Adopted 4-Year-Old Daughter of Americans Probably Won’t Be Deported. Either Way, Our Immigration System Is Broken.

Both of her parents are legal U.S. citizens. But if 4-year-old Angela Becerra doesn’t leave the country within the next three weeks, she runs the risk of deportation.

When Angela was born in May 2014, Amy and Marco Becerra were living in Peru. Marco is a dual U.S.–Peruvian citizen, and the couple owned home in the country. Though they’re not Angela’s biological parents, they’ve been taking care of the little girl for her entire life.

Angela was less than two weeks old when she was left at an orphanage by her developmentally disabled mother. Amy and her husband took Angela in and eventually decided to adopt her. Since they were living in Peru, the adoption was finalized in a Peruvian court last April. “The unique thing about Angela’s adoption is it’s not an international adoption. It’s a domestic adoption in Peru,” Amy tells KDVR.

Around that time, the family decided to move to Colorado. They had to send in an immigration application for Angela, but her case kept getting delayed.

Eventually, Angela came to the U.S. on tourist visa. But that visa expires at the end of the month, and her immigration application has been denied. “If she expires her visa, she is officially here as an undocumented alien, and legally is at risk for deportation even though both her parents are citizens,” Amy tells KDVR.

The Becerras say they don’t know why Angela’s immigration application was denied. David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, suspects it has to do with their application for a tourist visa. “You are just not supposed to use a tourist visa to come to the United States to then apply for permanent residency,” Bier tells Reason. Bier says it sounds like the Becerras first applied for a permanent visa, then opted for a tourist one instead. “As a consequence of that, the administration treats you as having given up your other visa,” he adds.

Matt Kolken, an immigration attorney and national immigration reform advocate, thinks there’s a viable solution. “The law specifically provides that if you are an immediate relative of a United States citizen, [you’re] eligible to apply for adjustment of status, which is to become a green-card holder from inside of the country,” says Kolken.

Since Angela is a child of two U.S. citizens and has already been “inspected” and “admitted” into the country, this shouldn’t be a problem. “Just because she becomes an undocumented immigrant for a temporary period, if you’re a minor and you’re the child of U.S. citizens you should be able to get a green card and get this fixed,” Bier says.

Still, “this is how people get entrapped in a broken system where things don’t make sense.” Angela’s story will probably have a happy ending. But people who say legal immigrants can just “get in line” should keep stories like hers in mind.

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Rod Rosenstein Defends Bad Forensic Science

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein defended several questionable forms of forensic evidence Tuesday.

“Most of you work on the front lines of the criminal justice system, where forensic science has been under attack in recent years,” Rosenstein said in a speech at the National Symposium on Forensic Science. “Some critics would like to see forensic evidence excluded from state and federal courtrooms.”

Over the past two decades, DNA testing has revealed hundreds of wrongful convictions, many of them stemming from “pattern” evidence such as bite marks, shoe prints, and microscopic hair comparison. The Justice Department has been under pressure to improve forensic standards since it and FBI admitted in 2015 that two dozen examiners in one of its hair analysis labs had given flawed testimony in hundreds of cases. In those cases, 32 defendants were sentenced to death; 14 were eventually executed or died in prison.

In 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report finding “a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence”—such as analyses of hair, bite marks, and shoe prints—”that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity.”

But the Justice Department, under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, has rejected calls to stop relying on such evidence. In his speech Tuesday, Rosenstein continued to defend them:

Many of the challenged methods involve the comparison of evidence patterns like fingerprints, shell casings, and shoe marks to known sources. Critics argue that the methods have not undergone the right type or amount of validation, or that they involve too much human interpretation and judgment to be accepted as “scientific” methods.

You regularly face Frye and Daubert motions that challenge the admission of routine forensic methods.

Those arguments are based on the false premise that a scientific method must be instrument-based, automated, and quantitative, excluding human interpretation and judgment. Such critiques contributed to a recent proposal to amend Federal Rule of Evidence 702 for cases involving forensic evidence. The effort stems from an erroneously narrow view of the nature of science and its application to forensic evidence.

Forensic science is not only quantitative or automated. It need not be entirely free from human assumptions, choices, and judgments. That is not just true of forensic science. It is also the case in other applied expert fields like medicine, computer science, and engineering.

Betty Layne DesPortes, a Virginia criminal defense attorney and past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is troubled by Rosenstein’s comments on court challenges to evidence. “Not challenging ‘routine methods’ is what got us dozens of wrongful convictions with bite marks and hair analysis,” she says, speaking in her personal capacity. “The idea that we’re scientists, so don’t challenge us, is very, very dangerous for the criminal justice system, and quite frankly dangerous for science too.”

DesPortes and other figures in the criminal defense world say Rosenstein inaccurately portrayed both their position and the actual issue: the untested reliability of pattern evidence like bite marks and shoe prints. Rosenstein’s speech “mischaracterizes and distorts the issues raised over the last decade concerning the problems with unreliable forensic practices,” says Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project. “The criticism of pattern matching disciplines is not that these disciplines involve human judgment and interpretation, but rather that there has never been sufficient scientific empirical research to ensure that those human judgments and interpretations have a reliable scientific foundation. The Department of Justice, no less than the Innocence Project, should want to ensure that only reliable science is used in criminal prosecutions because we are all harmed when the wrong person is convicted of a crime.”

For example, in the case of bite mark evidence, the PCAST report stated that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark.”

Reporting by former Reason reporter Radley Balko has revealed several wrongful conviction cases based on spectacularly flawed bite mark analysis. And yet bite mark evidence, along with such questionable methods as blood spatter and tool mark analysis, has never been barred from a single courtroom in the U.S.

Drew Findling, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), points out that his organization has worked for several years with the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Innocence Project to review flawed microscopic hair comparison analysis and notify defendants who this evidence was used against.

“Given this context, we are concerned about [Rosenstein’s] comments that pattern evidence that does not have sufficient foundational validity may be offered solely based upon ‘human assumptions, choices and judgments’ instead of science,” Findling says. “NACDL is concerned that the remarks could lead to a policy that will leave the door open to unreliable forensic evidence.”

While the Justice Department has made many changes to improve forensic practices, it has strenuously resisted calls for more sweeping reforms. Under former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the Justice Department rejected PCAST’s recommendations to require expert witnesses to disclose error rates in their testimony and, where methods haven’t been scientifically verified, not use them at all.

The National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS), an independent review group formed by the Obama administration, released a draft code of ethics for forensic science providers. The draft code included a mandate to inform all parties, including defendants and victims, when misconduct or a lack of professional standards adversely affected a case. But when Lynch adopted the new code of ethics in a 2016 memo, it only required forensic providers to “inform the prosecutors involved…of material nonconformities or breaches of law or professional standards that adversely affect a previously issued report or testimony.”

Last April, the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, chose not to renew the NCFS’s charter, effectively shuttering the group. At the the commission’s final public hearing, John Harward, who spent 33 years in Virginia state prison for rape and murder before being exonerated by DNA evidence, testified.

“It’s not right. Why’s it still around?” Harward said of bite mark evidence. “Just this year there’s been two people, like me, who’ve gotten out. Explain to me, what does it take to admit that this stuff’s all crap?”

The Justice Department replaced the commission with new working groups, but former members of the NCFS and others in the field worry that these are essentially in-house and will lack the NCFS’s independence.

Rosenstein’s comments are a shame, DesPortes says, because almost everyone welcomes many of the improvements he announced, such as introducing rules about what language forensic experts can use while testifying.

“The ironic thing is, I think both sides agree that the steps being taken are good steps,” DesPortes says. “We all agree on what to do, it’s just we don’t agree on how each side is characterizing the battle. When both sides do that, walls go up and things become more difficult.”

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American Aluminum Manufacturer Seeks Relief From Tariffs Meant to Help American Aluminum Manufacturers

Alcoa, one of the largest American manufacturers of aluminum, is asking the government for relief from tariffs that were supposed to help American aluminum manufacturers.

It turns out that businesses that make aluminum also have to buy things made of aluminum—and those purchases are now more expensive, thanks to Donald Trump’s 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports.

Alcoa filed five requests for tariff exemptions with the Commerce Department this week, Bloomberg reports. Three of those requests are for types of aluminum that the company says are not available from American suppliers, and two are for aluminum products that are not produced in sufficient quantity by domestic sources. The Pittsburgh-based company wants exemptions so it can import those products and components from a Canadian subsidiary.

Higher production costs created by tariffs have already forced Alcoa to lower its 2018 profit projections. “The company said in its second-quarter earnings report that it incurred $15 million in costs on material shipped to the U.S.,” Bloomberg notes in a separate article.

Alcoa’s request for protection from Trump’s protectionism reveals one of the critical flaws in the White House’s plans to use tariffs to boost domestic production of aluminum (and steel, on which the administration has placed a 25 percent tariff): There simply isn’t enough American-made aluminum to satisfy the demands of American aluminum-consuming businesses.

“Even if all the curtailed smelting capacity in the U.S. was back online and producing metal, the United States would still need to import the majority of its aluminum,” Tim Reyes, president of Alcoa’s aluminum operations, tells The Wall Street Journal.

But the point of the tariffs is to create demand for more domestically produced aluminum, right? Trump has repeatedly claimed that the tariffs are already reinvigorating American steel factories. “Tariffs have had a tremendous positive impact on our Steel Industry,” he tweeted this week. “Plants are opening all over the U.S., Steelworkers are working again.” Surely the president believes the same will happen for aluminum. If there isn’t enough supply, investors will spend to build more aluminum and steel plants here.

Except that’s not what’s happening.

“In the short term, tariffs are more likely to bring older, relatively inefficient steel plants back online than to stimulate new long-term investments, for the simple reason that the president could withdraw the tariffs at any moment,” Soumaya Keynes writes in The Economist.

Trump’s unpredictable trade policies are unlikely to give investors the confidence required to build more steel or aluminum plants in the U.S., and expanding production domestically would duplicate operations that are already set up and running in other places. Rather than spending to build more production here, companies like Alcoa are looking for ways to get around the tariffs or will end up having to absorb—and pass along to consumers—those higher costs.

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Netflix’s Insatiable Didn’t Deserve the Outrage Mob: New at Reason

'Insatiable'Before Insatiable ever aired a single episode, an outrage mob formed trying to force its cancellation, all over a very misguided belief that the show revolved around fat-shaming. It does not. Television critic Glenn Garvin explains:

Something like Death Wish if it had been directed by John Hughes, Insatiable starts off with Debby Ryan (Life Of The Party) encased in a Michelin-man size fat suit, playing a high school pariah named Patty—or Fatty Patty, as the rest of the school (even, oh my God, the band dorks) calls her. The name may be cruel, but it’s not exactly inaccurate. “While my classmates were out losing their virginity, I was at home, stuffing another hole,” laments Patty.

She bottoms out one night when a homeless drunk demands her chocolate donut on the grounds that she’s too fat to eat it. She punches him; he punches back, much harder, and breaks her jaw. Three months of liquid diet later, Fatty Patty is Hottie Patty, with all the popular kids who once shunned her (and now have no idea who she is) begging her to join their cafeteria table. She’s unplacated by her new popularity, and the stage is set for Revenge of the Plus-Sized.

View this article.

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American-Backed Saudi Coalition Kills 40 Children in Airstrike, Injures Dozens More

A Saudi airstrike in northern Yemen yesterday claimed the lives of 51 civilians, at least 40 of whom were children. An additional 79 people, including 56 children, were reportedly wounded. Given the dismal conditions of the area, it’s likely more will die from the lack of adequate medical care.

The American-backed Saudi coalition says the attack was a retaliation for a previous attack by Houthi rebels that killed one Yemeni person. The coalition claims that the missile was intercepted and the fragments ended up hitting a bustling market square and a bus carrying kids. Colonel Turki al-Malki, a spokesperson for the coalition, insists that the airstrike “conformed to international and humanitarian laws.” But Al Jazeera reports that the market was nowhere near any sort of Houthi rebel installation.

So far, the Pentagon has offered mixed messages about America’s role in the disaster. One spokesperson told Vox that the Pentagon isn’t sure whether American weapons were used in the strike or if the U.S. helped refuel the Saudi jets; another flatly denied any American involvement. Washington has yet to condemn the airstrike.

Regardless, this incident isn’t an anomaly. Just a little over a month ago, the United Nations found that the Saudi coalition was responsible for a majority of the conflict’s children casualties, and also that they were guilty of recruiting child soldiers. More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in this war so far, and U.S. support for the Saudis is adding gasoline to an already out-of-control fire. As Lee Keath of the Associated Press told CBS, American weapons, intelligence, and logistical help “has been vital for the coalition.”

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Kanye West’s Support for Trump Is No Different Than the Average Voter’s

|||Screenshot via YouTube/ Jimmy Kimmel LiveThose wondering why Kanye West admires Donald Trump finally got an answer last night when West sat down for an interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

The rapper, who once famously claimed that George W. Bush didn’t “care about black people,” caused anger and confusion in his fan base when he stated just after the election that he would have voted for Trump. About a month later, West met with Trump at Trump Towers. In April of this year, West tweeted his love and support for the president as well as an autographed “Make America Great Again” hat. Since then, West’s wife—reality TV star Kim Kardashian West—met with Trump to ask for clemency on behalf of nonviolent drug offender Alice Marie Johnson. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence in June.

West’s interview yesterday began lightly, with Kimmel suggesting that West use his Yeezy apparel to design the uniforms for the president’s Space Force. Later, West revealed that his support for Trump didn’t actually have much to do with policy, a position that’s probably similar to the average person’s support for any politician.

“It took me a year and a half to have the confidence to stand up and put on the [Make America Great Again] hat, no matter what the consequences were,” West said. “And what it represented to me is not about policies, because I’m not a politician like that, but it represented overcoming fear and doing what you felt no matter what anyone said.”

West added that he rather enjoyed when people became upset with him, invoked Galileo’s support for the theory of a heliocentric Solar System, and declared that someone needs to be “fearless enough to break the fucking simulation.”

The full interview can be viewed below.

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Why Would a Mother Throw Her Kids Off a Bridge?: Podcast

In 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith dropped her children off a bridge in Portland, Oregon. Her 7-year-old daughter lived, screaming until a good Samaritan fished her out of the freezing river. Her 4-year-old son drowned. Writer (and occasional Reason contributor) Nancy Rommelmann read about the story the next morning over a cup of coffee, then spent the next seven years chasing down every detail. The result is To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder, a reported work of non-fiction that is compelling and hard to read in equal measure.

Rommelmann and I sat down in a sweltering New York apartment in August to talk about true crime reporting, parenting, death, and the publishing industry. The conversation turned out to be one part interview, one part story assignment meeting for Rommelmann’s next feature. So tune in to hear about the who, what, when, where, and why of reporting on child murder at book length, and stay for a sneak peek at a Reason editorial meeting.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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L.A. Deputy Faked Evidence—but Was Still Used as a Witness in Criminal Cases for Years

Jose OvalleA sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles was nearly fired for faking evidence in 2003. He’s been a witness or potential witness in hundreds of criminal cases since then. In most cases the defendants were not aware of his background and thus never challenged him.

California’s legally mandated deep secrecy about police misconduct is in the spotlight again, thanks to a Los Angeles Times investigation about a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputy named Jose Ovalle. In 2003, Ovalle was tasked with collecting and documenting evidence involving a gang fight at a detention center in Castaic where an inmate had been slashed. He couldn’t find a bloody shirt that was part of the case, so he fabricated it by pouring taco sauce on a clean shirt, taking a photo of it, and submitting it into evidence.

Ovalle was caught, and the Sheriff’s Department initially wanted to fire him. But ultimately they didn’t, and he’s still working, making $240,000 a year. And the sheriff’s department didn’t inform prosecutors of Ovalle’s infraction, so they initially didn’t know about his behavior when they were handling cases where he was a witness. According to the Times, he testified in 31 cases before prosecutors found out what he had done.

Prosecutors are supposed to inform defendants when a police officer’s past misconduct could affect his credibility. But that’s simply not how things work in California. State law keeps police misconduct records so secretive that even prosecutors cannot directly access them. Defenders have to request that judges to check an officer’s record to see if there’s anything relevant.

Most of the time, even this doesn’t happen. More than 230 people were convicted in cases where Ovalle was a potential witness. Only a handful of defense attorneys attempted to inquire into Ovalle’s background. In one case, the Times reports, a man who believed that deputies (including Ovalle) planted evidence to justify a search of his car asked for his history, and the judge rejected the request. He ended up pleading no contest to a misdemeanor firearms offense and was put on probation for three years.

