never formally nominated McAleenan to be secretary. Trump formally nominated Wolf for the job later in August.

Donato said his is the fifth court that's ruled against Wolf's authority as head of the Cabinet department.

RELATED Federal judge in Texas to hear lawsuit seeking to dismantle DACA

"The government has recycled exactly the same legal and factual claims made in the prior cases, as if they had not been soundly rejected in well-reasoned opinions by several courts," the judge wrote.

"This is a troubling litigation strategy. In effect, the government keeps crashing the same car into a gate, hoping that someday it might break through.

Trump withdrew his nomination of Wolf on Thursday.

RELATED Michael Chiklis: 'Coyote' puts human face on migrant struggle

Immigration Equality, one of the plaintiffs in the case, welcomed Donato's ruling.

"Today's ruling halts the most sweeping illegal, anti-refugee volley of the Trump administration," said Bridget Crawford, legal director for the organization. "Asylum is an international human right. LGBTQ and HIV-positive refugees fleeing persecution will always be welcomed in the U.S."



upi.com/7066505

These Freshman Lawmakers Will Join AOC

 and the Squad in the Progressive Caucus

© Drew Angerer/Getty Congresswoman U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) speaks outside of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. Bush joined the progressive caucus of the Democratic party on Sunday after being…

The November election saw a number of victories for fresh Republican faces like Representative Madison Cawthorn, who replaced Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the youngest member of Congress, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory. But Sunday's swearing in of new congressional members also includes a number of progressives.

The so-called Squad, a group of progressive House Democrats including Ocasio-Cortez as well as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, inducted a second class of new representatives, thus bolstering the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes Senator Bernie Sanders.

As the divide between the Democratic Party's progressive wing and centrist Democrats continues to deepen, the impact these incoming officials will have on the party's future is still to be determined.

Progressives like Tlaib have argued that while Democrats lost House seats in the general election, it was candidates who ran on progressive platforms who were able to hold on to their seats or win their House races.

Here are the four new congressional members joining Sanders, the Squad and other members of the Democratic Party's progressive wing.

Representative Cori Bush

The veteran racial justice activist and former nurse elected to represent Missouri's 1st Congressional District ran on progressive platform, championing policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Bush first entered politics after becoming involved in the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown's fatal shooting by a police officer.

Bush's landslide victory came after she defeated 10-term incumbent William Lacy Clay in an upset during the Democratic primaries, which came on the same night Missouri voters decided to expand the state's Medicaid eligibility.

In her third run for Congress, she was backed by Sanders, the youth-led Sunrise Movement and the left-wing group Justice Democrats, which is well known for recruiting Ocasio-Cortez.

Bush is the first Black woman to serve the House of Representatives from Missouri.

"To all the counted outs, the forgotten abouts, the marginalized and the pushed asides. This is our moment," Bush tweeted on the night of her victory. "We came together to end a 52-year family dynasty. That's how we build the political revolution."

Representative Jamaal Bowman

Bowman, a former schoolteacher and principal, defeated 16-term Democratic incumbent Eliot Engel after being recruited by the Justice Democrats and went on to win in a landslide in New York's 16th Congressional District.

He was endorsed by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Sunrise Movement, New York state's Working Families Party and the editorial board of The New York Times.

Bowman has said he'd like to elevate the issue of slavery reparations in the same way Ocasio-Cortez did with the Green New Deal.

"I was watching it from afar, watching Bernie Sanders run, and then watching AOC and the Squad not just win but truly come in as voices for the underserved. So to be joining them in Congress in 2021 is surreal and exciting, and I think it illustrates a shift happening in the Democratic Party," Bowman told NBC News earlier this month.

In a Tuesday tweet, Bowman advocated defunding the police after the Justice Department announced that the police officers involved in the 2014 fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland would not face federal charges.

"A system this cruel and inhumane can't be reformed. Defund the police, and defund the system that's terrorizing our communities," the representative wrote.

Bowman and Bush have both declined to comment on whether they will vote for Nancy Pelosi as House speaker, a position Ocasio-Cortez has said should go to someone else.

© Stephanie Keith/Stringer Congressman Jamaal Bowman greets supporters on June 23, 2020 in Yonkers, New York. Bowman is another progressive joining the Squad in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stephanie Keith/Stringer

Representative Marie Newman

Newman, a former marketing consultant and anti-bullying advocate, won her seat in November after defeating an anti-abortion Democrat in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District.

Another Justice Democrat-backed candidate, she was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, Warren, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand in the primaries, where she beat eight-term Representative Dan Lipinski.

Lipinski frustrated the party's left by opposing abortion access, voting against the Affordable Care Act and refusing to endorse former President Barack Obama in his 2012 re-election bid.

Ocasio-Cortez told the Times that Newman "is a textbook example of one of the ways that we could be better as a party—to come from a deep blue seat and to be championing all the issues we need to be championing."

Newman ran on a platform of progressive policies that included Medicare for All, universal basic income, green jobs, the legalization of marijuana, immigrant protections in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and "unambiguous" immigration policies.

© Sarah Silbiger/Stringer Representative Marie Newman (D-IL) arrives to the Hyatt Regency hotel on Capitol Hill on November 12, 2020 in Washington, DC. Newman ran on a platform of progressive policies including Medicare for All and protections for DACA recipients. Sarah Silbiger/Stringer
Representative Mondaire Jones

Jones, a former Obama Justice Department lawyer from New York, won a competitive race in the Democratic primaries after longtime incumbent Democrat Nita Lowey decided not to seek reelection.

Running on a platform of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in one of the wealthiest of New York City's suburbs, Jones won the nomination and subsequently the general election in the state's 17th Congressional District.

"I'm part of a generation that stands to inherit a planet that's devastated by climate catastrophe," Jones told NBC News. "For me, there's no alternative to a Green New Deal. We have to be fighting for a thing that will make our planet inhabitable for ourselves and our children and their children."

He was endorsed by Obama, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren.

"We are uniquely positioned to lead the Democratic Party into the 21st century, and I don't think that has happened yet," Jones said. "I don't think that we have fully addressed as a party the unprecedented challenges that Americans now face, such as the student loan crisis."

Jones and fellow Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents New York's 15th Congressional District, are the first openly LGBTQ Black members of Congress.

