☠️🤯 IN DHS’S NEW AMERICAN GULAG (“NAG”), THEIR SPELLING MISTAKE CAN GET YOU DEPORTED! — NDPA Superstar Marty Rosenbluth Saves Another Life (For Now)!

Marty Rosenbluth Immigration Attorney Lumpkin,GA PHOTO: Linkedin
Marty Rosenbluth
Immigration Attorney
Lumpkin,GA
PHOTO: Linkedin

Marty writes on LinkedIn:

Major flying rainbow Unicorn starfish today. We actually got a client pulled off a deportation flight while the plane was on the tarmac in Louisiana. We have been emailing ICE since last week when we first heard that he had been moved from Stewart to Louisiana and was going to be deported, despite the fact that he has a hearing pending in the immigration court here. This of course would be entirely illegal, but since when does ICE care about the law? 

It wasn’t until today that we finally got ICE to admit that they were wrong!!! The poor kid is only 18 and doesn’t speak any English!!! I doubt they had an interpreter who speaks his language. He must have been scared to death!  I am sure he had no idea why he was on the plane, but I trust he was relieved when they pulled him off!  Only about a dozen emails later. 

To their credit ICE actually apologized! Sort of. They said that the asylum office had his name spelled wrong. Pffffft!!!!

***************************

Way to go, Marty! Thanks for all you do for American justice!  

This is what really happens when politicos and bureaucrats push for restrictions on asylum and tout summary removals. More innocent, vulnerable humans who seek only to have the U.S live up to its legal and moral obligations will die or be tortured without due process. THAT’S what “bipartisan consensus” really means.

The system is already dysfunctional. Speeding things up and eliminating legal rights will only make things worse. Why aren’t politicos discussing ways to fix the broken system, rather than penalizing asylum seekers by eliminating it? This also shows the need for life-saving representation to achieve due process!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-04-24

 

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️GARLAND’S FAILURES LOOM LARGE AS EOIR’S ABUSES OF BLACK REFUGEES EMERGE! 🤮 —  Biased, Thinly Qualified “Judges” Fingered In HRF Report On Wrongful Returns To Cameroon Remain On Bench Under Garland — Anti-Asylum BIA & Ineffective Leadership From Trump Era Retained By Garland In EOIR Fiasco!

Kangaroos
What fun, sending Black Cameroonian refugees back to rape, torture, and possible death! We don’t need to know much asylum law or real country conditions here at EOIR. We make it up as we go along. And, Judge Garland just lets us keep on playing “refugee roulette,” our favorite game!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rasputin243/
Creative Commons License

 

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/02/deported-cameroonian-asylum-seekers-suffer-serious-harm.html


From HRF:

. . . .

Nearly all of the deported people interviewed had fled Cameroon between 2017 and 2020 for reasons linked to the crisis in the Anglophone regions. Human Rights Watch research indicates that many had credible asylum claims, but due process concerns, fact-finding inaccuracies, and other issues contributed to unfair asylum decisions. Lack of impartiality by US immigration judges – who are part of the executive branchnot the independent judiciary – appeared to play a role. Nearly all of the deported Cameroonians interviewed – 35 of 41 – were assigned to judges with asylum denial rates 10 to 30 percentage points higher than the national average.

. . . .

*****************

The complete report gives a totally damning account of EOIR’s incompetence, ignorance of asylum law, poor decision making, “rigged” assignment of bad judges, and systemic bias directed against asylum seekers, primarily people of color. Although human rights conditions have continued to deteriorate in Cameroon, asylum grant rates have fluctuated dramatically depending on how the political winds at DOJ are blowing.

For example, judges denying asylum because of imaginary “improved conditions” in Cameroon falls within the realm of the absurd. No asylum expert would say that conditions have improved.

Yet, in a catastrophic ethical and legal failure, there is no BIA precedent “calling out” such grotesque errors and serving notice to the judges that it is unacceptable judicial conduct! There are hardly any recent BIA published precedents on granting asylum at all — prima facie evidence of the anti-asylum culture and institutional bias in favor of DHS Enforcement that Sessions and Barr actively cultivated and encouraged!

How bad were things at EOIR? Judges who denied the most asylum cases were actually promoted to the BIA so they could spread their jaundiced views and anti-asylum bias nationwide. See, e.g.https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/11/01/corrupted-courts-no-stranger-to-improper-politicized-hiring-directed-against-migrants-seeking-justice-the-doj-under-barr-doubles-down-on-biased-ideological-hiring-promot/

Even more outrageously, these same members of the “asylum deniers club” remain in their influential appellate positions under Garland! As inexplicable as it is inexcusable!

The HRF report details the wide range of dishonest devices used by EOIR to cut off valid asylum claims: bogus adverse credibility determinations; unreasonable corroboration requirements; claiming “no nexus” when the causal connection is obvious; failing to put the burden on the DHS in countrywide persecution involving the government or  past persecution; bogus findings that the presence of relatives in the country negates persecution; ridiculous findings that severe harm doesn’t “rise to the level of persecution,” failure to listen to favorable evidence or rebuttal; ignoring the limitations on representation and inherent coercion involved in intentionally substandard and health threatening ICE detention, to name just some. While these corrupt methods of denying protection might be “business as usual” at EOIR “denial factories,” they have been condemned by human rights experts and many appellate courts. Yet Garland continues to act as if nothing were amiss in his “star chambers.”

This bench needs to be cleared of incompetence and anti-asylum bias and replaced with experts committed to due process and fair, impartial, and ethical applications of asylum principles. There was nothing stopping Sessions and Barr from “packing” the BIA and the trial courts with unqualified selections perceived to be willing and able to carry out their White Nationalist agenda! Likewise, there is nothing stopping Garland from “unpacking:” “cleaning house,” restoring competence, scholarly excellence, and “due process first” judging to his shattered system!

Unpacking
“It’s not rocket science, but ‘unpacking’ the Immigration Courts appears beyond Garland’s skill set!”
“Unpacking”
Photo by John Keogh
Creative Commons License

All that’s missing are the will and the guts to get the job done! Perhaps that’s not unusual for yet another Dem Administration bumbling its way through immigration policy with no guiding principles, failing to connect the dots to racial justice, betraying promises to supporters, and leaving a trail of broken human lives and bodies of the innocent in its wake. But, it’s unacceptable! Totally!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-11-22

☠️⚰️DEATH IN THE GULAG: 4TH COVID DEATH @ ICE STEWART IS 1ST FOR BIDEN ADMINISTRATION — Killer Policies, Grossly Incompetent Administration, & White-Nationalist Cruelty Across The Immigration Bureaucracy @ DHS & DOJ Need Immediate Attention! — Delay = Death, & Death Doesn’t Care Whether It’s Biden Or Trump!

Grim Reaper
G. Reaper Approaches ICE Gulag With “Imbedded Captive Star Chamber”
Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Special to Courtside

Feb. 1, 2021

Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported the first death in the ICE/EOIR Stewart Detention Gulag under the Biden Administration. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiA4Iet8cjuAhUpF1kFHeRDBD4QFjAAegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ajc.com%2Fnews%2Ffourth-ice-detainee-dies-from-covid-19-in-southwest-georgia%2FTNPDEQCTD5AJNEJG3AB5UODNGQ%2F&usg=AOvVaw0dRM3U1mG3KNQFzmiINivM

It was the first reported death at the Stewart Gulag since the Trump regime’s final killing in December 2020.

With “Caretaker Bureaucrats” in charge @ DHS & DOJ, the deadly migrant killing, harming, and terrorizing policies continue unabated. Indeed, as far as I can tell, seedy DOJ lawyers are pushing forward with defending the very cruel, stupid, inhumane, and illegal policies and bankrupt legal positions that the Trump immigration kakistocracy made infamous. The same policies that Biden and Harris campaigned against! EOIR continues to crank out skewed anti-immigrant, anti-asylum jurisprudence. 

The current policies are killers; the bodies continue to pile up, even if they are (quite intentionally) in obscure places like Lumpkin, GA, the “no persons land” near the Mexican border, and in dangerous and corrupt foreign nations where our Government mindlessly “orbits” other human beings without regard to what it will happen to them. 

For now, these stories of death, despair, and unnecessary human suffering are largely “out of sight, out of mind.” But, they are being documented and eventually history will highlight those, from the Roberts’ Court on down, who abjured their duties to their fellow humans and abused their positions of public trust. 

Due Process Forever! Death ⚰️ in The New American Gulag ☠️, never!

