Supreme Court Wipes out Travel Ban Appeal

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DOCUMENTATION: EMERGENCY RESOLUTION ON TRAVEL “MUSLIM BAN”

LIST OF ARTICLES – FOLLOWED BY FULL TEXT

Liptak, Adam (24 Oct. 2017). Supreme Court Wipes Out Travel Ban Appeal. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/supreme-court-travel-ban-appeal- trump.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article

Liptak, Adam. (4 Dec. 2017). Supreme Court Allows Trump Travel Ban to Take Effect. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-supreme-court.html?_r=0

Goldman, Adam, and Fandos, Nicholas (29 Nov. 2017). Lawmakers Confront F.B.I. Director Over Report on Black Extremists. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/fbi-black-identity-extremist-report.html

Rosenthal, Andrew. (19 Oct. 2017). Op. Ed. The F.B.I.’s Black Phantom Menace. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/columnists/fbi-blacks-civil-rights.html

Saleh, Maryam. (7 Dec. 2017). The Intercept. At https://theintercept.com/2017/12/07/trump-travel-ban-supreme-court-muslims- national-security/

Baker, Peter, and Sullivan, Eileen (29 Nov. 2017). Trump Shares Inflammatory Anti-Muslim Videos, and Britain’s Leader Condemns Them. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/trump-anti-muslim-videos-jayda-fransen.html Saul, Stephanie (2 Jan. 2018). As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/international-enrollment-drop.html?_r=0 Murphy, Michael J. (18 July 2017). Commentary. Growth of xenophobia in U.S. drives talent to other lands. At http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-opinion/article/Growth-of-xenophobia-in-U-S-drives-talent-to-11297857.php Llorente, Elizabeth (10 October 2017). FBI cites black extremists as new domestic terrorist threat. Fox News. At http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/10/fbi-cites-black-extremists-as-new-domestic-terrorist-threat.html

DeYoung, Karen, and Miroff, Nick. (21 Nov. 2017). Trump administration to end provisional residency protection for 60,000 Haitians. The Washington Post. At https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-to-end- provisional-residency-protection-for-50000-haitians/2017/11/20/fa3fdd86-ce4a-11e7-9d3a- bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.61d201320907

#13 Right-Wing Money Promotes Model Legislation to Restrict Free Speech on University Campuses. (4 October 2017). ProjectCensored. At http://projectcensored.org/13-right-wing-money-promotes-model-legislation-restrict-free-speech-university- campuses/

Is the U.S. Exporting Its Travel Ban with Thousand of TSA & DHS Agents in 70 Countries? (29 Dec. 2017). Democracy Now. At https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/29/is_the_us_exporting_its_travel

Media Focus on Muslims After Attack in NY Even as NYPD Says Islam Played No Role. (2 Nov. 2017). Democracy Now. At https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/2/trump_media_focus_on_muslims_after

Mullen, Jethro . (15 Dec. 2017). Trump to propose ending rule allowing spouses of H-1B holders to work in U.S. CNN Money. At http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/15/technology/h1b-visa-spouses-h4-trump/index.html

++++++++++++ DOCUMENTATION – FULL TEXT OF ARTICLES (AS LISTED ABOVE) Liptak, Adam (24 Oct. 2017). Supreme Court Wipes Out Travel Ban Appeal. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/supreme-court-travel-ban-appeal- trump.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article Supreme Court Wipes Out Travel Ban Appeal The Supreme Court dismissed on Tuesday the last remaining appeal in a pair of cases challenging President Trump’s executive order, issued in March, that sought to limit travel to the United States. The March order was replaced in September with broader restrictions, and they have already been blocked by federal district courts in Hawaiiand Maryland. Tuesday’s dismissal mostly amounted to judicial housekeeping, clearing out challenges to the March order as the justices await eventual appeals from the one issued in September.

In its brief, unsigned disposition, the court said the March order had expired, making the case moot. “We express no view on the merits,” the court said. But the Supreme Court did a little more than simply remove the case from its docket. It also vacated the decision under appeal, from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, meaning it cannot be used as a precedent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying that she would have simply dismissed the case and allowed the appeals court decision to remain on the books. The Ninth Circuit ruled in June that Mr. Trump had exceeded his statutory authority in limiting travel from six mostly Muslim countries and suspending the nation’s refugee program.

Erasing that precedent may have implications for the new challenge to the September order. Last week, in blocking the new order, Judge Derrick K. Watson, of the Federal District Court in Honolulu, relied heavily on the Ninth Circuit’s decision.

The September order, Judge Watson found, “plainly discriminates based on nationality in the manner that the Ninth Circuit has found antithetical to both” a federal immigration law and “the founding principles of this nation.” The administration may seek to revisit Judge Watson’s ruling now that the Ninth Circuit’s decision has been vacated.

In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from both the Ninth Circuit’s decision and one from the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. The Fourth Circuit had also ruled against the administration but on different grounds, saying that the March order violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in discriminating based on religion.

Over the summer, the two sides continued to tangle in court over what aspects of the March order could be enforced in the meantime. In its June order, the Supreme Court said that people with “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States” could continue to enter the country. In rulings issued in July and September, the justices upheld broad restrictions against refugees entering the United States but allowed grandparents and other relatives of American residents to travel here.

The administration’s issuance of the September order prompted the justices to cancel oral arguments in the two cases, which had been scheduled for Oct. 10, and to ask the parties for briefs on whether the cases were moot. The administration said they were, and it urged the court to vacate the appeals court decisions. The challengers asked the justices to hear the appeals and to leave the appeals court decisions in place if they decided to dismiss them.

On Oct. 10 — the day the arguments were to have been heard — the court dismissed the administration’s appeal from the Fourth Circuit’s ruling and vacated the appeals court’s decision. Justice Sotomayor dissented from that ruling, too, saying that she would have simply dismissed the case without wiping out the appeals court’s ruling.

The Supreme Court did not take immediate action on the Ninth Circuit’s decision on Oct. 10, presumably because the decision was broader, addressing both limits on travel from six nations and the refugee program. The September order concerned only travel restrictions, from a similar set of countries, and not the refugee program.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Liptak, Adam. (4 Dec. 2017). Supreme Court Allows Trump Travel Ban to Take Effect. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/politics/trump-travel-ban-supreme-court.html?_r=0 Supreme Court Allows Trump Travel Ban to Take Effect WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the third version of the Trump administration’s travel ban to go into effect while legal challenges against it continue. The decision was a victory for the administration after its mixed success before the court over the summer, when justices considered and eventually dismissed disputes over the second version.

The court’s brief, unsigned orders on Monday urged appeals courts to move swiftly to determine whether the latest ban was lawful. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the administration’s request to allow the latest ban to go into effect.

The court’s orders mean that the administration can fully enforce its new restrictions on travel from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim. For now, most citizens of Iran, Libya,

Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea will be barred from entering the United States, along with some groups of people from Venezuela.