The slow speed of justice in California discourages defendants with little money or time from delving into officers’ backgrounds. It’s a lengthy process that can take months. Many end up accepting plea deals.

And when defense attorneys do find out about Ovalle’s past, it can compromise cases against some pretty sketchy guys. In one case, prosecutors ended up offering a plea deal to a known gang member facing more than a decade in prison after Ovalle’s conduct was discovered. The man served eight months in jail instead. Since his release, he’s been convicted of 10 additional crimes. In another case, a defendant with a lengthy criminal background had his entire conviction overturned after Ovalle’s past came to light. That defendant is now in prison in Nevada for intentionally infecting a girlfriend with HIV.

Given this risk of compromising a case, it shouldn’t be a surprise that prosecutors want better information about deputies with histories of misconduct. But law enforcement unions have been fighting every effort to make officers’ disciplinary histories more transparent and accessible, even to other government officials. It may take a California Supreme Court ruling to determine whether the sheriff’s department can pass the names of deputies with records of misconduct directly to prosecutors. There’s also a bill winding its way through the state legislature that would open up police records in cases of official misconduct.

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The First Crackdown on Indecent Recordings

Long before a Senate committee grilled Frank Zappa and Dee Snider about “sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content” in popular music, long before the FBI investigated the lyrics of “Louie Louie” to see if any obscenities were concealed in the song, a man named Russell Hunting was “charged with making improper use of phonographs,” as the The New York Times put it the day after his arrest. The year was 1896, and Anthony Comstock, the U.S. postal inspector who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had been on Hunting’s trail for two years.

“During all that time,” the Times reported, “Comstock and [agent George] Oram have been arresting various people for exhibiting phonographs that had cylinders containing vile songs and stories, but they had never been able to catch the person from whom these cylinders were purchased.” After Comstock and Oram “noticed that all the cylinders gave forth exactly the same voice,” they determined that the voice was Hunting’s and arranged a sting. “Oram played the part of a customer with such success that Hunting took him in the ‘laboratory’ and showed him how the cylinders worked,” the Times recounted. “Oram bought three cylinders for $1.50 apiece.” An arrest followed, and Hunting wound up spending several months in jail.

About a decade ago, Archeophone Records put out Actionable Offenses, an anthology of bawdy cylinder recordings by Hunting and other 19th-century comedians. One of the routines on it, recorded circa 1892, is “Gimlet’s Soliloquy,” in which Shakespeare’s most famous passage is rewritten as a speech by a guy with gonorrhea steeling himself for a painful trip to the bathroom. “To pee or not to pee, that is the question,” it begins. “Whether it is better in the flesh to suffer the stings and smarts of this outrageous clap or taking physic against the damned disease and—with it a syringe—end it…”

You can hear the whole thing below:

After his jail term, Hunting continued to flit about the early recording business, putting out war songs, faux-Scottish balladry, and more. Comstock continued to crusade against various forms of nonviolent behavior until his death in 1915. And no one ever recorded anything indecent ever again.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

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Melania Helped Her Parents Become Citizens, But Trump Called Chain Migration ‘NOT ACCEPTABLE!’

|||Chris Kleponis/SIPA/NewscomFirst Lady Melania Trump’s parents officially became United States citizens this week, thanks to a part of the law that President Donald Trump has claimed several times must end.

Viktor and Amalija Knavs were sworn in at a private ceremony on Thursday. The Associated Press reports that the Knavs, who came from Slovenia, lived in the country as permanent residents prior to their ceremony. Their lawyer, Michael Wildes, has confirmed that the first lady sponsored their Green Cards.

This family-based path to America—sometimes called “chain migration”—is the most common form of immigration. Through this process, a green card holder or legal U.S. resident “may sponsor a family member for immigration.” The president has repeatedly called for limiting this pathway to spouses and minor children, and he tweets frequently about its alleged evils:

NPR notes that this is not the first time someone associated with the first family has benefitted from immigration tools criticized by the president:

[Melania Trump] was paid for several modeling jobs in the U.S. before obtaining a work visa, which would be illegal under immigration law.

Her green card was granted under the elite EB-1 program, according to The Washington Post. That preferential program, popularly known as the “Einstein visa,” is intended for immigrants with “extraordinary ability, [who] are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a multinational executive or manager,” according to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services.

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