On November 1, 2017, Trump tweeted:

"I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program. Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!"

"The terrorist came into our country through what is called the "Diversity Visa Lottery Program," a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based."

"We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter). Fox & Friends"

Here are the assumptions underlying these tweets:

1. My "Extreme Vetting" works. The vetting done before didn't.

It appears 45 is running out of superlatives. His most recent Muslim Ban (EO-3) called it "enhanced vetting." EO-3 basically outsourced information sharing to the country. And for certain countries, asking more questions of the visa applicant.

Either way, it's bad policy. Information-sharing isn't static: it's continuously improving. If it cannot be immediately verified by the United States, the applicant won't get the visa, or will get one after a lengthy delay. Asking an applicant to provide information? News flash: criminals lie. Taking in irrelevant information only reduces the chances that truly dangerous intel is lost.

Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to. "Extreme vetting" - stepped up or not - is a soundbite, a word of Newspeak.

2. 45 has accepted political correctness in the past.

When has he ever said being PC was fine?

3. The DV Lottery was the reason a terrorist came. If we remove that program, terrorists won't be able to come anymore.

This same stupidity after San Bernardino when the focus was Tashfeen Malik's K-1 fiancée visa. It's not the visa program. It's the actions of the applicants. No visa program - whether K-1, B-2, H-1B, immigrant, Visa Waiver, or DV - does NOT have a counterterrorism and security check screening. Millions of visas issue every year, and even more entries/exits are administered.

4. The DV Lottery is not merit-based.

Actually, one has to have finished high school in order to qualify for a diversity visa. There are strict reporting requirements for family members. There are robust security checks.

5. Merit-based immigration is good!

This is a blatant attempt to shore up political points for the RAISE Act. They call it immigration reform. But it's immigration deformed.

The RAISE Act is a nativist dream come true. If you assume immigration is a drain - as nativists do - it makes perfect sense to shut off a family's ability to immigrate together (what they're pejoratively calling "chain migration"), slash refugees and diversity immigrants, and only open the door to an elite. Let's not mince words: the merit based system will allow only those who were privileged enough to earn advanced degrees and mastered English at a young age. All other immigrants are cast as undesirable. If you support this, or think it's not that bad, know that you are enabling policies that white nationalists find warm and cozy. You believe non-Americans have nothing to offer if they don't have money. You ignore the jobs they create and cultural contributions they make. You refuse to see the value in family unity. You're turning your back on the world's most vulnerable, adding to their anguish. You refuse to see the good in people you might not know. And you're shooting yourself in the foot: People who would have qualified under the current system would be locked out, and will take their talents and contributions elsewhere. This, 45 reasons, will MAGA us.

6. The DV Lottery is a Democrat system.
​
Soundbite. Trumpaganda. And false.

7. Extreme vetting, Muslim bans, and rigorous enforcement is the only way to go for immigration.

Rigorous enforcement is what caused Rosamaria Hernandez, a 10 year old with cerebral palsy, to be detained by CBP. It's how they tried to prevent Jane Doe from exercising her constitutionally protected reproductive freedom. It's how they deported my client Ella, too traumatized to talk about her persecution even when I was speaking for her.



Trump's tweetstorm following the horrific scene in New York yesterday was a disgusting and cheap politicization. Don't tell yourself it's just Trump being Trump. The assumptions underlying his tweetstorm can be traced back to anti-immigrant organizations who have been calling to ban entire nations, painting entire religions as incompatible with some version of America that never existed, and reduce legal immigration. This tells me he's being fed all this nonsense for years. He can't see a positive side to immigration: it's nothing more than a punching bag to score points with his nativist base. Gubernatorial candidates like Gillespie here in Virginia towing this line is despicable.

Don't let it become normal. Use your vote, EVERY TIME.

Make sure you're not accidentally registered to vote if you're not a citizen.



On May 11, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to create a new Commission for Election Integrity. Vice-chaired by notorious anti-immigrant Kris Kobach (the guy who designed the Muslim registry, NSEERS, and co-authored Arizona's "show me your papers" law) this new commission will seek to uncover "widespread" evidence of voter fraud. He promised to do this early on in his Presidency:

That means they will be looking for anything to increase the number of supposed cases.

A few years ago, we represented a refugee who had gone to the DMV to get a driver's license and, unbeknownst to him, had registered to vote by signing onto a "packet" of forms. No one asked whether he was a US citizen; he was eligible for a driver's license, and that was it. He nearly lost his chance to become a citizen - we were able to "timely recant" his registration, to prevent his near-certain deportation. (There are very few waivers for falsely claiming to be a US citizen.)

These cases are more common than you'd think: most folks doing voter registration drives are not aware of the consequences of voter registration on non-citizens. With Trump's new commission, we're going to see a lot more. One of the things Kobach has said he wants to do is to run the immigration database against the voter rolls. Once that's done, we're going to see prosecutions for voter fraud skyrocket, and all of these people - many of whom may have accidentally registered - will be placed into deportation proceedings.
Protect yourself. If you are not a citizen, call your local election board (usually at the county level) and make sure you are NOT registered.