The restrictions vary in their details, but in most cases, citizens of the countries will be unable to emigrate to the United States permanently and many will be barred from working, studying or vacationing here. Iran, for example, will still be able to send its citizens on student exchanges, though such visitors will be subject to enhanced screening. Somalis will no longer be allowed to emigrate to the United States, but may visit with extra screening.

The Supreme Court’s orders effectively overturned a compromise in place since June, when the court said travelers with connections to the United States could continue to travel here notwithstanding restrictions in an earlier version of the ban.

The orders gave no reasons for the court’s shift. The move did suggest that the administration’s chances of prevailing at the Supreme Court when the justices consider the lawfulness of the latest ban have markedly increased. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the order “a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people.” A spokesman for the White House, Hogan Gidley, said, “We are not surprised by today’s Supreme Court decision,” calling it “lawful and essential to protecting our homeland.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents people and groups challenging the ban, said it would continue to argue against the ban as challenges against it in lower appeals courts proceed. “President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret — he has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “It’s unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims.”

In a pair of filings in the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco said Mr. Trump had acted under his broad constitutional and statutory authority to control immigration when he issued a new proclamation in September announcing the new travel restrictions. Mr. Francisco wrote that the process leading to the proclamation was more deliberate than those that had led to earlier bans, issued in January and March. Those orders were temporary measures, he wrote, while the proclamation was the product of extensive study and deliberation.

Lawyers with the A.C.L.U. told the justices that little had changed. “The proclamation is the third order the president has signed this year banning more than 100 million individuals from Muslim- majority nations from coming to the United States,” they wrote.

In October, federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii blocked major parts of the latest ban while legal challenges proceed. “A nationality-based travel ban against eight nations consisting of over 150 million people is unprecedented,” wrote Judge Theodore D. Chuang of the Federal District Court in Maryland. Citing statements from Mr. Trump, some made as a presidential candidate and some more recent, Judge Chuang found that the new proclamation was tainted by religious animus and most likely violated the Constitution’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

Similarly, Judge Derrick K. Watson of the Federal District Court in Honolulu found that the September proclamation “suffers from precisely the same maladies as its predecessor,” adding that it “plainly discriminates based on nationality” in violation of federal law “and the founding principles of this nation.”

The administration has appealed both decisions to federal appeals courts in Seattle and Richmond, Va. Arguments in those appeals are scheduled for this week.

Judge Chuang limited his injunction to exclude people without “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” quoting from a Supreme Court order issued in Juneconcerning the second travel ban. Judge Watson did not impose such a limitation, but an appeals court modified his injunction, also quoting the Supreme Court’s language.

Lawyers for Hawaii, which is challenging the ban, told the justices that there was no reason to make changes now.

“Less than six months ago, this court considered and rejected a stay request indistinguishable from the one the government now presses,” they wrote. “But the justification for that dramatic relief has only weakened. In place of a temporary ban on entry, the president has imposed an indefinite one, deepening and prolonging the harms a stay would inflict.”

Mr. Francisco asked the justices to allow every part of the third ban to go into effect. The second version of the travel ban, he wrote, “involved temporary procedures before the review was conducted and in the absence of a presidential determination concerning the adequacy of foreign governments’ information-sharing and identity-management practices.”

“Now that the review has been completed and identified ongoing deficiencies in the information needed to assess nationals of particular countries,” he wrote, “additional restrictions are needed.

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Lawmakers Confront F.B.I. Director Over Report on Black Extremists

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress confronted Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, on Wednesday over an F.B.I. intelligence report that said that black extremists were targeting law enforcement because of police abuses in minority communities.

Mr. Wray met with the Congressional Black Caucus for about 90 minutes on Capitol Hill to discuss its members’ concerns about the report, which grouped together blacks who have espoused violent ideologies, some of whom went on to attack the police, under the term the “Black Identity Extremist” movement.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Wray struggled to defend the report’s analysis and could not identify a single black identity extremist group.

“He was asked to publicly clarify that there is no scintilla of evidence, as far as we can tell, to provide an example of the black identity extremist movement or any groups that fall in that category,” Mr. Jeffries said. “That clarification should be made publicly, it seems to many of us, and not privately behind closed doors.”

Mr. Jeffries said that Mr. Wray would consider the request.

In the report, the F.B.I.’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit said that violence directed at law enforcement increased after a grand jury did not indict a white police officer who fatally shot in 2014 Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, in Ferguson, Mo. Citing six attacks, the report said that those responsible committed assault over “perceived racism and injustice” and that some in the movement wanted to establish a sovereign, autonomous black homeland in the United States.

Elected leaders, legal experts and civil rights activists said that labeling a so-called movement as black identity extremists was ambiguous and meant to chill free speech. They said the bureau’s analysis, earlier reported by Foreign Policy, harked back to the F.B.I. spying illegally on blacks during the civil rights movement and other groups suspected of being subversive.

“The F.B.I. is linking disparate conduct and unconnected groups to come up with a manufactured black race-based ideology for suspicion and investigation,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’ve seen this kind of shoddy analysis and bias-based conclusions all too often, applied to African-Americans, Muslim-Americans, environmental activists and others.”

Ms. Shamsi added, “The F.B.I. has a critical role in protecting civil liberties, but it routinely undermines them by unjustifiably and unfairly targeting minorities and those who dissent.” This month, Representative Karen Bass, a Democrat who represents the Los Angeles area, questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the report during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “You should know that a lot of activists around the country are very concerned that we are getting ready to repeat a very sad chapter of our history,” she told Mr. Sessions. She said that activists were worried that they were targets of surveillance and labeled extremists simply for protesting.

Mr. Sessions said he had not read the report and declined to identify any black groups linked to police violence. Representative Terri A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama, who also serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Wray was respectful, answered all lawmakers’ questions and agreed to re-examine the report’s assumptions and underlying methodology. “I think he understood where we were coming from,” she said, adding that the Congressional Black Caucus wanted him to retract the report.

Mr. Wray also told the group that the Black Lives Matters movement was not under investigation, according to Ms. Bass, who also attended the meeting.

In the F.B.I. assessment, bureau analysts pointed to shootings in Louisiana and in Texas in July 2016 in which a total of eight police officers were killed. Gavin Long, identified by the authorities as the gunman who ambushed officers in Baton Rouge, had declared himself a Moor and had expressed frustration with the police and the justice system. Before the Dallas police killed Micah Johnson, he told the authorities he was upset about police shootings and white people. The F.B.I. report said he searched for and “liked” pages of black separatist groups on social media. Ms. Bass said members explained to Mr. Wray why those examples were flawed.

