And Washington reacts to ProPublica's latest SCOTUS investigation.
Realpolitik isn’t pretty
Category Archives: human rights
Another whitewash of history
Even as the most visible security measures have been loosened, Uyghurs continue to live under heavier official pressure than in other parts of the country.
Some good, some bad in this proposal
The purpose of the credible fear interviews is to screen out the asylum claims that are obviously without merit so that they don’t clog up an already overcrowded immigration court system. Sending applicants to an asylum officer before the case goes to court (which already happens when people who are inside the country apply for asylum) would serve to screen out the obviously valid claims. That would leave the court with those claims that are neither obviously without merit nor obviously worthy of a grant, i.e., the hard cases. Those are the ones that require the most preparation and time so expediting them as proposed is a bad idea. Few attorneys I know can handle cases on that short time frame. Besides, putting these new cases at the front of the queue moves everyone else back and would make the backlog even worse. The solution? Make the immigration courts independent and give them the resources needed to tackle their huge caseload.
The Biden administration?s overhaul of the asylum system went into effect for the first time on May 31, but only a limited basis.
What’s to come … maybe
“In Roe, the justices ruled the right to an abortion arose out of a right to privacy, which isn’t explicitly spelled out in the Constitution but rather assembled through the guarantees of the 14th Amendment. Over the decades, the Supreme Court has built a Jenga tower of legal reasoning around the existence of that right to privacy and how rights may be extrapolated from the Constitution. Pull out one block, like Roe, and you threaten to topple the whole thing, experts say. …
“In Roe, the justices ruled the right to an abortion arose out of a right to privacy, which isn’t explicitly spelled out in the Constitution but rather assembled through the guarantees of the 14th Amendment. Over the decades, the Supreme Court has built a Jenga tower of legal reasoning around the existence of that right to privacy and how rights may be extrapolated from the Constitution. Pull out one block, like Roe, and you threaten to topple the whole thing, experts say.”
?Any sort of civil rights or constitutional rights that people have won over the last 50 years is open for discussion. I mean, why not??
You think?
Ukrainian families at the US-Mexico border are getting the chance to do something most asylum-seeking migrants haven’t been allowed to do for years: cross legally into the United States.
Deteriorating human rights in India
New state laws make it harder for interfaith couples to marry. The idea is to halt forced marital religious conversions. But they've emboldened extremists to interrupt weddings.
Welcome news
The question of what constitutes “a particular social group” for purposes of asylum is one of the most difficult and vexing in immigration law.
The U.S. government has put an end to two Trump administration policies that made it harder for immigrants fleeing violence to qualify for asylum.
Welcome news
Bristol County Jail is considered among immigration practitioners to be the worst immigration detention facility in New England. And Hodgson is the New England version of Sheriff Arpaio.
The closures in Massachusetts and Georgia are part of a broader Biden administration plan to overhaul the immigration system.
The moral case is undeniable
But, alas, as a practical matter, I fear that the best they can get is compensation in some future peace deal. And even that seems a long shot.
If keeping faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn Palestinians for doing the same thing?
Two dysfunctional systems
Since the start of the year, much of the world?s attention was focused on two trials on opposite sides of the world. In one, a brave truth-teller was persecuted by a vengeful administration a?