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.

Trump’s Critics Are Wrong about the 14th Amendment and Birthright Citizenship

 

Donald Trump continues to bewilder political experts. He unabashedly wades into politically dangerous territory and yet continues to be rewarded by favorable poll results. He has clearly tapped into a reserve of public resentment for inside-the-Beltway politics. How far this resentment will carry him is anyone’s guess, but the Republican establishment is worried. His latest proposal to end birthright citizenship has set off alarm bells in the Republican party. The leadership worries that Trump will derail the party’s plans to appeal to the Latino vote. Establishment Republicans believe that the future of the party depends on being able to capture a larger share of this rapidly expanding electorate. Trump’s plan, however, may appeal to the most rapidly expanding electorate, senior citizens, and may have an even greater appeal to the millions of Republicans who stayed away from the polls in 2012 as well as the ethnic and blue-collar Democrats who crossed party lines to vote Republican in the congressional elections of 2014. All of these voters outnumber any increase in the Latino vote that Republicans could possibly hope to gain from a population that has consistently voted Democratic by a two-thirds majority and shows little inclination to change. RELATED: Not Hard to Read the 14th Amendment As Not Requiring Birthright Citizenship — And Nothing Odd About Supporting Such a Reading Critics say that Trump’s plan is unrealistic, that it would require a constitutional amendment because the 14th Amendment mandates birthright citizenship and that the Supreme Court has upheld this requirement ever since its passage in 1868. The critics are wrong. A correct understanding of the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment and legislation passed by Congress in the late 19th century and in 1923 extending citizenship to American Indians provide ample proof that Congress has constitutional power to define who is within the “jurisdiction of the United States” and therefore eligible for citizenship. Simple legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president would be constitutional under the 14th Amendment. Birthright citizenship is the policy whereby the children of illegal aliens born within the geographical limits of the U.S. are entitled to American citizenship — and, as Trump says, it is a great magnet for illegal immigration. Many of Trump’s critics believe that this policy is an explicit command of the Constitution, consistent with the British common-law system. This is simply not true. Congress has constitutional power to define who is within the “jurisdiction of the United States” and therefore eligible for citizenship. Although the Constitution of 1787 mentioned citizens, it did not define citizenship. It was in 1868 that a definition of citizenship entered the Constitution with the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Here is the familiar language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Thus there are two components to American citizenship: birth or naturalization in the U.S. and being subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Today, we somehow have come to believe that anyone born within the geographical limits of the U.S. is automatically subject to its jurisdiction; but this renders the jurisdiction clause utterly superfluous. If this had been the intention of the framers of the 14th Amendment, presumably they would have said simply that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are thereby citizens.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/birthright-citizenship-not-mandated-by-constitution