PWS

02-01-21

SIGN OF THE TIMES/HOPE FOR THE FUTURE? — U.S. JUDGE IN “ASYLUM FREE ZONE OF GEORGIA” REQUIRES SCOFFLAW REGIME TO FOLLOW CONSTITUTION IN BOND HEARINGS — Another Key Victory For NDPA Star Patrick Taurel & The Gang @ Clark Hill PLC! — But, Will The Dems Finally Follow Up With Bold, Decisive Action, To Fix EOIR, ⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️Or Throw Immigrants & Their Advocates “Under the Bus” Once Again!🤮⚰️

Patrick Taurel
Patrick Taurel
Senior Attorney
Clark Hill PLC
D.C.

 

Subject: Victory in M.D. Ga. – gov’t bears burden of justifying detention in 236(a) bond proceedings by clear & convincing evidence

 

Dear colleagues,

 

I’m pleased to share the attached opinion authored by Judge Hugh Lawson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia finding that the Due Process Clause requires the government in 236(a) bond proceedings to bear the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that the noncitizen’s detention is justified. The decision follows in the footsteps of cases like Velasco Lopez v. Decker, No. 19-2284-cv, 2020 WL 6278204 (2d Cir. Oct. 27, 2020), Dubon Miranda v. Barr, 463 F. Supp. 3d 632 (D. Md. 2020), and Pensamiento v. McDonald, 315 F. Supp. 3d 684 (D. Mass. 2018).

 

The bulk of the opinion is devoted to applying the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test. Notably, the court rejects the argument advanced by the government here and in other cases like Velasco Lopez that the Supreme Court’s civil detention cases have no purchase in the immigration context. Citing Zadvydas and Justice Souter’s concurring and dissenting opinion in Demore, the court finds that the government’s position “belies the fact that the Supreme Court regularly relies upon civil confinement cases to inform its due process analysis in immigration cases.” “[I]mmigration detention,” the court explains, “is an extraordinary liberty deprivation that must be carefully limited.”

 

Other items of note:

  • We argued, cribbing liberally from Mary Holper’s exceptional law review article, The Beast of Burden in Immigration Bond Hearings, 67 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 75 (2016), that the BIA’s decision in Matter of Adeniji, 22 I&N Dec. 1102 (BIA 1999) was arbitrary and capricious under the APA. The court does not reach that issue but does recognize that the regulation the BIA relied on in Adeniji to allocate the burden on the noncitizen “does not apply to IJs determining release at bond hearings.”
  • The court acknowledges that under 236(a) the “IJ may … set conditions of release such as subjecting the noncitizen to electronic monitoring.”
  • For those practicing in the Eleventh Circuit where the government continues to cite Sopo v. U.S. Att’y Gen., 825 F. 3d 1199 (11th Cir. 2016) when it suits the government’s interests, the judge recognized that that case confers no precedential value in light of its vacatur.

 

Best regards,

Patrick

 

Patrick Taurel
CLARK HILL PLC

******************************

Congrats, Patrick!

The case is Gao v. Paulk:  Here’s a copy of Judge Lawson’s decision:

Gao v. Paulk et al, 20-cv-93-HL-MSH, ECF No. 38, Order Rejecting Report and Recommendation

Here’s my favorite quote:

Petitioner has already experienced a severe liberty deprivation. Two years of immigration detention imitates the Government’s punishment of individuals convicted of serious offenses. See 18 U.S.C. § 3156(a)(2) (“‘[F]elony’ means an offense punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of more than one year….”); 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B) (“‘[V]iolent felony’ means any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year . . . .”); 18 U.S.C. §3559(a). Petitioner now faces a third year of incarceration—though the Government has “no . . . punitive interest” in civil confinement, and he “may not be punished.” Foucha, 504 U.S. at 80. 

Reality check:

I did lots of non-detained cases involving natives of the PRC in 13 years on the Arlington bench. Perhaps a couple failed to show for their asylum merits hearings, but if so, I don’t remember it. The PRC is always among the “league leaders” in EOIR asylum grants and applicants from there have little reason not to show up for their hearings. That’s particularly true of someone represented by Patrick Taurel and Clark Hill!

So, this detention has little, if anything, to do with insuring appearance at immigration hearings. And, by the Government’s own admission, it has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the public from danger. 

So, what’s it all about? It’s illegal punishment for applying for asylum and asserting rights, intended to “deter” other individuals from doing so, and to enrich those profiting from gross and abusive over-detention of foreign nationals, as well as throwing “red meat” to the political right wing. 

And, perhaps nowhere is the abuse of our system worse than in the Georgia Immigration Courts which have correctly been characterized as an “Asylum Free Zone” where unconstitutional, unlawful, and biased judging and demeaning of asylum applicants and their representatives has been allowed to flourish and “turned into an art.” 

Will the Biden-Harris Administration end these perversions of justice occurring in broad daylight? It’s not rocket science:

  • Adopt the proper constitutional rule for bond cases set forth by the court in this and other cases;
  • Remove the current BIA and replace them with real appellate judges: experts in asylum, human rights, and due process, who will insure equal justice and fundamental fairness for every single individual stuck in the now out of control, dysfunctional, and intentionally unfair EOIR system;
  • Have a real BIA crack down on the “judicial outliers” in Georgia and require them to follow the proper Cardoza/Mogharrabi generous asylum standards, stop illegal and wasteful detention, treat everyone with respect and human dignity, and follow best (not worst) practices, or find other jobs more suited to their anti-immigrant philosophies.

Or, will the incoming Administration follow in the footsteps of the Obama Administration by ignoring or papering over the problems causing deep dysfunction and mockery of the rule of law, due process, and best practices at EOIR.

There are only two ways of approaching the EOIR mess: solve it by bringing in the NDPA, or become a part of it. The choice is easy. 

But, sadly, not so easy that past Democratic Administrations have figured it out! And rumors that some of the same folks whose poor, ineffectual, wrong-headed approach to both immigration policy and administration of the immigration bureaucracy, as well as gross lack of appreciation for the Immigration Courts and their proper role, helped empower Stephen Miller & company to wreak havoc on our democracy and humanity are being seriously considered for high level posts in the incoming Administration are discouraging to say the least. 

Leaving the true “defenders of the faith” out in the cold once again, while rewarding those who weren’t fighting on the front lines to save democracy, and “didn’t get it” the last time the Democrats had power, could be the death knell for both the Democratic Party and our nation. 

Sad, but true. And you heard it first on Courtside!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-17-20

🤡WELCOME TO CLOWN COURT: Where The Lives Of Millions Of Humans & The Future Of America Are Treated Like A Cruel Joke, As Complicit Article III Courts Watch This Grotesque Unconstitutional Spectacle & Parody Of Justice Unfold On Their Watch!

Kate Brumback
Kate Brumback
Reporter
Associated Press
DEEPTI HAJELA
Deepti Hajela
Reporter
Associated Press, NY
Amy Taxin
Amy Taxin
Reporter
Associated Press

https://apple.news/A9aA4TWFpQoSBoXVeAOv_Rg

By KATE BRUMBACK, DEEPTI HAJELA and AMY TAXIN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a locked, guarded courtroom in a compound surrounded by razor wire, Immigration Judge Jerome Rothschild waits — and stalls.

A Spanish interpreter is running late because of a flat tire. Rothschild tells the five immigrants before him that he’ll take a break before the proceedings even start. His hope: to delay just long enough so these immigrants won’t have to sit by, uncomprehendingly, as their futures are decided.

“We are, untypically, without an interpreter,” Rothschild tells a lawyer who enters the courtroom at the Stewart Detention Center after driving down from Atlanta, about 140 miles away.

In its disorder, this is, in fact, a typical day in the chaotic, crowded and confusing U.S. immigration court system of which Rothschild’s courtroom is just one small outpost.

Shrouded in secrecy, the immigration courts run by the U.S. Department of Justice have been dysfunctional for years and have only gotten worse. A surge in the arrival of asylum seekers and the Trump administration’s crackdown on the Southwest border and illegal immigration have pushed more people into deportation proceedings, swelling the court’s docket to 1 million cases.

“It is just a cumbersome, huge system, and yet administration upon administration comes in here and tries to use the system for their own purposes,” says Immigration Judge Amiena Khan in New York City, speaking in her role as vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

“And in every instance, the system doesn’t change on a dime, because you can’t turn the Titanic around.”

The Associated Press visited immigration courts in 11 different cities more than two dozen times during a 10-day period in late fall. In courts from Boston to San Diego, reporters observed scores of hearings that illustrated how crushing caseloads and shifting policies have landed the courts in unprecedented turmoil:

–Chasing efficiency, immigration judges double- and triple-book hearings that can’t possibly be completed, leading to numerous cancellations. Immigrants get new court dates, but not for years.

–Young children are everywhere and sit on the floor or stand or cry in cramped courtrooms. Many immigrants don’t know how to fill out forms, get records translated or present a case.

