Hank Kalet

The nation’s highest immigration court is acknowledging something that battered and abused women have always know: domestic violence is a form of persecution.

As The New York Times reports, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a “nine-page decision (that) helps clarify the interpretation of broad and vague language in the legal definition of a refugee.” Under immigration,

Foreigners may qualify for asylum if they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” based on race, nationality, religion, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.”

Women’ now qualify as a protected group, because ongoing violence and threats are the essence of persecution.

This, of course, is something advocates for domestic violence have long understood. The National Domestic Violence Hotline defines abuse as

a repetitive pattern of behaviors to maintain power and control over an intimate partner. These are behaviors that physically harm, arouse fear, prevent a partner from doing what they wish or force them to behave in ways they do not want. Abuse includes the use of physical and sexual violence, threats and intimidation, emotional abuse and economic deprivation. Many of these different forms of abuse can be going on at any one time.

This is not materially different from the general dictionary definition of persecution: “to treat (someone) cruelly or unfairly especially because of race or religious or political beliefs.”

Anti-immigration groups disagree, as the Times reports.

“A lot of these cases are undeniably horrific, but do we want to destroy our refugee system to make these ultimately political statements about domestic violence?” asked Michael M. Hethmon, a lawyer who argued in the case for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that seeks reduced immigration.

But this is a flawed argument. All legal definitions are political. They are developed based upon a series of calculations and negotiations and attempt to balance a variety of competing interests. In this case, the court decided that the threat of continued violence faced by Aminta Cifuentes, the Guatemalan asylum-seeker at the center of this case, outweighed other considerations and that the those greats — and the threats faced by other women fleeing abuse — deserves protection.

Anti-immigration advocates are not really concerned about this being a political statement so much as they are concerned about its impact on asylum claims. The ruling is likely to expand access to asylum and could all ultimately have some bearing on child asylum claims. From a humanitarian standpoint, this is good news — as it is for the rights and welfare of women around the world.

This is unconscionable: FIU has denied press credentials to a Miami Herald reporter for the school’s opening football game, offering no explanation.

This might seem a minor issue — an insignificant sports item about a small football program — but it’s not. It represents what has become a standard effort by those in power to impose the ethos of public relations on coverage. The goal is to eliminate critical or what they believe is invasive coverage with positive press.

In response to the FIU decision to refuse credentials to the Herald beat reporter, the paper is opting not to cover the opening game. It’s a difficult choice — opting to avoid covering an event that readers may be interested in — but it is the only leverage the Herald has.

“It’s unprecedented for any local team to refuse to credential our beat reporter without reason,” Miami Herald Executive Editor Aminda Marqués Gonzalez said of the four pro and two college teams the Herald covers on a regular basis. “The team does not get to choose who covers the program.”

And that’s the key point. Teams, businesses, politicians — no one — should be given opportunity to select the entities that will cover them. That puts the power in the hands of the people who most need watching and potentially guts our ability as journalists to function as watchdogs. Journalists need a free hand to report, which they won’t have if they have to worry that negative coverage might cost them access or credentials.

I received this email today from an anti-immigrant group:

According to Judicial Watch, the Feds are warning of an imminent terrorist attack from ISIL affiliated groups operating out of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.

The article states, “Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat.”

The article goes on to say, “These new revelations are bound to impact the current debate about the border crisis and immigration policy.”

No kidding!

Click this link to read the whole story.

I know this is supposed to scare us , but it is a pretty typical bit of fear-mongering designed to gun up the outrage machine and generate fundraising for right-wing groups. So , scary it isn’t — unless the prospect that there are thousands who are quite ready to believe this nonsense. That’s what I find scary.

Gov. Chris Christie was in Arkansas yesterday, “stumping for a GOP gubernatorial hopeful” — which apparently means he doesn’t have to answer questions about his day job.

As Matt Arco reports for NJ.com, the governor refused to answer questions “about whether he intends to nominate his chief of staff as the state’s next attorney general”:

“I’m not answering questions about that,” he responded when asked about bumping his chief of staff, Kevin O’Dowd, over to the state’s Office of the Attorney General.

“I can’t believe you traveled all the way to Little Rock to ask me questions about New Jersey politics,” he said. “You can ask me New Jersey political questions anytime you want.”

Except that’s not really true. As Arco points out,

Christie has spent all or part of more than 70 days out of state since being sworn into his second term in January. The bulk of the trips have been for the RGA.

That’s about a third of his time so far this year. More significantly, as Arco writes,
Christie has had five in-state press conferences since April, but he’s held 17 around the country during that same period.

This doesn’t leave a lot of access for New Jersey reporters writing on New Jersey issues — if state politics are going to be off limits when he is out of state.

Ross Douthat, with whom I rarely agree, has an important column today in The New York Times. In it, he makes the point that the Obama administration’s attempts to paint ISIS as being on the “wrong side of history” is based on a flawed view of history as in some way being pre-ordained.

Douthat writes that “liberalism’s current dominance is contingent rather than necessary,” and that “its past victories have often been rather near-run things.”

The arc of history, another favored Obama phrase, has at times bent toward pogroms and chattel slavery, totalitarianism and genocide, nuclear annihilation. (For the Middle East’s persecuted Christians and Yazidis, it bends toward annihilation even now.) The ideals of democracy and human rights are ascendant in our age, but their advance still depends on agency, strategy and self-sacrifice, no matter what date the calendar displays.

Essentially what he is saying is that it is dangerous to assume that good will always win out. History is agnostic — not in a religious sense, but in a logical sense. What is coming cannot be known or assumed, so we must constantly work to create the kind of world in which many of us wish to live.

Chris Hedges has written about this, as well — his book The World as It Is is a collection of his columns that, when taken together, question what the book’s subtitle calls “the myth of human progress.” In a more recent piece, he describes American elites as believing “naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance.”

Both men are making an important claim — that we must, if we are to actually move forward (and they have very different visions of what moving forward means), we must relinquish the false narrative of agency-less progress. The arc of history is not predetermined. It is not even an arc. Groups like ISIS are not leftovers from another time. They are, as Douthat says, a reaction on some level to the world as a it is. Same goes for the reactionaries here in the United States who oppose marriage equality or abortion. They are reacting to things as they are — out of fear, out of tradition, or what have you.

Change is inevitable — is the only thing that is inevitable — but the shape that change will take is not. The narratives we live by today — that the market is inviolable, that democracy must win out — are not set In stone. They are written and rewritten daily by the participants, by us. To assume that the history’s arc will inevitably bend toward our goals, that there is an inevitable place history is taking us, is the best way to ensure that we never get where we want to go.