The order was granted Monday after various agencies refused to provide documents by the deadline last Friday under the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“We filed the FOIA lawsuit to understand ties between the Kushner family in relation to EB-5, to understand if strings were pulled. We want to understand whether he was involved in reauthorization of the program, which he [and his family] clearly stood to benefit from,” Democracy Forward senior counsel Josephine Morse told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Bottom line: What could he be shielding?” Morse said of Kushner, who serves as a senior White House adviser.

Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration in February after the Department of Homeland Security, State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services failed to disclose Kushner’s involvement in repeated renewals of EB-5, amid media reports of federal investigations into the Kushner family’s potential abuse of the program.

The EB-5 program provides green cards to immigrants who invest at least $500,000 in businesses in the United States that create 10 or more jobs per investor.

Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and New York federal prosecutors subpoenaed Kushner’s family business, Kushner Companies, for information on developments it financed in part through EB-5. The investigation includes attempts by Kushner Companies to present projects in New Jersey as EB-5 investments to get funding from Chinese investors.

Shortly before the subpoenas, Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer led a marketing campaign in Beijing and Shanghai seeking Chinese investors for Kushner Companies’ One Journal Square project in New Jersey. The marketing materials stated that up to 300 individuals who invested $500,000 each could be eligible for green cards through EB-5, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Democracy Forward, which filed its FOIA request in May 2017, has grown suspicious about the agencies’ delay in producing the documents.

“The amount of dragging and shifting stories about documents and whether we’re going to get them,” Morse said, “We’re wondering if there’s a cover-up and how Kushner was involved with the reauthorization of the EB-5 program.”

NEW: After over a year of illegal stonewalling, Trump officials were just ordered by a federal judge to appear in court and say whether they're withholding records of Jared Kushner‘s use of EB-5 visas to benefit his family business.

Watch this space: https://t.co/Gw81LIJIBx

— Democracy Forward (@DemocracyFwd) October 5, 2018

Morse said the court ordered the Department of Homeland Security to have a phone call with her and that said she would be more than happy to converse with a department representative “to get to the bottom of what’s happening here.”

“It’s just a constant pushback with no real explanation as to why, which obviously piques our interest even more,” Democracy Forward spokeswoman Charisma Troiano told Newsweek.

Troiano later said that Democracy Forward received a late-night communication Tuesday from the Department of Homeland Security contradicting past statements about the amount of responsive documents available.

“Our attorneys are reviewing to determine our next steps,” Troiano said.

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set the status conference for December 19 at 2:30 p.m.

“The Government is ORDERED to bring in a Department of Homeland Security representative who is prepared to discuss the status of Plaintiff’s request, the number of documents pending processing, and anticipated production dates,” the judge’s order states.

Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, declined to comment to Newsweek Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment from Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-company-visa-eb-5-1254829

Angelina Marquez fled death threats by MS-13 gang members in her native El Salvador in 2014, with the hope of seeking asylum in the United States. She was detained by Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas, during the Obama administration. Marquez—a pseudonym as she is still awaiting a final judgment on her asylum case—shared her story of being detained alongside her 6-year-old son with Newsweek. Newsweek was able to corroborate the major points of her story by reviewing court documents and speaking with her lawyer. What follows is Marquez’s story in her own words, as told to reporter Jessica Kwong.

Fleeing El Salvador for the United States was a matter of life or death for my 6-year-old son and me. It all started with being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was 15 years old living with my family in the province of Morazán when my panicked father woke me up at 1 a.m. to the smell of smoke. He told me and my siblings to evacuate. By then, the flames of a nearby factory fire had already reached the roof of our home.

I was afraid of dying. Once we made it outside, my father and I heard yelling from inside the factory, and we assumed from the regular security guard. Then we saw young men from our neighborhood, who were MS-13 gang members, run out of the burning building. They saw us, too.

My father testified as a witness in the murder of the security guard. He was killed by the gang two years later for doing so. Gang members were later charged in his death.

I thought I was safe and in my early twenties started combating crimes against women with the Salvadoran Justice Department. That’s when gang members began harassing me again. I received violent threats and survived a sexual assault.

They tried to kill me, too, and I realized it was no longer an option for me to stay in my country. My son and I had to leave.

In September 2014, at the age of 25, I set out with my son, my 16-year-old sister and a map of a route to cross the borders of Guatemala and Mexico, all in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States.

We cleared the dangers of crossing the borders, including human and drug trafficking, and made it across the Rio Grande. After walking for hours, Border Patrol agents stopped us in McAllen, Texas. Truthfully, we didn’t try to run, because we came looking for help. We wanted to apply for asylum.