— Frequent changes in the law and rules for how judges manage their dockets make it impossible to know what the future holds when immigrants finally have their day in court. Paper files are often misplaced, and interpreters are often missing.

In Georgia, the interpreter assigned to Rothschild’s courtroom ends up making it to work, but the hearing sputters moments later when a lawyer for a Mexican man isn’t available when Rothschild calls her to appear by phone. Rothschild is placed on hold, and a bouncy beat overlaid with synthesizers fills the room.

He moves on to other cases — a Peruvian asylum seeker, a Cuban man seeking bond — and punts the missing lawyer’s case to the afternoon session.

This time, she’s there when he calls, and apologizes for not being available earlier, explaining through a hacking cough she’s been sick.

But by now the interpreter has moved on to another courtroom, putting Rothschild in what he describes as the “uneasy position” of holding court for someone who can’t understand what’s going on.

“I hate for a guy to leave a hearing having no idea what happened,” he says, and asks the lawyer to relay the results of the proceedings to her client in Spanish.

After some discussion, the lawyer agrees to withdraw the man’s bond petition and refile once she can show he’s been here longer than the government believes, which could help his chances.

For now, the man returns to detention.

. . . .

********************

Read the full article at the link.  Yes, there’s lots of blame to go around: Administrations of both parties, an irresponsible Congress, several decades of underfunding and poor management.

But that doesn’t change these simple truths:

  • We have a scofflaw regime that glories in committing “crimes against humanity” directed at migrants;
  • We have a feckless Congress that won’t legislate responsibly as long as “Moscow Mitch” McConnell and his Trump-toady GOP control the Senate;
  • The only branch of Government that could put a stop to this unconstitutional and unconscionable mess is the Article III Federal Judiciary;
  • And, this highly privileged group of jurists, the only public officials I’m aware of with the “protective insulation” of life tenure, has stood by and watched their fellow humans being “thrown to the lions” in this disgraceful display of unconstitutional injustice.

Do your duty Article IIIs and put an end to the EOIR Clown Show! History is recording your failures to act, every day!

Due Process Forever; Clown Courts 🤡 and Their Complicit Enablers, Never!

PWS

01-17-20

CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!

https://apple.news/Au_bQMKN3QxmsBKokkqyP3w

Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
Reporter, HuffPost

Sarah Ruiz’s-Grossman reports for HuffPost:

U.S. NEWS

06/12/2019 05:25 PM EDT

Cages With ‘Kids’ Pop Up Around NYC To Protest Immigrant Detention

The art installations were meant to bring awareness to the horrific conditions children and other migrants face at the southern U.S. border.

Some people in New York City were confronted with an alarming image as they walked down the street on Wednesday morning: a chain-link cage on the sidewalk containing a child-size mannequin wrapped in a foil blanket, with audio playing of migrant children crying.

More than 20 cages were placed around Manhattan and Brooklyn ― from Union Square to the Barclays Center sports arena ― as part of a campaign called #NoKidsInCages by immigration nonprofit RAICES and ad agency Badger & Winters.

It was meant to draw Americans’ attention to the children and other migrants being held in alarming conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Speakers in the cages played the viral recording released by ProPublica last summer of kids wailing for their “mamá” and “papá” after having been separated from them at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

“We want to bring this back to the consciousness of the American people,” RAICES CEO Jonathan Ryan told HuffPost. “One of the many unfortunate consequences of the repeated traumatic stories coming from the border is that, as horrified and angry as people have been, we also become desensitized. It’s important for people … to be confronted with the reality that this is about children, human beings, whose lives are forever affected.”

“This is being done in our name by people who we elected,” he added. “And if we don’t do something to stop this, this will become who we are.”

About two dozen cages were dropped around the city from about 4 a.m. to 5 a.m., Ryan said. By midafternoon most of them had been taken down by police or city employees, with three remaining around 2 p.m., per Ryan. The New York Police Department confirmed to HuffPost that more than half a dozen cages had been removed around Manhattan, but did not respond to questions as to why.

The online campaign associated with the installations recalls the family separations under President Donald Trump’s hard-line zero-tolerance policy, which led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents last year. The policy sparked protests nationwide and was reversed by executive order in late June. But a January report from the Department of Health and Human Services found the administration may have separated thousands more kids from their families than was previously known, and it did not know how many or whether they were reunited.

RAICES also wants people to become aware of other issues migrants face, Ryan said.

He noted undocumented immigrant families are still separated “routinely” at the border, including when migrant kids are split from other guardians like uncles and aunts or older siblings. Separations occur inside the country too, he said, when a child’s undocumented mom or dad is arrested by immigration agents, for instance in a workplace raid.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended over 109,000 people at the border in April ― more than double the number of migrants detained during that month last year. A majority of the migrants apprehended were either families traveling together or unaccompanied kids.

A Department of Homeland Security watchdog, reporting on Border Patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, found last month that detained migrants were kept in dirty and extremely crowded conditions, forcing some people to stand on toilets to get some breathing room.

Last week, Trump said he reached an agreement with Mexico that includes “rapidly” returning to Mexico anyone who crosses the border seeking asylum in the U.S. Advocates are concerned about the dangerous conditions in cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, where more migrants will now be forced to wait as their claims are processed.

“When the American people hear stories of this problem being fixed by the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, it hasn’t been fixed, it’s just further from their view,” Ryan said. “The suffering will only increase.”

*************************************

Ah, life in the ivory tower of the Article III Federal Judiciary, where you seldom are confronted with the human faces or ugly reality of your abuses and failures to protect the human rights of others.

The “Remain in Mexico” Program is an ongoing affront to our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency for which the judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who are enabling this ongoing humanitarian outrage and giving it “legal cover” should be held fully morally and historically accountable!

PWS

06-13-19

 

AMERICA’S SHAME: Congress Dithers, Life-Tenured Article III Circuit Judges & Supreme Court Justices Shirk Their Duty, While Trump’s “False Courts” Violate Constitutional, Statutory, Treaty, & Human Rights On A Daily Basis With Impunity! — History Will Remember Those Who Are Complicit In & Who Are Morally Responsible For Unlawful Killings & Other Unspeakable Acts Committed Against Those Most Vulnerable Who Are Merely Seeking Fairness Under Our Broken & Fraudulent Justice System!

NEW REPORT EXAMINES WEAPONIZATION OF IMMIGRATION COURT SYSTEM

Advocates Launch Immigration Court Watch App to Ensure Greater Accountability, Transparency.

WASHINGTON, DC – The immigration court system has failed to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case review, according to a new report released today by Innovation Law Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center, entitled The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.Download the press release here.The report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, links the current crisis of accountability to the Attorney General’s absolute control over the immigration court system.In conjunction with the report, the groups also announced the launch of an Immigration Court Watch app, which enables court observers to record and upload information on immigration judge conduct to create greater judicial accountability.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the attorney general is required to create an immigration court system in which independent judges decide cases by applying law to the evidence on the record following a full and fair hearing. According to the report, however, today’s immigration courts are plagued by systemic bias and neglect.

“Despite the life-and-death stakes of many immigration cases within the current system, case outcomes have less to do with the rule of law than with the luck of the draw,” said Melissa Crow, Southern Poverty Law Center senior supervising attorney. “Under the Trump administration, the attorneys general have gone even further by actively weaponizing the immigration court system against asylum-seekers.”

The report explains how the Office of Attorney General has created an immigration court system that is biased, inconsistent and driven by political whims. It also examines the conflict that arises when immigration judges, who are expected to be neutral arbiters, are supervised by the United States’ chief law enforcement officer who prioritizes deterrence and deportation of immigrants, instead of an impartial review process.

The report recommends removing the immigration courts from the attorney general’s control and recreating them as Article I courts. To ensure that immigration judges are insulated from political pressures, they must be selected based on merit, receive tenure and be removed only for good cause. The immigration courts must also include more effective mechanisms of internal and appellate accountability.

“One of the key factors driving the immigration court crisis is the failure of judicial accountability,” said Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab. “The new Immigration Court Watch app addresses that lack of accountability, ensures greater transparency and will be a valuable resource for collecting and storing usable data on the pervasive abuses in the immigration court system.”

The new tool will allow data on immigration judge conduct to be gathered and stored in both individual and aggregate forms. This will provide advocates with valuable information to fight systemic patterns of bias and other unlawful court practices. This data can be used to bolster policy recommendations, advocacy and legal strategies.

Advocates, attorneys and other court watchers are encouraged to access the app available here.

“By establishing a presence in immigration courts within their communities and sharing their observations and information, advocates can help us leverage the power of technology, collaboration and strategic alignment to create the first interconnected information system which captures data about due process issues in U.S. immigration courts in real-time,” Manning said.