Indeed, during debate over the amendment, Senator Jacob Howard, the author of the citizenship clause, attempted to assure skeptical colleagues that the language was not intended to make Indians citizens of the United States. Indians, Howard conceded, were born within the nation’s geographical limits, but he steadfastly maintained that they were not subject to its jurisdiction because they owed allegiance to their tribes and not to the U.S. Senator Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, supported this view, arguing that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.” RELATED: End Birthright Citizenship Now: Barack Obama Makes the Case Jurisdiction understood as allegiance, Senator Howard explained, excludes not only Indians but “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” Thus, “subject to the jurisdiction” does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S. Furthermore, there has never been an explicit holding by the Supreme Court that the children of illegal aliens are automatically accorded birthright citizenship. In the case of Wong Kim Ark (1898) the Court ruled that a child born in the U.S. of legal aliens was entitled to “birthright citizenship” under the 14th Amendment. This was a 5–4 opinion which provoked the dissent of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who argued that, contrary to the reasoning of the majority’s holding, the 14th Amendment did not in fact adopt the common-law understanding of birthright citizenship. Get Free Exclusive NR Content The framers of the Constitution were, of course, well-versed in the British common law, having learned its essential principles from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. As such, they knew that the very concept of citizenship was unknown in British common law. Blackstone speaks only of “birthright subjectship” or “birthright allegiance,” never using the terms “citizen” or “citizenship.” The idea of birthright subjectship, as Blackstone admitted, was derived from feudal law. It is the relation of master and servant: All who are born within the protection of the king owed perpetual allegiance as a “debt of gratitude.” According to Blackstone, this debt is “intrinsic” and “cannot be forfeited, cancelled, or altered.” Birthright subjectship under common law is the doctrine of perpetual allegiance. America’s Founders rejected this doctrine. The Declaration of Independence, after all, solemnly proclaims that “the good People of these Colonies . . . are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.” So, the common law — the feudal doctrine of perpetual allegiance — could not possibly serve as the ground of American citizenship. Indeed, the idea is too preposterous to entertain. RELATED: Trump’s Immigration Plan Is a Good Start — For All GOP Candidates Consider as well that, in 1868, Congress passed the Expatriation Act. This permitted American citizens to renounce their allegiance and alienate their citizenship. This piece of legislation was supported by Senator Howard and other leading architects of the 14th Amendment, and characterized the right of expatriation as “a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Like the idea of citizenship, this right of expatriation is wholly incompatible with the common-law understanding of perpetual allegiance and subjectship. One member of the House expressed the general sense of Congress when he proclaimed: “The old feudal doctrine stated by Blackstone and adopted as part of the common law of England . . . is not only at war with the theory of our institutions, but is equally at war with every principle of justice and of sound public policy.” The notion of birthright citizenship was characterized by another member as an “indefensible doctrine of indefeasible allegiance,” a feudal doctrine wholly at odds with republican government. Nor was this the only legislation concerning birthright citizenship that Congress passed following the ratification of the 14th Amendment. As mentioned above, there was almost unanimous agreement among its framers that the amendment did not extend citizenship to Indians. Although born in the U.S., they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Beginning in 1870, however, Congress began to pass legislation offering citizenship to Indians on a tribe-by-tribe basis. Finally, in 1923, there was a universal offer to all tribes. Any Indian who consented could become a citizen. Thus Congress used its legislative authority under Section Five of the 14th Amendment to determine who was within the jurisdiction of the U.S. It could make a similar determination today, based on this legislative precedent, that children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. A constitutional amendment is no more required today than it was in 1923. A nation that cannot determine who becomes citizens or believes that it must allow the children of those who defy its laws to become citizens is no longer a sovereign nation. Legislation to end birthright citizenship has been circulating in Congress since the mid ’90s and such a bill is circulating in both houses today. It will, of course, not pass Congress, and if it did pass it would be vetoed. But if birthright citizenship becomes an election issue and a Republican is elected president, then who knows what the future might hold. It is difficult to imagine that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to confer the boon of citizenship on the children of illegal aliens when they explicitly denied that boon to Indians who had been born in the United States. Those who defy the laws of the U.S. should not be allowed to confer such an advantage on their children. This would not be visiting the sins of the parents on the children, as is often claimed, since the children of illegal aliens born in the U.S. would not be denied anything to which they otherwise would have a right. Their allegiance should follow that of their parents during their minority. A nation that cannot determine who becomes citizens or believes that it must allow the children of those who defy its laws to become citizens is no longer a sovereign nation. No one is advocating that those who have been granted birthright citizenship be stripped of their citizenship. Equal protection considerations would counsel that citizenship once granted is vested and cannot be revoked; this, I believe, is eminently just. The proposal to end birthright citizenship is prospective only. More Immigration The Very Real Economic Costs of Birthright Citizenship What Conservatives Get Wrong about Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution Donald Trump’s Half-Serious, Half-Fantasy Immigration Plan Political pundits believe that Trump should not press such divisive issues as immigration and citizenship. It is clear, however, that he has struck a popular chord — and touched an important issue that should be debated no matter how divisive. Both the Republican party and the Democratic party want to avoid the issue because, while both parties advocate some kind of reform, neither party has much interest in curbing illegal immigration: Republicans want cheap and exploitable labor and Democrats want future voters. Who will get the best of the bargain I will leave for others to decide.

 

Iran Cartoon

Key New York lawmaker backs Iran nuke deal

Dumb Ass.

WASHINGTON –  President Barack Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran gained momentum in Congress on Friday as a key Jewish Democrat from New York bucked home-state opposition to back the deal.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler's endorsement followed a personal appeal from Obama, and came despite opposition from New York's senior senator, prominent Democrat Chuck Schumer, and other Jewish members in the New York congressional delegation. Iran has threatened to destroy Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vehemently opposed to the deal.
Nadler became the latest undeclared Democrat to break in favor of the historic agreement, which seeks to keep Iran from building a nuclear bomb in exchange for billions in international sanctions relief.
"I bring to my analysis the full weight of my responsibilities as a member of Congress, and my perspective as an American Jew who is both a Democrat and a strong supporter of Israel," Nadler said in a statement. He said he'd concluded that of the alternatives, the agreement "gives us the best chance of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon."
Nadler, who's the first Jewish lawmaker from New York to back the deal, received a lengthy personal letter from Obama earlier this week defending the deal and pledging that the U.S. will continue to put economic pressure on Iran and keep military options open.
"In our conversations, Jerry raised specific concerns relating to Israeli security and the U.S. commitment to countering Iran's destabilizing activities in the region," Obama said Friday. "I wanted to respond to the thoughtful questions Jerry raised, and I am pleased that our discussions were ultimately productive."
Nadler's announcement comes at the end of a week that's seen the deal pick up a steady stream of Democratic support in the House and Senate despite furious opposition from the Israeli government and Republicans who say it makes too many concessions to Iran and could actually enable that country to become a nuclear-armed state.
Congress is facing a vote next month on a resolution disapproving of the deal, but Obama will veto such legislation if it prevails. Congressional Republicans would then need to muster two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate to overturn Obama's veto, a steep bar that even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says Republicans are unlikely to overcome.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a strong supporter of the deal signed by the U.S., Iran and five world powers, declared this week that House Democratic supporters have the votes necessary to sustain Obama's veto despite unanimous GOP opposition. She reiterated that assertion in a letter Friday to fellow Democrats in which she trumpeted Nadler's endorsement and declared, "I feel confident that we will sustain the president's veto, and we will all work together to hold Iran accountable to honoring the agreement."
The list of public Democratic supporters in the House is now approaching 60, with only a dozen opposed. In the Senate, only two Democrats — Schumer and Robert Menendez of New Jersey — have announced opposition to the deal while 26 have announced their support.
However some key Democrats have not yet made their positions known. Among them: Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada; Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat.