⚖️ FOLLOWNG SCATHING REPORT ON ABUSE OF KIDS IN IMMIGRATION COURT, EOIR ANNOUNCES SOME REFORMS — Rekha Sharma-Crawford Reports!

Rekha Aharma-Crawford
Rekha Sharma-Crawford ESQUIRE
Partner and Co-Founder Sharma-Crawford Law
Kansas City, KS

Rekha writes on LinkedIn:

A major step towards acknowledging that the best interest of the child must play a critical role in immigration cases. This was an idea I raised over 10 years ago with my friend and colleague, the brilliant Lory Rosenberg. Later the idea again was put forward with two additional brilliant colleagues, Paul Schmidt and Susan Roy. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but the right approach can’t be hidden forever.  So pleased to see it is finally seeing some daylight.

Here’s the Memorandum from EOIR Director David  L.  Neal:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-12/dm-24-01.pdf

Here’s the recent UCLA Center for Immigraton Law & Policy report on EOIR’s systemic failure to provide due process for children in Immigration Court:

🤮☠️ AS CONGRESS ENGAGES IN TRUTH & REALITY FREE (NON) DEBATE ON HOW TO INFLICT MORE CRUELTY AND MAYHEM ON VULNERABLE ASYLUM SEEKERS, THE REAL IMMIGRATION PROBLEMS GO UNADDRESSED — “No Fair Day” Documents Continuing Abuse Of Kids In Immigration Court!

Here’s a link to the “Sharma-Crawford, Rosenberg, Roy, Schmidt article” on “Best Interests of The Child in Immigration Court:”

🇺🇸⚖️ “BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD” IS A WIDELY-ACCEPTED EMPIRICALLY- SUPPORTED CONCEPT OF AMERICAN LAW — BUT NOT @  GARLAND’S DYSFUNCTIONAL EOIR! — The “Gang of 4,” Lory, Rekha, Sue, & I, With “Practical Scholarship” On How & Why To Argue For 21st Century Jurisprudence In A System Too-Often Wedded To The Past!

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As noted by my Round Table colleague “Sir Jeffrey” Chase, our Round Table has spoken out about the need for a separate Immigration Court system for children:

As you know, our Round Table signed on to a letter of support for proposed legislation to create a Children’s Immigration Court.

[Director Neal’s statement is] a positive administrative development.

Here’s my take:

  1. While progress is always welcome, this statement shrouds the concept of “best interest of the child” (“BIC”) with legal gobbledygook and bureaucratic doublespeak. (P. 3 of Neal Memo under “Legal Standards”).
  2. Here’s what a clear, correct statement on BIC would look like:

BIC, regardless of whether or not presented by a “Child Advocate” or incorporated in a “Best Interests Determination” (“BID”), can be directly relevant to issues of removability. For example, evidence of removability obtained by methods that clearly conflict with the BIC could be found unreliable or the result of “egregious misconduct” for the purposes of determining removability.

The BIC can also be highly relevant to issues of eligibility for relief. For example, a government or society that deprives certain children of all meaningful educational oportunities might well be engaging in persecution.

In addition, in NLPR cancellation cases, the BIC could be persuasive, even determinative, evidence that removal of a parent will result in “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a USC or LPR child or children.

3) Finally, since the EOIR Director is an administrator, not a quasi-judicial official, his or her policies have a distinct “you can take it or leave it” effect in Immigration Court. Therefore ameliorative statements from the Director, no matter how well-intended, are only effective if the BIA is willing and able to insist on and enforce “best practices” on Immigration Judges, preferably through precedent decisions and reassigning cases away from those IJs who show repeated contempt for due process and best practices.

Unfortunately, the current version of the BIA has, as a body, shown neither much sympathy nor concern for the substantive and due process rights of asylum seekers and other immigrants in Immigration Court. Unless and until Garland “cleans house” and appoints a BIA where all Appellate Judges are immigration/human rights experts laser focused on due process and best practices in Immigration Court — and not afraid of enforcing them uniformly in individual cases and incorporating them in binding precedents — the Director’s latest somewhat ameliorative statement is likely to be as toothless in practice as past efforts.

To a large extent, that’s a “nutshell” of why Garland’s Immigration Courts are in dire failure that threatens our entire democracy.

Unfortunately, that we are three years into this Administration and Garland is still bumbling along with a BIA that largely represents the mistakes and shortcomings of his predecessors suggests that waiting for him to “get religion” on the need for expertise, due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices at EOIR will continue to be an exercise in “Waiting for Godot!”

Waiting for Godot
Immigration practitioners waiting for Garland to institute “due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices” as the sole mission of his EOIR “courts.” It could be a long wait. Very long! Too long!
Naseer’s Motley Group in The Rose Bowl
Merlaysamuel
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Waiting for Godot in Doon School.jpg Copy
[[File:Waiting for Godot in Doon School.jpg|Waiting_for_Godot_in_Doon_School]]
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December 8, 2011

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-22-23

“TORTURE” UNDER U.N. DEFINITION! ☠️— “GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED CHILD ABUSE!” — WHAT HAVE WE BECOME AS A PEOPLE & A NATION? — AMERICA HAS PUT NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSERS AND SHAMELESS “PERPS” OF “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN CHARGE — We Now Have A Chance To Throw Them Out & Start The Return To Human Decency As An Overriding National Value! 🗽

 

Here’s an array of reports on how America under the Trump regime has joined the ranks of dictatorships, torturers, child abusers, persecutors, and human rights criminals!

Eugene Robinson
Eugene Robinson
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post
Source: WashPost Website

Eugene Robinson @ WashPost:

What kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show “toughness” by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has come to? Or are we better than that?