But being detained was harder than I expected. I am angry and disturbed by the way they treated a lot of women.

I told officials I was running away from gangs, but they dismissed me. “Everyone is saying that, but the gangs can’t do anything to you because they’re just a small group,” one of them told me. The official claimed it was my country’s problem, and that I was “just coming here to work.”

They brought us to cells with temperatures so low we called them hieleras, or iceboxes. The bathrooms were in the front part of the cells, the same area where they brought us food.

After five days, we were transported to a detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. The treatment there wasn’t any better, but at least we had cots.

You had to ask an official for everything, even soap and shampoo to shower. The shampoo made our hair fall out. Menstruating women got only one sanitary pad a day, so we would take turns asking for pads even when it wasn’t our time of the month, and shared with the women who needed them.

A lot of children became ill from the food they provided us. The milk was spoiled, the cereals expired.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, they fed us sandwiches, which were the only real meals our kids could eat. The mothers would also save the chips and cookies we got and trade with each other based on our children’s preferences. When authorities performed their checks, they would take away any snacks we had saved, even if they were sealed, to control rat infestations, so we would try to have them in our hands or hide them.

My son was too young to truly understand what we were living through. He and his friends spent their playtime re-enacting what was happening to us, from detention to our removal proceedings. They would run around saying, “La migra”—the Border Patrol—”is coming,” and they would go to the hieleras. The boys pretended some of them were officials, that others had to go to court, some acted like judges and lawyers. They even set bail amounts.

My son would ask me, “When are we going to get out?” and “Why are we locked up?” It was very difficult for me to answer him because I had always tried to shield him from what I suffered through in El Salvador. Sometimes I would tell him, “We’ll get out and see your aunt,” because he would ask where my sister was taken. But deep down, I didn’t know if we would ever be let out, if we would ever see her again or if they would deport us, which I feared most.

After two months in detention, my son and I were released when family members paid our bail. But my son, who is 10 years old now, has not stopped crying. He has overheard conversations I’ve had with my lawyer and knows I’m awaiting my last court date for asylum and doesn’t want me to go before a judge.

“Mom, don’t go to court because if you go, they’re going to deport you, and I’ll be left here,” he says, because he’s seen families being separated on TV.

https://www.newsweek.com/surviving-american-detention-center-my-6-year-old-son-1012641

Read the story as told by Jessica Kwong:

https://www.newsweek.com/surviving-american-detention-center-my-6-year-old-son-1012641

Two-person dorm-style cells remain clean and tidy, with dark blue tables, mint green bunk beds and doors with glass windows rather than cage-like metal bars. There is clean, blue and beige carpet to muffle ambient noise and large areas where inmates can mingle, watch TV, play board games or hang out in a recreation yard.

Santa Ana’s city jail, a state-of-the art design attached to a new police headquarters at the tail end of a 1980s and 1990s crime wave that boosted demand for inmate beds, has aged well.

But the four-story facility now stands as a symbol of changing times in incarceration: it’s nearly two-thirds empty, with an uncertain future and millions in remaining construction debt.

A number of factors have helped drain away inmates. Crime rates are lower today than when the jail opened; the state is working to cut the number of non-violent criminals it incarcerates. And, most recently, Santa Ana declared itself a sanctuary city, moving to undo a roughly $11-million-a-year contract to house undocumented detainees for federal immigration agencies.

“Obviously, it’s not nearly as busy as it used to be,” said Santa Ana Jail administrator Christina Holland, as she walked by vacant jail visiting rooms on a recent weekday.

In addition to what was hailed as a cutting-edge concept for jail management, the 512-bed facility was characterized as a model of creative fiscal management. The city could market lockup space it didn’t need to other agencies and help pay off Santa Ana’s portion of borrowing for the $107.4-million construction cost of both the jail and police headquarters.

However, the inmate population hasn’t come close to the facility’s capacity for four years, Holland said. That’s partly because those arrested in Santa Ana for felony offenses are taken to county jail, operated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and increasingly misdemeanor offenders are simply booked and released at the city jail.

With fewer inmates, jail staff also has been reduced. “There simply isn’t a need because the population has dropped,” Holland said.

But the jail facility still costs close to $16 million a year to operate and maintain, and it only generates $4.8 million in revenue, Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said.

A new low was reached last month with the removal of the last 10 detainees – all transgender women – held in Santa Ana on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As of Tuesday’s count, only five of eight housing modules—holding 179 arestees held under contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons – are still operating, plus two dormitory units housing pay-to-stay inmates and others that must be segregated.

