Marrying an American citizen generally provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship. But people who crossed the southern border illegally..."

"... must return to their home countries to complete the process for a green card.That means long separations from their spouses and families. The new program would allow families to remain in the country while they pursue legal status. Officials briefed on the discussions said the announcement could amount to the most sweeping unilateral move by a president to provide relief to unauthorized immigrants since President Barack Obama implemented DACA. In a separate move on Tuesday, Mr. Biden is also expected to announce new ways to help people in DACA, known as Dreamers, gain access to work visas."

From "Biden to Give Legal Protections to Undocumented Spouses of U.S. Citizens/Undocumented spouses of American citizens will be shielded from deportation, provided work permits and given a pathway to citizenship, according to officials briefed on the plan" (NYT).

"The decision comes as Mr. Biden tries to strike a balance on one of the most dominant political issues in 2024. Aware that many Americans want tougher policies on the border, Mr. Biden just two weeks ago announced a crackdown that suspended longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to seek asylum here. Almost immediately after he issued that order, White House officials began privately reassuring progressives that the president would also help undocumented immigrants who had been in the nation for years...."

"Trump Can’t Immediately End DACA, Supreme Court Rules."

The NYT reports.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court’s four more liberal members in upholding the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” the chief justice wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.”...  Chief Justice Roberts... said the administration may try again to provide adequate reasons for shutting down the program....

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito and Neil M. Gorsuch, said the majority had been swayed by sympathy and politics. 'Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision,' Justice Thomas wrote. The court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the legislative branch. In doing so.... it has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this court rather than where they rightfully belong — the political branches."

"The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside."

"Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments. The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.... In recent weeks alone, two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead on Sunday, overcome by the sweltering heat; elsewhere three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the Rio Grande; and a 6-year-old from India was found dead earlier this month in Arizona, where temperatures routinely soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit."

AP reports.

ADDED: The NYT examines the "potential" of this image of the end of potential:

Like the iconic photo of a bleeding Syrian child pulled from the rubble in Aleppo after an airstrike or the 1993 shot of a starving toddler and a nearby vulture in Sudan, the image of a single father and his young child washed up on the Rio Grande’s shore had the potential to prick the public conscience.

Yes, but which way are you pricked? You cannot help the dead. You can only change the incentives that bring desperate people to this place.

Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, grew visibly emotional as he discussed the photograph in Washington. He said he hoped that it would make a difference among lawmakers and the broader American public.

“It’s very hard to see that photograph,” Mr. Castro said. “It’s our version of the Syrian photograph — of the 3-year-old boy on the beach, dead. That’s what it is.’’

Human bodies, your soapbox.  You grow "visibly emotional" and invite us to grow visibly emotional, to admire ourselves in our empathy. You can create political energy with a photograph, but energy to do what?

But when Obama did it...

CNN's Sam Vinograd: Yes, Obama also separated families at the border, but when he did it, it was "for their own protection." pic.twitter.com/q9ZGailOX3

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 9, 2019

"Omar says the 'hope and change' offered by Barack Obama was a mirage."

"Recalling the 'caging of kids' at the U.S.-Mexico border and the 'droning of countries around the world' on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor. 'We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,' Omar says. 'And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.'"

From "The Democrats’ Dilemma/What Ilhan Omar and Dean Phillips tell us about the future of the Democratic Party" (Politico).

"A strange sentence in this New York Times article about Democrats apologizing."

A blog post from my son John looks at this strange sentence in the NYT:

As recently as 2006, national Democrats including former President Barack Obama expressed wariness about immigrants’ ability to assimilate into American culture and did not openly embrace gay marriage — two talking points that would probably be deeply damaging for any 2020 candidate."

See the problem?

Somebody... or everybody... is lying.

"President Trump claimed last week that 'some' former presidents privately confided to him that they support his mission to build a border wall. As of Monday, every living president has said otherwise" (CBS News).