Another instance cited involved a black man wielding a hatchet who attacked four white police officers in 2014 in New York. The man, Zale H. Thompson, had advocated armed struggle and had tattoos that indicated he was affiliated with black separatist groups, according to the report. But the analysis did not include that Mr. Thompson had also watched Islamic State beheading videos and reviewed radical jihadist propaganda, making his intentions less clear.

In 2014, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, referring to the Islamic State, said that Mr. Thompson sought “inspiration from foreign terrorist sources like ISIL, but there is also evidence he was focused on black separatist ideology.” The F.B.I. has about 1,000 domestic terrorism cases open involving white supremacists, black separatists, militias, sovereign citizens, environmentalists, abortion and animal liberation activists and Puerto Rican nationalists.

In a statement, the F.B.I. said it “remains committed to protecting those rights for all Americans. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on individuals who commit violence and other criminal acts. Furthermore, the F.B.I. does not and will not police ideology.”

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Rosenthal, Andrew. (19 Oct. 2017). Op. Ed. The F.B.I.’s Black Phantom Menace. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/columnists/fbi-blacks-civil-rights.html The F.B.I.’s Black Phantom Menace When most Americans think of domestic terrorism, they probably think about the Oklahoma City bomber, white supremacists who wallow in Nazi nostalgia, racists who spray gunfire in black churches and lone-wolf psychopaths like the one who murdered at least 59 people in Las Vegas on Oct. 1.

Not the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It’s thinking outside that narrow box.

In a report that was never supposed to be made public, but was on Oct. 6 by foreignpolicy.org, the F.B.I.’s Counterterrorism Division has concluded that there is a real threat from the “black identity extremist” movement.

It said “Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” has been responsible for “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence” in the future.

Wait, what exactly is black identity extremism? The answer is: nothing.

It’s a fiction, as others have powerfully argued, including Andrew Cohen, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.

But that doesn’t make the report any less sinister. As Cohen pointed out, the F.B.I. has a “history of surveillance and intimidation of black Americans that frequently goes beyond legitimate law enforcement into paranoia, racism, and political expediency.”

The F.B.I. document takes pains to say that the mere exercise of constitutional rights to protest and even the “rhetorical embrace” of violent tactics “may not” constitute extremism. But the danger — or even the aim — is that the entire racial justice movement gets painted with the brush of terrorism.

The next time there is an act of violence by an African-American against police officers, brace yourself for the right-wing media or the attorney general or the tweeter in chief to seize on the phrase “black identity extremists.”

It has already happened. Fox News obligingly used videotape of Black Lives Matter protests as the backdrop for its credulous account of the report after it was published.

The report inevitably draws comparisons to the notorious Cointelpro operations against black activists in the last century. But it would be unfair to say the F.B.I. has not made any progress since J. Edgar Hoover ordered the agency to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” what he called “black nationalist hate-type organizations.”

The language of the new document is more cagey. But the sentiments are chilling.

The report “conflates black political activists with dangerous domestic terrorist organizations that pose actual threats to law enforcement,” the Congressional Black Caucus said in a letter asking for a meeting with the F.B.I.

“It relies on a handful of obviously terrible incidents to paint black Americans who exercise free speech against witnessed police brutality as possible violent extremists,” the letter said. (It was referring to six cases since 2014 in which the F.B.I. said the black identity menace was behind attacks on police officers, including the reprehensible shooting of 11 police officers, five of whom died, in Dallas on July 7, 2016.)

The F.B.I. draws a line from the killing by a police officer of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 to all those other cases and warns of a “surge” in ideologically motivated violence against the police.

The report also draws a line from the activists of the ’60s and ’70s to the “extremists” of today. The black threat, it said, had simply been dormant.

There is no such connection. The F.B.I. failed even to make any real connection among the six incidents it cited.

The authors of the report act as though there is doubt about the institutional racism in our country and in some police forces. (I am not saying all white police officers are racists.)

The F.B.I. document talked about “perceived injustices against African-Americans” — perceived by anyone who is really paying attention.

The counterterrorism division said it “considered” the possibility that violence against the police is not driven by their phantom B.I.E.s but decided that was “very unlikely.”

Fifty years ago, Hoover’s F.B.I. spied on civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. It forged letters to create friction between rival black-power movements, which led to a shooting at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1969 that left two dead. Undercover police officers were responsible for framing 21 Black Panthers for a fake bombing conspiracy in New York in 1969.

The list goes on and on.

There is a slippery slope between this kind of intelligence assessment and acts of repression. The F.B.I. has slid gleefully down that slope before. It must not be allowed to do so again.

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Saleh, Maryam. (7 Dec. 2017). The Intercept. At https://theintercept.com/2017/12/07/trump- travel-ban-supreme-court-muslims-national-security/ U.S. COURTS HAVE BEEN TREATING MUSLIMS DIFFERENTLY FOR A VERY LONG TIME MORE THAN 100 million citizens of eight countries are now banned, to varying degrees, from traveling to the United States, thanks to a minor procedural ruling from the Supreme Court on Monday. Legal scholars caution that the decision is not necessarily an indication of how the justices will rule on President Donald Trump’s travel ban should it come before them for a hearing on its merits, but it is nonetheless part of a long history of U.S. courts approving government policies of dubious constitutionality that disproportionately target Muslims as national security threats.

“What happened at the Supreme Court is not distinct,” said Khaled Beydoun, a professor at University of Detroit Mercy Law School and author of the forthcoming book “American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear.”

Justice, at the Supreme Court level, is not blind. “An Orientalist or Islamophobic baseline that ties Muslim identity to the presumption of a national security threat is something that’s informed American policy and U.S. court decisions specifically,” Beydoun said.

The third version of Trump’s travel ban – a September proclamation that targets citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen – was struck down by federal district courts and is currently before the 4th and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeal.

Courts have largely rejected the ban in its various iterations, although the milder language of the September proclamation makes it more likely to withstand legal scrutiny. The earlier versions of the ban followed promises by then-candidate Trump to stop all Muslim immigration to the United States, targeted only Muslim-majority countries, and initially favored religious minorities in those countries. In an apparent attempt at creating an appearance of diversity, Trump added North Korea and Venezuela to the third version of the ban. North Koreans are barred from traveling by their own government, and the ban on Venezuelans applies only to some elements of the ruling elite.

The post-9/11 era ushered in a series of controversial policies that disproportionately targeted Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, including secret proceedings and unlawful detention practices. All three branches of government played a role in creating and enforcing those policies.

“In truth, the courts have in the war on terror addressed a number of cases affecting Muslims — like in the national security, Guantánamo [Bay detention camp] context — but to the extent they’ve sided with Muslims, it’s only been on abstract, separation of powers grounds because of executive overreach, and there’s rarely been an acknowledgment that these individuals have substantive rights,” said Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has litigated cases related to government surveillance and the rights of Guantánamo detainees.

“These cases have largely been a battle between the president and the courts, and I don’t think the court is particularly sensitive to claims involving Muslims, just as they haven’t been particularly sensitive to claims involving the Japanese or Chinese immigrants,” Azmy added.

The Supreme Court’s decisions in the landmark Guantánamo-era cases of Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush affirmed that Guantánamo prisoners have the right to challenge their detention before U.S. courts and are entitled to the protections of the laws of war, including the Geneva Convention, as well as the U.S. Constitution.

But those cases dealt with an extreme set of facts, in which people were indefinitely detained without charge, and the courts have been less friendly in other cases involving national security. The Supreme Court, in fact, has repeatedly declined to hear cases on central issues related to the Cuba military base. And federal courts consistently upheld the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, a Bush-era program known as NSEERS that required male visitors from certain countries to register with the U.S. government and disproportionately targeted Arabs and Muslims. (The Obama administration discontinued the system in 2011 and rescinded its regulatory framework in December 2016.)

The Supreme Court this year reversed a federal appeals court decision that former high-level members of the Bush administration could be sued for their roles in the post-9/11 abuse of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men.

THE CONSTITUTION AFFORDS the executive branch broad authority in the areas of national security and immigration, which is why even liberal judges tend not to interfere with the president’s decision-making there. And for that reason, the Supreme Court may be inclined to uphold the constitutionality of the travel ban, said Sahar Aziz, a professor at Rutgers Law School whose scholarship examines the intersections of national security, race, and civil rights.

“The justices are not going to be concerned with this particular travel ban,” Aziz told The Intercept, adding that the bigger concern will be the long-term implications of striking it down. “What they’re thinking is, ‘If we restrain the executive here, how is this going to affect the executive’s powers in the future if there’s a national security crisis, when there are disputes as to how immigration law should be enforced?’”

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the travel ban would make it easier for Trump to implement a Muslim registry, a proposal he made during his presidential campaign, said Aziz, who wrote a paper analyzing the legal feasibility of such a policy.

“I think it will be difficult for challengers to a Muslim registry to show that Trump the president who issues three versions of a travel ban is any different from Trump the president who issues a Muslim registry, and if the courts accepted the travel ban as legal, then why shouldn’t they accept the Muslim registry as legal?” She added that the president would still face political and practical barriers even if the legal framework were in place.

Conversely, if the high court were to strike down the ban, Trump would face legal barriers to acting on the Muslim registry, a proposal he has not publicly spoken about since his election but that could hypothetically be modeled after NSEERS.

Over the last 16 years, U.S. immigration policy has been crafted principally through a national security lens with a particular focus on Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim, but this pattern actually goes back centuries.

“Muslim identity and Islam have always been viewed as a national security threat,” said Beydoun, who has studied the legal origins of Arab-American identity during the Naturalization Era — a period from 1790 to 1952 during which whiteness was a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship. Judges at the time considered “Arab” and “Muslim” to be synonymous, Beydoun wrote in a 2014 paper, and because Muslims were presumed to be nonwhite, Arabs were presumed ineligible for citizenship — although some Arab Christians successfully rebutted that presumption.

That’s not to say Muslim litigants have not scored any victories in their challenges to war on terror policies. Several federal district courts have ruled in favor of Muslims who were arbitrarily included in the government’s no-fly list, although some legal challenges to that list continue.

In the case of Hassan v. City of New York – a challenge to the post-9/11 NYPD surveillance of Muslims brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights – the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals compared the government’s infringement on Muslims’ constitutional rights to that which took place during Japanese internment, a policy that was upheld by the Supreme Court. The appellate court also drew a parallel between the stigmatic injury Muslims face as a result of government surveillance to that suffered by African-Americans during the “separate but equal” era of schooling.

“Our Nation’s history teaches the uncomfortable lesson that those not on discrimination’s receiving end can all too easily gloss over the ‘badge of inferiority’ inflicted by unequal treatment itself,” wrote Judge Thomas Ambro. “Closing our eyes to the real and ascertainable harms of discrimination inevitably leads to morning-after regret.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Baker, Peter, and Sullivan, Eileen (29 Nov. 2017). Trump Shares Inflammatory Anti-Muslim Videos, and Britain’s Leader Condemns Them. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/trump-anti-muslim-videos-jayda-fransen.html Trump Shares Inflammatory Anti-Muslim Videos, and Britain’s Leader Condemns Them

WASHINGTON — President Trump touched off another racially charged furor on Wednesday by sharing videos from a fringe British ultranationalist group purportedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence, a move that was swiftly condemned by Britain’s prime minister as well as politicians across the spectrum.

The videos Mr. Trump retweeted were titled: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” But the assailant in one of them was not a “Muslim migrant” and the other two showed four-year-old events with no explanation.

No modern American president has promoted inflammatory content of this sort from an extremist organization. Mr. Trump’s two most recent predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both made a point of avoiding public messages that were likely to be seen as anti-Muslim and could exacerbate racial and religious animosities, arguing that the war against terrorism was not a war against Islam.

But Mr. Trump has shown little such restraint, targeting Muslims with a broad brush, including when he claimed on the campaign trail last year that “Islam hates us” and when he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming to the United States. Since taking office, he has sought to block visitors from select Muslim-majority nations and engaged in a long-distance feud with the Muslim mayor of London, whom he branded weak on terrorism.

The messages came at a time when Mr. Trump has been lashing out at an array of perceived adversaries, including the National Football League, CNN, NBC and Democratic leaders. He referred to a senator as “Pocahontas” this week in front of Navajo veterans he was honoring. In a meandering speech in St. Charles, Mo., on Wednesday, Mr. Trump labeled North Korea’s leader a “sick puppy,” asserted that welfare recipients lived better than some people with jobs, noted that his wealthy friends “love their children” and insisted that he did not like some bankers even though he was making their job “easy for them.”

Mr. Trump’s unbridled talk of Muslim violence thrilled some conservative supporters who see him as a truthteller breaking from the shackles of political correctness, but it alarmed mainstream political leaders in the United States and Britain, who deemed it reckless and counterproductive.

Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who has broken with Mr. Trump, called the postings “highly inappropriate” and added, “I hope he takes them down and doesn’t do it again.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who lately has been an ally of the president, said Mr. Trump was “legitimizing religious bigotry” with the Twitter posts. “We need Muslim allies in the war on

terror,” he said. “I can only imagine how some of our Muslim allies must feel when the president gives legitimacy to it.”

The reaction was sharp in London, where Prime Minister Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative Party, denounced the president for sharing material posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, the ultranationalist group. “It is wrong for the president to have done this,” Mrs. May’s office said in a statement. “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.”

David Lammy, a Labour Party member of Parliament, echoed that on Twitter. “Trump sharing Britain First,” he wrote. “Let that sink in. The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours.”

