AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

As we turn now to the continuing crackdown on immigrants by the Trump administration. Just this week, it’s been reported the administration plans to dismiss potentially hundreds of thousands of open asylum cases, those targeted or anyone who entered the US unlawfully rather than at a port of entry before applying for asylum. This would essentially shut down all possibilities of claiming asylum along the southern border. President Trump’s already made it effectively impossible to make an asylum claim at ports of entry on the border the day he took office. Critics say these restrictions on asylum are flagrantly illegal.

Also this week, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to send deportees to third countries rather than their own. This ruling stems from a case last month in which the government tried to send a plane of immigrants, mostly Latin-American and Asian, to South Sudan. The flight was diverted to a military base in Djibouti. A lower court said deportees should have a right to challenge their deportation to third countries. Other countries that have been approached by the administration to take US deportees include Ukraine and Libya.

And the administration may add more than 36 countries to the blanket travel ban already in effect for 12 nations if certain conditions are not met. 25 of the 36 countries are in Africa. For more on these developments and more, we’re joined from the Capital by Congressmember Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. She’s the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, begun holding a series of shadow hearings on Trump’s immigration actions most recently on what she calls third country disappearances and the weaponization of the Immigration Court. Why don’t you, Congressmember Jayapal, take it from there? The weaponization of the Immigration Court and what these third country disappearances are.

CONGRESSMEMBER PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Yeah, thanks, Amy, for covering this, as you always do. Look, this is an attack by the Trump administration on every part of the legal immigration system as we know it. And so, the third country removals is the attempt of the administration to deport people to third countries without any due process. And once they are on a flight, obviously they then claim that they can’t get those people back. And so, this had been upheld by lower courts that this was unconstitutional, illegal for the government to do because due process, as you know, is one of those clauses in the Constitution that’s very clear. It doesn’t say for citizens, it says for everybody.

And so, the government was losing in a number of lower courts, but then it got to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, as you said, just announced that it was actually OK for the government to do this. And we have been trying to shine a light on the Immigration Subcommittee. We’re in the minority, obviously, so we can’t do official hearings, but I’ve started doing a series of shadow hearings to shine a light on all of the ways that the government is attacking immigrants and the legal immigration system. The first one was on third country deportations. The whole series is called Kidnapped and Disappeared. The second one, which we did yesterday, was exactly on what the attorney for Andry was just talking about, the fact that now what the government is doing is, they have been dismissing cases when somebody shows up to be in compliance with the immigration system. They have appointments for citizenship, they have appointments for asylum, court cases.

In some cases, immigrants have been waiting for years to go through this process. They finally – imagine what it’s like when you finally get your appointment, you show up to your appointment, and the government dismisses the case. Now, typically, when the government has dismissed a case, it’s because they decide they’re not going to pursue it anymore. In this case, the government is dismissing the case so that then, as the person walks out of Immigration Court, they can be arrested, detained, and deported, again with no due process. And so, this is a remarkable attack on the idea that immigrants should show up for their court cases, and it’s a real catch-22 because if you show up, you could get detained and deported, arrested, detained, and deported. If you don’t show up, then you are now in violation of the immigration regulations, and you’re deemed as an absconder.

The reason they are trying to dismiss these cases is because once a case is dismissed, they can then put an immigrant into what’s called expedited removal. Expedited removal means that you don’t get due process. Now, there is a small provision where you can still make a case that if you’re going to get deported back to your home country where you’re going to be tortured, that theoretically, there should be a process where you can challenge it again, which is the most inefficient thing because that’s why you were in court to start with. But we know that that very small ability to challenge in a case of expedited removal is nonexistent.

So, all of this to say that the government is using every way, whether it’s cracking down on free speech, as we’ve seen with Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, it’s cracking down and using this wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act. That was a law from 1798 that essentially says if there’s an invasion, then the government can deport people. And what they’re now saying is that these, Andry, other members, Arturo, a number of others where the evidence is mainly these tattoos that are not related to gangs at all, these individuals can be deported. Venezuelans can be deported to El Salvador, to CECOT, and not have any due process. And so, we’re just trying to shine a light on this.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Congressmember Jayapal, we have 30 seconds. The budget. Talk about the vote that’s taken place and the decision of the Parliamentarian in the Senate to strike down parts of it.

CONGRESSMEMBER PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Yeah, well, there’s a 60-vote threshold in the Senate for anything related to policy if you use a budget reconciliation bill. And so, the Parliamentarian has said that you can’t, for example, tell states that they can’t have a Medicaid provider tax. You can’t say that states can’t use their own money to provide Medicaid to immigrants of all legal statuses. You can’t sell off millions of acres of public lands. These are some of the provisions that have been taken out of the Big Bad Betrayal Bill, which, just to remind people, kicks 16 million Americans off of healthcare and cuts SNAP benefits by $300 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, I know you have a briefing you have to go to. I want to thank you for being with us as we go now to a break, and then we remember Bill Moyers in his own words.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Dear Someone,” by Lila Downs.