ADDED: A comment by sdharms makes me see how it could be that no one is lying. The comment is "so? HRC talked to Eleanor Roosevelt and no one had a problem with that." It could be that none of the living presidents have confided to Trump that they support building the wall, but some of the dead presidents have communicated with him. It's possible that George H.W. Bush, while still alive, spoke to Trump about the wall, but Trump said "some," so it must be more than one, and so something supernatural is needed for it to be true that no one is lying.



OH, WAIT: I'm working my way further into the CBS article, because I wanted to see exactly what Trump said and to think about whether there's weaseling over the question of what it means to "support his mission to build a border wall." The quote you see there is CBS's paraphrase of whatever it was that Trump said. Trump might mean that he's spoken to former Presidents who support some sort of physical barrier at the border, and the former Presidents who want distance from Trump are denying support because they don't support exactly the kind of wall that Trump has been talking about. But as I read the article, I was astounded — because I'd relied on "every living president has said otherwise" — to find this:

Mr. Obama is the only living president who has not explicitly denied having this conversation, and his office did not return a request for comment from CBS News. But Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out against Trump administration immigration policies and made clear since the 2016 campaign that he does not support a proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Politico also pointed out that Mr. Obama and his successor have not had any extensive conversation since the 2017 inauguration.

"WaPo is so full of anti-Trump headlines that I should have inferred that it was NOT a Trump thing, since if it were, WaPo would have put that in the headline."

I write, at Facebook, in a comment on a post (by my son John) on a WaPo article with the headline "U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question." John put up a long passage that includes the crucial information:

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department began during Barack Obama’s administration to deny passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

WaPo didn't cry out when this was happening under Obama.

ADDED: John preserved an earlier version of the WaPo article. The sentence he copied as...

Based on those suspicions, the State Department began during Barack Obama’s administration to deny passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

...now reads:

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

I wonder what happened there? We could say it shows that WaPo did not assiduously protect Obama but let blame fall squarely on him when it could have been shifted to Bush. I'd like to know more about that, but my hypothesis would be that the Obama administration adopted more of a specific policy but the Bush administration was also doing some denials. I wonder why the Clinton administration did nothing. The Court cases were "in the 1990s." That's Clinton's era.

I'm inclined to give WaPo some neutrality points for letting the blame fall on Obama, but I need to know more about the criticism the earlier draft may have provoked and the basis for roping in Bush.

AND: This is also me at Facebook:

It's interesting to read the comments at WaPo, beginning with the oldest: "If you support Trump at this point, you support a racist. Pure and simple. Stories like this are all the proof a thinking person should need. You may not be a racist yourself, but you support one - and at some point, there ceases to be a meaningful difference." So there's someone who got the vibe of the headline the way I read it. Funny that he accidentally portrayed Obama as a big racist.

Trump is "a numbers guy."

I need to show you a second quote from Omarosa on "Big Brother": "Don't get me wrong, Obama's administration was aggressive about deportation too... I've seen the plan. The roundup plan is getting more and more aggressive... He's a numbers guy. He wants to outdo his predecessors."

I have an old post about Trump the numbers guy, and this post would be a better post if I could dig it out of the archive. Since I can't, I'll just leave this post in "stub" form.

"How the end of DACA is being framed as a legal matter — and how the Obama administration allowed that to happen."

That's the topic of the NYT "Daily" podcast this morning. Audio here. Interesting to hear the NYT put the responsibility squarely on Obama.

"The public should be suspicious of Trump’s policies and the media should speak truth to power and demand answers from the administration."

"But the media should also be truthful with the public and instead of claiming Trump singled out seven countries, it should note that the US Congress and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security had singled out these countries. It should have told us about the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 rather than pretend this list was invented in 2017. Trump’s executive order said 'countries of concern,' it didn’t make a list. That list was already made, last year and years before."

Writes Seth J. Frantzman.

ADDED: If you are horrified by what you see Trump doing, is it because when Obama did things like that you just didn't see? Or did everything look different because it was Obama doing them?