The sharply divided City Council is wrestling over the wisdom of past decisions, what comes next, and how to reduce the strain the jail’s ongoing costs imposes on residents and the city budget.

The city sold $80 million in bonds to help finance the jail and police headquarters, and will continue to incur $3 million annual debt expenses for the jail—one-third of the $9 million total in debt payments for the entire building—through 2024. Council members are aware the jail operation is contributing to a projected structural deficit of $14.4 million for fiscal year 2017-18 and $19.5 million for the following year, according to city staff.

A formal study of potential future uses of the jail is due to be completed in August.

“I don’t think at the start there was even an intention to convert it into anything other than a jail,” Holland said. “But it’s a different world today.”

Council member suggestions have included: creating a mental health center, the funding for which isn’t clear; cutting operating costs in half by converting the jail into a smaller-scale booking facility; or ramping up efforts to grow revenue by securing new contracts to house inmates for outside agencies.

Late Tuesday, June 6, council members were scheduled to consider a staff recommendation to convert part of the jail to a short-term holding facility in the 2017-18 fiscal year. But they decided to continue the item for two weeks.

“By transitioning to a holding facility, two of the four floors at the jail would become available for the city’s consultant to provide various use options,” Santa Ana spokeswoman Alma Flores said.

Councilman Jose Solorio said he’s optimistic “there might be additional federal or state departments that might have an interest in our facility to mitigate the losses to the city jail budget and our general fund.

“I think we need to keep all options on the table.”

But Mayor Pro Tem Michele Martinez and Councilman David Benavides have said the city erred in building the jail. Closing part of the jail and using the remainder for a booking operation is probably the better, more financially sustainable option, they have argued.

“Clearly what we’re seeing now in retrospect is that we shouldn’t have gone into the jail business,” said Benavides, who was part of the council majority that advocated for phasing out the federal ICE contract.

When the jail and police headquarters were unveiled in January 1997, top Santa Ana officials said it represented a smart investment in public safety and a commitment to the peace of mind for residents. At the time, violent crime rates were high. Just a few years earlier, the city hit a peak of nearly 90 homicides.

“This is, I believe, the best possible investment we could make as a community to ensure our long-term future,” Mayor Miguel Pulido said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The beauty of this is that we did it right.”

In the two decades since, crime has fallen—there were less than 25 homicides last year—along with the inmate population.

The political makeup of the City Council also has shifted.

In May 2016, the council majority voted to phase out the federal ICE contract that financially covered close to 40 percent of the jail’s beds. On the way out of office after an election setback, members of that same majority voted late last year to declare Santa Ana the first sanctuary city in Orange County. They also put federal immigration officials on notice that the city was reducing the jail beds available to ICE. In February, ICE notified the city it was terminating its contract.

The current council is split on a number of key issues, including whether to pursue new law enforcement contracts to help fill the jail.

Pulido, who has remained Santa Ana mayor, hasn’t wavered from the decisions he and his then-colleagues made two decades ago. The city should try to increase the inmate population, including restarting talks with federal immigration officials about housing undocumented detainees, he said.

“When you go back look at some of those early years and look at the (millions) … that used to go into the general fund, why?” he said. “Because we had 500 beds” occupied, he added. “Take 500 beds, multiply times $80 a day, whatever number you want. When you have that many beds and they’re full, then everything works.”

Pulido said he believes there’s potential to put the jail back in the black—housing inmates.

“We can try. We won’t know until we try,” he said, before acknowledging the political challenge for council members. “We’re deadlocked.”

Whether past contracting opportunities with immigration officials can be revived is an open question. To offset the loss of Santa Ana jail beds, ICE recently moved to expand its contract for jail space with Orange County officials.

“Right now, what have we done?” said Pulido. “We said no to ICE, they moved across the street” and they are offering Orange County government what amounts to a multi-million dollar windfall, he said. “Meanwhile, we have empty beds and we’re spending money on a reuse study. It was never intended to be empty – and that’s the real problem.”

But Martinez reiterated that the city should not be in the jail business because “it’s not a core service” for residents.

“I understand a holding facility, but am not sure how we ended up” running a longer-term, full-service jail operation. “That makes no sense when the county jail is next door,” she said. “As for the ICE going across the street, that is a policy decision on the county side” where the sheriff’s department must maintain a much higher-level, more costly jail operation.

The Santa Ana jail doesn’t have that obligation, she said.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/06/06/santa-ana-ponders-new-future-for-its-futuristic-jail/

Making a living in The City, however, was more difficult than they expected.

