Nepalese asylum seekers get temporary reprireve from deportation

The immigration status of Nepalese refugees has been given an extension by the courts and allowed to temporarily remain in the U.S.

The court decided last March 12 to allow Nepalese Keshave Bhattarai and his fellow plaintiffs to keep his Temporary Protected Status, which was due to end June 24, 2019. 

"I feel like I’ve been sick and this agreement is a few drops of medicine. If approved by the court, it means the government can't end TPS for Nepal and Honduras until the appeals court decides whether the Trump Administration’s previous TPS terminations violated the law. said Bhattarai, whose name is affixed to the case - Bhattarai v. Nielsen - challenging the Trump administration's immigration polices. Kristen Nielsen is the director of Homeland Security.

"It gives us all some breathing room to call on Congress to give us what we really need: permanent protection for TPS holders," he said.

Bhattarai's case hinges on whatever the court rules on Ramos v. Nielsen, another TPS case

Under the agreement, TPS for Nepal and Honduras — slated to end on June 24, 2019 and January 5, 2020, respectively — would remain in place at least until the appeal in Ramos v. Nielsen, another TPS case, is decided. 

The district court in Ramos previously found substantial evidence that the terminations of TPS for Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti were motivated by the Trump Administration's racism against non-white, non-European immigrants, and also that the terminations violated the Administrative Procedure Act. 

Plaintiffs in Bhattara raised similar challenges to the termination of TPS for Honduras and Nepal. The Ramos decision is currently on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. A hearing is expected sometime this summer, with a decision to follow.

A devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake had leveled their home in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2015. After living in a tent amidst the rubble of what used to be his home, Bhattaria was able to get tourist visas to the U.S. for his family. His son was already in the U.S. studying medicine.

In June of 2015, the Obama administration announced that Nepalis were eligible for Temporary Protected Status, a special legal protection that allows people from certain countries grappling with the aftermath of a natural disaster or other catastrophic event to live in the US. Bhattarai and his wife promptly applied, becoming two of about 15,000 Nepalis to obtain the legal status.

With Nepal still reeling from the twin natural disasters, Bhattali and seven other plaintiffs are seeking to remain in the U.S. until it is safe to return to thier homes in Nepal.

According to eyewitness accounts, Nepal has not recovered from the earthquake and a flood that occurred in 2017. A report last year from Adhikaar, a New York-based Nepali advocacy group, and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network concluded that “conditions in Nepal remain dangerous and unstable with no possibility of the country being able to safely absorb TPS holders.”

"We are pleased the government agreed to this interim measure, but we know that justice for TPS holders and their families must ultimately come through Congress, which should pass legislation providing lawful permanent residence to these people, who have contributed so much to our society," said Ahilan Arulanantham, Senior Counsel at the ACLU of Southern California.

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ACLU's Dale Ho takes on voter suppression in Kansas

SCREEN CAPTURE / MSNBC

The right to vote should be a given in our country, but it’s not. Our country has a long history of suppressing the vote, but the efforts of Donald Trump’s allies have been truly extraordinary. They are a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the vote for youth, people of color, and low-income people. 

"We've got to stop them," says Dale Ho, the ACLU's Voting Rights Project Director. 

In this new video below, Ho explains this vicious agenda the day before the ACLU goes to trial challenging the voter suppression law in Kansas. Watch and share with your friends to spread the word. 

Take Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who headed Trump's sham commission on "Election Integrity." In 2013, Kansas enacted a law he proposed that requires Kansans to produce citizenship documents – like a birth certificate or U.S. passport – in order to register to vote. It had a devastating impact on voter registration in the state – particularly for people under age 30, who represented almost half of the voter registrations blocked by the law.

More than 35,000 people were blocked from registering to vote because of Kobach's unnecessary and burdensome law. That's about one in seven would-be voters. The case went to federal trial Tuesday, March 6.

A big part of the case will be whether Kobach can show that current federal law is not doing enough to combat voter fraud. The federal form to register to vote requires a person to swear under penalty of perjury that he or she is a citizen, a safeguard Kobach said Tuesday was too weak and “like nothing.”

"The law has made voter registration drives in Kansas all but impossible," says Ho. "Most people don't carry around copies of their birth certificates or passports, and they usually don't hand them out to strangers. Not everyone has a copy of their birth certificate, and securing one can take time and money." 

Kobach's law is based on false allegations of voter fraud by noncitizens – a trope Trump has been promoting ever since he lost the popular vote in 2016. Kobach bases his claims on an outright misinterpretation of a study. He's so wrong that the author of that study is testifying against him in the trial – on the side of the ACLU.

The good news is that Kobach must prove that there is "substantial" voter fraud in Kansas in order to justify his additional voting requirements to the National Voter Registration Act. Since 2000, Kobach’s office has identified only 129 noncitizens who registered to vote or attempted to register. In 2016 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit preliminarily found that the law caused "mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right."

The judge ordered a stay of Kobach's law allowing thousands of Kansans the opportunity to use their right to vote.

You might be wondering what's so difficult about showing a birth certificate.

Fortunately, I don't live in Kansas. I have my birth certificate but many people don't. In order to get an official, legally accepted copy of the original certificate, you have to go to the County Clerk's office of the county you were born in and pay whatever fee they require. I was born in Manila. If I didn't have my certificate, getting a copy would be difficult.

Fortunately, my parents were sophisticated and meticulous enough to have copies of the certificate which I now have in my possession. But many naturalized immigrants, especially those who had to leave their home countries hastily as refugees, might not have all the necessary documents.

Oh, by the way, you need that birth certificate and your naturalization papers to get a passport, the other acceptable proof of citizenship.

So, you can see the possible difficulties for people to provide proof. And if Kansas is going to ask proof of citizenship, will they ask everybody? Or, will they only ask people with an accent or people who are not white? The Kansas law is fraught full of Constitutional pitfalls.

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