AND: I am fascinated by the NYT's presentation of "1984" as the book to read to understand Trump: "George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller," "Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read"

It seems to me that Obama was more of a Big Brother figure. You saw his smiling face. You loved him. You trusted him. Not all of you. But that was the overwhelming spirit of the time, reinforced by the press that served him. That face!

... the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken... But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer. At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant....  It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

Here's screenshot from my Kindle, sorted by author:

"I’m looking forward to being an active consumer of your work rather than always the subject of it."

Said Barack Obama to the White House press corps* on his second-to-last full day as President of the United States. But he's not promising to withdraw and leave the presidential stage to his successor, which is what George W. Bush did for him.

But there's this meme that the new President is not normal, adverted to by Obama:

There’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake.

Bush, like his father, adhered to an absolute principle. Obama respects the principle by cushioning it with a malleable escape clause: where core** values may be at stake. And what a wide door that is! Not only is the concept "core values" subject to infinite debate, but — whatever these values are — they don't have to be severely threatened, only "at stake." And they don't even need to be at stake. It's enough that they "may" be at stake. Well, then there's really no one-President-at-a-time principle of withdrawal at all.

Obama gives 4 examples of what would override the principle of withdrawal:

1. "Systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion."

2. "Explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote, to exercise their franchise."

3. "Institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press."

4. "Efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids, and send them someplace else, when they love this country."

Is #4 restricted to "kids"? Younger than 18? Is he serious about the condition "when they love this country?" When has Obama shown an interest in limiting immigration to those who actually love America? That sounds like a condition Trump would set.

The 4 examples of what Obama will consider not to be the "normal functioning of politics" suggests that he's ready to exert his influence whenever he wants. We'll see what he wants. The threat that he can drop back in might work as a check on President Trump: Don't stir the sleeping Obama. But we all know Trump has figured out how to leverage opposition. A reactivated Obama would offer a springboard for Trump's antic attacks on Obama. Any deviation from the principle of presidential withdrawal would put at stake the core value of the Dignity of the American Ex-President. And, frankly, it would threaten the the core value of the dignity of the current President.

________________________

* Pronounced corpse?



Some of those press corpsmen must feel they are dying, with the withdrawal of life-giving presence of the President We Loved and the arrival of President who tells them to their face they are garbage.

** Pronounced corps.

Judging from the "readers' picks" comments, the NYT article designed to instill empathy for immigrants did not work.

The article, "Low-Priority Immigrants Still Swept Up in Net of Deportation," begins:

Three agents knocked on the door of a modest duplex in a Wisconsin town just after dawn. The Mexican immigrant living on the ground floor stuck his head out.

They asked his name and he gave it. Within minutes José Cervantes Amaral was in handcuffs as his wife, also from Mexico, silently watched. After 18 years working and living quietly in the United States, Mr. Cervantes, who did not have legal papers, rode away in the back seat, heading for deportation.

It is a routine that continues daily.

You can read the whole thing, but you catch the drift. Readers are being instructed to rankle at the new Supreme Court case and to empathize with the good, hard-working, long-suffering immigrants.

After Thursday’s Supreme Court decision, the president’s protections are gone, but the enforcement plan remains in effect. It is part of a particularly edgy moment for immigrants and their supporters framed by the Supreme Court ruling, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and Britain’s surprise vote, influenced in part by anti-immigrant sentiments, to leave the European Union.

But look at the highest-rated comments. They're not taking the cue to distinguish themselves from those terrible people who vote for Trump/Brexit and thereby increase the suffering of immigrants. Despite the promptings of the elite opinion-leaders of the NYT, they're agreeing with the Trumpers and Brexiters.

Here's the 2 highest-rated comment, each with 118 recommendations:

Michael H. Alameda, California

These are good, hard-working, wonderful people. Unfortunately, there are two or three billion more, just like them, who would also love to come to the USA.