The report can be found here.

For more information, contact:

Marion Steinfels marionsteinfels@gmail.com / 202-557-0430

Ramon Valdez ramon@innovationlawlab.org / 971-238-1804

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, DC, is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, visit www.splcenter.org.

Innovation Law Lab is a nonprofit organization dedicated to upholding the rights of immigrants and refugees. By bringing technology to the fight for justice, Law Lab builds power for lawyers, human rights advocates, and immigrants in hostile immigration court jurisdictions, remote immigration detention facilities, and along the U.S.-Mexico border. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.

***********************************

Maybe the “Article III Enablers In Robes” need to start envisioning their kids and grandkids in cages, their daughters and granddaughters being gang raped, and their close relatives and best friends unnecessarily suffering and dying from intentionally life threatening conditions in prison where they are sentenced to indefinite confinement without rights and without being convicted of a crime.

No, American institutions aren’t “standing up” to Trump. From the Supremes legally wrong , immoral, and unconstitutional decision in Jennings, to their licensing of blatant racial and religious bias in Travel Ban 3.0, to the Ninth Circuit’s complicity in the mocking of legal, statutory, and Constitutional rights under the fraudulent and illegal “Remain in Mexico,” which they now “own” lock stock, and barrel, to the Eleventh Circuit’s refusal to stop the “law, asylum, justice, and human dignity free zone” in the Atlanta Immigration Courts, Article III Judges are ignoring their oaths of office and turning blind eyes to immigration outrages that are transparent on the records they review and have been building in plain sight for years.

Those in positions of power who fail to fulfill their Constitutional duty to prevent abuse of the most vulnerable among us deserve to be condemned by public opinion and by history. And that goes for Article III Judges, as well as legislators, politicos, and bureaucrats.

PWS

06-12-19

 

PWS

06-12-19

POLITICO: Are Trump’s Immigration Policies Causing More Migrants To “Voluntarily Depart?”

https://apple.news/ANCLqhkMJT5OlWhn2TePBdg

Christie Thompson and Andrew R. Calderon of The Marshall Project report in Politico:

Christie Thompson is a staff writer and Andrew R. Calderon is a data reporter for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the U.S. criminal justice system.

Alejandra Garcia Zamarrón, a mother of three American citizens, had lived in the United States for nearly 20 years when a police officer pulled over the unregistered vehicle she was riding in.

Georgia was her home, the place where she’d lived for years and raised her family. But when she found herself locked in the Irwin County Detention Center, she had few options to stay. She’d been brought to the U.S. as a child, but her protected status as a childhood arrival had expired. And she had given a fake name and date of birth to the police officer who stopped her, a misdemeanor that put her at greater risk of deportation.

Zamarrón, 32, initially vowed to fight her removal from the U.S. as long as she could. But as the months in detention dragged on, she changed her mind and asked for “voluntary departure,” which would allow her to leave the U.S. without a deportation on her record. “My family decided the best bet was for me to leave and fight from the outside,” Zamarrón said in a phone call from the detention center, before she returned to Mexico in November.

The number of immigrants who have applied for voluntary departure has soared since the election of Donald Trump, according to new Justice Department data obtained by The Marshall Project. In fiscal year 2018, the number of applications doubled from the previous fiscal year—rising much faster than the 17 percent increase in overall immigration cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The numbers show yet another way the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is having an effect: More people are considering leaving the U.S., rather than being stuck in detention or taking on a lengthy legal battle with little hope of success.

Last year, voluntary departure applications reached a seven-year high of 29,818. In the Atlanta court, which hears cases of Irwin detainees like Zamarrón, the applications multiplied nearly seven times from 2016 to 2018.

The increase in applications for voluntary departure could be seen as a win for the Trump administration, which has made it a goal to get undocumented immigrants out of the country and reduce the backlog of immigration cases. Indeed, the Justice Department has published the growing number of voluntary departures alongside deportations as a sign of a “return to the rule of law” and that Trump’s approach is working. It’s also a sign of how broad immigration enforcement has become, sweeping up the criminals Trump talks about alongside parents like Zamarrón who have little to no criminal history—voluntary departure is only open to immigrants without a serious record. When Mitt Romney once shared his plan to have people “self-deport,” he meant it as an alternative to ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s power. But the recent spike in voluntary departure has come with an increase in both arrests and detention.

An application for voluntary departure has to be approved by an immigration judge. The number of requests granted increased 50 percent in fiscal year 2017, according to data from the Justice Department. Because not every case is resolved during the year it is filed, and judges can grant voluntary departure without a formal application, the annual total of voluntary departures has exceeded the number of applications.

Under immigration law, voluntary departure is considered a kind of privilege. If you are deported, you have to wait years to apply for a visa to reenter the United States, but those who leave voluntarily don’t have the same wait. And you don’t face serious prison time if you are caught without legal status in the U.S.

But voluntary departure is a last resort for many undocumented immigrants because it means leaving their longtime homes and, often, their families without any clear prospect for returning. And those who take the option usually have to pay their own way home. Those flights can cost thousands of dollars because immigration officials require a special kind of ticket that can be changed at any time.

Several factors are probably responsible for the surge in the number of applications for voluntary departure, experts say. ICE has increasingly gone after immigrants who have no criminal backgrounds—those who are more likely to qualify for voluntary departure. Because of the growing backlog of immigration cases, judges and Department of Homeland Security attorneys may feel pressured to resolve cases quickly and offer voluntary departure instead of dragging out multiple appeals.

“I would definitely think that some of it might be related to judges trying to keep up with their production quotas,” said former immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review—the Justice Department office in charge of immigration courts—declined to comment on the increase in applications. “Using metrics to evaluate performance is neither novel nor unique to EOIR,” spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly wrote in an email. “The purpose of implementing these metrics is to encourage efficient and effective case management while preserving immigration judge discretion and due process.”

ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy wrote in an email many apply for voluntary departure so they don’t have to wait to apply to reenter the country. “In addition, voluntary departure generally provides far more time to make necessary arrangements than for those who are ordered removed,” he wrote.

Attorney Marty Rosenbluth, who represents clients in the immigration court at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, said more of his clients from Mexico are considering voluntary departure because of the danger involved in deportation. At Stewart, one of the country’s most remote detention centers, the number of applications last year was 19 times what it had been in 2016.

“It’s largely a safety thing,” Rosenbluth said. In deportations, “ICE just dumps you at the border, and you’re on your own.”

If they’re granted voluntary departure, people are able to fly into Mexico City or closer to home.

Immigrants may also be increasingly aware of voluntary departure as an option and of the slim chances of winning a case from detention. “Detainees talk to each other,” said Trina Realmuto, a directing attorney for the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. “The one guy fighting his case is going to say, ‘I’ve been here a year and nobody wins.’ There are legal factors, and there’s human factors.”

Zamarrón’s request for voluntary departure came as a surprise to her legal team. “She had been saying for months and months, ‘I’m going to fight this,’” said attorney Laura Rivera of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who worked on Zamarrón’s case. “It speaks to the desperation of people in detention that they’d be trying to sign up in droves for this thing that actually causes them to be removed. They’ve got to be thinking that there’s no way out.”

Before she returned to Mexico, Zamarrón said she was driven by the need to have more contact with her family than she was able to have in detention.

“When I come out, I’ll be able to have more communication with them, FaceTime with them,” she said. “I didn’t want to wait. I’m ready to see my baby’s face.”

From Mexico, she recently video-called into her 13-year-old daughter’s baptism. She hopes to apply for a U-Visa as a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault and, at the very least, have her 17-year old son petition to bring her to the United States after he turns 21.

Zamarrón said many of the women with whom she was detained were also considering voluntary departure.

“They’re tired of living in here, of dealing with ICE, dealing with guards, dealing with the injustice. … They give up. They’d rather be deported than fight for their case,” she said. “We’re not criminals. We just don’t have options.”

******************************

“Voluntary departure” (“VD”) is a mixed bag. It undoubtedly can be an effective way for Immigration Judges to manage crowded dockets by eliminating those cases that do not require “full merits” hearings. And, after Sessions got done stripping judges of their most effective docket management tools and reducing them to “enforcement clerks,” it’s one of the few such tools left to the beleaguered and diminished “judges.”

On the other hand, in conjunction with coercive detention and “production quotas,” there is a temptation for judges and DHS Counsel to use “VD” to duress migrants into abandoning plausible cases for asylum or other relief just to get out of what has intentionally become an oppressive and biased system.

Either way, it’s unlikely that the “VD rush” will be a major factor in reducing the ever-increasing backlog of Immigration Court cases. That would require a smarter due process oriented, more pragmatic approach than this Administration is capable of or willing to embrace.

