"Illegal...Inhumane" Immigration Policy Prompts Another Big Resignation at the State Department

[babylonsister]

October 4, 2021
“Illegal…Inhumane” Immigration Policy Prompts Another Big Resignation at the State Department
Veteran human rights lawyer and scholar Harold Koh steps down because of Title 42.
Isabela Dias


Less than two weeks after the US special envoy for Haiti resigned in response to the “inhumane” deportation of Haitians arriving at the Southern border, a senior State Department official has also quit, decrying the Biden administration’s continued use of a Trump-era policy known as Title 42. In an internal memo from October 2 obtained by Politico, State Department legal adviser Harold Koh described Title 42 as a “badly flawed policy,” which relies on a public health authority to summarily expel migrants save for a few exceptions. Its existence, he argued, “continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return (‘refouler’) individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” a country he describes as a “humanitarian nightmare.”

The “illegal and inhumane” Title 42 expulsions, Koh continued, are “not worthy of this Administration I so strongly support.” He urged the administration “to do everything in your power to revise this policy, especially as it affects Haitians, into one that this worthy of this Nation we love.”

In March 2020, then President Donald Trump invoked Title 42 to purportedly control the spread of COVID-19. Since then, the obscure public health order has faced fierce criticism and legal challenges. Public health experts and some officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have repeatedly argued its implementation lacks any epidemiological justification for preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, pro-immigrant advocates say it violates the right to seek asylum under the law and places migrants in harm’s way. In addition to returning them to dangerous places in Mexico, where many have experienced extortion, kidnapping, and rape, the policy also forces migrants to cross through more remote and perilous parts of the border.

Link to tweet

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snip//

Koh, the son of a South Korean diplomat who won asylum in the United States after a military coup overthrew the government in 1961, served as a State Department legal adviser under President Barack Obama and prior to that as US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. In the early 1990s, he led a group of Yale law students in arguing a case at the Supreme Court for the release of 300 Haitian migrants who had been detained at the Guantanamo Naval base. In his resignation memo, Koh wrote that the implementation of Title 42 cannot “be squared with the Biden Administration’s own publicly stated policy objectives and values” and degrades US credibility abroad.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/10/harold-koh-senior-state-department-official-slams-title-42-on-his-way-out/

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[MichMan]

2. Everyone needs to test negative and be vaccinated before being permitted to enter in a pandemic

Title 42 or not

[Klaralven]

3. I thought immigration matters were handled by the Department of Homeland Security?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. K&R

[crickets]

5. K&R for visibility.