Meanwhile, US citizens with minimal skills and poor work habits are unemployed. Until we can motivate our own citizens to work, we have no room for anyone else. Part of the motivation would be higher wages, leading to more expensive tomatoes.

I can afford more expensive tomatoes. As a nation we can't afford a completely disenfranchised lower class, with no chance of working their way up. Charity starts at home.

The Supreme Court is hearing oral argument this morning on Obama's power over immigration policy.

From the NYT report:

Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the government’s top appellate lawyer... was sharply challenged by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and several of the court’s other members.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy questioned whether the president can defer deportations for millions of people without specific congressional authorization, saying “that is a legislative task, not an executive task.” “It’s as if the president is defining the policy and the Congress is executing it,” Justice Kennedy said. “That’s just upside down.”...

[Roberts] pressed Mr. Verrilli on whether the president could simply deem all illegal immigrants to be legally present under the new policy. Mr. Verrilli, the solicitor general, said there are statutory constraints that would prevent the president from doing so....

The government lost below, so a 4-4 split would leave in place an injunction barring the policy. There had been some speculation that Justice Roberts might give a 5th vote to the pro-government side using a standing doctrine ground, but he said something that made that seem unlikely:

... Mr. Verrilli asserted that the state of Texas should not be allowed to challenge the president’s actions by claiming it would cost the state money to give driver’s licenses to the millions of immigrants affected by the federal policy. Mr. Verrilli argued that Texas could simply change its law to deny driver’s licenses to the immigrants.

“You would sue them instantly,” Chief Justice Roberts said as he repeatedly questioned the government’s arguments.

Listen to Justice Breyer explain very carefully the extent to which the Supreme Court is not political.

They don't change like the weather... but like the climate.

The question that takes him there is specifically about the case the Court just took about President Obama's go-it-alone immigration policy, which will be argued and in all likelihood decided within this period running up to the presidential election.

"The Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would consider a legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules."

"The court, which has twice rejected challenges to Mr. Obama’s health care law, will now determine the fate of one of his most far-reaching executive actions," the NYT reports.

Why did the Court take this one, United States v. Texas, No. 15-674?

In their written arguments before the court, the states acknowledged that the president has wide authority over immigration matters, telling the justices that “the executive does have enforcement discretion to forbear from removing aliens on an individual basis.” Their quarrel, they said, was with what they called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits.

In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that “lawful presence” is merely what has always followed from the executive branch’s decision not to deport someone for a given period of time. He added that the consequences of allowing immigrants to be lawfully present were positive. “Without work authorization,” Mr. Verrilli wrote of the people eligible for the program, “they are more likely to work for employers who will hire them illegally, often at below-market wages, thereby hurting American workers and giving unscrupulous employers an unfair advantage.”

Much of the briefing so far has been focused on the threshold question of whether the states have suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gives them standing to sue....

There is special reason to think the states have standing, after what the Court did in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, allowing the state to challenge the EPA's idea that the Clean Air Act didn't refer to greenhouse gases, back in the days when the Bush administration wasn't doing enough about global warming to suit the political party in power in Massachusetts. The tables are turned now, but the standing doctrine precedents are what they are. Fortunately for Obama, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency is a murky mess of a case.

United States v. Texas coming up for oral argument and decision will add some interesting dimension to the issue of immigration and presidential power in this election year.

ADDED: Just a snippet from Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency to give you a sense of how the majority muddled standing doctrine where a state is a plaintiff challenging the work of the executive branch:

"How can something American law requires be 'not American'?"

That question — intended as a rhetorical question — is asked in a National Review article by Andrew C. McCarthy titled "Refugee ‘Religious Test’ Is ‘Shameful’ and ‘Not American’ … Except that Federal Law Requires It."

McCarthy makes good points in that article: Under U.S. statutory law, religious persecution is one of the grounds for granting asylum.

