Nazis in America

From The Intercept newsletter:

A Trump administration program that has already stranded thousands of asylum-seekers in Mexican border cities, where many have become targets for violence, is about to get a lot worse. Debbie Nathan, whose reporting on the plight of asylum-seekers recently earned The Intercept an Edward R. Murrow Award, revealed details of a new plan to hold mass video proceedings in giant tents on the border. Presiding judges will be hundreds or thousands of miles away, and immigration lawyers, reporters, and migrants’ family members may be banned from the so-called port courts.

Lawyers banned? MASS hearings means individuals' claims don't matter. This is truly reprehensible.

Officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, the Trump program has already pushed over 15,000 migrants seeking asylum out of the U.S. and into areas just across the international line, many of which the State Department advises Americans to limit travel to because they are so crime-ridden. Many immigrant rights advocates call the program the “Migrant Persecution Protocols.”

  The Intercept

Certainly it's anything but protection.

In Mexico, few of these immigrants have been able to work legally, and many are homeless. As stateless people with no family or friends in Mexico, they are sitting ducks for severe violence.

[...]

So far, the MPP has sent immigrants to Mexico but returned them for hearings in traditional brick-and-mortar courtrooms, where immigration judges almost always sit a few feet from the migrants and their lawyers, and journalists and representatives from immigrant advocacy groups observe from benches in the spectator section. But the new plan is to erect giant tents, each one subdivided into several courts, and each court containing migrants but no judges, reporters, or observers.

[...]

The scenario was described at an hourlong briefing in early June given by DHS officials to several senior staff on Capitol Hill, according to a person with knowledge of the details of the meeting.

[...]

The source said that the tents were being considered for Brownsville, Donna, Laredo, Del Rio, and El Paso in Texas; Nogales and Yuma in Arizona; as well as Calexico and San Diego. Of those cities, three or four will be chosen to host courts in tents, the source said.

[...]

If implemented as described in the Capitol Hill briefing, the mass proceedings will severely undermine civil liberties, not to mention the national immigration court system and asylum in America.

[...]

It is still not clear if immigrants’ lawyers will be allowed in the tents with their clients, said Levy, the El Paso immigration attorney who spoke to a government official about the new plan. She said she has heard that it’s “quite possible” that attorneys will have to commute to the courts of the judges presiding by video.

Information that the activists and policy groups have received indicates that immigration reporters and observers located at the border will also be banned from local proceedings. Instead, they will have to travel to the judges’ far-flung courts in the interior. [...] Immigrants, too, will lose their ability to have family and witnesses attend court with them. [...] The task of the public and the media will be further complicated by the fact that asylum cases often change judges and cities on short notice.

That will no doubt become a signature of the program.

Nationally, the courts employ only about 400 judges. At the Capitol Hill meeting, DHS said that 200 will be reassigned to MPP cases. With only half of the judges left to handle their customary dockets, the average waiting time to resolve immigration cases, which is already two years, will likely increase.

Another feature.

America is failing.