© Timothy A. Clary/AFP Mondaire Jones, Representative for New York's 17th Congressional District, poses outside his home in Nyack, New York, July 23, 2020. Jones, who ran on a platform of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, joined a new class of progressive lawmakers after being sworn into Congress on Sunday. Timothy A. Clary/AFP

Biden told this immigrant rights activist 'vote for Trump' in a blunt exchange. 

He voted for Biden but is ready to push him hard on immigration reform.

© Joe Raedle/Getty Images 

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden speaks to the media after receiving a briefing from the transition COVID-19 advisory board on November 09, 2020 at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Biden spoke about how his administration would respond to the coronavirus pandemic. 

In November 2019, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, then-candidate Joe Biden was asked a question by immigrant rights activist Carlos Rojas Rodriguez and an immigrant community member.

A tense back-and-forth ensued, with Rodriguez and Silvia criticizing the Obama administration's record on deportations and calling for a moratorium on deportations if Biden was elected.

Biden disagreed and told Rodriguez, "You should go vote for Trump."

With the Biden administration set to take office on January 20, 2021, Business Insider spoke with Rodriguez about the work ahead for immigrant rights activists.

Carlos Rojas Rodriguez made headlines in 2019 when a question about the Obama administration's immigration record received a blunt response from then-candidate Joe Biden.

Standing next to an immigrant mother and local activist named Silvia in Greenwood, South Carolina, Rodriguez translated her question to Biden. Silvia remarked that she worried about Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting her family next, and she was concerned about Biden's defense of the Obama administration's deportation campaigns. When Silvia asked Biden if he would implement a moratorium on deportations on day one, he responded "No," and defended deportations for individuals with criminal records.

Rodriguez, however, chimed back in, this time with his own thoughts and concerns as a formerly undocumented person, reminding Biden that millions of families were separated under his administration.

In video of the encounter, audience members could be heard yelling "Give him a mic!" asking for Biden's team to give Rodriguez a mic to ask his follow-up. Biden, roaming down the school gymnasium to address Rodriguez, squarely told him: "You should vote for Trump," and proceeds to turn his back and walk away as Rodriguez says, "No, I am not going to do that. But I want to make sure that immigrant families and people like Silvia are not afraid."

"I wanted to make it clear to the public, to Biden, who was a presidential candidate then that if he were to become president at the time, that he has both legislative and also administrative actions that he can do, going through the executive branch, and also obviously through the legislative branch," Rodriguez told Business Insider of his exchange with now President-elect Biden. (And to some extent, with the recently-announced 100-day freeze on deportations, it seems that Rodriguez's message resonated.)

© Meg Kinnard/AP 

President-elect Joe Biden talks with Carlos Rojas Rodriguez objecting to his stance on deportations during a town hall at Lander University in Greenwood, S.C., on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019. 

Biden eventually called the 3 million deportations, 1.7 million of which were of people with no criminal record "a big mistake," during a February 2020 interview with Telemundo.

"To be clear I did not vote for Trump," Rodriguez said, stating that at the time he worked for Movimento Cosecha, an immigrants rights organization, and then went on to work for Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign. In 2008, he volunteered for the Obama campaign. Carlos became a citizen in 2017 and voted in his first presidential election in 2020, voting for Biden.

Video: Biden says he will take executive action on immigration (FOX News)

Trump's immigration policies were widely derided by activists as increasingly punitive. Throughout his time in office, he consistently increased the Department of Homeland Security budgets for immigration enforcement efforts, spent over $18 billion on the incomplete border wall, and enacted a series of policies focused on detention and separation, alongside a systematic gutting of the asylum system through the Migrant Protection Protocols.

"The pain that the Latino community is going under, it is so big that we actually need all the approaches. We need executive action. We need administrative action. We need legislative action," Rodriguez added. "Unfortunately, we are dealing and I think we're going to continue to deal with the least effective Congress in modern United States history, where gridlock is what you get every day, and where compromise is seen as a sign of weakness."

At DHS, the undoing Trump policies and implementation Biden policies will be the purview of Alejandro Mayorkas if he's confirmed. Mayorkas came to the US as a refugee from Cuba and was tapped to lead Biden's Department of Homeland Security, and if confirmed he would be the first immigrant and Latino to head the agency.

And Rodriguez, while glad to see the Trump administration go, said his work will continue under a Biden administration. He singled out the addition of Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Obama, to Biden's transition team as a major cause for concern.

"Munoz was a former immigrant rights advocate who defended mass deportations and family separation under the Obama Administration and de-escalated the immigrant rights movement for eight years," Rodriguez said. "Her presence in the Biden transition team only signals that we could be very well going back to the Obama era of pro-immigrant rhetoric with anti-immigrant practices and policies which led to a record of 3 million deportations."

This tension, of being relieved to have defeated Trump but being worried about returning to Obama-era immigration policies, is playing out in his community, Rodriguez said. He added that the uplifting of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is welcome but that there must be a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented people in the US.

"[T]he Obama and the Biden administration funded DHS budgets and ICE budgets for them to have the infrastructure to do all the things that Trump did with separating and incarcerating immigrant families," Rodriguez said. "So my biggest fear is that people feel that these cages all of a sudden disappeared, that deportations are not happening, just because you have someone who is speaking on the issue better in rhetoric, but not so much in the practice."

Rodriguez does acknowledge that there were immigration policy wins under the Obama administration, including DACA. (Mayorkas who worked for the agency during the Obama administration has been praised by immigrants rights groups for his work on DACA.)

During that time he said activists "were really catalyzed by mass mobilization, direct action, public confrontation, civil disobedience, led by directly affected folks. The common denominator there has always been public action, pressuring the Democratic Party, challenging them publicly."

Rodriguez added that what he would want to see from Biden is strong administrative relief and executive actions that include DACA and PPS and "also provide a real tangible relief for every undocumented person in the country." Rodriguez mentioned that executive actions reversing the travel ban, abolishing ICE, and enforcing a lasting moratorium on deportations are stances he will push the new administration towards.

"I am going to focus my time on making sure that we're empowering directly-affected people to take action, to be visible," Rodriguez said. "We're not going to let the Biden administration or the Democratic Party frame our fight."

Read the original article on Business Insider

US Federal judge reinstates DACA, orders Homeland Security to quickly accept new applicants

A New York federal judge on Friday restored the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which President Donald Trump has tried to end — in a court ruling that would swiftly grant thousands of immigrants whose parents brought them to the U.S. as young children the ability to continue to work and study in the country.

© Provided by NBC News

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis said in his six-page ruling that he was fully reinstating the DACA program based on the terms established under former President Barack Obama's administration. Trump tried to end the program in September 2017, and this past July Chad Wolf, the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, suspended DACA pending a “comprehensive” review.

However, Garaufis also ruled in November that Wolf has not been acting lawfully as the chief of Homeland Security and that, as such, his suspension of protections for a class of migrants brought to the United States illegally as children is invalid

The judge reaffirmed that position in his Friday ruling. Although Trump formally nominated Wolf for the job in summer, Wolf has yet to get a full vote in the Senate, keeping his role as "acting."

He also ordered DHS to post a public notice by Monday prominently on its website to accept first-time applications, renewal requests and advance parole requests based on Obama-era rules and to ensure that work permits are valid for two years.

This is the latest blow to the Trump’s administration’s efforts to halt the program. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the Trump administration wrongly tried to shut down the program. The president’s administration then began rejecting new applicants to the program this summer about a month after the High Court blocked the White House from ending the program completely.

In its ruling, the high court found that his administration was “arbitrary and capricious” in its attempt to end the Obama-era program. Existing applicants also must reapply every year, but remain in the program.

The National Immigration Law Center called the ruling a "major victory" in a tweet on Friday.

"This is a major victory for immigrant youth, led by immigrant youth. We would not be celebrating this day were it not for our courageous plaintiffs that fought to affirm that their #HomeIsHere," the organization said. "This is a day to celebrate, and we look forward to working with the incoming Biden administration to create a permanent solution for immigrant youth and communities."

SCOTUS skeptical of plan to block undocumented immigrants from census count

Several Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned the legality of a last-ditch attempt by the outgoing Trump administration to exclude undocumented immigrants from the federal count used to award states seats in Congress and the Electoral College.

© Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images 

The conservative-leaning high court heard more than 80 minutes of oral arguments on the legal challenges against President Trump's effort to remove immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the decennial census count that dictates redistricting for the House of Representatives.

"A lot of the historical evidence and longstanding practice really cuts against your position," Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest addition to the bench, told the government attorney arguing the administration's case.

The U.S. government has always counted most of the country's residents, including non-citizens without legal status, for the purposes of allocating congressional seats. The 14th Amendment requires House seats to be awarded after the government counts "the whole number of persons in each State." The constitutionally mandated process occurs every 10 years following the census.

In July, arguing that "persons" was not strictly defined in the 14th Amendment, Mr. Trump said that it would be U.S. policy to exclude immigrants who lack "lawful immigration status" from calculations that determine how many House districts each state should have. His presidential directive instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who administers the Census Bureau, to provide him information following the 2020 Census that would allow him to do this.

Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, on Monday called the legal argument that undocumented immigrants should be counted for congressional apportionment "fairly strong."

"They are persons, aren't they?" Breyer asked acting solicitor general Jeff Wall, the lawyer representing the Trump administration in the suit, known as Trump v. New York.

Barrett, who is Mr. Trump's third appointment to the high court, reminded Wall of the unprecedented nature of the change sought by the administration, and posed the example of an undocumented immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years. "Why would … such a person not have a settled residency here?" she asked Wall.

Wall responded by saying that the U.S. has previously excluded foreign diplomats living in the country on a long-term basis from the apportionment count. "I'm not disputing at all that illegal aliens form ties to the community in the sense you are talking about, but they're not the sort of ties that are sufficient to qualify you within the apportionment base," he said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, said that immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — whom the Trump administration has said would likely be excluded from the apportionment count under its proposal — could be eligible to stay in the country through asylum or other forms of immigration relief.

"I'm not sure how you can identify any class of immigrant that isn't living here in its traditional sense," Sotomayor told Wall. "This is where they are."

Members of the high court's conservative majority and liberal wing pressed Wall on the practical feasibility of the Trump administration excluding the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the redistricting count. The Commerce Department has a December 31 deadline to provide the president a tabulation of each state's population. The president is then required by federal law to submit a statement to Congress that would be used to redraw House districts.

Census count puts Montana in a unique spot

Justice Samuel Alito, nominated to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, called it a "monumental task."

Under questioning by Alito, Wall conceded that it was "very unlikely" that the Census Bureau would be able to identify and remove all unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment calculations.

Three federal courts have already ruled against Mr. Trump's planned changes to the census. In September, a three-member panel of federal judges in New York said the proposal violates federal laws that govern the redrawing of congressional seats and the census count, though they did not weigh in on its constitutionality.

Last week, however, another panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C. dismissed a fourth challenge against Mr. Trump's effort, saying the case was not yet "ripe for review" given the uncertainty surrounding which undocumented immigrants would be removed from the redistricting count.

Several conservative justices, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's second appointment to the Supreme Court, on Monday weighed the possibility of the high court taking a similar approach and ruling after the administration decided which immigrants to exclude.

"The key point, I think, is that [Mr. Trump's] memorandum imposes no obligations on the plaintiffs to do anything at this point, unlike for example, a typical agency regulation," Kavanaugh said. "We call that a lack of ripeness."

If Mr. Trump's plan is enacted, California, Texas and Florida, states with large immigrant communities, could end up with one fewer House district than they would have been given under the current calculations, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Pew Research Center. Conversely, some states like Alabama and Ohio with less undocumented residents would gain a congressional seat that they would've otherwise not secured.

The Justice Department has argued that the impact of Mr. Trump's proposal on certain states potentially losing or gaining House seats is unclear, since he has yet to determine which classes of immigrants to exclude from the apportionment figures. The number of ICE detainees, the population Mr. Trump is most likely to exclude, stands at 16,075, according to government figures.

However, Justice Elena Kagan, an appointee of Mr. Obama, noted that the government also has records on hundreds of thousands of immigrants with final deportation orders or in removal proceedings, and of more than 640,000 recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. While DACA offers works permits and protection from deportation, it does not legalize the status of its recipients, who remain undocumented.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee, said in his opening questioning that if the court did not intervene now before the commerce department transmits state population information to the president, "I don't know when the court would be able to intervene."