There is no right to emigrate to the United States. And the fact that one comes from a country or territory ravaged by war does not, by itself, make one an asylum candidate. War, regrettably, is a staple of the human condition. Civil wars are generally about power. That often makes them violent and, for many, tragic; but it does not necessarily make them wars in which one side is persecuting the other side. In the case of this war, the Islamic State is undeniably persecuting Christians. It is doing so, moreover, as a matter of doctrine. Even those Christians the Islamic State does not kill, it otherwise persecutes as called for by its construction of sharia (observe, for example, the ongoing rape jihad and sexual slavery). To the contrary, the Islamic State seeks to rule Muslims, not kill or persecute them.... While there is no question that ISIS will kill and persecute Muslims whom it regards as apostates for refusing to adhere to its construction of Islam, it is abject idiocy to suggest that Muslims are facing the same ubiquity and intensity of persecution as Christians....

So, there is a basis for making the process different for Christians and Muslims: They are differently situated with respect to their exposure to persecution. There is still, however, a serious question about whether the U.S. government should openly adopt a policy of sorting the refugees into Christian and Muslim and treating them radically differently. Obama has articulated his position in terms of what it means to be an American:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

Obama calls us to what he portrays as a higher standard of compassion and nondiscrimination. We are — perhaps you've noticed — always in the middle of a debate about what America means. McCarthy's side of the debate reminds us of a statutory choice to provide refuge for those who face religious persecution and of the factual differences in the persecution experienced by the Christians and Muslims who are fleeing Syria. 

We don't have to answer immigration questions by deciding which approach is most American, but the culture here in America is to be endlessly immersed in a process of defining American values. We don't hear any serious politicians saying: I don't care what America supposedly means or what American values theoretically are, I only care about protecting the lives of American people. They might think that, but they don't speak in those terms. We wouldn't accept that.

Does McCarthy, with his rhetorical question — "How can something American law requires be 'not American'?" — really mean to suggest that once something happens to make it into the United States Code it is immune from arguments that it is inconsistent with American values? I'll bet there are many American statutes that conflict with McCarthy's idea of what is American.

So, let's move forward and look closely at what kind of discrimination based on religion we want to support. It's one thing to say we want to offer asylum to those whose lives are in danger because of religious persecution. It's quite another to propose that when thousands of people are fleeing from one place and all are exposed to religion-fueled violence, that we will, at the outset, crudely sort them into 2 groups, depending on which religion they espouse.

Is that who we are?

"I want to encourage you, Mr. President, come back and insult me to my face."

"Let’s have a debate on Syrian refugees right now. We can do it anywhere you want. I prefer it in the United States and not overseas where you’re making insults. It’s easy to toss a cheap insult when no one can respond, but let’s have a debate."

Ted Cruz has a way with words.

What was Obama's insult? "Apparently, they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America. At first they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn't seem so tough to me."

Where all the governors stand on resettling Syrian refugees in their state.

AP has an extensive run down. I'll focus on some governors that I would expect to be relatively supportive of the President's agenda. The number in parentheses is the number of refugees who have already arrived in the state. Boldface is mine:

CALIFORNIA (218): Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown says he'll work closely with President Barack Obama to ensure any Syrian refugees coming to California are "fully vetted in a sophisticated and utterly reliable way." He says the state can help uphold America's traditional role as a place of asylum while also protecting California residents.

COLORADO (5): Colorado's governor isn't ruling out Syrian refugees. But Gov. John Hickenlooper says the federal government needs to make sure the verification process for refugees is "as stringent as possible."

"A fast-growing group of Republican governors on Monday revolted against President Barack Obama’s existing plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees next year..."

"... saying the Paris terrorist attacks show that it’s too risky to provide a safe haven for those displaced by Syria’s bloody civil war...."

By Monday afternoon, governors from Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Ohio, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Jersey, Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire and Montana had joined Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who on Sunday led the charge in refusing to accept refugees from Syria. Kentucky Governor-elect Matt Bevin, who won't take his oath of office until next month, also said on Monday that he is opposed.

ADDED: New Hampshire and Montana have Democratic governors.