Month: February 2017

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is widely considered to be the most consistently libertarian member of Congress. He is also the son of a Syrian immigrant and a Palestinian refugee. So it didn’t exactly come as a surprise when Amash became one of the first Republican politicians to criticize President Donald Trump’s refugee/immigration executive order of one week ago.

But Amash is also unsatisfied with America’s existing process for screening potentially dangerous refugees from Syria and other unstable, terrorist-producing countries. In an interview with me one year ago, the congressman said, “I went to one of these briefings put on by the administration, and was frankly stunned at the poor vetting process. It is a long process, but contrary to what I at first believed, it is not a very rigorous process. The important thing to me at the end of the day is making sure that we can identify who the person is when they’re coming over.”

I spoke with Amash again for SiriusXM Insight on Wednesday, at a time when it seemed (to me anyway) that the EO’s controversial provisions affecting green-card holders who live in the U.S. had been reversed. Since then the State Department has disclosed that 60,000 visas have been revoked as a result of the order, though if this week is any guide, the reporting on that could soon change a great deal. The bottom line, according to the congressman, is that this policy trend won’t change until Republican attitudes change, and that doesn’t seem immediately likely: “Right now we are going through a period where we are sort of closing up a little bit.”

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation; at the bottom of it you can listen to the first three minutes:

Reason: The green card element of it, which was many people’s…lead objection to the executive order…that one seems to be resolved. What are your remaining objections to the executive order as they stand today?

Amash: Well, I wouldn’t call that one resolved….

Reason: Oh, okay.…

Amash: I talked to some of my colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus to send the word back up to the administration that they are letting in green-card holders in by a case-by-case basis but they are going to receive additional screening and all the rest. It’s my opinion, and certainly the opinion of a lot of people in Congress, including a lot of Republicans, that people who have been living here for a long time, who are lawful permanent residents, these are legal immigrants who live among us, who serve in our armed forces, who pay taxes. They shouldn’t be treated like they are some kind of suspect every time they want to come back into the country.

Reason: As far as you know, are they being pulled aside for questioning routinely at airports still, even after the clarification from the Department of Homeland Security on Sunday?

Amash: So I don’t have any anecdotal evidence of that, but I can say that based on the statements we have heard from the administration, whether it’s DHS or Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus or anyone else, they are going to receive an additional scrutiny when they come in. Now, they are going to be let in on a case-by-case basis, but they are going to receive additional scrutiny; in other words, the executive order will still cover them.

I think that’s not the way to handle people who have been living here as lawful permanent residents and are well-vetted. We cannot prevent every terrorist attack that is going to happen in the world, and we have to at some point trust some people. And I think the people who live here and serve in our armed forces, we are going to have to trust. That’s just how the world has to work, and life has to work.

Reason: And just for people who aren’t really aware of how the green card process works, there is vetting—you have to get fingerprinted and you have to go to some interviews.

Amash: Yes absolutely.

Reason: You have to say that you’re not allegiant to a foreign totalitarian system of thought.

Amash: That’s right, that’s right.

There’s no perfect way to stop everything, so we do our best to look at the people who we might be most concerned about, but certainly I wouldn’t put lawful permanent residences up there at the top of the list, just like I wouldn’t put citizens up there. We wouldn’t want to subject citizens to additional harassment every time they go someplace—although we do see that with TSA, obviously—but we wouldn’t want to do that just for the sake of saying, “Okay, well, some of these citizens might be bad.” Sure, some American citizens might also want to do us harm, but that’s just not the way you operate in a free country.

Reason: Let’s talk about other aspects of the order. What is wrong from your lights of the seven-country, temporary—though we don’t know when it’s going to stop and we’ve heard some indications that it might not stop after the 90 days are up—but temporary ban on all non-diplomatic travelers emanating from those seven countries? What is wrong with that?

Amash: Well, you are going to affect a lot of schools, and there are students who come here from other countries who want to learn the American way and go back and actually help improve their countries. But then when you also look at the seven countries, these aren’t the seven countries that have provided the greatest threat to the United States over the past couple decades. We’re missing big names, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan. And so I think that the list that was, yes, drawn up during the Obama administration for totally different purposes—not for the same purposes, for different purposes—is mostly a political list. It is more a political list than a safety list, and if we are worried about the safety of our citizens here then we should be looking at countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where a lot of the radicalism arises.

Reason: Now I interviewed you about a year ago in your office and we talked about this issue, because they had just passed through the latest omnibus these adjustments to the Visa Waiver program that affected dual nationals from those countries. And at the time you said to me that the refugee screening process of people from Syria…really needs to be improved. Can you talk about that briefly?