Wall said that lawsuits could be brought after Mr. Trump determines who will be excluded from the redistricting numbers and sends his report to the House of Representatives.

"Isn't that going to be like having to unscramble the eggs?" Roberts asked.

Deported Mexican migrants dream of change under Biden



Issued on: 28/11/2020 - 

Many Mexicans who were deported from the US hope that President-elect Joe Biden will push for changes that protect undocumented migrants Guillermo Arias AFP/File

Mexico City (AFP)

Mauricio Lopez was deported to Mexico after spending most of his life in the United States. Now he hopes against the odds that Joe Biden's administration will let him return.

The 26-year-old English teacher is one of thousands of migrants known as "dreamers" who as children were taken to the US by their parents.

Like many Mexicans who were expelled, in particular under outgoing President Donald Trump, Lopez is hoping that President-elect Biden will push for changes that protect undocumented migrants.

"It would be good for us if he relaxes immigration laws ... if there are asylum processes, if he makes it easier for us to obtain work permits or tourist visas, since many of us have families there," he said.

Lopez was deported to Mexico from North Carolina in 2016 after he was unable to renew his residency permit under the DACA program for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He was deported with his mother, leaving behind a sister but joining a brother who had already been sent back to Mexico years earlier.

- Biden's hands tied? -

Lopez is part of a growing number of deportees trying to integrate into a country that often feels foreign to them.

Around 89,000 Mexicans were expelled from the United States in the first half of this year, according to the interior ministry.

Widespread expulsions have also occurred under Democratic administrations.

About three million unauthorized immigrants were deported by former president Barack Obama between 2009 and 2016, when Biden was vice president.

Biden has signaled a break with the policies of Trump, who vowed to halt almost all immigration and expel the more than 10 million undocumented migrants estimated to live in the United States.

The Republican sparked anger during his 2016 election campaign when he branded Mexican migrants "rapists" and drug dealers, and vowed to build a wall along the southern US border.

But experts say Biden may be hamstrung by a Republican-controlled Senate, depending on the result of runoffs in the state of Georgia on January 5.

"Even with the best will of the new government, it (change) won't happen imminently," said Leticia Calderon, an expert on migration at Mexico's Mora Institute.

The Democrat's win should not be seen as an "invitation to migrate" because "the bad guy is leaving and now the good guys" are in the White House, she said.

"The immigration system in the United States has no political party."

- 'Feel more positive' -

One area where she does expect action from Biden is to try to address rights for "Dreamers" to stay and work in the United States.

Biden fiercely criticized Trump's moves against "Dreamers."

"It's likely that they will deal with it in the first 100 days of government, but it has to go through the Senate," where it is likely to meet resistance, Calderon said.

Even if it is too late for him personally, Lopez hopes that other young migrants can benefit under the new administration.

"The Dreamers feel more positive with Biden. There's hope that they have a route to citizenship or residency," he said.

Around 12 million people born in Mexico live in the US, as well as another 26 million who have at least one parent or grandparent born on Mexican soil.

Father-of-two Ben Moreno, who has been deported from the US twice, most recently in 2014 during the Obama presidency, is also cautiously optimistic that things will improve.

"I honestly don't think Biden will stop the deportations," said the 54-year-old, who ran a construction company in Indiana.

"But what I do hope is that this administration will be fair about who it deports and how it does it," he said.

© 2020 AFP

Judge rules Daca suspension invalid, Homeland Security head in office illegally


Chad Wolf took office unlawfully, says federal court judge, therefore could not suspend program that shields young people from deportation


Associated Press

Sun 15 Nov 2020 
 

Acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf during a Senate confirmation hearing in September. Photograph: Greg Nash/AFP/Getty Images


A federal judge in New York has ruled that the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, assumed his position unlawfully and has invalidated Wolf’s suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields young people from deportation.

“DHS failed to follow the order of succession as it was lawfully designated,” the US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote.

Chad Wolf: who is the Trump official leading the crackdown in Portland?


“Therefore the actions taken by purported acting secretaries, who were not properly in their roles according to the lawful order of succession, were taken without legal authority.”

About 650,000 people are part of Daca, which allows young immigrants who were brought to the country as children to legally work and shields them from deportation.

Karen Tumlin, an attorney who represented a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits that challenged Wolf’s authority, called the ruling “another win for Daca recipients and those who have been waiting years to apply for the program for the first time”.

Wolf issued a memorandum in July effectively suspending Daca pending review by DHS. A month earlier the US supreme court had ruled that Donald Trump failed to follow rule-making procedures when he tried to end the program, but the justices kept a window open for him to try again.

Daca has changed lives – and the country – for the better. It must be preserved

Roberto G Gonzales and Kristina Brant

In August the Government Accountability Office, a bipartisan congressional watchdog, said Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were improperly serving and ineligible to run the agency under the Vacancies Reform Act. The two have been at the forefront of administration initiatives on immigration and law enforcement.

Wolf is the fifth person to serve as homeland security secretary under Trump in an acting or confirmed capacity, while George W Bush and Barack Obama each had three people in the job over the course of their two presidential terms. Wolf was named to the post only after two of the president’s preferred candidates were ruled ineligible to take up the job.

Since being appointed to the role, Wolf has overseen the controversial deployment of federal agents to quell Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, as well as denying that there was a problem with systemic racism in US law enforcement. He has also downplayed the threat of Covid-19, while overseeing the implementation of extreme immigration restrictions the White House claimed would stem the spread of coronavirus.

In Garaufis’s ruling on Saturday, the judge wrote that DHS did not follow an order of succession established when then-secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in April 2019.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the

Hot-button words trigger conservatives and liberals differently

by Yasmin Anwar, University of California - Berkeley
  

Graphic shows differences in liberal and conservative brain responses to news media Credit: Yuan Chang Leong

How can the partisan divide be bridged when conservatives and liberals consume the same political content, yet interpret it through their own biased lens?

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University scanned the brains of more than three dozen politically left- and right-leaning adults as they viewed short videos involving hot-button immigration policies, such as the building of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and the granting of protections for undocumented immigrants under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Their findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, show that liberals and conservatives respond differently to the same videos, especially when the content being viewed contains vocabulary that frequently pops up in political campaign messaging.

