Also, thanks Yael

Do you know of any reporting on Guatemala specifically? I'm responding to a motion where DHS is claiming that it's fully in effect and that our client should be removed to Guatemala (now).

The bigger concern is chain refoulement, looks like a feature more than a bug. The US sends migrant to a third country where the person knows nobody, and that country sends them to their home country where they'll be killed. Guatemala specifically said as much in its denial of having signed an ACA.

The whole premise is silly. Guatemala has the capacity for a few thousand asylum seekers a year (not that they're doing it well, but that's their capacity). There are hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who could be deported to Guatemala under the guise of having to first seek asylum there.

Notably, it says nothing about whether applicants will have a fair chance to seek asylum or whether they will be safe while doing so (both of those are required by the statute). But where's the actual agreement, which Guatemala said in June doesn't exist?

Here's what DHS is claiming is our agreement with Guatemala. It's not signed by anyone. And the highlighted part states pretty explicitly that this is not an agreement yet (although it could be later if the terms are agreed on).

Under the asylum statute, INA 208(a)(2), the US can bar an asylum seeker from seeking protection if we have a Safe Third Country agreement and that person could be sent there. Trump is getting ready to try to wipe out a huge swath of asylum cases with these agreements.

In my immigration court cases, the DHS has begun to ask courts to not allow asylum seekers to make their claims, citing these agreements. And last month, the BIA said yeah, that all sounds great (see below). But I've seen no reporting on whether the agreements exist. www.justice.gov/eoir/media/1...

So anyway, hopefully that means most folks won't actually see that website because it loads like shit and crashes their browser. Good job to whomever put that one together (assuming that was your goal!)

It kills CDNs and optimizations. Images normally get served through content-delivery networks, optimized for speed, compression, and caching. Putting them into HTML bypasses all that—no lazy-loading, no compression tuning, no responsiveness.

It’s terrible for memory and mobile devices. Phones choke on giant HTML blobs. Instead of downloading an image into a normal image buffer, they’re forced to allocate memory for one gigantic text string, decode it, and only then render it.

It blocks rendering. Until the entire HTML file is downloaded and parsed, nothing can show on screen. That’s why the DOJ page feels like it’s hanging. Your phone has to download the world’s longest <img> tag before it can display anything.

It can't be cached. Normally, your browser can store images separately and reuse them on later visits. But if the image is inside the HTML, the browser has to re-download the whole thing every single time. It’s like printing your photos directly onto every page of a book instead of referencing them.

Base64 makes files bigger (about 33% larger than the original), and when you inline those images, the entire page becomes a multi-megabyte wall of text. Instead of downloading a normal 150 KB image, your browser has to ingest a 7M character <img> tag. It’s heavy, slow, and impossible to optimize.

Using Base64 for those huge images is silly because it shoves the entire image file directly into the HTML, turning the page into one giant, unreadable blob. It balloons the file size, kills mobile loading, breaks caching, and forces the browser to download everything every time.

NOT JUST THAT! Their code is over 7 Million characters for just that little image of the "Lady Justice." It takes 30 seconds to scroll through it. That's a ton of code for your browser to interpret when you go to their website. And they did it with all three images on that page.

I left out the especially gross H1 just below the image: "Define America for Generations." Yes guys we get it. Why bother with dog whistles when you can just print the white-supremacist subtext in 48-point type?

As if the blatant white-supremacist propaganda weren’t enough, the whole thing loads like a time capsule from 1998. What in the Geocities is happening?