This election demands we answer those questions. The choice between President Trump and Joe Biden is not just political. It is also moral. And perhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision than the Trump administration’s policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump’s warped vision of American strength.

We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.

These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1,500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.

Please think about that. The shocking scenes we saw two years ago did not result from a sudden spasm of presidential anger. They didn’t stem from a Fox News segment Trump might have seen one evening. Rather, the administration rehearsed this form of cruelty.

What the administration did not plan for was how to reunite the children taken in 2017 with their families. Many of the parents were deported, and their children were placed in shelters around the country, then ostensibly released to parents or guardians, placements that the ACLU is still trying to confirm.

[Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term]

The ACLU and other organizations have sent investigators to towns and villages in Central America in an attempt to find the kidnapped children’s families — an effort complicated not just by time and distance, but also by the covid-19 pandemic. Parents of 545 children have not been found, the ACLU reported this week.

Disturbingly, the Department of Homeland Security suggested that some of the parents declined to get their children back so they could remain in the United States. Keep in mind that most of these families were seeking asylum from deadly violence in their home countries. The Trump administration changed immigration guidelines to make it unlikely that the families would ultimately be allowed to stay in the United States, but federal law gives them the right to apply for asylum and to have their cases heard. They did nothing wrong. They should never have been asked to choose between parenting their children and getting them to safety — not by their home countries, and not by the United States.

Trump’s racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks of his presidency from the beginning, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he would preside over such an outrage. But he didn’t do this by himself. He had plenty of help.

Former attorney general Jeff Sessions seized an opportunity to make his rabid antipathy toward Hispanic immigration into policy. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide in the Senate, was the architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2018 that the children taken would be “taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.” Former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last year that she regretted that “information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place” — but not the separations themselves.

. . . .

Read the rest of Eugene’s article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-we-tolerate-the-kidnapping-of-children-this-election-is-our-chance-to-answer/2020/10/22/0f60d17c-1496-11eb-ad6f-36c93e6e94fb

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Elise Foley
Elise Foley
Deputy Enterprise Editor
HuffPost
Photo Source: HuffPost.com

Elise Foley @ HuffPost:

President Donald Trump’s administration started and carried out a policy that took more than 4,000 children from their parents, at least 545 of whom are still split apart years later. But at Thursday’s debate, the president insisted that he did nothing wrong at all ― blaming his Democratic predecessors and even insisting the kids are doing fine.

“They are so well taken care of,” Trump said of the children taken from their parents by his administration. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

Trump’s first term was marked by a full-out assault on immigration, both legal and unauthorized. The most dramatic was his “zero tolerance” policy on unauthorized border-crossing, used in a 2017 pilot program and expanded more broadly in 2018, that led to criminal prosecution of parents and locking up their kids separately. Splitting up families was intentional and calculated, according to multiple reports.

Thanks to mass public outrage and a court order, Trump was forced to stop his family separation policy. Most families were reunited, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which was part of the lawsuit against the government that stopped the policy, said this week that at least 545 kids are still away from their parents.

“Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said during the debate. “And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Elise’s article here:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-debate-family-separation_n_5f924368c5b62333b2439d2b

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Ruth Marcus
Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus, moderates a panel discussion about chronic poverty with Education Secretary John B. King and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, during the National Association of Counties at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. U.S. Department of Agriculture photo by Lance Cheung.

Ruth Marcus @ WashPost:

545.

That is the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is unimaginable and irreparable.

545.

Even one would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.

545.

That number represents an indelible stain on President Trump and every individual in his administration who implemented this policy, flawed at the conception and typically, gruesomely incompetent in the execution. It is, perhaps in the technical sense but surely in the broader one, a crime against humanity. It is torture.

545.

That number — I will stop repeating it, yet it cannot be repeated enough — represents a moral challenge and responsibility for the next administration. If Joe Biden is elected president, he must devote the maximum resources of the federal government to fixing this disaster. The United States broke these families; it must do whatever it takes to help them heal.

Nothing like that would happen in a second Trump term, because Trump himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t grasp the horror that he oversaw. He doesn’t comprehend the policy, and he is incapable of feeling the pain it inflicted.

Those truths could not have been clearer cut than during Thursday night’s debate.

Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News asked the president a simple question: “How will these families ever be reunited?”

First, Trump misstated the situation: “Their children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country.”

No. These are children separated from their families, not separated from smugglers. They are children brought by their parents in desperate search of a better life, desperate enough that they would take the risk of the dangerous journey.

Then Trump pivoted to the irrelevant: “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.”

Welker persisted: “But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”

Trump responded by pointing his finger at his predecessor: “Let me just tell you, they built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages, and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said look at these cages, President Trump built them, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”

This is typical Trumpian deflection, bluster undergirded by ignorance. The “cages” are ugly but irrelevant to the topic at hand: the deliberately cruel plan to deter border-crossing by separating children from parents. That was a Trump administration special, implemented with callous sloppiness and so extreme that even the Trump administration abandoned it.

Welker, for the third time: “Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?”

At which point Trump made clear that he did not: “We’re trying very hard, but a lot of these kids come out without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.” The children, he added later, “are so well taken care of, they’re in facilities that were so clean.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Ruth’s op-ed here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/545-children-are-still-separated-from-their-families-what-if-one-of-them-were-yours/2020/10/23/63d3be04-154f-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html

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Bess Levin
Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair


Bess Levin
@ Vanity Fair:

The third and final presidential debate gave Donald Trump and Joe Biden the opportunity to make their final pitch to the American people before the 2020 election. For the Democratic nominee, that meant driving home the point that he believes in science, that he’ll take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, that climate change is real, and that systemic racism must be dealt with. For Trump, it meant making it clear that in addition to being a science-denying, QAnon-promoting dimwit, he’s also an actual monster who thinks separating small children from their parents, in some cases permanently, is absolutely fine.

