Chris Hedges's Blog, page 563

Why It’s So Hard to Catch—or Even Count—Fake Immigration Lawyers

Christopher Bailey needed to hire an immigration lawyer – but he didn’t have the luxury of comparison shopping.

The Jamaican-born cook was in immigration detention after overstaying his tourist visa, and he wanted to fight to stay with his family in the United States. While Bailey was locked up, his mother paid $8,000 to George Cameron, a man she knew had taken immigration cases for folks in Philadelphia’s Jamaican community.

Cameron helped Bailey get out of detention, and represented him in his first hearing before an immigration judge. After that hearing, Cameron told Bailey not to return to court.

Cameron promised he’d handle Bailey’s case without him. Bailey decided to take his attorney’s advice. His court date came, and he stayed home.

“You have a lawyer, you’re supposed to trust your lawyer, right?” he said.

What Bailey didn’t know, and what a federal jury heard at a trial earlier this year, was that Cameron also failed to show for the hearing. Bailey was ordered deported in absentia; he got his deportation notice in the mail and, he said, he never saw Cameron again.

Last year, Bailey’s mother sent him a news story that explained it: Cameron wasn’t a lawyer after all.

For at least 25 years, Cameron had solicited clients and argued before immigration judges in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. But he had no law license, nor had he completed law school. In his firm, “Cameron, Cameron and Associates,” he had no associates. And the three Philadelphia-area offices he advertised were, in fact, his home, his girlfriend’s home, and a post office downtown.

Worse, Cameron had been convicted twice in Pennsylvania for pretending to be a lawyer. But he kept taking clients like Bailey anyway, until federal authorities raided his home in March 2015. In February, he was convicted yet again, after jurors heard tape of Cameron stumbling through immigration hearings and, in Bailey’s case, failing to appear. At his sentencing scheduled for July, he faces decades in federal prison.

But Bailey, whose tale of misfortune helped convict Cameron, said investigators never contacted him directly. As soon as he heard the charges against Cameron, he wanted to make a report. But, he said, “I don’t know where to go to start the complaint.”

Bailey is still in the country, working two jobs to raise money to pay a new lawyer to reopen his case.  Recouping the $8,000 his mother paid Cameron would help, but he has no idea how to make that happen.

“Everything comes down on me,” he said. “I want to open up my case. But I can’t because of money issues.”

Fraud in immigration law is an old problem, and the fight to stop it is decades old, too. Bailey’s case illustrates one of the greatest challenges: Fraud victims just don’t know where to report the crime. That makes it hard to catch fraudsters, and hard to track the scope of the problem.

“Lawyers and community organizations have known about this issue – notario scams and immigration fraud – for a very long time,” said Prof. Juan Manuel Pedroza, who teaches sociology at University of California at Santa Cruz. “The issue was: Is there way we can figure out where it’s happening and where the prevalence is really high? We’re not there yet.”

Pedroza recently completed his doctoral work at Stanford University, and his dissertation explored the huge variance in the distribution of immigration law fraud complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. Since 2011, the agency has maintained a category for tips about immigration law fraud. Pedroza filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all 2,300 complaints from 2011 to 2014, then looked for trends in the geographical distribution.

One takeaway from his research: Counties with stronger support networks for immigrants produced more legal fraud complaints to the FTC.

That doesn’t mean there’s more fraud in those places, Pedroza said. Across the country, there are far more people being defrauded than people filing a complaint – as Bailey’s case illustrates. In places with strong support networks, immigrants are more likely to know how to make a complaint, and more willing to trust the government to handle their case.

“The sense that you can go to a protective arm of the government, and your information won’t get shared” with immigration authorities, Pedroza said, “that sell is easier in San Francisco, Colorado or Los Angeles.”

Pedroza singled out two counties where the opposite is true: Madera County, California, and Cameron County, Texas both have large immigrant populations but sent almost no fraud complaints to the FTC.

Anne Schaufele, an attorney with Project END at the Washington-based nonprofit Ayuda, helps victims file fraud reports to the FTC as well as with local agencies. Police and local prosecutors usually are more willing to take action on the most common complaints. Federal prosecutors, she said, are focused on long-running, multi-state operations like Cameron’s fraudulent law practice.

“They’re looking for big cases,” Schaufele said. “A lot of notario fraud happens small-scale, so we see the same actor harming the community over lots of years.”

She said that coming forward to report fraud, like other crime, comes with extra risks in the Trump era. ICE has access to the FTC’s complaint database, she said, so she advises people not to include personal information if they’re at risk for deportation.

In the past, Department of Homeland Security officials told ICE agents and prosecutors to weigh a person’s “status as a victim, witness or plaintiff in civil or criminal proceedings” when deciding who to pursue. Under President Donald Trump, though, everyone eligible for deportation is fair game.

That’s a big risk to take when the odds of catching the fraudster, let alone recouping the money you paid, are so long.

“A lot of databases feel like black holes in practice,” Schaufele said, “because you see so little enforcement around these issues.”

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

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Ex-Senate Aide Charged With Lying About Contacts With Reporters

WASHINGTON—A former employee of the Senate intelligence committee has been arrested on charges of lying to the FBI about contacts he had with multiple reporters, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

James A. Wolfe, the longtime director of security for the committee — one of multiple congressional panels investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign — was indicted on three false statement counts after prosecutors say he misled agents about his relationships with reporters.

Though Wolfe is not charged with disclosing classified information, prosecutors say he was in regular contact with multiple journalists who covered the committee, including meeting them at restaurants, in bars, private residences and in a Senate office building. He also maintained a yearslong personal relationship with one reporter, which prosecutors say he lied about until being confronted with a photograph of him and the journalist.

Wolfe, 58, of Ellicott City, Maryland, is due in court Friday. It wasn’t immediately clear if he had a lawyer.

Each false statement count is punishable by up to five years in prison, though if convicted, Wolfe would almost certainly face only a fraction of that time.

The criminal case arises from a December 2017 FBI interview with Wolfe in which he denied having relationships with journalists or discussing committee business with them. At one point, he was presented with a news article containing classified information and was asked, in a written questionnaire, if he had had contact with any of the piece’s three authors. He checked “no” even though records obtained by the government show that he had been in communication with one of them.

In a separate instance, after one journalist published a story about a witness who’d been subpoenaed to appear before the committee, Wolfe wrote to say, “Good job!” and “I’m glad you got the scoop.”

The indictment was announced soon after The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records and emails of one of its journalists, Ali Watkins, as part of the same leak investigation involving Wolfe. The newspaper said Watkins was approached by the FBI about a three-year relationship she had had with Wolfe when she worked at other publications. The newspaper also said that Watkins said that Wolfe was not a source of classified information for her during their relationship.

In a statement Thursday night, Watkins’ attorney, Mark MacDougall, said: “It’s always disconcerting when a journalist’s telephone records are obtained by the Justice Department — through a grand jury subpoena or other legal process. Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the investigation and the scope of any charges.”

The prosecution comes amid a Trump administration crackdown on leaks of classified information. President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have decried such disclosures, with Sessions saying in August that the number of leak of criminal leak probes had more than tripled in the early months of the Trump administration.

“The Attorney General has stated that investigations and prosecutions of unauthorized disclosure of controlled information are a priority of the Department of Justice. The allegations in this indictment are doubly troubling as the false statements concern the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and confidential information,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in a statement.

The Obama administration had its own repeated tangles with journalists, including secretly subpoenaing phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors during a 2012 leak investigation into a story about a bomb plot. The Justice Department amended its media guidelines in 2015 to make it more difficult for prosecutors to subpoena journalists for their sources, though officials in the last year have said they are reviewing those policies.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and the top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Mark Warner, said in a joint statement that they were troubled by the charges. Wolfe had worked for the committee for roughly 30 years, and his position as security director meant that he had access to classified information provided to the panel by the executive branch.

“While the charges do not appear to include anything related to the mishandling of classified information, the committee takes this matter extremely seriously,” the senators said. “We were made aware of the investigation late last year, and have fully cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice since then.”

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Associated Press writers Chad Day and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Detention Centers Fill Up; Border Detainees Sent to Prisons

SEATTLE—More than 1,600 people arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border, including parents who have been separated from their children, are being transferred to federal prisons, U.S. immigration authorities confirmed Thursday. They said they’re running out of room at their own facilities amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

The move drew condemnation from activists who said the detainees may have legitimate claims to asylum and don’t deserve to be held in federal prisons.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson issued a letter Thursday night seeking more information from the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after learning that ICE had transferred dozens of mothers who had been separated from their children to the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac.

“The Trump Administration’s new family separation policy is inflicting intentional, gratuitous, and permanent trauma on young children who have done nothing wrong and on parents who often have valid claims for refugee or asylum status,” they wrote.

Historically, immigrants without serious criminal records were released from custody while they pursued asylum or refugee status. The Trump administration has ended that policy.

In an emailed statement, ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said that due to a surge in illegal border crossings and the Justice Department’s “zero-tolerance” policy — designed to discourage illegal border crossings — the agency needed to acquire access to more than 1,600 beds in Bureau of Prisons Facilities. The agency said those include 1,000 beds in Victorville, California; 209 beds in SeaTac; 230 beds in La Tuna, Texas; 230 beds in Sheridan, Oregon; and 102 beds in Phoenix.

“The use of BOP facilities is intended to be a temporary measure until ICE can obtain additional long-term contracts for new detention facilities or until the surge in illegal border crossings subsides,” the statement said.

The letter from Inslee and Ferguson followed a report from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project earlier Thursday that as many as 120 asylum seekers had been transferred to the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac.

The organization said that on Wednesday it spoke with two of the women, who arrived at the southern border with their young daughters in mid-May seeking asylum. Both were separated from their children shortly after they were apprehended by Border Patrol. Instead of being returned to their children after being sentenced to time served for the misdemeanor of unlawful entry, they were transferred to Washington state while they seek asylum, the organization said.

“There is simply no moral or legal justification for separating children from their parents in this draconian effort seeking to deter other immigrants,” Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said in a written statement. “This is not only unlawful, but also contrary to basic human decency.”

Inslee and Ferguson said they wanted more information about when the women would be released and when they can expect to see their children again, as well as where the children are and who is caring for them

The American Civil Liberties Union is seeking a court injunction to stop immigration authorities from separating parents from their young children.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in California ruled that a case involving two mothers could go forward, saying that if the policy was being carried out as described in the lawsuit, it is “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.” The judge said he would issue a separate ruling on whether to expand the lawsuit to apply to all parents and children who are split up by border authorities.

Adult Film Industry Slams Giuliani for Saying Stormy Daniels Isn’t Credible

LOS ANGELES — President Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said Stormy Daniels’ claim she had sex with Trump in 2006 isn’t credible because she’s a porn actress with “no reputation,” quickly drawing condemnation from members of the legal sex industry.

“I’m sorry I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation,” Giuliani said Wednesday at a conference in Tel Aviv.

Daniels’ work as an adult film actress “entitles you to no degree of giving your credibility any weight,” he said, adding that people could “just look” at Daniels to know she wasn’t believable.

“Excuse me, but when you look at Stormy Daniels …” Giuliani said, prompting the moderator to interject and tell him that he must respect women while speaking at the “Globes” Capital Market conference.

The adult film industry took the former New York City mayor to task Thursday, saying his comments demean women in general and were aimed solely at discrediting Daniels because of how she makes a living and not based on the facts of the case.

“The fact of the matter is the average person in the adult film industry is generally no more or less honest than any other person in society, and in the case of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, probably quite a bit more honest,” said Mark Kernes, senior editor of Adult Video News, the industry’s trade publication, and a longtime friend of Daniels’.

Jackie Martin, a spokeswoman for Vivid Entertainment, one of the industry’s largest porn producers, said Giuliani’s comments were “offensive and outlandish.”

“Many talented women of substance have chosen to make their careers in the adult industry,” she said.

Other advocates for legal sex-related industries bemoaned Giuliani’s comments as trying to silence the voices of women who face exploitation.

“It’s incredibly dangerous to attach the worth of a person to their sexual behavior,” said Christa B. Daring, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project.

“Frequently, appearance is weaponized against women in our society, whether that be because they’re too pretty or they’re too heavy,” Daring said.

Giuliani’s comments also drew a heated response from Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, who called for Trump to immediately fire Giuliani.

Daniels has said she had sex with a married Trump in 2006. She is fighting to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she signed days before the 2016 election.

Trump has denied Daniels’ allegations that they had sex just months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son.

Trump has appeared in benign roles in at least three soft-core porn films in the 1990s and early 2000s.

BuzzFeed and CNN reported in 2016 that in one of the videos, Trump appears backstage at a fashion show with two Playboy Playmates and the future first lady. In another, he pops open a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo and the third shows him photographing clothed models and interviewing a Playboy Playmate.

Photos in which Melania Trump, a former model, had posed nude surfaced during the 2016 campaign. They were taken in the 1990s for the now-defunct French magazine Max. She also posed naked and lying on a fur blanket for British GQ in 2000.

Giuliani said the first lady doesn’t believe Daniels’ claim.

But Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s spokeswoman, said Thursday: “I don’t believe Mrs. Trump has ever discussed her thoughts on anything with Mr. Giuliani.”

Giuliani said the $130,000 that Daniels was paid as part of the nondisclosure agreement was “like a nuisance thing.” If her claims could be proven, she would have been paid millions of dollars, he said.

Avenatti fired back on Twitter, calling Giuliani a “misogynist.” He said Daniels “should be celebrated for her courage, strength and intelligence” and that he “would be put her character up against Mr. Giuliani’s any day of the week.”

Giuliani declined to comment further Thursday when reached by The Associated Press.

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Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington, Alexandra Villarreal in Philadelphia and John Rogers in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Trump: Summit With Kim Is About Attitude, Not Preparation

WASHINGTON — Heading into his North Korea summit with characteristic bravado, President Donald Trump said Thursday that “attitude” is more important than preparation as he looks to negotiate an accord with Kim Jong Un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

Preparing to depart Washington for next week’s meeting, Trump dangled before Kim visions of normalized relations with the United States, economic investment and even a White House visit. Characterizing the upcoming talks with the third-generation autocrat as a “friendly negotiation,” Trump said, “I really believe that Kim Jong Un wants to do something.”

Trump’s comments came as he looked to reassure allies that he won’t give away the store in pursuit of a legacy-defining deal with Kim, who has long sought to cast off his pariah status on the international stage. The North has faced crippling diplomatic and economic sanctions as it has advanced development of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“I don’t think I have to prepare very much,” Trump said. “It’s about attitude. It’s about willingness to get things done.”

Declaring the summit to be “much more than a photo-op,” he predicted “a terrific success or a modified success” when he meets with Kim next Tuesday in Singapore. He said the talks would start a process to bring about a resolution to the nuclear issue.

“I think it’s not a one-meeting deal,” he said. Asked how many days he’s willing to stay to talk with Kim, Trump said, “One, two three, depending on what happens.”

Still he predicted he’ll know very quickly whether Kim is serious about dealing with U.S. demands.

“They have to de-nuke,” Trump said. “If they don’t denuclearize, that will not be acceptable. And we cannot take sanctions off.”

Trump, who coined the term “maximum pressure” to describe U.S. sanctions against the North, said they would be an indicator for the success or failure of the talks.

“We don’t use the term anymore because we’re going into a friendly negotiation,” Trump said. “Perhaps after that negotiation, I will be using it again. You’ll know how well we do in the negotiation. If you hear me saying, ‘We’re going to use maximum pressure,’ you’ll know the negotiation did not do well, frankly.”

At another point, he said it was “absolutely” possible he and Kim could sign a declaration to end the Korean War. The 1950-53 conflict ended with an armistice but not a formal peace treaty.

Trump spent Thursday morning firing off a dozen unrelated tweets — on the Russia investigation and other subjects — before meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to talk about summit preparations and strategy.

“I think I’ve been prepared for this summit for a long time, as has the other side,” he said. “II think they’ve been preparing for a long time also. So this isn’t a question of preparation, it’s a question of whether or not people want it to happen.”

Administration officials indicated that Trump actually was putting in preparation time. National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis noted the president met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton Thursday afternoon “to continue their strategic discussions” ahead of the summit.

Pompeo said he was confident the president would be fully prepared and dismissed reports of division inside Trump’s foreign policy team over the decision to embrace the meeting with Kim.

In his previous role as CIA director, Pompeo told reporters Thursday, “there were few days that I left the Oval Office, after having briefed the president, that we didn’t talk about North Korea.”

Pompeo said Kim had “personally” given him assurances that he was willing to pursue denuclearization and said U.S. and North Korean negotiating teams had made unspecified progress toward bridging the gap over defining that term as part of a potential agreement. He would not say whether Trump would insist that the North put an end to its chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs.

Pompeo said Trump’s approach is “fundamentally different” from prior administrations. “In the past, there’d been months and months of detailed negotiations and they got nowhere,” he said. “This has already driven us to a place we’d not been able to achieve.”

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly accused his predecessors of failing to address the nuclear threat from a nation that launched its atomic program in the 1960s and began producing bomb fuel in the early 1990s. Past administrations have also used a combination of sanctions and diplomacy to seek denuclearization, but the results failed to endure.

Christopher Hill, the lead U.S. negotiator with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, said a summit with the North had long been available to U.S. leaders.

“The fact was no U.S. president wanted to do this, and for good reason,” he said. “It’s a big coup for (the North Koreans), so the question is whether we can make them pay for it.”

Before he sits down with Kim, Trump must first face wary U.S. allies who question his commitment to their own security and resent his quarrelling with them on sensitive trade matters. Trump on Friday departs for a 24-hour stop in Canada for a Group of Seven summit of leading industrial nations.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that the international community supports Trump’s efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, but “if he does succeed in his negotiations with North Korea, we want him also to remain credible on the nuclear situation in Iran.” Trump pulled out of President Barack Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran over the objections of European allies.

Abe, for his part, pushed Trump to raise with Kim the issue of Japanese abductees held in North Korea. The Japanese leader wanted to make sure that Trump’s efforts to negotiate an agreement don’t harm Japan’s interests. Trump said Abe talked about the abductees “long and hard and passionately, and I will follow his wishes and we will be discussing that with North Korea absolutely.”

U.S. allies in the region have expressed concern that Trump’s push to denuclearize Korea could ignore the North’s sophisticated ballistic missile and chemical weapons programs.

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AP writers Matthew Pennington in Washington and Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed.

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Voters Favor Candidates Who Promise to Be a Check on Trump

Bill Clinton famously campaigned under the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” assuming voters would choose the candidate they saw as most likely to create jobs and economic growth. Under this assumption, Trump-allied candidates in the 2018 midterm elections should be shoo-ins.

According to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, however, while six in 10 Americans are currently satisfied with the economy, and a plurality credit Donald Trump for it, most voters surveyed prefer candidates who promise to be a check on the president. The favorable state of the economy simply is not enough to generate heavy support for Trump allies in the midterms.

In fact, according to NBC News, voters who say they’re more likely to vote for a candidate who disagrees with the president on most issues come out on top by “a whopping 25-point margin.”

As NBC News reports:

And 48 percent of voters indicate they’re more likely to support a congressional candidate who promises to provide a check on President Trump, compared with 23 percent who say they’re less likely to support such a candidate.

By contrast, a majority — 53 percent — say they’re less likely to vote for a candidate who supports the president on most issues.

The poll also shows Democrats with a 10-point advantage over Republicans in the upcoming congressional elections. Half the voters surveyed preferred a majority Democratic Congress, with 40 percent preferring a Republican one. It’s a plurality rather than a majority, meaning more poll respondents preferred Democrats than Republicans, but neither had a majority of responses, as 10 percent of respondents were not sure which party they preferred.

Democrats now have a 10-point advantage on this question. In April, the last time this poll was conducted, their advantage was seven points.

Trump’s approval rating also has climbed—to 44 percent, but as Greg Sargent observes in The Washington Post, “That is not far off the approval suffered by other presidents who were hit by wave elections.” Even so, he notes that the generic ballot has tightened and says, “There could be a wave and Dems could still fall short, due to structural disadvantages and the Democrats’ 23-seat deficit.”

Some Democratic pollsters remain optimistic. Fred Yang, who conducted the poll with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, told NBC, “I think this is becoming a traditional midterm where the party controlling the White House is going to lose seats.”

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GOP Moderates: Tentative Immigration Deal With Conservatives

WASHINGTON — A leader of House Republican moderates said Thursday that a tentative deal with conservatives is being discussed to help young “Dreamer” immigrants stay in the U.S. legally. It was unclear if the offer was a potential breakthrough in the GOP’s long-running schism over immigration or would devolve into another failed bid to bridge that gap.

The proposal emerged the same day that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said leaders will craft an attempt at compromise on the issue that Republicans could embrace. Ryan is hoping an accord will derail threats by GOP centrists to force a series of House votes on immigration soon that leaders say would be divisive and damage the party’s electoral prospects in November.

Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., said that under an offer from the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, young immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children could get a new visa that would let them stay in the country for eight years. He expressed uncertainty over what would happen after that, but said participants have characterized the proposal as a bridge to the legal immigration system — which suggests a pathway to remaining in the U.S. permanently.

Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., Denham’s fellow moderate leader, said that while talks have focused on providing legal status to Dreamers, the proposal “does not involve a special pathway nor a visa unique to any specific group.” Conservatives have been adamant about not providing a “special” process carving out a unique way for Dreamers to gain legal status, and some of them bristled at Denham’s narrower description.

Denham, Curbelo and other lawmakers said details of the proposal remained in flux and nothing has been finalized.

“This was their offer to us and it’s something we can agree to, but not until we see it on paper,” Denham said.

Denham said that without a deal, the moderates’ threat to force the House to consider four immigration bills remains in effect. He and Curbelo need two more GOP signatures on a petition that could force those votes, assuming all Democrats sign. If they get them by next Tuesday, the House would be on track to have those roll calls on June 25.

“We have a firm deadline of next Tuesday,” Denham said. “We’re prepared to have the final signatures if there’s no agreement between now and then.”

The moderates would force votes on bills ranging from liberal plans offering citizenship to Dreamers to a conservative proposal curbing legal immigration. GOP leaders and conservatives say the likely result would be left-leaning legislation that would never clear the Senate or get President Donald Trump’s signature. They also say it would antagonize conservative voters, jeopardizing GOP turnout in November elections in which control of the House is at stake.

While Republicans acknowledged talks were underway, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leader of the Freedom Caucus, said no immigration agreement has been reached and said the question of granting citizenship to Dreamers “has been the thorniest issue from the start.” Another member of that group, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., said the idea Denham described has been discussed, but cautioned that there are “tons of moving pieces to it.”

Denham said moderates would accept border security measures as part of the accord, including backing the full $25 billion Trump wants to construct his proposed wall with Mexico.

He said the conservatives’ proposal involves a merit system, but said he was unfamiliar with its details.

He also said the plan would apply to more than the nearly 700,000 people who have been protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, that Trump has halted. Around another 1 million immigrants are thought to have qualified for that program but not applied, by some estimates.

Ryan described leaders’ effort to find compromise after a meeting of all House GOP lawmakers that didn’t resolve the party’s divisions. He said leaders would work toward a draft that resembles Trump’s demands on the issue.

“This effort to get our members to come to a common ground is the best chance at law,” Ryan said.

In exchange for providing possible citizenship for Dreamers, Trump wants full financing for his wall with Mexico. He’s also wanted to end a lottery that distributes about 50,000 visas annually to countries with few U.S. immigrants and to limit the relatives legal immigrants can bring to this country.

Democrats and many moderate Republicans have opposed curbs in legal immigration. Such a plan would seem to have no chance in the Senate, where Democrats have enough votes to block it.

Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., said conservatives have discussed providing a pathway to citizenship to Dreamers in exchange for funding for the proposed border wall, ending the visa lottery and limiting the relatives immigrants can bring into the country. Walker said the more Dreamers given an opportunity for citizenship, the tighter curbs on family-based migration would be.

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AP reporters Andrew Taylor, Kevin Freking and Padmananda Rama contributed.

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U.S. Military Plans as if Guantanamo Won’t Close for Decades

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A new dining hall for guards at the Guantanamo Bay detention center has a shimmering view of the Caribbean and a lifespan of 20 years. Barracks scheduled to start getting built next year are meant to last five decades. And the Pentagon has asked Congress to approve money for a new super-max prison unit to be designed with the understanding that prisoners will grow old and frail in custody — some perhaps still without being convicted of a crime.

President Donald Trump’s order in January to keep the Guantanamo jail open, and allow the Pentagon to bring new prisoners there, is prompting military officials to consider a future for the controversial facility that the Obama administration sought to close. Officials talked about the plans in an unusually frank manner as a small group of journalists toured the isolated base where 40 men are still held behind tall fences and coils of razor wire on the southeastern coast of Cuba.

“We’ve got to plan for the long term,” Army Col. Stephen Gabavics, commander of the guard force, told reporters this week. “We ultimately have to plan for whether or not they are going to be here for the rest of their lives.”

The Pentagon was investing in upgrades at the Navy base under President Barack Obama, whose push to shutter the detention center couldn’t overcome opposition in Congress. But those projects, including the $150 million barracks, were funded with the understanding that they could be used by the personnel of the Navy base that hosts the detention center. Now they are viewed as part of a broader effort to be able to operate the prison for many years to come.

“Now my mission is enduring,” said Adm. John Ring, commander of the task force that runs the jail. “So I have all sorts of structures that I have been neglecting or just getting by with that now I’ve got to replace.”

The Pentagon wants at least $69 million to replace Camp 7, the super-max unit that holds 15 men designated as “high-value detainees” who were previously in CIA custody. They include five men facing trial by military commission at Guantanamo for planning and aiding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the U.S. The men could get the death penalty if convicted, but the proceedings have been bogged down in pre-trial proceedings for years and any conviction would likely bring years of appeals.

Officials say Camp 7 is in need of major repairs, with cracking walls and a sinking foundation, and it is not suitable to hold men who will likely be in custody for many years to come. The new unit, which would be known as Camp 8, would have cell doors wide enough for wheelchairs and hospice beds and communal areas so elderly prisoners could help each other as they grow old.

The White House has endorsed the proposal but it is not known whether Congress will approve it.

“We have the responsibility for the detainees that we have here, regardless of what the political flavor is outside there,” Gabavics said. “We have the responsibility to provide for their safety, care and custody so all that we ask is that we get the resources we need to be able do that.”

The 40 detainees left at Guantanamo include five who were deemed eligible for transfer under Obama but couldn’t clear the bureaucratic and diplomatic hurdles before he left office. Of the remainder, nine have been charged in the military commission system and are in proceedings at various stages. The remaining 26 have neither been charged nor deemed eligible for transfer. They are being held in indefinite detention under what the U.S. asserts are the international laws of war.

The military allowed journalists a brief visit this week inside Camp 6, where most of the prisoners are held, as the men milled about and conducted late-afternoon prayers.

Attorney David Remes, who represents four prisoners, said they are bored and frustrated. “Limbo has never been more limbo-like,” Remes said. “They are just waiting, waiting, waiting.”

The detention center opened in January 2002 under President George W. Bush as a makeshift place to hold and interrogate people suspected of involvement with al-Qaida and the Taliban. Global outrage erupted over the treatment of prisoners and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that anyone held there was entitled to challenge their detention in American courts, eliminating one of the main rationales for using Guantanamo in the first place.

Bush eventually said the jail should close and released more than 500 prisoners. Obama said the facility was damaging U.S. relations around the world and was a waste of money, costing more than $400 million a year to operate, and ordered it closed shortly upon taking office. But Congress blocked closure and passed legislation that barred any of the men held there from being transferred to U.S. soil, even for criminal trials. His administration transferred 242 prisoners out of Guantanamo.

Trump has so far allowed only one prisoner to leave: a Saudi who was transferred to his homeland to serve out the rest of his sentence as part of a plea deal.

Officials at the detention center said they could take in about 40 more male detainees without any changes to staff levels and about 200 if additional guards are brought in. No such request has come from the administration, Ring said, but he added that he has been asked “some hypothetical questions” about capacity.

“We are not imminently expecting any new guests if you will,” he said.

 

Yahoo News: Colin Kaepernick’s Lawyers May Subpoena Trump

Robert Mueller’s team has been reported to be considering a subpoena for Donald Trump for months, but there’s a chance a football player may beat Mueller to the punch.

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been in a legal battle with the National Football League since October, alleging that he’s been blacklisted by the league because of his protests against police violence and racism, including his refusal to stand for the national anthem.

According to a Thursday report from Yahoo Sports, Kaepernick’s legal team is expected to subpoena Trump, Vice President Mike Pence “and other officials familiar with the president’s agenda on protesting NFL players.”

Lawyers for Kaepernick want to determine whether the Trump administration interfered in the NFL’s affairs while Kaepernick was a free agent, preventing him from getting a spot on a new team. This comes, Yahoo notes, “after recent disclosures that multiple owners had direct talks with Trump about players kneeling during the national anthem.”

Yahoo Sports reports that those conversations “are expected to shape the requests to force the testimony of Trump, Pence and other affiliated officials, sources said.”

According to  Talking Points Memo, Trump “pressured the NFL to punish players who knelt during the anthem, a protest Kaepernick started at the beginning of the 2016 season.” The NFL recently made a rule requiring that players stand during the anthem or risk a fine against their teams, and “franchise leaders admitted that Trump’s name had come up in discussions of the rule.”

Lawyers will first have to go through the NFL’s system arbitrator, who handles conflicts between management and the players union, proving the need for depositions from Trump and members of his administration even though such testimony is beyond the usual scope of the collective bargaining agreement.

The issue of NFL protests has been a convenient one for Trump, a way to easily stoke his base. As Yahoo points out, he’s been using it as a talking point in rallies since at least September 2017, and as recently as May he told “Fox & Friends”: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing—you shouldn’t be there.” Trump continued, “Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

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U.S., Chinese Telecommunications Firm Make a Deal

WASHINGTON—The United States and China have reached a deal that allows the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp. to stay in business in exchange for paying an additional $1 billion in fines and agreeing to let U.S. regulators monitor its operations.

The fine announced Thursday comes on top of $892 million ZTE has already paid for breaking U.S. sanctions by selling equipment to North Korea and Iran. The Commerce Department said that ZTE must also put $400 million in escrow — a sum that it would forfeit if it violated Thursday’s agreement.

In addition, a compliance team chosen by the United States will be embedded at ZTE and the Chinese company must change its board and executive team.

President Donald Trump has drawn fire from Congress for intervening in the case to rescue a Chinese company that had violated U.S. sanctions against two rogue nations that have been pursuing nuclear weapons programs.

“ZTE is essentially on probation,” said Amanda DeBusk, chair of the international trade and government regulation practice at Dechert LLP and a former Commerce official. “It’s unprecedented to have U.S. agents as monitors … It’s certainly a good precedent for this situation. ZTE is a repeat offender.”

In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from importing American components for seven years, having concluded that it deceived U.S. regulators after it settled charges last year of sanctions violations: Instead of disciplining all employees involved, Commerce said, ZTE had paid some of them full bonuses and then lied about it.

The decision amounted to a death sentence to ZTE, which relies on U.S. parts and which announced that it was halting operations. The ban also hurt American companies that supply ZTE.

Trump barged into the ZTE case last month by tweeting that he was working with President Xi Jinping to put ZTE “back in business, fast” and save tens of thousands of Chinese jobs. He later tweeted that the ZTE talks were “part of a larger trade deal” being negotiated with China.

Trump has drawn criticism from members of Congress for going easy on the Chinese company. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York immediately responded to Thursday’s announcement: “Despite his tough talk, this deal with ZTE proves the president just shoots blanks.”

Still, the resolution of the ZTE case may clear the way for the United States to make progress in its trade talks with China. The two countries have threatened to impose tariffs on up to $200 billion worth of each other’s products in a dispute over China’s tactics to supplant U.S. technological supremacy, including demands that U.S. companies hand over trade secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market.

Thursday’s agreement was “a prerequisite for making broader progress,” DeBusk said. “The ZTE case was a thorn in the side for China … For the U.S. to shut down one of China’s largest companies is a very dramatic type of move. It certainly got their attention.”

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