—> US Sends More Immigrants to Salvadoran Prison | SCOTUS vs POTUS

[superrific]

There are some obvious issues. The fact that you can sneak into the country and wait for up to a year to claim asylum is just crazy and clearly just a tool to be set free to continue trying to hide and avoid being deported. It should be a requirement to claim asylum at a port of entry before you enter the country.

Do you know why there is a year grace period? If you don't know the justification for a law, you can't cogently criticize it. You just end up showing your ass. Which would be a shame, because in this case my intuition matches yours. But I'm going to first find out why the law is the way it is before condemning it.

For instance, to take a silly example: what if the Area 51 incident was actually the arrival of aliens who told the US government that they would destroy the planet if refugees weren't given a year to seek asylum? If that were true, it wouldn't be crazy would it? In fact, it would be crazy not to. Of course this is an exponentially silly example (which I chose because it has no political salience); it illustrates the point that there are likely factors that we don't know about, and those factors could be terribly important.

In the case of asylum, the issue is more complex than "make them declare." There are international treaties that have to be adhered to; while I don't think those treaties speak to any grace period, I'm not sure about that. Traditionally asylum in the US was used to give refuge to small numbers of people who were being persecuted by vicious regimes for political beliefs. The idea was to let them get into the country quickly and then sort out their plans; delays could mean death. Also, the requirement that asylum would have to be declared at the border would undermine its use for defections.

Now maybe the importance of those justifications has lessened over time; the issue of defections definitely has. And it happens frequently that laws erode in effectiveness over time, as circumstances change. Most statutes need updating, because nobody can foresee the whole future. But if you don't understand what the law was trying to do, how can you ever design one that's better?

This shoot-first, ask-questions-later is Trump's approach, and we've of course seen how disastrous that is.

 

[ZenMode]

Do you know why there is a year grace period? If you don't know the justification for a law, you can't cogently criticize it. You just end up showing your ass. Which would be a shame, because in this case my intuition matches yours. But I'm going to first find out why the law is the way it is before condemning it.

For instance, to take a silly example: what if the Area 51 incident was actually the arrival of aliens who told the US government that they would destroy the planet if refugees weren't given a year to seek asylum? If that were true, it wouldn't be crazy would it? In fact, it would be crazy not to. Of course this is an exponentially silly example (which I chose because it has no political salience); it illustrates the point that there are likely factors that we don't know about, and those factors could be terribly important.

In the case of asylum, the issue is more complex than "make them declare." There are international treaties that have to be adhered to; while I don't think those treaties speak to any grace period, I'm not sure about that. Traditionally asylum in the US was used to give refuge to small numbers of people who were being persecuted by vicious regimes for political beliefs. The idea was to let them get into the country quickly and then sort out their plans; delays could mean death. Also, the requirement that asylum would have to be declared at the border would undermine its use for defections.

Now maybe the importance of those justifications has lessened over time; the issue of defections definitely has. And it happens frequently that laws erode in effectiveness over time, as circumstances change. Most statutes need updating, because nobody can foresee the whole future. But if you don't understand what the law was trying to do, how can you ever design one that's better?

This shoot-first, ask-questions-later is Trump's approach, and we've of course seen how disastrous that is.

"The idea was to let them get into the country quickly and then sort out their plans"

First, people who are sneaking into the country aren't being "let" in, they are sneaking in illegally.

Second, IF there were ever an urgent situation, where we needed to get people in as quickly as possible, the discussion of allowing a year could be discussed. Even that really makes no sense because the people should be detained and processed on the US side of the border.

However, as usual, your default is to try to defend federal government ridiculousness....

 

[sringwal]

From Night Chapter 1 by Elie Wiesel:

One evening, I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar, the Kabbalistic works, the secrets of Jewish mysticism. He smiled indulgently. After a long silence, he said, "There are a thousand and one gates allowing entry into the orchard of mystical truth. Every human being has his own gate. He must not err and wish to enter the orchard through a gate other than his own. That would present a danger not only for the one entering but also for those who are already inside."

And Moishe the Beadle, the poorest of the poor of Sighet, spoke to me for hours on end about the Kabbalah's revelations and its mysteries. Thus began my initiation. Together we would read, over and over again, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart but to discover within the very essence of divinity. And in the course of those evenings I became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And then, one day all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet. And Moishe the Beadle was a foreigner.

Crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was left was thick, dirty smoke.