Asked by moderated Kristen Welker about the news that parents of 545 children separated at the border—60 of whom are under the age of five—cannot be located, Trump defended the policy and gave no explanation for how the government plans to find these people and reunite their families. “Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump said, which is objectively false, as they are brought here by their parents, which is why it’s called the family separation policy. “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers and we let people in but they have to come in legally.”

pastedGraphic.png

Noting that Trump hadn’t answered the question, Welker pressed: “But how will you unite these kids with their families?”

“They built cages, they used to say I built cages…that was him,” Trump said, pointing to Biden and referring to the fact that the Obama administration did build temporary enclosures but failing, naturally, to mention that his predecessor did not separate families.

“Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their parents?” Welker asked a third time. Again, Trump responded by claiming that the children “come without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.”

At this point, Joe Biden was given a chance to weigh in and used his time to describe the policy implemented by Trump as the horror show all non-sociopaths know it to be. “Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and they were separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

Then Trump interjected with what he apparently believed was an important point that would cast his administration in a much more favorable light and perhaps might even win it some awards or sainthood by the Catholic church. “Kristen, I will say this,” he told the moderator, of the children stolen from their parents. “They’re so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that are so clean.

pastedGraphic_1.png

With regard to that claim, NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff weighed in on that after the debate, telling Rachel Maddow: “I was one of the reporters I guess the president mentioned, they invited me to go to the epicenter of this policy…what I saw was little children sitting on concrete floors, covered by mylar blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower, it makes me sick every time I recall it. And Physicians for Human Rights…called this torture…the American Academy of Pediatrics called this state-sanctioned child abuse, and the president of the United States I guess interprets that as children being well taken care of.”

pastedGraphic_2.png

Read the rest of The Levin Report here:

https://mailchi.mp/c4319dce073e/levin-report-trumps-heart-bursting-with-sympathy-for-his-buddy-bob-kraft-2882762?e=adce5e3390

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Jacob Soboroff
Jacob Soboroff
NBC Correspondent
Jacob Soboroff at the ABC News Democratic Debate
National Constitution Center. Philadelphia, PA.
Creative Commons License

Here’s a video from NBC New’s  Jacob Soboroff, who has actually been inside “Trump’s Kiddie Gulag.” Surprise spoiler: It’s not “nice.” More like “torture” and “child abuse.”

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/soboroff-the-conditions-of-migrant-children-trump-described-as-well-taken-care-of-made-me-sick-94450757764

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Julia Edwards Ainsley

And, here’s another video from NBC News’s always incisive and articulate Julia Edwards Ainsley:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/10/21/lawyers-cant-find-parents-of-545-migrant-children-separated-by-the-trump-administration.html

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There is neither moral nor legal justification for what the Trump regime has done to asylum seekers and other migrants over the past four years as part of their racist, White Nationalist, nativist agenda. But, we can show that we’re a better country than his horrible vision by voting him and all of his enablers out of office! Vote ‘Em out, vote ‘Em out!

PWS

10-25-20

CONTEMPT FOR COURTS: 7TH CIR. BLASTS BIA FOR MISCONDUCT: “We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again. Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.” — Baez-Sanchez v. Barr — Chief “Perp” Billy Barr remains at large to inflict more wanton damage on our republic, our legal system, and the most vulnerable humans!

FULL DECISION:

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2020/D01-23/C:19-1642:J:Easterbrook:aut:T:fnOp:N:2462983:S:0

Baez-Sanchez v. Barr, 7th Cir., 01-23-20, published

PANEL:  BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Easterbrook

KEY QUOTE:

What happened next beggars belief. The Board of Immigration Appeals wrote, on the basis of a footnote in a letter the Attorney General issued after our opinion, that our deci- sion is incorrect. Instead of addressing the issues we specified, the Board repeated a theme of its prior decision that the Secretary has the sole power to issue U visas and therefore should have the sole power to decide whether to waive in- admissibility. The Board did not rely on any statute, regulation, or reorganization plan transferring the waiver power under §1182(d)(3)(A)(ii) from the Attorney General to the Secretary. Nor did the Board discuss whether only aliens outside the United States may apply for relief under §1182(d)(3)(A)(ii). Likewise the Board did not consider whether Baez-Sanchez is entitled to a favorable exercise of whatever discretion the Attorney General retains. In sum, the Board flatly refused to implement our decision. Baez- Sanchez has filed a second petition for review.

We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again. Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.

The Board seemed to think that we had issued an advisory opinion, and that faced with a conflict between our views and those of the Attorney General it should follow the la]er. Yet it should not be necessary to remind the Board, all of whose members are lawyers, that the “judicial Power” under Article III of the Constitution is one to make conclusive deci- sions, not subject to disapproval or revision by another branch of government. See, e.g., Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 514 U.S. 211 (1995). We acted under a statutory grant of authority to review the Board’s decisions. 8 U.S.C. §1252(a)(1). Once we reached a conclusion, both the Constitution and the statute required the Board to implement it.

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A NOTE TO THE 7TH CIRCUIT AND OTHER ARTICLE III JUDGES:

My sympathies to you. 