Amash: Well, the reason I say it needs to be improved is because I’ve been in classified meetings, and I know that some of our highest level officials, including the FBI Director, do not believe that the screening process is adequate, and they are unwilling to certify that people coming into the United States are screened effectively. Are safe, in other words. So as long as you have the heads of these agencies—and this is under the Obama administration—saying that they are unwilling to certify, unwilling to assure us that they’ve been properly screened, I think there is more work to do. Now what all that work is, I don’t know. I don’t know all the details of the screening process and how we can improve it. Certainly these officials who are in charge of it should come up with better ways so they can feel confident.

Reason: So what’s next for Congress right now having to do with the executive order. What are you cooking up, what are your colleagues cooking up, if anything, to respond [to], alter or adjust this in any way?

Amash: Well, we will look at various things; I think some of my Democratic colleagues have already dropped some legislation, and I’ll certainly be reviewing all that legislation. But at the end of the day I don’t think that you are going to get any changes to this executive order until a sizeable number of Republicans, particularly Republicans at home, change their minds about it. And right now it doesn’t seem that way. I think most Republicans at home applaud the order for one reason or another.

Of course Trump said that this is something he was going to do, and there is a lot of misinformation out there; everyone is conflating things. People say it is just like what President Obama did, when it is nothing like what President Obama did. Or that President Obama cut off…the Iraqi refugees for six months, when that’s nothing like cutting off legal immigrants or student visas, as has been done with this executive order, so it is comparing apples to oranges. Until Republicans really understand what’s going on and are concerned about it, it’s probably not going to change.

Reason: Donald Trump has said that he wants the new target of the total number of refugees in this country to be reduced from this year’s 110,000 to 50,000 going forward. The target for the 15 years prior to this year had been 70 or 80,000, and we are living at a time when the global refugee population has gone from around 10 and a half million to 16 plus in a very short period of time, three or four years. What is your sense of what this says about America’s traditional role as being the magnet for and great shock absorber for worldwide refugees?

Amash: Well I think culturally right now we are going through a period where we are sort of closing up a little bit. I mean, you have a lot of nationalism in sort of what brought Trump to power, and as a result you have a country right now that says, ‘Hey let’s close our borders, let’s close off trade, let’s really just look at our own people and not worry about being that shining beacon to the rest of the world.’

No one is calling for making the United States a part of some kind of global government. We don’t want the U.N. telling us what to do, we don’t want global government. But at the same time we have to be open to a conversation with the world, bringing people here, letting them see how great it is to have a free system, so that we can have a better world, so we can have better relations with other parts of the world. Everyone prospers when there is freedom across the world. We don’t want to do it militarily like George W. Bush did or like Obama did, but let’s make sure that we are open and willing to speak and converse with other countries.

Those first three minutes:

Every month climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville report global temperature trends based on satellite-based instruments that measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about eight kilometers above sea level. The based on th latest data, they report that while temperatures in the tropical atmosphere continued to drop in January as temperatures there moved closer to their long-term averages, the composite temperatures over both hemispheres bumped slightly warmer in January, especially in the higher latitudes.

Global Temperature Report: January 2017

Tropics cool in January; globe doesn’t

Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.12 C per decade

January temperatures (preliminary)

Global composite temp.: +0.30 C (about 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for January.

Northern Hemisphere: +0.27 C (about 0.49 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for January.

Southern Hemisphere: +0.33 C (about 0.59 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for January.

Tropics: +0.07 C (about 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for January.

The researchers add that in the Northern Hemisphere, pockets of warmer than normal air were especially pronounced over the eastern U.S., Canada and the North Atlantic. In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and a large area of southern ocean between South America and New Zealand were warmer than normal. the month of January, 2017.

No television network rolls the dice with more abandon than FX. Originally conceived as a way to wring a few last nickels out of Fox’s massive library of old action movies and television series, FX went rogue early the new millenium, offering up a steady stream of envelope-shredding programming that was as unhinged as it was excellent.

So when FX announced it was embracing television’s obsession with comic-book super heroes, you knew there’d be a catch. And Legion is a big one, in every sense of the word, a rollicking psychedelic trip of a show that washes over you like a vat of Ken Kesey Kool Aid. Splashy, free-associative and generally as nuts as its schizophrenic characters, Legion is as delirious and dazzling as television gets.

Legion is based oh-so-loosely on the Marvel Comics character David Haller, a minor character in the X-Men comic-book family, so tangential that Marvel’s studio gladly licensed him away rather than hanging on to him for one of its own films. Television critic Glenn Garvin evaluates Legion, and far less success new Fox series APB.

View this article.