Behind me, someone said, sighing, "What do you expect? That's war..."

The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after they left, it was rumored that they were in Galicia, working, and even that they were content with their fate.

 

[superrific]

"The idea was to let them get into the country quickly and then sort out their plans"

First, people who are sneaking into the country aren't being "let" in, they are sneaking in illegally.

Second, IF there were ever an urgent situation, where we needed to get people in as quickly as possible, the discussion of allowing a year could be discussed. Even that really makes no sense because the people should be detained and processed on the US side of the border.

However, as usual, your default is to try to defend federal government ridiculousness....

I'm not defending anything. This is a point of logic. It is a fundamental mistake to criticize -- let alone mock dismissively -- something you don't understand.

To say that the US asylum laws were written in a time when defectors were more politically salient than migrants or refugees isn't to say that the laws are well-suited for today's world. Indeed, they are not. Most laws decrease in effectiveness with the passage of time, because circumstances change. Sometimes circumstances change enough to make the whole apparatus nonsensical.

For instance, there are still volumes of regulations that apply to pay telephones (here, still means "as of 15 years ago" because that's the age of this observation; it's still a valid illustration). Why? Why would the government put so much effort into crafting regulations for something as unimportant and at best niche-useful as a pay phone? If you didn't know the history, and you were just looking at it right now, you'd say the whole thing is ridiculous.

Except pay phone regulation was never ridiculous. It was in fact important for reasons few of us have the technical knowledge to appreciate (it was explained to me by a former colleague who worked for the FCC; the details bored me and I don't remember them -- the conclusion was what stuck). Like most regulations, they made sense at the time. The problem is that they didn't keep up with technology, which is fine; we don't need pay phones any more. If we applied those regulations to smart phones, THAT would be ridiculous. But of course it's not what happened.

***

To a first approximation, none of our regulations are ridiculous. They can't be. The process of crafting the regulations weeds out most of the ridiculousness. We have notice-and-comment rulemaking, so any ridiculousness would be conveyed to the agency. The agency has to respond to those points, and if the regulation is truly ridiculous, the agency would be unable to do so. Thus would the regulation be vacated by the federal courts, which strike down regulations that are arbitrary or capricious. In addition, since 1981, regulations have to pass cost-benefit analysis, which is a form of non-ridiculousness. Regulations can't produce 100 units of happiness and 10000 units of unhappiness -- they will get struck down or filtered out if they do.

Regulations are sometimes outdated, and in extreme examples they can become ridiculousness. But by far the primary source of the "ridiculousness" comes from people who want to mock without understanding. Lots of things can look ridiculous if you intentionally turn a blind eye to their justifications.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[altmin]

US Customs and Border Protection Quietly Revokes Protections for Pregnant Women and Infants

CBP's acting commissioner has rescinded four Biden-era policies that aimed to protect vulnerable people in the agency's custody, including mothers, infants, and the elderly.

www.wired.com

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has quietly rescinded several internal policies that were designed to protect some of the most vulnerable people in its custody—including pregnant women, infants, the elderly, and people with serious medical conditions.

The decision, outlined in a memo dated May 5 and signed by Acting Commissioner Pete Flores, eliminates four Biden era policies enacted over the last three years. These policies were intended to address CBP’s long-standing failures to provide adequate care for detainees who are most at risk—failures that have, in some cases, proved fatal.

CBP justified the rollback by stating in the memo–titled Rescission of Legacy Policies Related to Care and Custody–that the policies were “obsolete” and “misaligned” with the agency’s current enforcement priorities.

Together, the now-rescinded policies laid out standards for detainees with heightened medical needs—requiring, for instance, access to water and food for pregnant people, ensuring privacy for breastfeeding mothers, and mandating diapers and unexpired formula be stocked in holding facilities. They also instructed agents to process at-risk individuals as quickly as possible to limit time in custody.


“It's appalling and it's just an extension of the culture of cruelty that the administration is trying to perpetrate,” says Sarah Mehta, deputy director of Government Affairs for the ACLU’s Equality Division. Rescinding the policies, she says, “is a damning statement about the way that this administration thinks and cares about people with young children.”

CBP did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

 

[farce©]

Together, the now-rescinded policies laid out standards for detainees with heightened medical needs—requiring, for instance, access to water and food for pregnant people, ensuring privacy for breastfeeding mothers, and mandating diapers and unexpired formula be stocked in holding facilities.

Isn’t access to water and food required for all detainees?