This Wikipedia link has links to nearly all state voter portals, which may help you be able to search for your name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Voter_registration_in_the_United…

And if you are a non-citizen and find you are registered to vote, contact a lawyer immediately.
​

​Veteran journalist Scarborough tweeted, "I had said Friday was the worst day of Donald Trump's presidency. I was wrong. It is today." He was referring, of course, to FBI director James Comey's March 20 confirmation of an investigation into Trump and his team's connections with Russia. It's almost like emails, except it's a thousand times worse.

But folks like Trump continue to paint pretty pictures of themselves, and pretty horrid pictures of everyone else. Merriam-Webster defines propaganda as "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." (Emphasis added.)

Today, the Trump administration released more propaganda, but it wasn't about the Russians.

Section 9(b) of Executive Order 13768 (the one best described by the hashtag #ICERaids) mandated a weekly report from ICE on the number of declined detainers. Called the "Declined Detainer Outcome Report,"  it lists the jails that allegedly failed to honor detainers, requests by ICE to hold over detainees for up to 48 hours until ICE could come pick them up and begin the deportation process.

That costs taxpayers additional money on what is already an extremely expensive process. It turns jails into deportation pipelines, and exacerbates (many times for very minor violations) the traumatic effect of deportation on children, family, and employers. More simply - it's not a local lawman's job to enforce federal immigration law. ICE continues to complain they aren't getting any help, but Trump is giving them 10,000 more officers. ICE knows there is no way to deliver on a campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented people. So, crowdsource. Make others do your job and protest if they don't. It's like complaining about your bad grades because the smart kid didn't help you.

Trump didn't come up with this on his own. At least as far back as July 2015, the right-wing think tank Center for Immigration Studies urged Congress to mandate local cooperation with ICE detainers, running through the same type of numerology seen in today's DDOR. For those who may not be familiar, CIS began as an "independent" offshoot to FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. CIS began as a FAIR program, which was started by Dr. John Tanton, a far-right white nationalist who believed Latinos were not as educable, saw immigration as a threat, and whose organizations have now grown to wield considerable influence in the current White House. 

That the CIS report from 2015 and today's DDOR report from ICE are barely distinguishable speaks to the root of the problem: xenophobia rooted in white nationalism is informing the immigration policy of the United States.

Note that the DDOR lists people who were both charged and convicted. This is because ICE wants to count people charged but not convicted as people "released" by uncooperative law enforcement. That the charges may have been dropped (or pleaded down; the DDOR does not clarify) is of no import: under the new administration, they are all top priorities for deportation. (In fact, even being charged isn't necessary; just that ICE believes you committed an act that would be chargeable as an offense, and if not that, just being a threat to public safety, which includes merely overstaying a visa, which is not even a crime.)

The DDOR is an attempt to shame jails into doing ICE's job. Jails that don't perfectly comply are broadly labeled as "uncooperative jurisdictions." And, of course, it lists cherry-picked data clusters of mostly low-level offenders and lists their country of nationality. It even counts as "declined detainers" where the jail did inform ICE of the presence of a foreign national, but not quickly enough. Acts of terror perpetrated by white nationalists, or crime committed by those born in the United States is simply not reported. Coupled with Trump's misguided VOICE office (singling out victims of crime committed by immigrants) and other reports on immigration benefits issuance broken down by country, the administration seeks to continue the process of building a state-sanctioned alternative factual narrative correlating immigrants and crime. See generally, definition of "propaganda," above. 

The ICE raids and the Muslim ban have taken up a lot of response time. But alternative factual narratives do much greater, long-term damage. We're being told this is about transparency, but we're only being shown one pane in the window. If we see it and call it the propaganda it is, we can engage in counter-propaganda, which is done by building bridges, strategic partnerships, and relentlessly discrediting the credibility and motives of the propagandists.

The new executive order on immigration, dubbed "MuslimBan 2.0" signed March 6, 2017 presents a more nuanced, but still ultimately unconstitutional affront to religious liberty. Reviewing the redline version prepared by the ACLU of Massachusetts, coupled with the implementing memorandum to DHS, and the letter from AG Jeff Sessions and S-DHS Kelly to President Trump, a few themes emerge.
​