The United States Border Patrol has a new chief, Ronald Vitiello, who has spent 30 years rising in the agency’s ranks. Vitiello was appointed with the full backing of his union, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which also vocally backed President Trump’s candidacy and which fiercely opposed the previous chief, Mark Morgan, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

Morgan had spent his career in the FBI and was thus considered an outsider to the rank and file of the Border Patrol. He had supported reforming the culture of the agency, including increased transparency, more vigorous investigations of misconduct, and stricter rules regarding the use of deadly force. Morgan had also gone public with his support of immigration reform, infuriating the agents under his command.

Yet even with a reform-minded chief at the helm, the internal agency board created to vigorously investigate numerous disturbing allegations of excessive force by Border Patrol agents absolved those agents of wrongdoing every time.

Shortly after Trump’s election, the NBPC executive board published an op-ed in Breitbart calling Morgan “a disgrace to the Border Patrol.” And last week, a day after Trump signed an executive order officially calling for the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall, Morgan was asked to resign from his leadership post.

NBPC union head Brandon Judd told the Associated Press last month that Morgan “didn’t know the job to begin with,” and said in a statement earlier this week, “The previous administration’s attempts to treat the Border Patrol like any law enforcement agency resulted in leadership that was reactive and in constant crisis.” When the union publicly backed Trump in March 2016, it released a statement justifying its first-ever presidential endorsement by arguing “if we do not secure our borders, American communities will continue to suffer at the hands of gangs, cartels and violent criminals preying on the innocent. The lives and security of the American people are at stake…”

The Border Patrol has jurisdiction over 8,000 miles of land and coastal areas, as well as any area within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders, where it operates about 170 checkpoints and conducts “dragnet, suspicionless stops that cannot be reconciled with Fourth Amendment protections,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Watch Reason TV’s classic video “Holding Border Patrol Accountable: Terry Bressi on Recording his 300+ Checkpoint Interactions” below.

An attorney with the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, told a federal judge in Virginia today that the government had revoked more than 100,000 visas, yielding gasps from courtroom observers, the Washington Post reports. Reuveni said he didn’t know how many visa-holders the government sent back to the seven “countries of concern” from which President Trump’s executive order of last Friday temporarily banned virtually all travel, but claimed all green card holders detained at airports around the country over the weekend had been allowed into the U.S.

Meanwhile, the State Department disputed those numbers. It said fewer than 60,000 visas were revoked per the executive order, the Associate Press reports. In 2016, the department issued 31,754 immigrant visas for nationals of the seven affected countries—Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. In 2015, it issued 72,162 nonimmigrant visas—numbers from 2016 are not available. A State Department spokesperson told the AP the attorney’s confusion came from including diplomatic visas (diplomatic travel has not been banned, so it’s unclear why the DOJ would include them, except for the entire process being dominated by chaos and a lack of clarity) and visas that had already expired prior to the order taking effect.

Nevertheless, both numbers are far higher than the 109 number cited by Press Secretary Sean Spicer, referring to those people immediately affected by the order because they were in transit when it was issued. “Three hundred and twenty-five thousand people flew into this country from airports and 109 people were affected and slowed down in their travel,” Spicer said. “I understand that is an inconvenience but at the end of the day that is a small price to pay as opposed to somebody losing their life because a terrorist attack was admitted.”

Two Yemeni brothers who said the government seized their visas, revoked their permanent resident status and sent them on a return flight to Ethiopia filed this particular suit where the DOJ attorney told the court more than 100,000 visas were revoked. The judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, said she’d never seen “so much public outpouring” as I’ve been in this case” before, according to the Post. “This order touched something in the United States that I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing.”

The government, the Post reports, is an attempting a “case by case reprieve” and has offered the brothers news visas in exchange for dropping their lawsuit. Customs and Border Patrol says it has granted 87 visa holder waivers and “recommended denial of boarding” to 87.

The State Department, meanwhile, is encouraging nationals of the seven banned countries who have begun the process of applying for an immigrant visa to continue to do so. It recommends applicants “continue to pay fees, complete your Form DS-260 immigrant visa application, and submit your financial and civil supporting documents,” although all interview appointments in February for applicants from the banned countries have been canceled. Nonimmigrant visa applicants, on the other hand, are recommended not to pay any visas at this time.

The whole fiasco surrounding the executive order, and especially the casual cruelty and heavy-handedness toward lawful permanent residents and legal visa-holders, reveals that, indeed, for some critics of immigration, the distinction between legal and illegal immigrant is not particularly important. The government’s approach to people holding legal documents permitting them to travel to or even live in the United States undermines the legal immigration system and discourages legal immigration more than any kind of relief for long-term illegal immigrants who otherwise abide the law could have. Moreover, it further engrains the idea that the government need not limit its actions to what is necessary or proper, nor even to pay lip service to the constitutional principle, as previous Republican presidents have often at least tried to do. Whatever else may be disrupted in the new administration, the decades long project of the government undermining basic principles of the rule of law will continue unabated, with a new set of cheerleaders.