But, frankly, rather than coming as a “shock,” you should know that similar stuff happens every day in our U.S. Immigration Courts, which are not “courts” by any known definition, do not provide fair and impartial decision makers, do not satisfy even minimal standards of Constitutional Due Process, and operate in a blatantly unconstitutional manner that you and your colleagues in other circuits and the Supremes have condoned for decades as it unfolded right under your noses. Contempt for the law, disregard of basic Due Process and fundamental fairness, bias against immigrants, particularly asylum seekers, rude treatment, disrespect for lawyers, contempt for the other coequal branches of Government, and failure to respect human decency and dignity are now among the “staples” of today’s “captive” Immigration Courts.

It’s just that most litigants don’t have the wherewithal and and access to competent lawyers to take their cases all the way to the Circuit Courts, sometimes several times as happened in this particular case, in a search for justice. They are, in very plain terms, simply railroaded out of the country without regard to the law or our Constitution.

Sadly, even when they do get before your colleagues across the country, far too many of them ignore the contemptuous travesty of justice being perpetrated by the Department of Justice in the Immigration “Courts.” They merely “rubber stamp” the defective final product. It’s called “going along to get along” or “cowardice in the face of tyranny.” 

For some reason, not obvious those of who once put our careers on the line to stand up for justice and the legal rights and human dignity of the most vulnerable among us, many, many Article III Judges seem to treat “life tenure” as a sinecure that empowers them to ignore needlessly ruined lines and human suffering, rather than as an opportunity, given to none others within our democratic institutions, to stand up for truth, justice, and the Constitution, even in the face of an overbearing and tyrannical Executive who has no respect for your functions. 

Since you seem to have disturbingly little understanding of the true nature of the system which forms a significant part of your appellate workload, let me help you out. Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals are not true “judges” in any sense of the word. They are “employees” of Attorney General Billy Barr. 

Billy himself is an acolyte of the “Unitary Executive” — a neo-fascist concept described by former White House Counsel and ex-con John Dean as meaning “that neither Congress nor the federal courts can tell the President what to do or how to do it.” In Billy’s view,. the power of Donald Trump, or any other GOP President (I doubt that he would apply it to a Democrat President), is unlimited and unfettered and the functions of the Judiciary and the Legislature are largely meaningless, except to the extent that they align with Trump’s agenda. The same goes for the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Code. They are nothing more than what Donald Trump and his toadies like Billy say they are.

Billy Barr is also an unapologetic agent of DHS Enforcement. Although nominally listed as a “party” before these “kangaroo court’ proceedings involving migrants, Barr and his equally contemptuous and lawless predecessor, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, have made it clear that “their judges” are to operate as an adjunct of their “partners” at DHS enforcement. Their only meaningful function is to railroad as many migrants as possible out of the country without regard to Due Process or legal rights. 

Indeed, both Barr and Sessions have simply rewritten the law, through bogus “precedent decisions” that plainly violate the basic rules of judicial ethics requiring impartiality and forbidding prejudgment of cases, as will as requiring that litigants and their attorneys be treated with basic respect and civility. All of these “bogus precedents” favor DHS Enforcement; none favor the individuals trying to save their lives and vindicate their legal rights. A number reverse well-established rules insuring fair adjudication, particularly for asylum seekers, while others deprive “their judges” of even minimal power to manage their dockets in a rational manner.

Additionally, Sessions and Barr have proved to be historically incompetent managers. While doubling the number of Immigration Judges, by hiring almost exclusively from the ranks of government prosecutors, they have more than doubled the court backlog, now approximately 1.1 million “active” cases with another 300,000 “waiting in the wings” as a result of a mindless and unethical precedent decision by Sessions reversing years of slow but incremental progress on docket management. 

They have also created this dysfunctional mess through a process of eliminating the reasonable and sensible use of priorities and “prosecutorial discretion” by DHS in the Immigration Courts as well as by using a process known as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” or “ADR.” Under ADR, judges and cases are shuffled around the country and the dockets are rearranged to respond to the “emergency of the day” while “ready for trial” cases, some of which have been pending for many years, are arbitrarily “orbited” to the end of dockets, some of which stretch out beyond 2024.

The judges and Board Members work for Billy Barr, who can fire them, reassign them, send them off to the FOIA unit, or turn them into “hall walkers.” (All of which actually happened during the reign of John Ashcroft, where a group of us were “punished” for exerting our authority as independent quasi-judicial officials and the BIA was absurdly cut from 23 Members to 12, under an astoundingly disingenuous claim of “efficiency.” By comparison, Barr recently announced an equally ill-conceived and unjustified plan to expand the BIA to over 50 Members stationed throughout the country).

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that Board Members feel themselves compelled and justified in ignoring your court orders in favor of a footnote in letter from the Attorney General, “the boss.” It’s completely consistent with the theory of the all-powerful “Unitary Executive” and the actuality that Board Members and Immigration Judges are constantly told that there are “mere employees” of the Attorney General required to carry out his “policies” under the threat of job loss.

The good news is that you folks aren’t as powerless as you seem to think yourselves to be. You don’t actually need a “motion” from private counsel to:

  • Hold this systemic clown show purporting to be a “court” system unconstitutional, as it most surely is, and shut it down pending legislative reform;
  • Throw Billy Barr in jail for his contemptuous behavior in allowing the BIA to violate your valid orders and then compounding it by neither confessing error nor apologizing, but rather sending his DOJ attorneys in to waste your valuable time and insult your intelligence;
  • Schedule some contempt hearings for non-compliant EOIR officials and explain to them that the “Unitary Executive” is nothing more than a figment of Billy’s warped imagination and that, no matter who signs their paychecks, they are obliged to follow the laws, obey your orders, provide Constitutional Due Process of law to individuals coming before them, exercise independent judgment based on the law and facts in the record, and ignore any nonsense stemming from Billy & company that flies in the face of any of the foregoing.