"Our study suggests that there is a neural basis to partisan biases, and some language especially drives polarization," said study lead author Yuan Chang Leong, a postdoctoral scholar in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. "In particular, the greatest differences in neural activity across ideology occurred when people heard messages that highlight threat, morality and emotions."

Overall, the results offer a never-before-seen glimpse into the partisan brain in the weeks leading up to what is arguably the most consequential U.S. presidential election in modern history. They underscore that multiple factors, including personal experiences and the news media, contribute to what the researchers call "neural polarization."

"Even when presented with the same exact content, people can respond very differently, which can contribute to continued division," said study senior author Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree. Our experiences, and the media we consume, likely contribute to neural polarization."


Specifically, the study traces the source of neural polarization to a higher-order brain region known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is believed to track and make sense of narratives, among other functions.

Another key finding is that the closer the brain activity of a study participant resembles that of the "average liberal" or the "average conservative," as modeled in the study, the more likely it is that the participant, after watching the videos, will adopt that particular group's position.

"This finding suggests that the more participants adopt the conservative interpretation of a video, the more likely they are to be persuaded to take the conservative position, and vice versa," Leong said.

Leong and fellow researchers launched the study with a couple of theories about how people with different ideological biases would differ in the way they process political information. They hypothesized that if sensory information, like sounds and visual imagery, drove polarization, they would observe differences in brain activity in the visual and auditory cortices.

However, if the narrative storytelling aspects of the political information people absorbed in the videos drove them apart ideologically, the researchers expected to see those disparities also revealed in higher-order brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. And that theory panned out.
 

Study shows conservative-liberal disparity in brain response to hot-button vocabulary.

 Credit: Yuan Chang Leong

To establish that attitudes toward hardline immigration policies predicted both conservative and liberal biases, the researchers first tested questions out on 300 people recruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk online marketplace who identified, to varying degrees, as liberal, moderate or conservative.

They then recruited 38 young and middle-aged men and women with similar socio-economic backgrounds and education levels who had rated their opposition or support for controversial immigration policies, such as those that led to the U.S.-Mexico border wall, DACA protections for undocumented immigrants, the ban on refugees from majority-Muslim countries coming to the U.S. and the cutting of federal funding to sanctuary cities.

Researchers scanned the study participants' brains via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as they viewed two dozen brief videos representing liberal and conservative positions on the various immigration policies. The videos included news clips, campaign ads and snippets of speeches by prominent politicians.

After each video, the participants rated on a scale of one to five how much they agreed with the general message of the video, the credibility of the information presented and the extent to which the video made them likely to change their position and to support the policy in question.

To calculate group brain responses to the videos, the researchers used a measure known as inter-subject correlation, which can be used to measure how similarly two brains respond to the same message.

Their results showed a high shared response across the group in the auditory and visual cortices, regardless of the participants' political attitudes. However, neural responses diverged along partisan lines in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, where semantic information, or word meanings, are processed.

Next, the researchers drilled down further to learn what specific words were driving neural polarization. To do this, they edited the videos into 87 shorter segments and placed the words in the segments into one of 50 categories. Those categories included words related to morality, emotions, threat and religion.

The researchers found that the use of words related to risk and threat, and to morality and emotions, led to greater polarization in the study participants' neural responses.

An example of a risk-related statement was, "I think it's very dangerous, because what we want is cooperation amongst the cities and the federal government to ensure that we have safety in our communities, and to ensure that our citizens are protected."

Meanwhile, an example of a moral-emotional statement was, "What are the fundamental ethical principles that are the basis of our society? Do no harm, and be compassionate, and this federal policy violates both of these principles."

Overall, the research study's results suggest that political messages that use threat-related and moral-emotional language drive partisans to interpret the same message in opposite ways, contributing to increasing polarization, Leong said.

Going forward, Leong hopes to use neuroimaging to build more precise models of how political content is interpreted and to inform interventions aimed at narrowing the divide between conservatives and liberals.


Bringing people on both sides of the aisle together on climate change
More information: Yuan Chang Leong et al, Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content, PNAS first published October 20, 2020; doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2008530117

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Provided by University of California - Berkeley

Why We’re Fighting for a World Without ICE
Under the cover of post-9/11 antiterrorism, the Department of Homeland Security has unleashed a carceral assault on immigrant families and children


UnitedWeDream.org





This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

By Cristina Jiménez Moreta and Cynthia Garcia

Immigrant youth and our families courageously left everything behind in our countries of origin to move to the United States. Some of us fled poverty, military coups, violence, and wars, while others simply wanted to go after a better life. While adapting to a new place, we’ve experienced some of the worst this country has to offer: workplace exploitation, wage theft, racial profiling, fear of deportation, and police violence. But as part of the immigrant youth movement at United We Dream (UWD), we’ve also experienced the power of people coming together, taking action, and winning change.

The seeds of our movement began with the idea that we have to protect and defend our families from deportation and fight for our right to access higher education. In the early 2000s, tens of thousands of undocumented students were graduating from high school each year. All of us lived with the fear of deportation and the looming possibility that our families could be torn apart, while simultaneously facing barriers to college education, exploitation at work, and a future filled with uncertainty.

This fear of deportation was heightened after September 11, 2001, as we witnessed how immigration enforcement and national security were being conflated in new and troubling ways. In the name of fighting terrorism, President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, within which immigration and immigrants were considered matters of national security. This not only led to increased racial profiling and xenophobia, but as a result, local and federal law enforcement were targeting Muslims, Black immigrants, and non-Muslim immigrants of color at higher rates, often leading to detention and/or deportation.

Nationwide, thousands would be implicated by the post-9/11 enforcement regime, which produced an expanding infrastructure that supported local and federal law enforcement efforts to criminalize, target, detain, and deport immigrants. Within this infrastructure, we saw the increase in racial profiling, greater policing of Black and Brown communities, enhanced militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the implementation of racist federal policies, such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which targeted immigrants from 25 countries.

Among the thousands who were affected by the post-9/11 regime were Kamal Essaheb and Walter Barrientos in New York and Marie Gonzalez in Missouri — three young undocumented immigrants who were threatened with deportation.

