Oppose the House REAL ID Act Take Action

#1Chicago

Registered Users (C)
Send a letter to your Representative and Senators urging them to oppose the anti-immigrant provisions of the House REAL ID Act.


I urge you to oppose Representative Sensenbrenner's REAL ID Act (H.R. 418). The House passed this measure on February 10 without any hearings or debate and now the bill has been attached (inappropriately) to the Emergency Supplemental bill for U.S. soldiers and tsunami relief efforts. Full hearings on the various provisions would have revealed that none of H.R. 418's ill-conceived measures will enhance national security. Hearings also would have highlighted the overwhelming opposition to these provisions from groups across the political spectrum.

When the House and Senate begin conference negotiations over the emergency supplemental, PLEASE URGE HOUSE CONFEREES TO OPPOSE the following misguided provisions:

Heightened Asylum Eligibility and Proof Standards: Asylum applicants already undergo more extensive security checks than any other foreign nationals who come to this country and terrorists and others who pose a danger to our security are ineligible for asylum. While the proposal to revamp our asylum system would do nothing to make us safer, it would deny asylum to legitimate applicants who cannot prove the central motive of their persecutor, who cannot produce corroborating evidence of their account, who make an inaccurate or inconsistent statement that is immaterial to the claim, or whose demeanor is inconsistent with an immigration judge's preconceived expectations.

Proving motive is already a difficult exercise for many individuals fleeing persecution. To require them to establish the centrality of one motive above potentially several motives would be to impose a nearly insurmountable standard of proof. In addition, people fleeing severe persecution often lack the opportunity and the wherewithal to secure the type of legal evidence needed to corroborate their claims. Moreover, the demeanor of torture survivors has repeatedly been found to be a poor indicator of credibility because the effects of the trauma often leaves them with a dull or flat affect.

Linkage of Driver's License Eligibility to Immigration Status: The intelligence reform bill that Congress passed last year already addresses the concerns raised by the 9/11 Commission regarding driver's licenses and identity documents. However, H.R 418 would actually repeal the driver's license provisions set forth in the intelligence reform bill and would set federal eligibility requirements for driver's licenses, including restrictions on immigrants' access to licenses. This would undermine, not enhance, national security by pushing people deeper into the shadows. Such a result would severely undermine the law enforcement utility of Department of Motor Vehicles databases by limiting, rather than expanding, government data about individuals in this country.

Expanded Grounds of Inadmissibility and Removal: The proposal to permit deportation of non-citizens who are members of or support any political organization that has used violence, even if the organization has not been designated as a "foreign terrorist organization," is unnecessary and potentially unconstitutional. This proposal to impose guilt by association confounds our basic understandings of liberty and, with its retroactive application, could be used to deport long-term, lawful residents, even if the association rendering them deportable occurred decades earlier and was legal at the time.

Restricted Habeas Corpus Review for Noncitizens: This provision would explicitly suspend the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus for the first time since the Civil War. It would limit all judicial review of detention and removal orders to one petition for review to the federal court of appeals. Those ineligible for such review would be barred from ANY review in federal court. This provision also would reduce the scope of any remaining federal court review to an extremely narrow and possibly unconstitutional standard that would allow courts to consider only "pure questions of law" or constitutional claims. Finally, this provision would eliminate temporary stays of removal pending federal court review in all immigration cases.


http://capwiz.com/aila2/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=7313861
 
Top