PWS

05-10-19

 

 

 

 

MARTY ROSENBLUTH, ESQUIRE: AMERICAN HERO — In An Era Where Courage, Integrity, & Dedication To The Rule of Law Are Scorned By Political Leaders & Even Ignored By Some Federal Judges, Rosenbluth Stands Tall With Those Whose Legal Rights & Very Humanity Are Being Attacked Daily By A System Gone Badly Awry — Profile By Simon Montlake of The Monitor

https://apple.news/Amlo-pXUXQOijDJIp8pqX7w

 

Simon Montlake of The Monitor (L) & Marty Rosenbluth, Esquire (R)

Simon  writes:

Long shot lawyer: Defending migrants in US’s toughest immigration court

Lumpkin, Ga.

A hazy sun rises over pine-covered hills as Marty Rosenbluth pulls out of his driveway and hangs a left on Main Street. Outside town the two-lane road dips, then climbs before Mr. Rosenbluth slows to take the right-hand turnoff to Stewart Detention Center, a privately run prison for men who face deportation from the United States.

This is where Mr. Rosenbluth, a lawyer, can be found most days, either visiting clients inside the country’s largest immigration detention center or representing them before a judge in an adjacent courtroom. It’s a mile outside Lumpkin, a forlorn county seat that most days has fewer inhabitants than the prison, which has 2,000 beds.

Mr. Rosenbluth parks his red Toyota Prius in the lot and walks to the entrance. He waits at the first of two sliding doors set in 12-foot-high fences topped with coils of razor wire. The first time he came, the grind and clang of the metal doors unnerved him. Now he doesn’t notice, like the office worker who tunes out the elevator’s ping.

Passing the gates, Mr. Rosenbluth enters the court annex and stoops to remove his black shoes for the metal detector. He shows Alondra Torres, his young Puerto Rican assistant who’s on her first day of work, where to sign in and introduces her to the uniformed security guard standing by the detector.

Mr. Rosenbluth, who has a shaved head, black-framed glasses, and a two-inch gray goatee, smiles and spreads his hands. “I’ve never had a paralegal before,” he proudly tells the guard.

Lawyers are in short supply on the ground at Stewart Immigration Court, one of 64 federal courts tasked with deciding the fate of migrants who the U.S. government seeks to send home. The prison is more than two hours from Atlanta, and lawyers often wait hours to see clients and are allowed to bring only notebooks and pens into visitation rooms.

Lawyers who work with these handicaps face longer odds. On average, detained migrants are far less likely to win asylum than those on the outside, in part because it’s much harder to prepare and fight a case from behind bars. Still, of all immigration courts, this may be the toughest of all. “The reputation of Stewart among attorneys is that you will lose,” says Mr. Rosenbluth.

That deters many from taking cases here. But not Mr. Rosenbluth. He moved to Lumpkin two years ago in order to defend people who may have a legal right to stay in the U.S. His clients include recent migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, whose continued arrival has become a lightning rod for critics of U.S. asylum law and border security. But the majority of his cases involve men who have lived in the country for years or decades, fathering children and putting down roots.

For detainees, having an attorney in immigration court makes a big difference. A 2015 study found that detained immigrants who had legal counsel prevailed in 21% of cases. For those who represented themselves, the success rate was just 2%. Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants have no right to a public defender.

Mr. Rosenbluth, who works for a law firm in Durham, North Carolina, is the only private attorney in Lumpkin. He’s never advertised his services, but word gets around; detainees will pass him notes during prison meetings. Then he consults with his boss on whether to pursue a case.

“If a case has no chance of winning, we just don’t take it,” he says.

But it’s not just about the strength of an individual’s asylum case or bond request. It’s also about who will hear it: Will it be a judge who has denied scores of other similar motions? Or will it be a judge who might, just might, set a bond that a family can afford so their father or son can go home?

“Your judge is your destiny,” says Monica Whatley, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Even when Mr. Rosenbluth thinks he has a strong case and the right judge, he knows that his client is more likely than not to be deported – and that an immigration judge in New York or Los Angeles may well have ruled in his favor. It’s usually then that he circles back to a nagging moral question: Is he stopping systemic injustices or just greasing the wheels of the deportation industry?

Human rights crusader 

Mr. Rosenbluth’s route to becoming a champion of immigrants’ rights was circuitous. In 1979 he dropped out of college to become a union organizer. A few years later, in 1985, he moved to the West Bank to work with Palestinian trade unions on conditions in Israel. His original plan was to stay three months, then go back to the United Auto Workers. He ended up staying seven years.

Back in the U.S., he worked for Amnesty International on Israeli and Palestinian issues as a researcher and spokesman. The job required Mr. Rosenbluth, who is soft spoken and a natural introvert, to speak publicly about one of the world’s most exhaustively debated conflicts. But he learned how to talk to a crowd and to prepare for tough questions.

Having worked for decades on labor issues and international human rights, law school seemed a good fit. By then Mr. Rosenbluth was in his late 40s. He had moved to North Carolina, which was emerging as a testing ground for stricter enforcement of immigration law and deportation procedures.

“I’m still working on human rights, just from a different angle,” he says. “And these are human rights violations that my government is committing right here at home.”

Counties in North Carolina were early adopters of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that trained local law enforcement officers to locate and turn over unauthorized immigrants. The program predated President Barack Obama, but his administration supported its expansion as a way to target criminals for deportation.

After graduation, Mr. Rosenbluth found work as an immigration lawyer for nonprofits in North Carolina that were inundated with calls from families seeking the release of detained members. Most had no convictions for felonies or violent crimes. Still, the Obama administration insisted that it was deporting criminals and ensuring public safety.

It was maddening, but it could also be useful: Lawyers would challenge deportations in court as contrary to the administration’s policy of going after only serious criminals. “We could use their own propaganda against them to try to get our clients released,” says Mr. Rosenbluth.

He started hearing about Stewart, a remote facility in Georgia that was housing detainees from across the region. Built as a private prison but never used, it reopened in 2006 as a detention center contracted to ICE. Judges in Atlanta ruled on deportations via video link before the Department of Justice opened a court inside the prison complex in 2010.

That same year Mr. Rosenbluth made his first trip to Stewart. “I was scared witless because it’s so intimidating,” he says. It wasn’t just the metal gates, prison garb, and taciturn guards. He couldn’t confer with his client before the hearing; even a handshake wasn’t allowed.

Mr. Rosenbluth lost his first case. He would lose virtually all his cases at Stewart the next six years while traveling back and forth from North Carolina and staying in the nearest hotel, 36 miles away. He hit on the idea of opening a nonprofit law firm in Lumpkin to provide free counsel to as many detainees as possible. He even had an acronym: GUTS, for gum up the system.

When he pitched the idea to national liberal donors, they blanched. It wasn’t the right time to gum up the system, he was told. Mr. Obama was working on comprehensive immigration reform. The president needed to hang tough on removals of unauthorized immigrants. There were “Dreamers” to protect.

Yeah, thought Mr. Rosenbluth. And their parents are being locked up and deported every day.

Courtroom coups

It’s 8 in the morning when the court rises for Judge Randall Duncan. As he settles into his black wingback chair, three rows of Latino men in prison jumpsuits stare back from wooden benches. One of them is Hugo Gordillo Mendez, a Mexican living in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who was detained in January after neighbors called the police to report an incident at his house. His wife, Diana Gordillo, a U.S. citizen, sits next to Mr. Rosenbluth. The previous day she drove nine hours to attend today’s bail hearing, and she’s hoping Mr. Rosenbluth can persuade the judge to release Mr. Gordillo on a bond.

Ms. Gordillo locks eyes for a minute with her husband. He stares at his feet.

Getting out on bail or a bond is a big deal. Lawyers advise clients to do everything possible to secure their release, preferably with a U.S. citizen and family member as sponsor, so they can go back to their community and fight their deportation there instead of at Stewart. “When people get out of Stewart, they get as far away from there as they can,” says Sarah Owings, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta.

Moving to another jurisdiction is no guarantee of success, of course. But the chances improve significantly. Between 2013 and 2018, some 58% of asylum claims in U.S. immigration courts were denied, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Over the same period, the denial rate at Lumpkin was 94%. Take Judge Duncan: Of 207 asylum cases that he heard in those five years, only 12 were granted. (Others may have won on appeal.) Denials of bond requests are high at Lumpkin too.

Mr. Gordillo’s case begins with an ICE lawyer citing the immigrant’s status and his arrest for assault as reasons not to release him. “The respondent has not shown that he’s not a danger,” he says.

Mr. Rosenbluth points out that the assault charge was dismissed and that Mr. Gordillo supports his wife and two U.S.-born children, one of whom has a severe medical condition. “His wife, Diana, is in court today,” he says, gesturing at her. She suffers anxiety and has bipolar disorder, he adds. And she will be filing a petition for Mr. Gordillo to become a legal U.S. resident.