Then and only then, by standing up for the rights of the most vulnerable among us and your constitutional prerogatives, will you become part of the solution instead of “just another snappy quote line in one of my Courtside headlines.” 

If you don’t act now, this dysfunctional mess of an out of control, illegal, and grotesquely mismanaged system will eventually fall into your collective judicial laps, no matter how much you would like to shun it. For example, Billy is encouraging, basically demanding, that the BIA make more use of largely judicially discredited. “summary affirmances” and often arbitrary, capricious, and sloppily reasoned, “single member opinions,” both entered without meaningful deliberation or discussion, to “rubber stamp” more removal orders. Indeed, one of your retired colleagues, Judge Richard Posner, was an outspoken critic of the shockingly unprofessional and frequently incorrect results produced by the earlier “weaponization” of  “assembly line justice,” featuring “summary affirmances” and “single member decisions” resulting from the “Ashcroft debacle.”

Billy and his EOIR bureaucratic toadies fully intend to further reduce the already questionable quality of the “legal product” that the BIA sends your way. They are counting on you folks to either 1) look the way and join the”rubber stamp brigade,” or 2) do their dirty work for them.  At that point, you will not be able to avoid the “judgment of history” regarding your own complicity and fecklessness in the face of lawless tyranny that is destroying our precious democratic institutions and even more precious human lives every day. Wake up and act, before it’s too late, for you and for our nation!

Due Process Forever!

With my very best wishes,

PWS

01-25-19

 

FOOTNOTE:

For those interested, Judge Easterbrook was appointed by President Reagan; Judge Bauer by President Ford; and Judge Hamilton by President Obama.

If nothing else, Billy and EOIR are uniting judges across the political spectrum in their disgust and outrage.

FASCINATING “MUST READ:” “Dickie The P’s” Exit Interview With The NYT — See How Being A Judge Transformed A Conservative “Economic Analyst” Into A Pragmatic Humanist!

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/us/politics/judge-richard-posner-retirement.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F09%2F11%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fjudge-richard-posner-retirement.html&eventName=Watching-article-click&_r=0&referer

KEY QUOTE:

“The basic thing is that most judges regard these people [unrepresented litigants] as kind of trash not worth the time of a federal judge,” he said.”

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Read the full, very revealing interview at the above link.

I do hope that Judge P will turn his attention and boundless energy to the way that unrepresented litigants are routinely mistreated, denied due process, and abused in our U.S. immigration Court system. Children forced to present their own asylum claims? He could also shed some needed light on how the DOJ is intentionally attacking and wearing down the NGOs and pro bono attorneys, who are indigent migrants’ sole lifeline to due process, with Aimless Docket Reshuffling (“ADR”).

I was interested in how he described the staff attorney system in the 7th Circuit as placing the real adjuducation of appeals in the hands of staff, with Article III Judges all too often merely “signing off” or “rubber stamping” results. Most Circuit Court staff attorney systems were instituted to deal with the overwhelming flow of petitions to review BIA decisions following the so-called “Ashcroft Purge and Reforms” that largely eliminated critical thinking and dialogue at the BIA and turned it into the “Falls Church Service Center.”

The current BIA is largely a staff-driven organization. That the Article III Courts have replicated the same system resulting in the same problems is disturbing, and shows why due process for migrants is being given short shrift throughout our legal system.

The good news: The New Due Process Army knows what’s going on in the system and is positioned to carry the fight to the entrenched status quo, for decades if necessary, until our legal system delivers on the constitutional guarantee of due process for all.

Many thanks to my good friend and colleague Judge Dorothy Harbeck for sending this item my way!

PWS

09-11-17

ABA JOURNAL: “Dickie The P” Reportedly Quit 7th Over Rift With Colleagues About Treatment Of Pro Se Litigants — Perhaps He Should Check Out In Person How Sessions’s DOJ & Captive Immigration Courts Intentionally Abuse & Deny Due Process To Unrepresented Migrants!

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/why_did_posner_retire_he_cites_difficulty_with_his_colleagues_on_one_issue/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email

Debra Cassens Weiss reports:

“Judge Richard Posner had intended to stay on the federal appellate bench until he reached 80, an age he believed to be the upper limit for federal judges.

But on Friday, at the age of 78, he abruptly announced his retirement from the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, effective the next day. The reason is due to “difficulty” with his colleagues over the court’s treatment of people who represent themselves, he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in an email.

“I was not getting along with the other judges because I was (and am) very concerned about how the court treats pro se litigants, who I believe deserve a better shake,” Posner said. The issue will be addressed in an upcoming book that will explain his views and those of his colleagues “in considerable detail,” Posner said.

Posner said he did not time his retirement to allow President Donald Trump to appoint his replacement. “I don’t think it’s proper for judges or justices to make their decision to retire depend on whom they think the president will appoint as replacements,” he told the Law Bulletin. With Posner’s retirement, the 7th Circuit has four vacancies.

Posner was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and was widely considered a conservative. He has since written more than 3,300 judicial opinions, and not all please conservatives, according to the Law Bulletin. On the one hand, he struck down the Illinois ban on carrying weapons in public, called for fewer restrictions on domestic surveillance, and limited class certification in class-action lawsuits. But he has also written opinions favoring abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

In a 2012 interview with National Public Radio, Posner said he has become less conservative “since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.” But he won’t remain above the fray in politics.

He told the Law Bulletin that his retirement will allow him to assist his cat, Pixie, in a run for president in 2020. Above the Law had endorsed Pixie last year, but Posner was unable to participate in the campaign.”