Their deportation cases spurred some of our first advocacy efforts that would eventually carry us forward in later forming UWD in 2008. Together, along with activists and organizers from across the country, we mobilized people to write letters and telephone elected officials to demand that the government allow Kamal, Walter, and Marie to stay in the United States, winning extensive media attention. Although Marie’s parents were deported, our organizing efforts stopped the deportations of Marie, Walter, and Kamal. This was a bittersweet moment in our fight to protect immigrants, as it further exposed the human impact of the enforcement regime in not only deporting immigrants but also tearing apart families.


In the early 2000s, tens of thousands of undocumented students were graduating from high school each year. All of us lived with the fear of deportation and the looming possibility that our families could be torn apart, while simultaneously facing barriers to college education, exploitation at work, and a future filled with uncertainty.

This moment also taught us that people closest to the pain are closest to the solutions our communities need. At the time, undocumented immigrants publicly fighting against deportations were unheard of. Yet, in defiance of conventional wisdom, undocumented youth and their families launched campaigns to share their stories, pressure those with decision-making power, and win deportation relief. It was clear that our movement had the power to create real change.

This was even more evident in 2012, when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was created as a direct result of our organizing efforts. Under the Obama administration, enforcement programs and collaboration between ICE and local police were aggressively expanded, leading to an increase in the number of immigrants being detained and deported even for minor violations, such as traffic infractions. Under the political calculation that ramping up enforcement would bring members of Congress from both parties to the negotiating table, the Obama administration deported a record number of immigrants from the United States. During Obama’s eight years in office, more than 3 million individuals and families were deported and separated from their loved ones. His administration failed to pass legislative immigration reforms, while the enforcement regime steadily grew in resources and power.

As organizers and directly affected people, we recognized this as a moment of leverage: By sharing our stories, we could pressure President Obama to take action. Our movement successfully created the conditions that led President Obama to implement DACA, which protected close to 800,000 young immigrants from deportation. The program continues to be the most significant policy breakthrough and victory on immigration in almost three decades. By sharing our stories and leading direct action and civil disobedience to get ICE agents out of our communities, we recognized the power we had in winning protection from deportation through policy changes.

This and other victories have strengthened our movement and brought hope to our communities — but as we have seen, mass detention and deportation have not stopped. ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the two agencies primarily responsible for immigration enforcement, have continued to carry out a racist and white supremacist agenda, targeting immigrants — particularly Black and Brown immigrants — for detention and deportation with little oversight or accountability. Clearly our fight is not over.

Year after year, failure at the immigration-policy negotiation table has been followed by near-silent acceptance of growing annual budgets and authority for ICE and CBP. Together, the two agencies employ more than 80,000 people, with a massive budget of $25.3 billion in 2020 ($8.4 billion for ICE and $16.9 billion for CBP), which is more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Yet, while resources for the deportation force have grown, schools and hospitals in our communities often remain underfunded and suffer from a lack of federal support.

The deportation force of ICE and CBP, built by administrations on both sides of the aisle, has been completely unleashed under the Trump administration. ICE and CBP have carried out a list of attacks against immigrant communities, including putting children in cages; targeting immigrants in their workplaces, schools, places of worship, hospitals, and homes; and breaking down doors and abducting parents from their children. But the Trump administration hasn’t stopped there.

Throughout his four years in office, Trump consistently tried to dismantle DACA, reduce refugee programs, and detain and deport an increasing number of immigrants. Under his administration, we have seen 57 immigrants, including children, die in detention camps, the deportation of a woman who served as a key witness into reports of sexual assault and harassment inside ICE facilities, reports of forced hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women, and eight immigrants who have died as a result of Covid-19 while in ICE custody.

Facing these and a number of other attacks, UWD has fought tirelessly to protect and demand justice for immigrant communities. Over the past decade, UWD alone fought on behalf of more than 1,000 people threatened by deportation. Facing hundreds of calls per week on our community “Migra Watch” free hotline, UWD community organizers responded to immigrant families reporting interactions with ICE and CBP agents and needing help when their friends and loved ones faced detention and deportation.

In one instance, Tania, a cancer survivor in Georgia, was taken to a detention camp after a traffic stop. ICE agents kept Tania locked away for four months, away from her children and the cancer treatment she needed to live. UWD has fought on behalf of individuals like Hector, who was taken away after being stopped for expired tags on his license plate, and high school students like Dennis, who was dragged away by ICE agents after reporting being bullied at school.

Our history and the present moment have shown us that the risk of harm, detention, and deportation will always exist wherever police and federal law enforcement do. Our vision is for all people in this country, regardless of immigration status, to be able to live freely, with full dignity, and thrive. To get there, we must unite in the larger struggle against white supremacy and racism, which are rooted in interlocking systems of policing, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement that, by design, target and further dehumanize immigrants, especially people of color.

At the same time, we must also acknowledge the historic erasure of Black and Indigenous people from immigration conversations and center these communities in our fight for immigrant justice. The United States’ legacy of genocide and colonialism cannot be ignored, as the impact of this continues to be felt today. We have seen indigenous immigrants die as a direct result of the U.S. immigration system’s failure to provide interpretation and translation services to immigrants who speak indigenous languages. In 2018, two children from indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala died in CBP custody after not receiving proper medical attention, as medical services were not translated in Q’eqchi’ and Chuj, the two indigenous languages that the children and their families spoke.

This is why, over the past decade, UWD leaders have made the demand of abolition and justice for all central to our vision, work, and movement strategy. Grounded in our lived experience, we know that ICE and local police work together to racially profile immigrants. For many in our communities, a traffic stop or any other contact with local police is the first entry point into the deportation pipeline.

Thus, when we call for the abolition of ICE, we are also calling for the abolition of enforcement on all levels and the systems that support it, from detention facilities to prisons. The abolition of ICE is inherently tied to the abolition of all other forms of enforcement and incarceration. Hence, UWD stands unequivocally with the Movement for Black Lives and its demands to defund the police, because we know that the police, ICE, and CBP work together to disproportionately target Black and Brown immigrants. We also know that the same people who profit from the mass incarceration of U.S.-born Black and Brown people also profit from immigrant detention and deportation.