It took Chen’s father, who fixed excavators in China, nearly two years to get a part-time job repairing cars in San Bruno because he didn’t speak English. Chen’s mother, who knew a little English, had a slightly easier time finding work — as a seamstress. Now, three years since immigrating, all their income still goes to rent, food and basic necessities.

“We don’t have any money left at the end of the month,” said Chen, 18, a senior at George Washington High School. “We don’t think we can stay here for a long time since my parents’ jobs are not stable and they might get laid off tomorrow.”

The perception, Chen said, is that Asians living in the west side of San Francisco are wealthy and own homes. But the reality for Chen’s family is they will likely need to move to another city in order to save money.

And they are far from the only Asian family in that part of The City living in poverty.

Although higher incomes were reported overall in the Sunset, Richmond, Lakeshore and Parkside areas than in other areas with Asian and Pacific Islander residents, almost 30 percent of San Francisco’s poor Asians live there, according to a report released today by the Asian Pacific Islander Council.

The report, Asian and Pacific Islander Health and Wellbeing: A San Francisco Neighborhood Analysis, is the first granular look at poverty and health issues across Asian ethnicities citywide, according to the council, a coalition of 29 organizations that formed in 2012 in response to deep budget and social-services cuts at the local level.

For years, individual organizations and policy advocates made their case for support from local government through stories such as Chen’s, but that hasn’t always been enough to leverage funds, said Malcolm Yeung, steering committee member of the council and deputy director at the Chinatown Community Development Center.

“It’s the pervasiveness of the ‘model minority,'” Yeung said, “And I think when we start talking about it, we’re able to talk about it as anecdotes, but what we’re missing in the narrative is hard facts to back it up.”

The report, conducted by Davis Y. Ja and Associates starting last October, drew from existing data including the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2010 to 2012. While some findings confirmed familiar tales of poverty like overcrowding at Chinatown single-room-occupancy hotels, others surprised even members of the council who work with the Asian communities every day.

Asian and Pacific Islander people were affected by poverty at lower rates than other racial groups — 14 percent compared to 30 percent and 17 percent among blacks and Latinos, respectively — but by population numbers they were the largest minority group affected. A 44 percent increase in Asians and Pacific Islanders living below the poverty threshold, from 25,413 in 2006-2008 to 38,497 people in 2010-2012, was “another piece of the puzzle that nobody expected,” Yeung said.

Also shocking to the council was unemployment data. The report noted 7.3 percent of Asians were unemployed, more than the overall rate in the city of 5.4 percent, and the rate was nearly three times that for Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians at 14.2 percent.

Hunters Point resident Fiapapalagi Montufau, who belongs to San Francisco’s little-known Samoan community, recently became a certified nursing assistant but has only been able to find on-call work. About 90 percent of The City’s Samoan families, including her own, live in low-income housing.

“The juvenile justice system, gang affiliation, violence — we see it all the time,” said Montufau, 35. “And then the other thing is obesity and health issues. Samoans and Pacific Islanders are large people.”

San Francisco’s Samoan population, between 5,000 and 7,000, is often overlooked because they don’t “yell and scream and protest,” explained Patsy Tito, executive director of the Samoan Community Development Center on Sunnydale Avenue.

“A lot of our folks tend to go more toward the blue-collar jobs rather than the white collar because of a lack of education or skills,” she said.

Other neighborhoods in the south — Visitacion Valley, Bayview-Hunters Point, the Excelsior, Oceanview, Crocker-Amazon, Portola and Silver Terrace — had 74 percent of their Asian population report being foreign-born. Despite overall lower rates of violent crime in those neighborhoods than in the past, 77 percent of residents said they still did not feel safe.

The north — which the report defined as Chinatown, downtown, Civic Center, Nob Hill, North Beach, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, the Tenderloin and South of Market — had the highest rate of Asian unemployment at more than twice the citywide rate, and with 24 percent below the poverty line. And the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods had the highest rates of violent crime.

For Lourdes Hitones, 80, who immigrated to San Francisco from the Philippines in 1988, living at a low-income apartment at Tenderloin Family Housing on Turk Street has meant getting used to coming home before dark.

“Every time we go out, we don’t stay long outside,” she said. “We’re afraid that something might happen.”

The north side of The City had the most overcrowding in households, with 24 percent of rooms in Chinatown considered overcrowded. The SRO hotels in which families pack into spaces as small as 8-by-10 feet with their belongings is not a living condition of the past.