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Perhaps “Dickie The P” can take some time away from Pixie to visit the kangaroo courts that DOJ has established in prisons intentionally located in out of the way places where traumatized individuals seeking refuge from life-threatening conditions are held in substandard conditions and forced to represent themselves in “death penalty cases” involving some off the most complex and (intentionally) obtuse concepts in modern American law.

Love him or loathe him (or both), Posner is a prolific writer and thinker whose views can’t be ignored or swept under the table. What’s happening in the U.S. Immigration Courts under Sessions is a national disgrace. A high profile legal commentator like Posner, who frankly doesn’t care whom he pisses off, could shed some light on the travesty now passing for due process in the Immigration Courts and how too many of his former Article III colleagues have turned their backs on their constitutional duties rather than taking a strong legal stand against intentional abuse of the most vulnerable  by our legal system. A voice like Posner’s advocating for an Article I Court would be heard!

PWS

09-08-15

U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES CAN BREATHE EASIER: Judge Richard “Dickie The P” Posner Retires — 7th Cir. Jurist Was Caustic, Unrelenting Critic Of U.S. Immigration Courts!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-judge-richard-posner-retires-met-20170901-story.html

The Chicago Tribune reports:

“Judge Richard A. Posner, one of the nation’s leading appellate judges, whose acerbic wit attracted an almost cultlike following within legal circles, is retiring after more than three decades with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

Posner, 78, is stepping down effective Saturday, according to a news release Friday afternoon from the 7th Circuit. He was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and served as its chief judge from 1993 to 2000.

Posner said in a statement he has written more than 3,300 opinions in his time on the bench and is “proud to have promoted a pragmatic approach to judging.” He said he spent his career applying his view that “judicial opinions should be easy to understand and that judges should focus on the right and wrong in every case.”

Posner’s biting and often brilliant written opinions as well as his unrelenting questioning from the bench have made him an icon of the court for years.

 

Known as a conservative at the time of his appointment, Posner’s views skewed more libertarian through the years, and he often came down in favor of more liberal issues such as gay marriage and abortion rights.

Lawyers who regularly appeared before the 7th Circuit knew that when Posner was on a panel they had to be ready for a line of questioning that could come out of left field. The salty judge was known to abruptly cut off lawyers who he thought were off-point, often with a dismissive “No, no, no!” delivered in his trademark nasal tone.”

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Read the full article at the link.

Here’s a classic Posner comment on the U.S. Immigration Courts from a 2016 case,  Chavarria-Reyes v. Lynch:

“POSNER, Circuit Judge, dissenting. This case involves a typical botch by an immigration judge. No surprise: the Immigration Court, though lodged in the Justice Department, is the least competent federal agency, though in fairness it may well owe its dismal status to its severe underfunding by Congress, which has resulted in a shortage of immigration judges that has subjected them to crushing workloads.”

See my prior blog on Chavarria-Reyes:

http://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/01/02/the-u-s-immigration-courts-vision-is-all-about-best-practices-guaranteeing-fairness-and-due-process-7th-circuits-judge-posner-thinks-its-a-farce-blames-congressional-underfunding/

Judge Posner was always provocative, often entertaining, and eminently quotable. While I found some of his commentary on the Immigration Courts and the BIA, and particularly some of his harsh words about individual Immigration Judges, to be “over the top,” his blunt criticism of the failure to provide due process to migrants and his recognition that the DOJ and Congress shared the majority of the responsibility for screwing up the system was spot on.

He was always a “player,” and he will be missed even by those who disagreed with him. I look forward to a “Posner commentary” on the state of due process in the Immigration Courts in the Sessions regime.

PWS

09-03-17

 

 

Unpublished 7th Cir. Provides Sound Advice For U.S. Immigration Judges Who Want to Insure Due Process W/O Becoming Potted Plants! — Hernandez-Alvarez v. Sessions

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2017/D06-27/C:16-3516:J:PerCuriam:aut:T:npDp:N:1985804:S:0

“Next, Hernandez‐Alvarez argues that the judge violated his due process rights by “improperly assum[ing] the role of counsel for the Government.” He asserts that the judge had a “negative attitude” toward his case, “frequently interrupted” his lawyer, and “took over entire lines of questioning.” The judge, he adds, prejudged the case.1

This due process challenge raises a constitutional claim that confers jurisdiction over this part of the petition. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(D), Kuschchak v. Ashcroft, 366 F.3d 597, 602 (7th Cir. 2004). On the merits, however, the Board did not err by deciding that the judge gave Hernandez‐Alvarez a fair hearing.

An immigration judge has the authority to “interrogate, examine, and cross‐ examine” a petitioner and any other witnesses. 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(b)(1). Immigration judges carry heavy caseloads and do not have time to waste. Like an appellate court, a trial judge in a bench trial can raise questions and try to focus the presentations to the court based on the judge’s understanding of the facts and law. Such efforts do not show that the judge has abandoned an impartial and neutral stance or has prejudged the case. See Barragan‐ Ojeda v. Sessions, 853 F.3d 374, 381–82 (7th Cir. 2017) (“When the IJ does not demonstrate ‘impatience, hostility, or a predisposition against’ an alien’s claim, and where the questions assisted in the development of the record on relevant points, the mere fact that the IJ elicited testimony is not inappropriate and certainly does not raise due process concerns.”); Kharkhan v. Ashcroft, 336 F.3d 601, 606 (7th Cir. 2003). On the other hand, as

1 Hernandez‐Alvarez relies on the following statement by the judge: “Well, Mr. Metcalf [Hernandez‐Alvarez’s attorney], I don’t see any point in continuing on with the respondent’s case. I just don’t see him eligible for cancellation of removal. I mean, you can continue the questioning, but one, you know, the records show that he has the ’99 conviction for domestic battery causing bodily injury; the Seventh Circuit has found that to be a crime of violence, and so he would be precluded from cancellation of removal eligibility statutorily. Secondly, he has a 2013 for domestic battery or aggravated battery, and he served approximately 150 days in jail. In addition, it’s only recently that the respondent by court order has been reestablishing a relationship with his children. So this case doesn’t even come close to being eligible for cancellation of removal. So do you want to ask some other questions concerning those topics, good moral character?”