We are engaged in a lifelong journey toward racial, gender, and economic justice. With each victory, our sense of what is possible should grow and our understanding of the vulnerabilities of our adversaries should deepen. A world where our communities do not have to live with the fear of deportation and detention is possible. A world in which we and others in the movement have abolished ICE — and where the safety, health, education, and well-being of our communities is a priority. We have witnessed and participated in a movement of undocumented people who have transformed the politics and policy of immigration with a bold vision of freedom and dignity for all people, regardless of immigration status. That movement has proven that when we follow the leadership and vision of those closest to the pain and injustice, a new world is possible.



Cynthia Garcia is an out, queer, undocumented womxn living in Oklahoma City. She serves as the national campaigns manager for community protection at United We Dream, where she runs a nationwide hotline of support for immigrants whose family members have been abducted by ICE agents and teaches them how to organize and fight back. Cynthia is herself protected from deportation because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta is a community organizer, strategist, and freedom fighter who is a co-founder of United We Dream (UWD). Cristina migrated to Queens, New York, from Ecuador with her family at the age of 13 seeking a better life and grew up undocumented. She is the former executive director of UWD. Under her leadership, UWD grew into a powerful grassroots network of 800,000 members across 28 states.

Joe Biden promises to reform H-1B visa system, eliminate country quota for Green Cards

In a major policy document for Indian-Americans released on the occasion of India's 74th Independence Day, the Biden Campaign also emphasised its support to family-based immigration system.

Published: 16th August 2020


Democratic presidential nominee, former US Vice President Joe Biden (R), and vice presidential running mate, US Senator Kamala Harris. (Photo | AFP)
By PTI (PRESS TRUST INDIA)

WASHINGTON: If voted to power in the November general elections, a Biden administration will reform the H-1B visa system and work towards eliminating the country-quota system for Green Cards, his campaign said on Saturday, in a move to woo the influential Indian-American community.

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.

Companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

In a major policy document for Indian-Americans released on the occasion of India's 74th Independence Day, the Biden Campaign also emphasised its support to family-based immigration system and streamlining processing for religious worker visas.

The administration will also take steps to stem the rising tide of hate and bigotry, address the security needs of house of worship, eliminate language barriers and honour the diversity and contributions of Indian-Americans, it said.

This is for the first time that a Democratic presidential candidate has come out with an exclusive policy document for Indian-Americans.

There are 1.3 million eligible Indian-American voters across eight battleground states.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is scheduled to address the Indian-American community in a video message later in the day.

Biden will support family-based immigration and preserve family unification as a core principle of our immigration system, which includes reducing the family visa backlog, his campaign said.

"He will increase the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions and exempt from any cap recent graduates of PhD programmes in STEM fields," the campaign said.

"And, he will support first reforming the temporary visa system for high-skill, specialty jobs to protect wages and workers, then expanding the number of visas offered and eliminating the limits on employment-based Green Cards by country, which have kept so many Indian families in waiting for too long," it said.

According to the policy document, Biden will restore and defend the naturalisation process for Green Card holders.

A Green Card allows a non-US citizen to live and work permanently in America.

"He will increase the number of refugees we welcome into this country by setting the annual global refugee admissions target to 125,000 and seek to raise it over time to commensurate with our responsibility, our values, and the unprecedented global need," it said.

"He will also work with Congress to establish a minimum admissions number of 95,000 refugees annually.

Biden will remove the uncertainty for Dreamers by reinstating the DACA programme and explore all legal options to protect their families from inhumane separation," the campaign said.

It said Biden will end workplace raids and protect other sensitive locations from immigration enforcement actions.

As a largely immigrant community, but in some cases with American roots reaching back generations, Indian-Americans know firsthand the strength and resilience that immigrants bring to the US, the campaign said.

"But President Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants.

It's wrong, and it stops when Biden is president," it alleged.

"Biden will rescind Trump's Muslim ban on day one and reverse the detrimental asylum policies that are causing chaos and a humanitarian crisis at our border," the campaign said.

"He will immediately begin working with Congress to pass legislative immigration reform that modernises our system, with a priority on keeping families together by providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants -- including more than 500,000 from India," it said.

Indian-Americans of all backgrounds -- Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jain, and others -- have been subjected to bullying and xenophobic attacks and need now, more than ever, a reassurance that the US leaders in Washington will have their backs, it said.

During the Obama-Biden administration, the FBI expanded its hate crime statistics programme to include Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists.

As President, Biden will directly address the rise in hateful attacks and enact legislation prohibiting someone convicted of a hate crime from purchasing or possessing a firearm, it said.

"Biden will appoint leaders at the Department of Justice who will prioritise the prosecution of hate crimes, and he will order his Justice Department to focus additional resources to combat hate crimes -- including religion-based hate crimes -- and to confront white nationalist terrorism," it said.

"He will also seek legislation that increases the potential sentence for certain hate crimes that occur in houses of worship and other religious community sites, such as gurdwaras, mandirs, temples, and mosques.

And, he will use his executive power to ensure that the Department of Justice pursues such heinous acts of violence against houses of worship to the fullest extent of the law," the campaign said.

Noting that in 2012, the Sikh community suffered a terrible tragedy when a white supremacist opened fire in an Oak Creek, Wisconsin, gurdwara, ultimately killing seven and wounding four, the campaign added that in January 2019, a Hindu temple was the victim of a horrific act of vandalism and destruction, with windows shattered and xenophobic messages spray-painted across the walls.

Biden administration will place 'high priority' on strengthening India-US ties

In a major policy document on Indian-Americans, the campaign said Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden believes there can be no tolerance for terrorism in South Asia, cross-border or otherwise.

Published: 16th August 2020


Joe Biden (Photo | AP)
By PTI

WASHINGTON: A Biden administration will place a "high priority" on continuing to strengthen the India-US relationship, his campaign said on Saturday, asserting that no common global challenge can be solved without the two countries working as responsible partners.

In a major policy document on Indian-Americans, the campaign said Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden believes there can be no tolerance for terrorism in South Asia, cross-border or otherwise.

A Biden administration will also work with India to support a rules-based and stable Indo-Pacific region in which no country, including China, is able to threaten its neighbours with impunity, it said.

"Biden will deliver on his long-standing belief that India and the United States are natural partners, and a Biden administration will place a high priority on continuing to strengthen the US-India relationship," the Biden Campaign said as Indians and 4 million Indian-Americans celebrated India's Independence Day.

"No common global challenge can be solved without India and the United States working as responsible partners," said the campaign as it released 'Joe Biden's Agenda for the Indian American Community' policy document.