“I think that we have a very strong, very viable” case against deportation, he says. “We ask that a reasonable bond be set.”

Judge Duncan takes a few minutes to decide, but as he sums up the family’s medical hardship, he’s already scribbling on a document. “Bond is set at $5,000,” he says.

Mr. Rosenbluth ushers Ms. Gordillo out of the courtroom and explains how she can pay the bond; she has already raised $4,300, and her father will loan her the rest. “He’ll be out today,” Mr. Rosenbluth says, his lawyerly demeanor giving way to giddiness.

Had he lost, Mr. Gordillo could have appealed the ruling and contested his removal to Mexico. But that might take months, and the longer his clients are locked up, the more likely they are to accept deportation as a way out.

“There’s no question that ICE uses incarceration as a litigation strategy. They know people will give up,” he says.

 Judges under pressure

While immigration judges are civil servants who are supposed to apply federal law, studies have found wide variations among judges and between courts in how they handle cases. Being assigned to a judge in Lumpkin or Los Angeles is a distinction with a difference – and for defendants who fear persecution in their home country, it’s a distinction with life-threatening consequences.

Some experts blame the Department of Justice for failing to adequately train and equip judges to handle complex immigration cases. “I think it’s a question of resources,” says Jaya Ramji-Nogales, an assistant professor of law at Temple University and co-author of a study of asylum adjudication called “Refugee Roulette.” “The political will is about building border walls.”

As the backlog of immigration cases has grown, so has pressure on judges to speed through dockets. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions drew criticism last year for faulting judges who failed to clear 700 cases in a year. Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ), has called the push to have understaffed courts investigate complex claims the equivalent of “doing death penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”

Ms. Ramji-Nogales found wide variations in asylum claim rulings filed in different courts. Women judges were on average more likely than men to grant asylum, and judges who joined the bench after careers as federal immigration prosecutors were more likely to deny claims.

Judges who see only detainees in their courtrooms develop a thick skin, says Paul Schmidt, a retired judge. “If all you’re doing is detained [cases], you get the preconception that all these cases are losers,” he says. “If you get in a denial mode, it gets harder for judges to see the other side.”

Mr. Schmidt, a former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, spent 13 years as an immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia. He says the judges who go to work in these courts “probably assume that it’ll be mostly denials, and that’s fine with them.” This also serves the political agenda in Washington, says Mr. Schmidt. “People who are known for moving lots of cases for final removal are classified as productive. And there’s a lot of pressure for moving cases.”

Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and current president of NAIJ, agrees that courts need more resources. But she pushes back against comparisons of harsh versus lenient judges and says there is no “right number” of denials. “Each case is decided on its merits,” she says.

For most of the men in Judge Duncan’s court this morning, this is their first appearance. After he hears another bond motion – “denied” – he asks the 13 remaining detainees to rise and raise their right hands to affirm they understand their legal status. “Sí,” the men mutter. Speaking via a Spanish interpreter, Judge Duncan explains that they have the right to contest their deportation and to appeal any rulings.

Respondents also have the right to hire an attorney, Judge Duncan says. “How many of you have an attorney?” he asks. Two men raise their hands and are given more time to prepare. The others are called up to the bench. The judge rules all will be deported.

Lumpkin’s lone lawyer

After Mr. Rosenbluth took the job here, he bought a house in town for $20,000. He invites visiting lawyers to rent out his second bedroom and share his home office so they can represent clients at Stewart. But a trickle of defenders has not become a flood. Some days Mr. Rosenbluth is the only lawyer in court.

Attorneys who travel to Stewart grow weary of prison lockdowns, talking to clients through plexiglass windows, and dealing with pettifogging guards. “It’s meant to grind you down,” says Ms. Owings, who has defended several detainees at Stewart.

To save time, most lawyers skip client visits and phone into court hearings in Lumpkin. Mr. Rosenbluth never does this. “I consider it to be borderline malpractice,” he says.

At first guards in Lumpkin would stop Mr. Rosenbluth from shaking his clients’ hands or patting their shoulders. Not in here, they’d scold him; it’s not allowed. Mr. Rosenbluth, who is Jewish, persisted, politely, in a way that was more rabbinical than righteous. Eventually he wore down the guards one by one, and now he embraces his clients, a human touch denied in prison.

When he loses his cases, as he often does, Mr. Rosenbluth comforts the detainee, walks out of the prison, and drives his Prius the mile back home. “Then I’ll scream at the walls,” he says.

As a one-man act, Mr. Rosenbluth can juggle only a dozen or so individual cases at Stewart at a time, knowing that most will end in deportation. Far from gumming up the system, he admits he may be just helping put a veneer of due process on mass expulsions.

Still, he takes solace in making a difference where he can. “You bang your head against a wall” trying to stop Israel from torturing Palestinian suspects, and nothing changes, he says. “Here I make a difference on a daily basis, and I can see it.”

That difference could be amplified as his firm, Polanco Law, is looking to add two more lawyers in Lumpkin this year. Mr. Rosenbluth has begun scoping out empty storefronts for an office. A nearby house has also opened its doors to provide free accommodations for family members visiting detainees.

Having a shingle in town would expand Mr. Rosenbluth’s practice – and perhaps send a message that detainees have a shot at success.

‘This is the best’ 

Mr. Rosenbluth is making coffee when he gets the call. Abdallh Khadra, a Syrian imam whose political asylum was granted a week ago, is getting out after five months inside. The lawyer jumps in his car and heads to Stewart, a broad smile splitting his beard. He always makes sure to be at the prison gate when his clients are released. “It never gets old,” he says. “This is the best.”

On the drive his phone rings again, and this time it’s Mr. Khadra himself. “We’re coming to get you now,” Mr. Rosenbluth tells him. He’s brought Mr. Khadra’s driver’s license and credit card so that he can drive himself back to Cary, North Carolina.

But the head of Mr. Khadra’s mosque calls Mr. Rosenbluth, insisting that he take a bus to Atlanta so that he can be picked up from there. Mr. Rosenbluth shrugs. “I will do what my client wants,” he says after he hangs up.

Most men discharged from Stewart don’t get choices. Those without family or friends waiting outside are shunted into a white van and dumped at a bus station in Columbus, usually at night after the last bus to Atlanta has already left. Local volunteers provide backpacks and blankets and a bed for the night.

Mr. Khadra is more fortunate: The sun is still high when the prison’s side gates grind open and he walks out wearing a gray tunic and black pants, carrying two plastic bags. Mr. Rosenbluth is waiting by a picnic table.

He strides forward to greet his client. The two men, Muslim and Jew, hug and exchange Arabic greetings. “God is merciful. May God bless you.”

Then Mr. Khadra steps forward and falls to his knees on a concrete utility cover. He drops his head and begins to pray.

As he drives home afterward, Mr. Rosenbluth cues up a song on his iPhone that he plays after every release. It’s “Freedom” by Richie Havens.

A long

Way

From my home, yeah.

From my home, yeah.

Yeah.

Sing.

Fr-e-e-dom.

Fr-e-e-dom. 

**************************************************

Thanks for all you do, Marty! You are indeed an amazing and inspirational role model for a new generation of “New Due Process Warriors.”

They will be out there shortly to help you take the fight against “21st Century Jim Crow” immigration policies to every corner of the country and to every court in America that touches upon the lives and rights of migrants. This is a system that relies on cruelty, coercion, isolation, dehumanization, false narratives, fear, misinformation, denial of representation, fake assembly line justice, “go along to get along judging,” and keeping the true horrors of “The Gulag” and the “Kangaroo Courts” that support and enable it out of the public eye. That’s why I also appreciate Simon’s outstanding work in exposing what’s really happening in “The Gulag” operating in our own country using taxpayer dollars to finance its fundamentally unconstitutional and dehumanizing mission.

I just noted in a recent post the complicity of certain judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals who are turning a blind eye and going out of the way to misinterpret the law to allow places like the Atlanta Immigration Court and the Stewart Detention Court to flourish, continue to arrogantly abuse human rights, and mock Due Process, Equal Protection, and fundamental fairness right under their noses. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-4dF Those Article III judges who “look the other way”  are just as culpable as the corrupt politicos who run this dysfunctional parody of justice inflicted on America’s most vulnerable. History will not forget their roles and derelictions of duty.