No. 16‐3516 Page 5

we explained in Barragan‐Ojeda, that authority can be misused. We will order new hearings where judges have been hostile or abusive or have prevented rather than facilitated presentation of an alien’s case. 853 F.3d at 381, citing Rodriguez Galicia v. Gonzales, 422 F.3d 529, 539 (7th Cir. 2005); Podio v. I.N.S., 153 F.3d 506, 510 (7th Cir. 1998).

In this case, the judge posed appropriate questions that probed Hernandez‐ Alvarez’s statutory eligibility for relief. At the key hearing, both lawyers were new to the case. The judge was already familiar with the relevant circumstances, which did not need to be repeated. The judge’s questions about the extent of the hardship the children would suffer if Hernandez‐Alvarez were removed, the nature of his past criminal convictions, and his physical presence in the United States were right on target. They framed the challenge for Hernandez‐Alvarez and his lawyer, and the judge invited them to present additional evidence.

The process was similar to an appellate argument when a judge explains his or her understanding of the difficulties the lawyer’s client faces and invites response. Hernandez‐Alvarez has not identified any evidence that the judge prevented him from introducing, and his brief overlooks several opportunities the judge gave him to testify as he pleased. See Perez‐Fuentes, 842 F.3d at 511 (explaining that a petitioner does “not have a meaningful opportunity to be heard” when relevant evidence has been wrongly excluded). We also reject the argument that the judge prejudged the case. In the passage quoted in the footnote above, the judge reacted to the facts and evidence, identified the obvious and serious problems with Hernandez‐Alvarez’s application for cancellation of removal, and invited him to address them. That’s what a judge is supposed to do. Accordingly, the portion of the petition for judicial review that is not barred by 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(i) is DENIED.”

PANEL: Circuit Judges Posner, Kanne, Hamilton

Per Curiam

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PWS

07-02-17

 

 

Judge Posner Slams BIA For Ignoring Evidence Of Worsening Conditions In South Sudan — Deng Arej v. Sessions — 7th Cir.

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2017/D03-28/C:15-2061:J:Posner:aut:T:fnOp:N:1937333:S:0

“Arej has conceded that he qualifies as a criminal alien under 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(C), so our review of the Board’s decision is limited to issues of law. 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(D). But it was a serious legal error for the Board to have ignored Arej’s evidence. As we noted in Iglesias v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 528, 531 (7th Cir. 2008), the Board cannot make a reasoned decision to deny a motion to reopen if it ignores the evidence that a petitioner presents.

Furthermore, a competent immigration service would not ignore world events. The dramatically worsening conditions in South Sudan have been widely reported, with the young nation described as “cracking apart” and United Nations officials raising concerns about genocide. See, e.g., Jeffrey Gettleman, “War Consumes South Sudan, a Young Nation Cracking Apart,” New York Times, March 4, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2lHeELw. “Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed”; “every major cease‐fire that has been

No. 15‐2061 5

painstakingly negotiated by African and Western officials has been violated”; and “dangerous fissures are opening up within the South Sudanese military.” Id. And time doesn’t stand still. The Board’s order dismissing Arej’s appeal from the immigration judge’s denial of his motion to reopen was issued on May 8, 2015—almost two years ago. Considering that Arej has not yet been removed and that the order was perfunctory, the Board should consider whether he should be allowed to present evidence concerning current conditions in the two Sudans. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.2(a).

The petition for review is therefore granted, the decision of the Board vacated, and the case remanded to the Board for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

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Seems like a South Sudan case would be a “no brainer” for reopening by the BIA. Not sure we even deport folks there. And, actually reviewing the evidence carefully would be a great first step toward becoming “the world’s best administrative tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” Or, has the vision become just a slogan from bygone years? He’s probably only eligible to apply for withholding or CAT, though, because of the nature of his criminal conviction.

PWS

03/29/17

MATT CAMERON IN THE BAFFLER: Trump’s Immigration Policies Promise To Make A Bad System Even Worse

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/strangers-in-a-cruel-land?utm_campaign=Newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=45427323&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–SrQwaCmT1prkolHBKrPKHSN4djFsqLNoveeB1BWE10ZO3rscc5BcXMhmwFedKjGnCbzzw56UKYKQ-sIulUP96Hwj8rw&_hsmi=45427323

“Donald Trump’s presidential campaign capitalized on a familiar brand of nativist anti-immigrant slander usually reserved for our nation’s most desperate times. It was an ugly old vein to mine, but now that he’s managed to strike electoral gold there, he is not wrong to view his election as a mandate to carry out his promise to enforce federal immigration law to its fullest extent. This would be alarming to friends of the Constitution under any circumstances, but especially so given Trump’s open embrace of white supremacy—as a concept, if not a movement—in the primaries. We haven’t encountered such an openly bigoted presidential campaign on the right since Pat Buchanan’s last failed insurgent run at the GOP nomination in 1996, and we have never seen an avowedly white-nationalist leader accede to the Oval Office.
Nor should any of us expect the chastening experience of actual governing to temper his outlook. Trump has proven at every opportunity that he is all but ineducable about even the simplest details of how immigration to the United States actually works. And this, it turns out, is probably one of the few things he has in common with a considerable majority of Americans.”