"Together, we will continue strengthening India's defense and capabilities as a counter-terrorism partner, improving health systems and pandemic response, and deepening cooperation in areas such as higher education, space exploration, and humanitarian relief," the campaign said.

The policy document comes days after former vice president Biden named Indian-origin US Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Harris, whose father is an African from Jamaica and mother an Indian, is the first-ever Black vice-presidential nominee.

"Biden will ensure that South Asian Americans are represented in his administration, starting with his Vice-Presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris, whose mother emigrated from India to study and build a life in the United States," the campaign policy document said.

"Our government will reflect the diversity of the United States, and Indian American voices will be included in shaping the policies that impact their communities.

From fighting COVID-19 to building our economy back better to reforming our system of immigration, a Biden-Harris Administration will be one that Indian-Americans can count on," it said.

As the world's oldest and largest democracies, the United States and India are bound together by their shared democratic values: fair and free elections, equality under the law, and the freedom of expression and religion, the campaign said.

"These core principles have endured throughout each of our nations' histories and will continue to be the source of our strength in the future," it said.

Biden played a lead role, both as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as the Vice President, in systematically deepening the US' strategic engagement, people-to-people ties, and collaboration with India on global challenges, it said.

"In 2006, Biden announced his vision for the future of US-India relations: 'My dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States'," it said.

He has also worked to make that vision a reality, including leading the charge in Congress, working with Democrats and Republicans, to approve the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2008, said the campaign.

The Obama-Biden administration continued to deepen collaboration between India and the United States on strategic, defence, economic, regional, and global challenges.

Biden was a major champion of growing and expanding the US-India partnership.

Recognizing India's growing role on the world stage, the Obama-Biden administration formally declared US support for India's membership in a reformed and expanded United Nations Security Council, it said.

The Obama-Biden administration also named India a "Major Defense Partner" -- a status approved by the Congress -- to ensure that when it comes to the advanced and sensitive technology that India needs to strengthen its military, India is treated on par with its closest partners, it said.

Former President Barack Obama and Biden also strengthened their cooperation with India to fight terrorism in each of "our countries and across the region", it added.

The Obama-Biden administration worked closely with India to secure the successful signing of the Paris Climate Agreement to address the global climate crisis that "threatens all our peoples".

"A Biden administration would bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement, giving us the ability to again work closely with India to fight climate change and once more work hand in hand to reduce our carbon emissions and secure our clean energy future, without which we cannot build the green economy we need," the campaign said.

Trump ‘is so much anti-life,’ Kentucky Catholic bishop says in abortion discussion

Mike Stunson,
Miami Herald•August 7, 2020


The Rev. John Stowe has long been critical of President Donald Trump, and the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Lexington did not hold back in recent comments about what it means to be pro-life.

In a live video chat July 31 with the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs, Stowe said Trump is “so much anti-life.”

“For this president to call himself pro-life, and for anybody to back him because of claims of being pro-life, is almost willful ignorance,” Stowe said. “He is so much anti-life because he is only concerned about himself, and he gives us every, every, every indication of that.”

Stowe’s comments come as Trump has been vocal about the beliefs of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s own beliefs.

Trump attacked the former vice president Thursday, saying Biden, a practicing Catholic, would take away constitutional freedoms if elected president, The Hill reported.

“Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything,” Trump said of Biden. “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.”

Stowe channeled previous comments made by Pope Francis in saying why Trump should not be considered pro-life.

“Pope Francis has given us a great definition of what pro-life means,” Stowe said. “He basically tells us we can’t claim to be pro-life if we support the separation of children from their parents at the U.S. border, if we support exposing people at the border to COVID-19 because of the facilities that they’re in, if we support denying people who have need to adequate health care access to health care, if we keep people from getting the housing or the education that they need, we cannot call ourselves pro-life.”

Pope Francis questioned Trump’s pro-life stance in 2017 when the president tried to end DACA, a federal immigration program that offered protections to some people who were brought to the United States illegally as children.

“I have heard the President of the United States speak,” the pope said at the time, according to the National Catholic Reporter. “He presents himself as a pro-life man. If he is a good pro-lifer, he should understand that the family is the cradle of life and you must defend its unity.”

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of DACA and its so-called Dreamers, marking a major blow to the Trump administration.

Trump became the first sitting president last year to speak at the March for Life in Washington, an annual gathering to protest abortion.

He advocated for limiting abortion access, saying he would “defend the right of every child, born and unborn, to fulfill their God-given potential,” NBC News reported.

Following a 2019 controversy at the March for Life gathering that included a confrontation between Catholic high school students from Kentucky and a Native American elder, Stowe shunned the students’ apparel. Some of them were wearing Trump’s “Make America Great again” hats.

“It astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies,” Stowe wrote in a Herald-Leader opinion article.

“We cannot uncritically ally ourselves with someone with whom we share the policy goal of ending abortion,” he continued.

Judge orders Trump administration to accept new DACA applications


The new order comes one month after the Supreme Court said the Trump administration's efforts to terminate DACA were arbitrary and capricious. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

July 17 (UPI) -- A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to accept new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on Friday.

Since President Donald Trump began his efforts to terminate the program in 2017, the U.S. government hasn't accepted new applications. The administration has allowed existing DACA recipients -- undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children -- to continue to receive the protections.

Last month, though, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's attempts to terminate DACA was arbitrary and capricious, and unconstitutional.

District Judge Paul Grimm on Friday said the Trump administration must enforce DACA according to its status before the efforts to terminate it.

RELATED Judge extends deadline for U.S. to release migrant children

CASA, the organization that sued to enforce DACA fully, welcomed the ruling.

"This DACA decision reaffirms what we already knew and what SCOTUS already said: the Trump admin's ... heartless attempt to terminate the DACA program was illegal and they must immediately begin accepting new DACA applications," the organization said on Twitter.

President Barack Obama started the DACA program with an executive order in 2012 in an effort to provide temporary relief from deportation for children brought to the United States by undocumented parents. It also allows them to work and go to school in the United States without risk of being sent to their country of birth.

RELATED U.S. imposes visa restrictions on employees of Chinese telecoms

Trump sought to end the program in favor of allowing Congress to pass its own immigration reform, which failed.

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