As I always told myself, Due Process is fundamentally about saving lives — one at a time. At the same time, every life you save “builds America,” one case, one human being, one precious life at a time. Thanks again, Marty and Simon, for all you are doing!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-21-19

INSIDE THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — Jim Crow Lives In Stewart Co., Georgia — Perhaps He Never Left!

https://www.splcenter.org/attention-on-detention/healing-open-wounds-injustice-stewart-county-georgia

Mary Claire Kelly writes for the Southern Poverty Law Center:

On the stretch of highway careening south from Columbus to Lumpkin, patches of Georgia red clay lie like open sores on the road’s shoulder. The sun burns bright orange, through air that is hazy with pollen and smoke from controlled forest fires.

The land here was once valuable. It was coveted. Nearly 200 years ago, white men named this county Stewart, after a revolutionary war militia general. White men massacred the men, women and children of the Creek Confederacy over this land.

Wealthy white men forced black men, women and children to scrape this land and stuff it with cotton. They gouged this land. Farmers, laborers and enslaved Africans dug deep ditches, taking no steps to avoid soil erosion, and those ditches became pits. In one part of Lumpkin, flowing water carved out the enormous pinnacles that mark Providence Canyon State Park. Nicknamed Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” it is a beautiful scar of a violent extractive history.

Today, Stewart is one of the poorest counties in the state of Georgia. Its economic and population peak was in the mid-1800s, when slavery still reigned. Now, nearly half the roads in this majority-black district are still unpaved. Lumpkin’s downtown area, the county seat, has one four-way stop and many boarded up businesses.

The city’s population more than doubles when you include the 2,000 people locked away at the county’s main employer, Stewart Detention Center. The immigration prison is made of concrete and steel, but is sustained by a diversity of barriers.

First, there are the barriers you see: The trees hide Stewart from the roads, the two layers of curly-cue barbed wire fences insulate the facility, the formidable red gates stand tall, and the freshly cut grass stretches like a moat around the building.

Then, there are the barriers you experience: You leave your phone and any other connection to the outside world in your car, wait at two red gates outside the building entrance for an unseen force to open them, endlessly wait for one of three designated rooms to open for visitation, remove your jacket and shoes to endure the TSA-style security process to enter, and then you wait in the empty visitation room for a man with sleepless, red eyes to appear behind the thick, protective, plastic partition.

Next, there are the barriers you hear: the screech of your chair whenever you shift positions, the distracting human resources video blaring in the hallway outside of the visitation room, the echoes reverberating in the small concrete space that prevent you and the immigrant who sits behind the plastic barrier from being able to hear each other, and the static crackling across the telephone line that you must use to listen to the man who is sitting only feet away.

Then, there are the barriers that comprise the very reason this man sits in front of you: the violent political divisions in his home country, the obstacles to making a living wage, the language barrier, the gap in education needed to navigate the labyrinth of immigration bureaucracy.

And, last but not least, there is the barrier that is the entire reason for this place and this situation: the American border.

The logo of CoreCivic Inc. – the private, for-profit prison company that the government pays to run this facility – is a deformed American flag that is missing its stars, leaving only stripes that resemble the bars of a cage.

Through the entrance to the courtroom, President Donald Trump smiles in the lobby from his portrait above the list of that day’s hearings. In those hearings, detainees who have come from all over the world will sit on hard, wooden pews facing the U.S. Department of Justice seal.

Here, an attorney for the government will argue why each of these men and trans women should stay at this immigrant prison, or be sent back to the country they fled. In many cases, these immigrants might not have an attorney to represent them, because they do not have the constitutional right to counsel. Sometimes, family and friends can sit in on the hearing to show support for their loved one’s case.

Here, an immigration judge in black robes will methodically determine whether each of these people will remain caged at Stewart, be returned to the country they escaped, or be allowed to leave the prison. The verdict is delivered either by the judge with an authoritative tone, or the courtroom interpreter with a clinical lilt. If a person is allowed to leave, they will most likely have to continue waiting in this immigrant prison until someone on the outside can pay their bond, which is typically thousands of dollars. If they do leave, it will likely be late in the evening – too late to find transportation out of Stewart County.

The men and trans women who churn through Stewart’s machinery are called by their A-number, not their name. They are reduced to numbers. CoreCivic receives approximately $62 of taxpayer money for each body that fills a bed in its institution each day, according to Shadow Prisons, an SPLC report about the immigration system that is rife with civil rights violations, poor conditions, and little commitment to the safety of detainees. CoreCivic pays the people who are detained here as little as $1 a day for their “voluntary” labor.

To gain their freedom, these detained individuals must prove, through financial statements, that they will not be an economic burden on the government.

This is the knot of racist bureaucracy that staff of the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI)a project of the SPLC that provides pro bono legal counsel to those facing deportation proceedings in the Southeast – patiently work each day to untangle. The U.S. immigration system presses every parent, child, sibling and caregiver it entraps into an anonymous mold — a serial number in scrubs — that can be delivered to immigration prisons in a fleet of white vans.

SIFI staff see past the mold. They look into the eyes of each person they represent. They recognize the details that belong to that individual, and that individual alone: their family on the outside working for their release, the aches and pains that prevent them from sleeping, the professional skills they worked for years to achieve.

For many detained individuals, their bureaucratic purgatory in Stewart has been the end of an Odyssean journey to escape torture, the murders of loved ones, and threats on their lives. Every one of these tragic epics is woven with contagious trauma.

Yet, the men and women of SIFI are strong – even when the battles seem uphill every day. They model for volunteers how to confidently perform quality legal work, while treating each client with respect and compassion.

The small community of immigrants’ rights activists in Lumpkin, which also includes local immigration attorneys and the hospitality ministry El Refugio, often supports one another. They celebrate victories — the release of a client, the grant of a low bond amount — and quietly mourn defeats.

Stewart Detention Center is a painful symptom of violent injustice. It festers in a South Georgia landscape that bears deep, historic wounds.

Here, the men and women of SIFI are trying to heal the system.

Mary Claire Kelly is a Harvard Law School student and a former digital media associate at the SPLC.

*********************************

Grotesque abuses of Constitutional Due Process, fundamental fairness, and human decency, not to mention errors of law, go on daily in the “NAG” aided and abetted by its EOIR enablers. What kind of “court” operates in such a one-sided and coercive atmosphere. Why don‘t those in charge insist on neutral hearing sites rather than those controlled by one of the parties in interest?

Bill Barr just went to great pains to insure that even those who pass “credible fear” and who can prove financial responsibility won’t in the future be released from detention (unless, of course, ICE runs out of detention space, which is already happening).

In fact, they won’t even get a chance to make the case for relief to an Immigration Judge. That’s the kind of mindless “Jim Crow” use of the law to promote cruelty and unfairness that corporate “stuffed shirts” like Barr, more concerned with covering for his corrupt boss than upholding the Constitution, can mete out from his protected perch at the DOJ. But, perhaps the folks at SIFI will be able to stuff Barr’s disregard for the Fifth Amendment back in his face in the “real” Federal Courts.

In any event, history won’t forget the Barrs of the world, any more than they have forgotten the Wallaces and others who were on its “wrong side.”

If nothing else, the performance of Bill Barr over the last several days shows why a true “court system” can’t possibly run under his auspices.

PWS

04-19-19

 

JUSTICE DENIED: U.S. Immigration Judge @ Stewart Detention “Court” (“Where Asylum Cases Go To Die”) Denies “Slam Dunk” Asylum Bid To Unrepresented Refugee From DRC, Threatening Him & Family With Death! — System That Once Promised To “Guarantee Fairness and Due Process for All” Is Now A Bastion Of Injustice!

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-separated-father-20190227-story.htm

Kate Morrissey writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Constantin Bakala and his family have survived kidnapping, torture, rape, poison and a shipwreck.

Now, faced with the complexities of the U.S. immigration system, they may be on the verge of defeat.

Bakala, 48, and his family fled their home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in late 2016 after they were targeted for Bakala’s participation in an opposition party that promoted democracy in the country, according to his wife.

After traveling through more than 10 countries, the family arrived at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in November 2017. Bakala was separated from his wife and seven children and sent to an immigration detention center in Georgia while they were released to live in the San Diego area, a common practice at the time. He hasn’t seen them since.

Because they were separated physically, their cases were also handled separately in immigration court. Since the federal government prioritizes detained cases, Bakala’s finished before the family’s even began, according to their attorney.

Unable to find an attorney to represent him at the detention center in rural Georgia and with little money to even pay for phone calls to the outside world to try to get help, Bakala faced by himself an immigration court known for being tough on asylum seekers. Judge Michael Baird, who heard his case, granted 11 of the 152 asylum cases that he decided between fiscal 2013 and 2018, records show.

Bakala lost.

He tried to appeal the case by himself and was denied that as well, according to court records. Now the family, with the help of a San Diego church, has found an attorney to help him, but it may be too late.

He is convinced that if he returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he will be murdered by his own government.