1. How the new EO works (super briefly): Iraq is off the list. Effective date for remaining 6 countries is 3/16/17. Green card holders excluded from the new ban. Visa holders who have a valid visa as of 3/16/17 are also excluded. Refugee resettlement still paused for 120 days, but now includes Syria (which was indefinitely suspended in the old order) and does not include people formally scheduled for resettlement already. The cap on refugee resettlement is still cut to 50,000. But there are a number of exemptions to those who would otherwise be affected - these 'waivers' existed before but the new order goes into greater detail on what might constitute a waiver. Dual nationals are now exempted. But the EO still provides a mechanism to ban nationals of other countries, in a very similar manner, down the road.
2. The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone: The MuslimBan 2.0 is an ex post facto creation of justification of the need for the ban. Like I said about the Muslim Registry, it is a bigotry-flavored self-licking ice cream cone, a scheme that exists only to serve itself. Enforce a ban, then create a mechanism to create the facts to justify it. This, even though the (actual, non-alternative) facts *from within DHS* thus far indicate that citizenship is an unreliable indicator of terror threat, and 10 high-ranking current and former national security officials swore under penalty of perjury that such a ban not only doesn't do what it purports to do, it actually undermines US national security.
3. Propaganda Clauses: The order creates reporting benchmarks for future factual justification of its need. The joint Sessions/Kelly statement comes at the issue from the administration's side, saying "we would benefit from a pause on immigration from affected countries," essentially parroting Trump's campaign rhetoric back to him. Trump directs Kelly to start publishing statistics on immigration - number of visas issued, green cards granted, etc. - all broken down by nationality. Every 3 months. Plus, reports on the costs of running the refugee admissions program. Simultaneously, the EO continues to mandate official government reporting of actions of foreign-born radicalization, terrorist attacks, attempts, and domestic violence (example: honor killings). Thus, as time goes on, a narrative can be built correlating visa issuance with terrorism, which will, eventually, survive constitutional scrutiny. Unfortunately, the administration's tenuous relationship with facts and truth makes any such "reports" inherently suspect, and are better described as propaganda rather than "transparency" as claimed by the administration.
4. Rigorous Inadmissibility: Although the classes of foreign nationals directly affected by the new MuslimBan are more limited than the original order, the implementing memo has a very concerning clause: "I direct the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the heads of all other relevant executive departments and agencies (as identified by the Secretary of Homeland Security) to rigorously enforce all existing grounds of inadmissibility and to ensure subsequent compliance with related laws after admission." This is a direct call to rigorously enforce immigration laws at the border, and should be seen as a counterpart to the calls for enhanced enforcement in the interior of the US, which has led to the ICE raids we've seen over the past month. Remember - both officers at overseas consulates and border officials have a great deal of discretion to deny entry to foreign nationals. This is a call to "unshackle" them, giving them even greater latitude.
5. Plenary power: The new EO contains the same, if not enhanced reliance on Section 212(f) of the Immig. & Nationality Act (INA). This will continue to be the foundation of the administration's legal argument: that Congress has total power over immigration and the admission and exclusion of foreign nationals. Some of that power was delegated to the President, who can suspend entry of any particular class of foreign national he wants, while making it appear more digestible (by a 10 day phase in, excluding say, green card holders, etc.)
6. "Not a Muslim ban because we say it isn't." The new EO is cognizant that this looks, talks, walks, acts, breathes, and otherwise is a Muslim ban. And the reckless statements of the administration keep coming back to haunt them. Thus, they smartly recognized they would have to sever religious animus on campaign trail and the first ban from the new ban. They did this, largely, by merely stating, "This is not a Muslim ban." The Sessions/Kelly statement says the ban came from countries that are state sponsors of terrorism, or countries where territories have been lost to extremist groups. But if that's the case, many other countries should have been included - even under a restrictive, Muslim-only definition of terrorism. These, and other reasons (such as the delay in implementation for non-urgent reasons, delays requested in court proceedings, and persistently pesky real facts) undermine the administration's stated rationale. But whether a rationale is good or not will not be the subject of judicial review: there must be a violation of the law. Make no mistake: this is still a Muslim ban, and remains so regardless of the shade of lipstick applied to the pig.

The new ban still suffers from a very ominous deficiency: both the administration and terrorist groups stand to benefit from another attack. This is one reason the 10 national security officials stated these types of blanket bans are a bad idea, even if they are later tempered. Our judiciary took care of the first ban, but this administration has a narrative they want to protect and nurture. And they will keep blue penciling this order until some court somewhere upholds it.

There will be legal challenge. Where any new case is brought will have tremendous effect. I suspect some of the ongoing litigation will be turned to the new order, since it raises many of the same issues.
What are some things ordinary folks can do?

1. If you're a lawyer, we need you. Amicus briefs. Helping us find plaintiffs. Volunteer at airports (shout out to www.dullesjustice.org!) Offer to take a case under the supervision of an immigration lawyer. (Message me, I will help you!)
2. If you know another language, reach out to a local immigrants' rights group and offer your services to help translate or interpret.
3. LIGHT UP the switchboards on the Hill. Let your congressfolk know that siding with the administration will cost them.
4. Protest, protest, protest. Show up at airports and rallies. Spread your beautiful exercise of First Amendment rights on social media.
5. Support an immigrants' rights organization monetarily. There are too many to list here so I'll ask folks to post them in the comments below.
6. Go hug a lawyer. Yes, we need love too.