Late in the day, Mr. Trump pushed back against the prime minister. “Theresa,” he wrote on Twitter, initially getting her handle wrong, “don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, defended the president’s tweets, saying he was talking about the need for national security and military spending. “The threat is real,” she told reporters. “The threat needs to be addressed. The threat has to be talked about, and that’s what the president is doing in bringing that up.”

Some activists on the right expressed appreciation for the blunt talk about the threat from Islamic extremists. “It’s a pretty major undercurrent for all of American politics since 2001, as it should be,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates less immigration. “That’s not news. He just expresses that stuff in the most unfiltered, guy-ranting-in-the-bar” way. The first video distributed by Mr. Trump to his nearly 44 million followers on Wednesday showed a teenage boy attacking another and was presented as footage of a “Muslim migrant” beating a Dutch boy.

But according to local officials, both boys are Dutch. The clip was taken in Monnickendam, a small town in the North Holland province of the Netherlands, in May and shows a teenager punching and kicking another boy holding a crutch. Marleen van Fessem, a spokeswoman for the local public prosecutor’s office, confirmed the 16-year-old boy who was arrested after the video came to light was “born and raised in the Netherlands.”

The Embassy of the Netherlands in Washington then chided Mr. Trump. “Facts do matter,” it replied to the president on Twitter. The two additional videos were taken in 2013, one in Syria, the other in Egypt, and are provided with no explanation of the political turmoil taking place in those countries at the time, and with no details on the extremist affiliations of one of the men in the video.

The president’s decision to share them was in keeping with his habit of disseminating information he has not verified even as he attacks news organizations for producing “fake news.” Two White House aides, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Trump found the videos himself. Aides said they believed he spotted one on the Twitter feed of Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator.

In an email later in the day, Ms. Coulter said that while she was still “annoyed” that Mr. Trump had not yet built the border wall he promised, “I LOVE the president’s tweets!” Responding to the British criticism, she said, “Maybe between blathering about the values of ‘tolerance and respect,’ poor Theresa May might want to ask herself whether the Muslims the U.K. is importing at breakneck speed share these ‘values of tolerance and respect.’”

Britain First was partly founded in 2011 by James Dowson, a far-right activist who left the group in 2014 and supported Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. The organization calls itself a “patriotic” political party, but has been criticized by human rights activists as an extremist group that seeks to bait Muslims.

Ms. Fransen, who has previously been charged in Britain with “religious aggravated harassment,” thanked Mr. Trump for promoting her message. “I’m facing prison for criticising Islam,” she wrote on Twitter. “Britain is now Sharia compliant. I need your help!”

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DONALD TRUMP, HAS RETWEETED THREE OF DEPUTY LEADER JAYDA FRANSEN'S TWITTER VIDEOS! DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA! OCS @JaydaBF@realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/BiQfQkTra9

— Jayda Fransen (@JaydaBF) Nov. 29, 2017 In the United States, Mr. Trump’s tweets were welcomed by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, who wrote on Twitter: “Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him. Trump retweets video of crippled white kid in Europe being beaten by migrants, and white people being thrown off a roof and then beaten to death, He's condemned for showing us what the fake news media WON'T. Thank God for Trump! That's why we love him! 9:33 AM - Nov 29, 2017

But they undercut efforts by Mr. Trump’s own administration to dispel the impression that he is anti- Muslim. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, had expressed hope that his success at building alliances with leaders from Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations in recent months had put that perception behind them, according to White House officials. James K. Glassman, who as under secretary of state under Mr. Bush was charged with promoting American ideals around the world, said Mr. Trump was “simply playing into the hands of terrorists.”

“New recruits are attracted not by some phony version of Islam,” he said, “but by adolescent fantasies of sado-masochism and power and by the idea of being part of a global conflict that’s transfixed and frightened the rest of the world. The president’s retweet just reinforces the narrative. Not good.” Craig M. Considine, a lecturer at Rice University and the author of several books on Muslims in the West, called the tweets an effort to stir up intolerance of Muslims in Western countries and build a case for driving them out. “He’s playing on this fear, whipping up the fear,” Mr. Considine said. “It is completely reckless.”

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Saul, Stephanie (2 Jan. 2018). As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting. The New York Times. At https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/international-enrollment-drop.html?_r=0

As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

At Wright State University in Ohio, the French horn and tuba professors are out. So is the accomplished swimming team.

At Kansas State, Italian classes are going the way of the Roman Empire.

And at the University of Central Missouri, The Muleskinner, the biweekly campus newspaper, is publishing online-only this year, saving $35,000 in printing costs. Just as many universities believed that the financial wreckage left by the 2008 recession was behind them, campuses across the country have been forced to make new rounds of cuts, this time brought on, in large part, by a loss of international students.

Schools in the Midwest have been particularly hard hit — many of them non-flagship public universities that had come to rely heavily on tuition from foreign students, who generally pay more than in-state students. The downturn follows a decade of explosive growth in foreign student enrollment, which now tops 1 million at United States colleges and educational training programs, and supplies $39 billion in revenue. International enrollment began to flatten in 2016, partly because of changing conditions abroad and the increasing lure of schools in Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

And since President Trump was elected, college administrators say, his rhetoric and more restrictive views on immigration have made the United States even less attractive to international students. The Trump administration is more closely scrutinizing visa applications, indefinitely banning travel from some countries and making it harder for foreign students to remain in the United States after graduation.

While government officials describe these as necessary national security measures, a number of American colleges have been casualties of the policies.

“As you lose those students, then the tuition revenue is negatively impacted as well,” said Michael Godard, the interim provost at the University of Central Missouri, where 944 international students were enrolled in the fall, a decline of more than 1,500 from the previous year. “We’ve had to make some decisions, budgetary decisions, to adjust.”

International students pay double the $6,445 tuition of Missouri residents, and the lost revenue amounts to $14 million, according to Roger Best, the chief operating officer for the school, in Warrensburg, Mo. Dr. Best said that the university has been forced to cut instructors in computer programs, where many of the foreign students were enrolled, as well as defer maintenance and shave money from other departments, such as the campus newspaper.

Nationwide, the number of new foreign students declined an average of 7 percent this past fall, according to preliminary figures from a survey of 500 colleges by the Institute of International Education. Nearly half of the campuses surveyed reported declines.

Now that the revenue stream appears to be diminishing, the financial outlook may be dire enough to weigh down the bond ratings of some schools, making it more expensive for them to borrow money, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Last month, Moody’s changed its credit outlookfor higher education to “negative” from “stable.”

“Growing uncertainty for international student enrollment stems from immigration policies that are in flux,” Moody’s said, warning that universities without global brand recognition would be hit hardest. While some flagship public and elite private colleges have been affected, the Institute of International Education said, the biggest impact will be felt by second-tier institutions.

The shift comes just as some states also are experiencing a drop in domestic students, partly the result of a decline in birthrates two decades ago. This year, the number of domestic undergraduate students dropped 224,000, or 1 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

An increasingly diverse population in that age group means that more of the students come from low-income families in which no one has ever gone to college, also presenting recruitment challenges for universities, according to Doug Shapiro, the organization’s executive research director. “Affordability issues are the biggest hurdles,” Mr. Shapiro said. “There’s only so much you can do with recruiting if the families can’t afford the tuition.”

Officials at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., reported an overall enrollment decline of more than 900 students, including 159 fewer international students. One official cited a “perfect demographic storm.” Budget cuts are underway.

Faced with a demand from the university that it trim its budget, faculty in the school’s modern languages department picked Italian as the language to cut, a decision that will save the university the salary of its only Italian professor, which one faculty member said was about $47,000. A final decision is still pending.

“This definitely undermines that idea of diversity many U.S. universities proclaim to promote across the country,” said Alessia Salamina, the professor whose job is in jeopardy. “This is in fact a national emergency, not only a K-State one.”

According to the institute’s survey, enrollment is falling from a broad range of countries, including China and India, the two biggest sources of students. Among countries covered by Mr. Trump’s travel ban, Iran is the largest, though it can still send students to the United States.

But many administrators believe the president’s views on immigration have made applying to United States colleges more of a gamble today. Officials said that other reasons for the decline in enrollment include increased competition from schools in other countries, cuts in scholarship programs in Saudi Arabia and Brazil, and a currency crisis in India caused when the government decided to swap widely used notes for new bills.

For years, American colleges had been staking their futures on continued growth in foreign students, and after the recession a decade ago, those students were a lifeline for colleges that had poured money into new buildings and amenities. In just the past six months, the University of Akron opened an international center in an existing building and hired 10 employees to work in international programming. The president, Matthew Wilson, said that students from India were reporting increased scrutiny of their visa applications, one of the reasons for a drop of about 200 international students.

Even a marketing campaign featuring Akron’s favorite son, LeBron James, who is wildly popular in China, hasn’t been enough to stave off declines.

But Mr. Wilson said he remained optimistic. “International isn’t something where I’m thinking this is going to result in budgetary cutbacks,” he said. “Some folks are scaling back. We’re actually scaling up.”

Akron is one of several public universities in Ohio reporting drops in enrollment, including of international students.

At Wright State, near Dayton, the cuts have been deep and broad. Moody’s has already downgraded Wright State three notches, citing among other factors a notable drop in international enrollment, nearly 800 students over two years.

Wright State has decided to eliminate Italian, Russian and Japanese, part of more than $30 million in budget cuts.

The swimming team will cease to exist this spring, even after five of its members recently competed at the U.S.A. Winter Nationals. The team’s elimination prompted at least two members to decide to leave the university, according to Trevor Keriazes, who specializes in the breaststroke.

Other cuts included the full-time French horn and tuba professors, both one year short of tenure protection.

The school had asked both to remain as adjunct professors with reduced pay. Instead, they landed other jobs, and adjuncts have taken their positions at Wright State.

“It was a contentious thing for a lot of people,” said Jonas F. Thoms, who had developed a vibrant French horn studio at Wright State, and recently joined West Virginia University. The trumpet and trombone still have full-time professors, but with the loss of the horn and tuba jobs, Mr. Thoms said, “they cut half of the brass faculty.”

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Murphy, Michael J. (18 July 2017). Commentary. Growth of xenophobia in U.S. drives talent to other lands. At http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-opinion/article/Growth-of-xenophobia-in-U-S-drives-talent-to-11297857.php Growth of xenophobia in U.S. drives talent to other lands My daughter was accepted at Rutgers and several other American universities. I am thinking of forbidding her to go." This was the incredible comment that began a conversation here in Hangzhou, China, where I teach a course in ethics in science each summer. My professional colleague here has one child. This is, of course, the norm in China and parents are in constant fear of something happening to their only son or daughter. Our conversation centering on the fear of "looking different" while in the United States in today's political and cultural climate was quite distressing. What have we become in America? The images in China from the BBC, CNN, CCTV (China Television), the internet, and the China Daily all paint a bleak picture of the dangers of being the "other" while on American soil. The reports illustrate in graphic detail the numerous accounts of verbal and physical harassment, deadly physical assault, and subtle and not-so-subtle racism and xenophobia. The recent horrific story of a white Starbucks customer calling a black man a "slave" was something I never thought I would hear in my lifetime. The multiple reports of the killings of unarmed black men are a national shame, as was the recent stabbing attack in Oregon of men attempting to protect two Muslim women. The statistical rise in hate crimes documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center is exponential and unprecedented in recent history. My campus, Zhejiang University of Technology, could easily be an American campus in its make-up. The difference is that the majority population is largely ethnic Chinese with a good representation of international students and faculty. Multiple languages, women in hijabs, men and women of color, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, atheists and others

are all are represented. The environment seems similar, yet my colleagues here in Hangzhou are deciding to send their children to Australia instead of the States or the UK. From their perspective, this is quite reasonable, as the U.S. data concerning the increases in hate crimes is alarming. There is a certain evolving, unbridled meanness and willingness to attack and assault those who look "different" or talk differently in the United States. It is clear from media reports and from data from the Southern Poverty Law Center that it does not matter to the aggressor whether a person is an "illegal" immigrant, a refugee, a legally visiting student or worker, or an American born here with a non-European (white) background. They are different; therefore, they are bad and unwanted. What incredible talent will we lose because of this rampant xenophobia? So, my last week of teaching, we held a discussion in my ethics class that was not planned. Do Americans still have a moral center? What is happening in the United States that may be a dangerous, pragmatic concern for a visitor? How can we develop strategies to keep talented visitors, students, and all peoples of permanent or temporary residence in the United States safe and flourishing? There are many, many good people in the States. However, it is the unfettered provoking and unleashing of the rabid, often ill-educated, racist and xenophobic that tarnishes our image abroad. That this provocation also comes from some in American leadership is not only a disgrace, but a danger to our national security and diplomacy and to our moral character. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Llorente, Elizabeth (10 October 2017). FBI cites black extremists as new domestic terrorist threat. Fox News. At http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/10/fbi-cites-black-extremists-as-new-domestic-terrorist- threat.html

FBI cites black extremists as new domestic terrorist threat The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., has spawned a violent domestic threat from “black identity extremists” who have stepped up attacks on police, according to an explosive new report by the FBI’s counterterrorism division. The warning, first reported by Foreign Policy magazine, says that “it is very likely BIEs proactively target police and openly identify and justify their actions with social-political agendas commensurate with their perceived injustices against African Americans ...” Brown, an African-American 18-year-old, was shot in August 2014 after struggling with white police officer Darren Wilson. Although Brown's supporters claimed it was a deadly case of police brutality, Wilson was cleared of wrongdoing and resigned in November 2014. Police officials said that Wilson stopped Brown after getting a call about a robbery at a convenience store in which the clerk was strong-armed after the suspect – with whom Brown was a match -- attempted to leave. Wilson and Brown got into a scuffle as Brown reportedly reached for the police officer’s gun, and Wilson then gave chase, shooting him. Brown's family said he had his hands up when he was shot, police said it was untrue. The shooting led to protests in Ferguson that then spread to other parts of the country. It gained added momentum after subsequent racially charged police shootings, spurred on via social media and the group Black Lives Matter. The FBI report said that the agency previously had analyzed the potential for violence of black identity extremism, a term that was unfamiliar before it appeared in the document. What has changed, according to the report, is that violence has now actually occurred and is 'likely" to continue. “It is very likely that BIEs’ perceptions of unjust treatment of African-Americans and the perceived unchallenged illegitimate actions of law enforcement will inspire premeditated attacks against law enforcement over the next year,” the report said. “It is very likely additional controversial police shootings of African-Americans and the associated legal proceedings will continue to serve as drivers for violence against law enforcement.” Attacks in which police officers are targeted have been on the rise in recent years. The most high- profile such incident occurred last year in Dallas, when a gunman named Micah Johnson hid in a parking garage and fired on 11 police officers, killing five of them, during a protest against officer-involved shootings. The FBI report noted that Johnson referred to anger over police shootings and toward whites as what drove him to kill the five police officers. The FBI report drew accusations of racial profiling. DeRay Mckesson of Black Lives Matter told The Guardian the terrorism report echoes the days when the FBI tracked activist groups including the NAACP and those that opposed wars.

“We knew that we were likely being watched,” said Mckesson, a longtime critic of government monitoriing of protest groups. “This is confirmation that the work of social justice continues to threaten those in power.” The Guardian also quoted an unnamed source it described only as a former senior official from the Department of Homeland Security saying that the category "black identity extremist" was troubling. "This is a new umbrella designation that has no basis," the source is quoted as saying. "There are civil rights and privacy issues all over this." But others say that the FBI is correctly sounding an alarm about a serious trend. "It's not racial profiling, it's violence profiling," Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank, told Fox News. "Identity politics can kill, whether it's white identity politics, which killed in Charlottesville, or black identity politics, which kills cops." "We have to be able to distinguish between free speech and violence," Walter said. "[Many] longtime [black] activist groups were not obsessed with violence." Randy Sutton, a former Las Vegas law enforcement official who now is the national spokesman for Blue Lives Matter, told Fox News that the FBI report makes official what he and others in police work have been observing in recent years. "Nobody is saying anything negative about protests," Sutton said, "Protesting is everyone's right. This is about committing acts of violence. Many Black Lives Matter protests call for violence against police, with chants like 'What do we want?' and 'Dead cops!' It's terrorism, and it's no different than Islamic terrorism." Sutton said the rising number of ambush attacks on police has had a chilling effect on how they do their jobs. "Police are not being as aggressive because of the political climate," he said. "There's been a dramatic decrease in proactive policing." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DeYoung, Karen, and Miroff, Nick. (21 Nov. 2017). Trump administration to end provisional residency protection for 60,000 Haitians. The Washington Post. At https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-to-end- provisional-residency-protection-for-50000-haitians/2017/11/20/fa3fdd86-ce4a-11e7-9d3a- bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.61d201320907 Trump administration to end provisional residency protection for 60,000 Haitians The Trump administration has given nearly 60,000 Haitians with provisional legal residency in the United States 18 months to leave, announcing Monday that it will not renew the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that has allowed them to remain in this country for more than seven years.The decision came after the Department of Homeland Security determined that the “extraordinary conditions” justifying their presence in the United States following a 2010 earthquake “no longer exist,” a senior administration official said. “Since the 2010 earthquake, the number of displaced people in Haiti has decreased by 97 percent,” acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke said in a statement. “Significant steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens, and Haiti is able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens.” The 18-month deadline, Duke said, will allow for an “orderly transition,” permitting the Haitians to “arrange their departure” and their government to prepare for their arrival. The Haitians are among more than 300,000 foreigners, the majority of them illegal arrivals from Central America, living here under TPS. The designation was created in 1990 to shield foreign nationals from deportation if the executive branch determined that natural disasters or armed conflict in their countries had created instability or precarious conditions. Successive administrations have regularly renewed their status, and many of the Haitians have U.S.-born children. But the Trump administration has repeatedly noted that the program was meant to be temporary, not a way for people to become long-term legal residents of the United States. Administration officials have said that decisions about further extensions will be made on the basis of whether initial justifications for protection still exist. Monday’s announcement comports with a broader administration effort to restrict immigration to the United States and increase efforts to expel those who have no permanent legal status. Earlier this month, the administration announced that it would not renew the provisional residency of 2,500 Nicaraguans. They were given 14 months to leave the United States.

But Duke deferred for six months a decision for the much larger group of 57,000 Hondurans living here under the same designation, saying that more time was needed for consideration. The deferral came after an unsuccessful White House effort to press her to end their TPS authorization, officials said at the time. Nicaraguans and Hondurans have been shielded from deportation since a devastating 1998 hurricane hit those nations. TPS status for 200,000 Salvadorans, here since El Salvador was struck by earthquakes in 2001, is due to expire in January. They are by far the largest group of TPS recipients. More than half the Haitians affected by Monday’s announcement live in Florida, where lawmakers had asked that they be allowed to remain. The lawmakers cited ongoing economic and political difficulties in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, as well as a still-raging cholera epidemic. “I traveled to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 and after hurricane Matthew in 2016. So I can personally attest that Haiti is not prepared to take back nearly 60,000 TPS recipients under these difficult and harsh conditions,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), one of several GOP lawmakers who joined Democratic leaders in chastising the decision on Twitter. Ros-Lehtinen is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would extend TPS for Haitians and others. Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was less reserved in his criticism of the decision. “Donald Trump’s cruelty knows no bounds,” he said in a statement. “He’s taken away protections for immigrant children and their parents, and now he’s going after U.S. residents whose home countries have been devastated by war and environmental disaster.” Rocio Saenz, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which claims thousands of members living in the United States under TPS, called the decision “heartbreaking, and harmful in every way.” TPS holders, who include a relatively small number of Africans in addition to Central Americans and Haitians, “have more than 270,000 U.S.-born children,” she said in a statement, “and thousands of grandchildren. After all of this time, no conceivable purpose is served by upending all of that and ordering them to return to some of the most dangerous and precarious countries on earth.” But the senior official, one of several who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity set by the administration, said that “the law is relatively explicit, that if the conditions on the ground do not support a TPS designation, then the secretary must terminate.” Duke had “assessed overall that extraordinary temporary conditions” that justified the designation in the first place “had sufficiently improved such that they no longer prevent nationals of Haiti from returning,” the official said. As the Haitian status was due to expire this past spring, then-DHS Secretary John F. Kelly extended it for six months but said that conditions may not warrant further extension. Kelly, now the White House chief of staff, visited Haiti shortly after that initial announcement and later joined Vice President Pence for a meeting in Miami with Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Duke, in her statement, said that she met recently in Washington with Haiti’s foreign minister and the Haitian ambassador to the United States and consulted other U.S. government agencies. “In 2017 alone,” Duke said, “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted extensive outreach to the Haitian communities throughout the country.” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) hosted a meeting last week with Duke to which all members of the state’s congressional delegation were invited. Days before the decisions about Nicaraguan and Honduran were announced, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson informed Duke that the State Department assessed that TPS was no longer necessary for the Central Americans or the Haitians. The senior official who briefed reporters said that the 18-month “wind-down” period for the Haitians was enough time “to allow families with U.S.-born children to make decisions about what to do, and make arrangements.” Some immigration experts have speculated that many Haitians are likely to seek residency in Canada, particularly in French-speaking Quebec, to avoid being sent home. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ #13 Right-Wing Money Promotes Model Legislation to Restrict Free Speech on University Campuses. (4 October 2017). ProjectCensored. At http://projectcensored.org/13-right-wing- money-promotes-model-legislation-restrict-free-speech-university-campuses/