At a four-story SRO building on Jackson Street, Cui Ping Zhang, her husband, and 14- and 2-year-old daughters share two bunk beds, the top half of one which is stacked to the ceiling with clothes and diapers. The room has one window and the family keeps its only door open to allow for ventilation. For privacy, a sheet hangs over the doorway alongside banners inscribed with “May money and fortune be plentiful” and “Bringing in wealth and prosperity” in Chinese characters.

“It’s hard to breathe,” said 14-year-old Sophia Yu from the top bunk.

Her mother, Zhang, 42, said she never imagined they would live like that when they moved to Chinatown.

“In China, our place was not as packed,” she said in Cantonese. “We didn’t know it would be like this until we came here.”

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, whose district includes Chinatown, said the report is the first time more than two dozen Asian community groups have come together to highlight disparities in areas including workforce development.

“Every year, I have conversations with each of those groups, but separately,” Chiu said. “It is unprecedented for them to come together to ask my colleagues and I this year to focus on the workforce,” among other issues.

Support from local government has been restored to levels before the recession, but costs for resources have risen with inflation, said Amor Santiago, co-chair of the council and executive director of APA Family Support Services, based in Chinatown.

“What we’re hoping for in this next budget cycle,” he said, “Is that the mayor and supervisors will help us with at least some resources to meet the need.”

The council’s goal is to release updates annually or every other year to make the case to city, state and federal agencies that much of the Asian community in San Francisco doesn’t fit the “model minority” stereotype.

“The perception is that Asians by and large don’t have socio-economic issues going on in our community,” Yeung said. “This report really starts to shine a light on how that assumption is false.”

Chinese Hospital caters to specific community needs

In Chinatown, more than in any other neighborhood in The City, the streets are packed with elderly Asians, rarely obese, going about their business up and down steep hills, and so often they are typically lauded as healthy.

“At Portsmouth Square, there’s tai chi going on, and so there’s a perception of health,” Chinese Hospital Chief Nursing Officer Peggy Cmiel said. “The underlying issues don’t really show.”

But a report on Asian and Pacific Islander health and well-being released today details a different picture. Health concerns specific to the community include high rates of diabetes, tuberculosis, liver cancer, smoking and mental health issues.

At the Chinese Hospital on Jackson Street, founded more than a century ago by 15 family associations and the only health care facility in the country dedicated to serving the Chinese, according to staff, anyone who gets admitted with a cough with a slight possibility of tuberculosis is immediately isolated.

“Living in SROs and tight quarters, the chances of it being communicated, spread to others is high,” Cmiel said.

A 65-year-old living with diabetes, Catherine Lee from Hong Kong, said about 70 percent of Asians she surveyed for Self-Help for the Elderly at the Manilatown Senior Center said they had diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.

“People say I don’t look like I have [diabetes],” she said in Cantonese. “But it’s very common.”

The finding from the report that most surprised Cmiel and other staff at the Chinese Hospital was that the HIV/AIDS cases almost doubled among Asian and Pacific Islanders between 2000 to 2010.

“I’ve been here for eight years and have never seen one case,” said Gigi Lim, a nursing supervisor at the hospital.

The report also found Asian and Pacific Islanders had lower rates of using health care resources like cancer screenings, mental health services and HIV testing. The vast majority of health and wellness organizations in San Francisco do not have cross-cultural services and programs, a concern given the continued increase in immigrants from Asia.

It underscores the importance of facilities like the Chinese Hospital, where about 90 percent of staff speak Cantonese and even most of the food is Asian.

“We probably have the largest wok in the kitchen of any hospital, and jook,” said Lim, using the Cantonese word for porridge. “Other hospitals don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

Asian poverty throughout city

Comparing Asian and Pacific Islander populations with the entire population of San Francisco (broken down by region of The City):

Poverty distribution

– North 37.1% South 16.9% West 29.4%

– 34,750 Asians living below poverty level in San Francisco

– 110,889 San Franciscans overall living below poverty level

Unemployment rates

– North 11.7% South 10.4% West 7.2% City overall 5.4%

Overcrowded households

– North 10.4% South 10% West 4.3%

– City overall 5.1%

Exposure to violent crime

– North 2.8 times citywide average South 1.04 times citywide average

– West 0.3 times citywide average

Regions defined:

 North: Chinatown, downtown, Civic Center, Nob Hill, North Beach, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Tenderloin, South of Market

 South: Visitacion Valley, Bayview-Hunters Point, Excelsior, Oceanview, Crocker-Amazon, Portola, Silver Terrace

 West: Richmond, Sunset, Lakeshore, Parkside

Source: Asian and Pacific Islander Health and Wellbeing: A San Francisco Neighborhood Analysis

https://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/model-minority-struggling/Content?oid=2798764