. . . .

The immigration system I keep hearing about from pundits and politicians (all of whom should know better) is almost entirely unmoored from actual fact. It seems to be a chimerical pastiche of the one we had before Ellis Island closed, the one we had just before the moon landing, and some sort of rosy Tomorrowland fantasy in which visas would be awarded to the undocumented if only they would do it the right way. This is not the system I work with every day.
When a white, native-born American says, “my family came here the right way,” what the speaker almost invariably means is that one or more of his ancestors came to the United States without a visa during a time of virtually unrestricted European migration. They boarded a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, stood in line at an immigration inspection station for the better part of a day, answered a standard series of twenty-nine questions, were subjected to a medical exam, and were admitted indefinitely to the United States. That’s how my Scottish great-grandparents did it in 1916. If you were born in the United States with European ancestors, it’s probably how you came to be here too. That system ended in 1924. Its successor, the “national origins” quota system (a more restricted but still relatively open “line”), was abolished in 1965. But I still regularly meet well-meaning fellow citizens who believe that anyone who deserves a chance can simply “fill out the forms,” “get in line,” and “come the right way, like my family did.” At which point, I have to patiently explain that they can’t.

For most of my undocumented neighbors, in East Boston and beyond, there are no forms. There is no line. There never was. Telling an undocumented Mexican dishwasher that he should “wait in line, like my family did” is no more realistic than advising him to switch to the same model of iPhone your great-grandfather used. Yet the lie persists, with nearly every presidential candidate since George H. W. Bush invoking the imaginary “line.”

. . . .

[Bill] O’Reilly was too charitable. There is no reason to believe that Trump has ever understood the basic precepts of due-process protection. Commitment to due process would have been fundamentally incompatible with Trump’s record as a casino magnate, a New York City landlord, or an authoritarian game show host given unlimited license to “fire” contestants at whim.

Trump has signaled the likely place of due process in his immigration system by promising to immediately deport 2 to 3 million “criminal aliens.” This staggering number, nearly the entire urban population of Chicago, would represent more deportations than Obama (the current record-holder) completed in eight years, and more than twice as many as were carried out during Operation Wetback.

. . . .

In fifty-eight immigration courts nationwide, immigration judges are operating (per a recent study) at a degree of mental stress equivalent to that of an emergency-room doctor. “This case,” sneered federal judge Richard Posner in a recent dissent, “involves a typical botch by an immigration judge.” Posner, punching down from the lofty heights of a federal appeals court, went on to concede graciously that the immigration court’s status as “the least competent federal agency,” might have something to do with congressional underfunding and the resultant “crushing workloads.”
Our nation’s roughly 250 immigration judges [now approximately 305] are now responsible for managing a record backlog of more than five hundred thousand pending deportation cases, with thousands more pouring into the system each day. The judges I appear before in the Boston immigration court are humane and learned experts who work long hours, in circumstances that couldn’t be less familiar to Judge Posner, but they are as susceptible to human error as any judge anywhere.

In an executive order signed within days of his inauguration, Trump authorized Congress to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the ground. He has made no mention of any plans to extend the courts the same courtesy, but this new flow of cases simply cannot be sustained within today’s judicial plumbing.”

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Cameron’s full, hard-hitting article is definitely worth a read. And, as he points out, quite sadly, it’s likely to get much worse from a due process standpoint before it gets better.

I also think he is right that few U.S. Court of Appeals Judges would be able to survive working as U.S. Immigration Judges under today’s incredibly difficult circumstances and conditions.

PWS

03/15/17

 

Judge Posner, Split 7th Circuit, Slam IJ, BIA On Denial Of Protection To Honduran With HIV!

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2017/D01-19/C:15-2619:J:Posner:aut:T:fnOp:N:1898108:S:0

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The case, full text at the above link, is VELASQUEZ‐BANEGAS, v. LYNCH.  

I agree with Judge Posner’s bottom line that protection should have been granted on this record.  But, I think that he was overly harsh on the Immigration Judge.

These would be difficult cases for any judge at any level of our system.  One of the significant problems is that the Appellate Division of the Immigration Court, the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) has failed to provide adequate positive guidance on granting protection.

The overwhelming number of BIA precedent cases dealing with asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture are denials by the BIA.  But, even with asylum grant levels leveling off and actually falling slightly over the past several years, the majority of applicants for protection actually qualify for some form of relief at the trial level based on fear of persecution or torture.

The unnecessarily negative approach of the BIA in its precedent decisions both gives a misleading negative guidance to Immigration Judges and creates the impression with U.S. Court of Appeals Judges that the system is even more skewed against applicants than it actually is.

Although I agreed with the majority in Velasquez, I think that the concluding paragraph of the Judge Ripple’s dissent also makes some good points:

“Immigration cases always pose a special burden on United States judges. As Jacques Maritain so eloquently put it: “We are all wounded souls.” See Jacques Maritain, Réflexions sur lʹAmerique 87–91 (1958). Every American, including every United States judge, has a family memory that includes ancestors who came from some place where life was not as good as it is here. The DNA of our national character makes it very difficult to tell an individual that he cannot enjoy the same liberty, safety, and security that we enjoy. When the individual suffers from a medical condition that cannot be treated as well in the country to which he is returned, basic humanitarian values make the task even more difficult. No doubt, those who must make necessary policy choices and those who must enforce those choices feel, or should feel, that same angst. But immigration must be regulated, and, in this Country, national policy is set by Congress and enforced by the Executive. Our own task as judges is limited. Because the immigration judge’s determinations were supported by substantial evidence, I respectfully dissent.”

Food for thought.

PWS

01/23/17