Border Crossing Cartoon

US judge orders immigrant families released from detention

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A federal judge in California has ordered the government to release immigrant children from family detention centers "without unnecessary delay," and with their mothers when possible, according to court papers.

 U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee

Another Dumb Ass

 In a filing late Friday, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee refused the government's request to reconsider her ruling in late July that children held in family detention centers after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally must be released rapidly.

Calling the government's latest arguments "repackaged and reheated," she found the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in breach of a longstanding legal agreement stipulating that immigrant children cannot be held in unlicensed secured facilities, and gave agency officials until October 23 to comply.

Lawyers for Homeland Security had asked the judge to reconsider her ruling, arguing that the agency was already doing its best to move families through detention quickly and that the facilities had been converted into short-term processing centers.

Attorneys for the government are reviewing the order, said Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said Friday night.
This is the second time Gee has ruled that detaining children violates parts of a 1997 settlement from an earlier case. The settlement requires minors to be placed with a relative or in appropriate non-secure custody within five days. If there is a large influx of minors, times may be longer, but children still must be released as expeditiously as possible, under the terms of the law.

In her order, Gee countered that immigration officials "routinely failed to proceed as expeditiously as possible to place accompanied minors, and in some instances, may still be unnecessarily dragging their feet now."

Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said that the court's order "will protect refugee children and their mothers from lengthy and entirely senseless detention."

The government poured millions of dollars into two large detention centers in Texas after tens of thousands of immigrant families, mostly mothers with children from Central America, crossed the Rio Grande into the U.S. last summer. Many have petitioned for asylum after fleeing gang and domestic violence back home.

The centers in Karnes City and Dilley, both south of San Antonio, recently held more than 1,300 women and children combined. A third, smaller facility located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, held about 70 people. All three are overseen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the two centers in Texas are run by private prison operators.

Between September 2013 and October 2014, some 68,000 family members — mostly mothers with children in tow — were caught at the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Between last October and July of this year, less than 30,000 have been apprehended, a drop authorities say is a result of better enforcement in both the U.S. and Mexico.

In her order Friday, Gee challenged Homeland Security's claim that drastically limiting or ending its family detention policy could spark another surge in illegal border crossings, calling this "speculative at best" and "fear-mongering."

Report: Biden makes unscheduled trip to huddle with Warren, adding to 2016 speculation

Speculation about a White House bid for Vice President Biden intensified Saturday when he made an unscheduled weekend trip from his Delaware home to his Washington residence, reportedly to see Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Democrats in past months have called for the Massachusetts senator to seek the party nomination, convinced that her progressive, Wall Street-reformer message was good enough to defeat front-running Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Warren has so far decline. However, Clinton’s slipping polls numbers amid an email controversy has raised speculation that the 72-year-old Biden after the recent death of his son Beau Biden began considering a likely third-and-final White House bid
Biden ran in 1988 and 2004 but failed to get past the primaries.
Such talk has also been fueled by reports that Democratic donors and operatives along with Biden supporters are putting together plans for another Biden run.
The purported Biden-Warren meeting at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence, was reported first by CNN.
Biden’s official schedule shows him spending the weekend in Delaware. The administration confirmed Saturday only that Biden went to his Washington residence for a last-minute meeting.
In addition, Fox News observed him traveling on Amtrak on Saturday morning from his regular stop in Wilmington, Del., to Washington, D.C., and Warren arriving via a commercial jet from Massachusetts.
Also this week, the pro-Biden group Draft Biden 2016 signed up longtime Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who helped President Obama win Florida in 2008 and 2012. And a Quinnipiac Poll showed Biden running strong in head-to-head match-ups with Republican candidates in key states.

Trump's call to end abuse of US birthright citizenship divides GOP field, legal experts

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants has refueled the immigration debate and spilt the GOP field and legal experts who question whether such a change is possible.

Trump’s plan goes after the 14th amendment, which grants citizenship to essentially anybody born in the United States. But he is particularly focused on stopping pregnant women from illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border for the purpose of having a child or an “anchor baby,” which reduces the likelihood of the parents being deported.
Trump announced his plan Sunday, calling the amendment the country’s “biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” And he continues to suggest that his lawyers think the amendment might not withstand a court challenge.
“I was right,” Trump, the billionaire businessman and top GOP candidate, said Friday night at a rally in Alabama. “You can do something, quickly.”
However, other candidates and legal experts are split on the issue.
“Trump thinks ‘our country is going to hell.’ Well, there is likely little more than a chance in hell that we are going to amend the Constitution,” Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola University of Los Angeles, said Wednesday. “Amending the Constitution is one of the most serious things that lawmakers can do. Therefore the path to doing it is rightfully arduous. I would put the chances … as beyond a longshot."
To be sure, changing the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, would require a two-thirds vote in Congress, then ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures. It could also be changed through a constitutional convention in which at least 34 states convene to vote on an amendment, which would then need ratification from a minimum 38 states.
Trump since announcing his candidacy in mid-June has made illegal immigrants from Mexico a top concern and has suggested several solutions -- including a wall along the southern border and the change to birthright citizenship.
“Many lawyers are saying that’s not what (the amendment) is,” he told Fox News on Monday. “They say it’ll never hold up in court. It’ll have to be tested.”
Trump's six-page immigration proposal was released on the campaign website on Sunday. And within hours, questions about it had become a litmus test for fellow GOP White House candidates and has largely divided the field.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday said he agreed that birthright citizenship should be ended but that he didn’t back the part of Trump’s plan that calls for deporting the so-called anchor babies.
“I categorically disagree with Trump and Gov. Walker on this point,” 2016 GOP candidate and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore said a day later. “Denying people citizenship is wrong. … I’d very surprised if any lawyer would tell Donald Trump anything like this.”
On Thursday, fellow Republican candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush defend using the term.
“You give me a better word and I’ll use it,” he told reporters on the campaign trail. Bush earlier in the week commended Trump for producing a comprehensive plan but suggest the issue of what to do with illegal immigrants in the United States must be addressed in a more “realistic” way.
The amendment was ratified to the Constitution in 1868, roughly 11 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sanford that denied citizenship to African Americans, whether free or slaves.
And the amendment has already withstood a Supreme Court test. In 1898, the high court ruled that San-Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark was a citizen despite being born to parents of Chinese descent living in the U.S.
Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon and another of the 17 major GOP candidates, said Tuesday that the U.S. allowing the so-called anchor babies “doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Republican candidate and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham also agreed this week that the birthright citizenship issue must be addressed but told CNN that fixing the county’s broken immigration system must come first and that he disagrees with Trump’s call for “forced deportation.”
Supporters of such a change argue that most European countries don’t automatically grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.
The issue has also been a complicated one for GOP candidate Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a former Supreme Court lawyer who in 2011 suggested that conservatives would be making a “mistake” in trying to mount a legal challenge to the amendment.
This week, Cruz, born in Canada to an American-born mother and Cuban-immigrant father, said he supports changes to birthright citizenship.
Critics of the amendment are trying to make the argument before voters that the hundreds of thousands of children who fall into that category are costing them millions in tax dollars.
However, Levinson questions whether enough Americans will buy the argument.
“It may be politically popular with a certain segment of the electorate, but I do not believe this is a mainstream view,” she said, arguing two-thirds of Americans support a path to citizenship or permanent legal status for illegal immigrants. “This is an argument that is likely to gain traction in the primary elections, but I think it could be viewed quite differently in the general election."

More evidence, questions arise about existence of second, private Clinton email server

It's all over but the Crying.

The tens of thousands of emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server from when she was secretary of state could also be on a second device or server, according to news reports.

The FBI now has the only confirmed private server, as part of a Justice Department probe to determine whether it sent of received classified information for Clinton when she was the country’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
Platte River Networks, which managed Clinton's server and private email network after she left the State Department, has indicated it transfer – or “transferred” – emails from the original server in 2013, according to The Washington Examiner.
However, Clinton, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate, has suggested that she gave the department 55,000 pages of official emails and deleted roughly 30,000 personal ones in January, which raises the possibility they were culled from a second device.
Neither a Clinton spokesman nor an attorney for the Colorado-based Platte River Networks returned an Examiner’s request for comment, the news–gathering agency reported Saturday.
The DailyMail.com on Aug. 14 was among the first to report the possibility of a second server.
The FBI took the server last week, after a U.S. Intelligence Community inspector general reportedly found two Clinton emails that included sensitive information, then asked the FBI to further investigate.
Platte River Networks has told news agencies that the server, now in New Jersey, has been wiped clean. But forensics experts still might be able to recover some information.
There have been reports that some of the emails that Clinton turned over included classified information. Clinton maintains that she neither sent nor received classified data, which suggests the missives might have been marked after the fact as classified or with some other top-secret classification.
The emails that Clinton gave to the State Department were on multiple storage devices.  A Clinton lawyer turned over at least one thumb drive that reportedly included copies of the emails that his client has already given to the federal government.
Clinton has maintained that she has done nothing wrong or illegal and says she will cooperate fully with the non-criminal investigations.
However, polls show the controversy and frequents news headlines have hurt the front-running Clinton among potential voters, who are increasingly questioning her transparency and trustworthiness.