#13 Right-Wing Money Promotes Model Legislation to Restrict Free Speech on University Campuses Right-wing conservatives are using money and power to influence public policy to suppress student dissent on US college and university campuses. The right-wing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservatives including Charles Koch and the Mercer family, has proposed model legislation that seeks to quell student dissent in favor of guest speakers who attempt to discredit climate change, oppose LGBTQ rights, and espouse hate speech, Alex Kotch reported for AlterNet in March 2017.

The stated intent of the Goldwater Institute’s proposed “Campus Free Speech Act” is to “uphold free-speech principles” and to ensure “the fullest degree . . . of free expression”—but, Kotch reported, the model legislation does not consider protest or dissent to be free speech. In fact, the model legislation stated that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon on the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.” Students found to have infringed on the expressive rights of others more than one time would be “suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled,” according to the model legislation.

UnKoch My Campus is a campaign that seeks to “expose and expel undue donor influence” from institutions of higher education.62 Kotch’s AlterNet article quoted Ralph Wilson, a senior researcher with UnKoch My Campus: “These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe.”

The Goldwater Institute’s “Campus Free Speech Act” has been adapted in proposed legislation in many states. For example, states including Illinois, North Dakota, Virginia, and Tennessee have proposed bills that crack down on free speech with some elements of the model legislation. Additional states, including Colorado, Florida, and Utah, are also proposing so-called “campus free speech” bills.

The text of the proposed legislation was written by Stanley Kurtz, James Manley, and Jonathan Butcher. Kurtz is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank that applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” The Ethics and Public Policy Center, Kotch reported, has received “millions of dollars in donations” from the foundations of conservative families, as well as “hundreds of thousands” from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which serve as vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors. Between 2006 and 2015, the two groups received more than $9 million in contributions from Charles and David Koch. The Goldwater Institute’s senior attorney, Manley, previously worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which also received significant donations from the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Butcher, the Institute’s education director, worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation—which has been heavily funded by the Kochs—from 2002 to 2006.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Is the U.S. Exporting Its Travel Ban with Thousand of TSA & DHS Agents in 70 Countries? (29 Dec. 2017). Democracy Now. At https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/29/is_the_us_exporting_its_travel

Is the U.S. Exporting Its Travel Ban with Thousands of TSA & DHS Agents in 70 Countries? A New York Times investigation has revealed how the Department of Homeland Security is increasingly going global, with thousands of agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration stationed in more than 70 countries around the world. Hundreds more DHS workers are deployed at sea on Coast Guard ships or in the skies on surveillance planes. Stationing ICE overseas is reportedly about four times as expensive as a domestic post. Now some countries are accusing DHS of attempting to export the United States’ restrictive immigration laws, with one German politician saying DHS’s interrogations and detentions at foreign airports constitute an extrajudicial travel ban. We speak with Ron Nixon, The New York Times’s homeland security correspondent who broke the story, “Homeland Security Goes Abroad. Not Everyone Is Grateful.” Full Transcript of Show at https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/29/is_the_us_exporting_its_travel +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Media Focus on Muslims After Attack in NY Even as NYPD Says Islam Played No Role. (2 Nov. 2017). Democracy Now. At https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/2/trump_media_focus_on_muslims_after Trump & Media Focus on Muslims After Attack in NYC, Even as NYPD Says Islam Played No Role We look at how the treatment of Muslims and how the phrase “Allahu akbar” is used in the media after so-called terror attacks, like the one in New York City, with Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates.

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Since 2015, the spouses of H-1B, or high-skilled, visa holders waiting for green cards have been eligible to work in the U.S. on H-4 dependent visas, under a rule introduced by

President Obama's administration. The tech sector is a major employer of H-1B visa holders, a category of visas for highly skilled jobs.

But in a statement Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said it intends to do away with that rule.

The department didn't explain its reasons in the announcement, saying only it was acting

"in light of" the "Buy American, Hire American" executive order that President Trump signed in

April. The formal process to rescind the rule will still need to be initiated at a later date.

While changing the rule wouldn't prevent spouses of H-1B holders from pursuing other avenues for work authorization, it could deter a number of high-skilled immigrants from staying in the U.S. if their spouses can't easily find work.

The order also called for the H-1B visa program for skilled workers to be reviewed with the aim of reforming it. As well as dropping the rule allowing spouses to work, the Department of Homeland

Security statement mentioned plans for other changes to the H-1B visa program. They include revising the definition of what occupations are eligible for the program "to increase focus on truly obtaining the best and brightest foreign nationals." That would be a standard potentially far above what is currently understood under the law.

The Obama-era rule allowing spouses to work already faces a legal challenge. A group called

Save Jobs USA filed a lawsuit in April 2015 arguing that it threatens American jobs.

It has continued to press the case following Trump's election, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said in the past that the H-4 rule "hurts American workers."

The Trump administration's plans to overhaul the H-1B program has caused particular alarm in

India, which accounts for 70% of all H-1B workers.

Related: Trump administration toughens H-1B visa renewal process

The H-1B is a common visa route for highly skilled foreigners to find work at companies in the

U.S. It's valid for three years, and can be renewed for another three years.

It's a program that's particularly popular in the tech community, with many engineers vying for one of the program's 85,000 visas each year.

In October, the government said it was toughening up the process for renewing the visa. The U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services instructed its officers to review requests for renewal as thoroughly as they would initial visa applications.

-- Tal Kopan contributed to this report.