Bakala’s party membership card shows he was part of the Rassemblement des Congolais Démocrates et Nationalistes, or RCDN, which opposed former president Joseph Kabila’s maneuvers to stay in power past his term limit. When Bakala wasn’t at his job at the Ministry of Health, he worked with the party’s youth and advised them on how to demonstrate peacefully against the ruling party, his wife Annie Bwetu Kapongo said.

Bwetu Kapongo tells their story slowly, haltingly, sometimes with painful detail and sometimes in circles, a symptom of the trauma she carries from what happened.

She remembers when her husband first told her about getting threatened, and she remembers the day he went missing in 2016.

When she went to the police to ask for help finding him, she was locked in a room that reeked of urine. Later, three policemen came in, beat her and raped her. She tried to stop them and pointed out that she was pregnant.

The men didn’t care, she said. She ended up losing the baby.

When she was eventually able to return home, her husband was still missing. The two stores she owned, one that sold fish and one that sold cakes and juice, were broken into and robbed by people looking for her husband, who had by this point escaped where he had been imprisoned and tortured, according to his attorney.

One night, Bwetu Kapongo woke up to the family dog’s aggressive barking before hearing it abruptly stop. They found the dog dead the next day.

Another night, she and the children got sick. Their heads were spinning, and they were vomiting. Eventually, they found a tool someone had used to release poison into the house, she said.

Finally, one night she heard a knock on her window. It was her husband.

Aided by people he’d brought to help the family, they scooped the children out of their beds while they were sleeping and fled in a boat down a river to the Republic of Congo, where the people helping them paid for their hotel, Bwetu Kapongo said.

They waited a couple of months there until they had travel documents to get to Brazil and left in early 2017 to begin a grueling journey to the U.S. border.

“We came because America respects the law, and they know how to protect people,” Bwetu Kapongo said through a translator.

In each of the countries they passed through, officials told them that they could not stay, she added. They were sent from Panama back to Colombia when they tried to get across the border by boat and ended up having to make the grueling 6- to 7-day walk through the jungle to Costa Rica.

In Costa Rica, they found a boat that would take them to Nicaragua.

After they’d been on it for about 45 minutes, Bwetu Kapongo heard shots fired at them. She told her children to lay down. Then, the boat broke, she said, and it began to sink.All of a sudden, her youngest child Joseph, who is now 5, was no longer in her arms.

She started to drown.

“Is this a nightmare? Is this real? Is this happening?” she recalled asking the darkness that surrounded her.

She felt other bodies in the water, hands pushing her head down as they tried desperately to reach the surface. She felt someone clutch her neck. It was David, her 12-year-old son.

When a rescue boat pulled her to safety, she found her 17-year-old daughter Marie Louise. Bwetu Kapongo began to pray, crying out the names of her five other children and asking God to find them. Her husband was soon rescued from the water and prayed with her.

When rescuers noticed bubbles moving in the water, they found Joseph along with 8-year-old Moses and 10-year-old Augustine clinging to a rope and pulled them to safety.

Emmanuel, her 15-year-old son, had been carried further away into the water with 14-year-old Daniel. They found a life preserver that had been thrown into the water and clung to it, bringing with them two girls from another family who were also nearly drowning.

When Emmanuel used the last of his strength to cry out, rescuers found them, Bwetu Kapongo said. Two people who had been on the boat died, one adult and one child.

Though the family survived, all of the documents and photos that could have been used as evidence were lost in the water.

They would have to journey by boat two more times between Costa Rica and Nicaragua before successfully making it the rest of the way up to the U.S. border.

Bwetu Kapongo said she expected to receive “protection and respect” when they arrived. Instead, her husband was quickly taken away.

It is only when she reaches this point in the story that she begins to cry.

She wouldn’t hear from him for about a month. He told her that he didn’t know how to find her, that it took that long for officials to give him information about where she was.

The family’s attorney Julie Hartlé said the family’s story is “horrific but not unusual.” Other attorneys she knows have had similar cases.

“This family meets every criteria. They were persecuted for being democracy activists, kidnapped and tortured by their own government,” Hartlé said. “It meets the exact definition of asylum for political persecution. It should’ve been straightforward. They were able to use the detention system against them.”

Bakala had to fill out his asylum application in English, a language he does not speak well. Though he told the judge verbally about three times he was taken by police, how he was beaten, interrogated and held without food, he only put information about one of the incidents in his application.

“That sounds like a pretty bad event,” the judge said in his ruling of one of the incidents Bakala described. “Unfortunately, it is never mentioned anywhere in the respondent’s application for asylum.”

The evidence that Bakala was able to gather and present — including a notice from his political party about his disappearance, another notice that the ruling party was looking for him, his voter ID card and party membership card — was not translated into English, so the judge said he couldn’t consider it, according to court records. He found Bakala’s story not credible.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review said it does not comment on judges’ decisions.

Neither Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor Customs and Border Protection were able to respond to request for comment in time for publication.

As immigration officials prepared to deport Bakala, attorneys filed emergency motions to temporarily keep him in the U.S. to try to reopen his case with new evidence. Last week, the 11th Circuit granted him a stay until Friday.

In the meantime, members of the church helping the family here in San Diego are planning a protest outside of the federal building at noon on Thursday in support of Bakala.

Bwetu Kapongo said the most important thing for her is protection for her children.

“He sacrificed his life to protect his kids,” she said in French. “If we hadn’t done what we did, they would already be dead.”

Beyond that, she wishes for her husband’s return. She tries to hide her exhaustion and her tears from her children, but she doesn’t think she can raise them alone.

“After the mountain I went through, I’ve got no more strength,” she said.

******************************************

So, how might a real judge, one committed to guaranteeing fundamental fairness, due process, and properly applying the generous dictates of U.S. asylum law have approached this case?

First, Bakala comes from a country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”) which is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, where persecution is rampant. For example, the DRC received a score of 17 on a scale of 100 in the latest Freedom House freedom rankings.

Here’s a quote from the most recent U.S. State Department Country Report summarizing the daily horrors of life in the DRC:

The most significant human rights issues included: unlawful killings; disappearances and abductions; torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment, including sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and rape; life-threatening conditions in prisons and detention facilities; arbitrary arrests and prolonged detention; denial of fair public trial; arbitrary interference with privacy, family, and home; restrictions on freedoms of speech and the press, assembly, and association; abuse of internally displaced persons (IDPs); inability of citizens to change their government through democratic means; harassment of civil society, opposition, and religious leaders; corruption and a lack of transparency at all levels of government; violence and stigmatization against women, children, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, indigenous persons, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons, and persons with albinism, with little government action to investigate, prosecute, or hold perpetrators accountable; trafficking in persons, including forced labor, including by children; and violations of worker rights.

Authorities often took no steps to investigate, prosecute, or punish officials who committed abuses, whether in the security forces or elsewhere in the government, and impunity for human rights abuses was a problem.

Therefore, knowing that Bakala comes from a notorious “refugee producing country,” the Immigration Judge should have insisted as a matter of due process and fundamental fairness that the case be continued until the respondent could get the assistance of a competent lawyer to fully and fairly present a case for saving his life.

Asylum law has been made intentionally and unnecessarily complicated by a politicized system run with a strong enforcement bias; statistics, as well as experience, show that unrepresented individuals have virtually no realistic chance of success, particularly in a system run by an Administration clearly prejudiced against them. Human lives become mere “case completions.”

Second, Bakala’s wife also appears to have a strong asylum claim in her own right.  If granted, he could also have been protected as a derivative asylee under his wife’s application. Therefore, unless ICE were basically willing to stipulate to an asylum grant, proceeding with the cases separately was presumptively unfair. A judge committed to fairness, would have “pushed” the ICE Counsel on why this family’s cases were not being heard together.

Third, to justify an adverse credibility finding under the statute and BIA precedents, the judge’s ruling must demonstrate significant discrepancies or omissions, provide cogent reasoning, and carefully consider and give reasons for not accepting the respondent’s explanations for any problems. This judge’s ruling appears to have “flunked” all of those tests. The idea that a detained unrepresented individual’s omission of an event from the asylum application is a cogent basis for finding him not credible is facially absurd. That’s particularly true where the respondent is not a native English speaker and is held in detention where his ability to prepare, or, indeed, to even understand what is required for a successful asylum application, is intentionally impaired.

Moreover, a simple reference to the most current State Department Country Report (quoted above) would have shown the judge that the respondent’s testimony was highly plausible in light of known country conditions.  Indeed, persecution, torture, and abuse are daily occurrences in the DRC.

Additionally, the judge violated due process by requiring a detained individual to get translations of key corroborating documents. It’s simply not possible in most cases. How is a detained unrepresented individual going to find a qualified foreign language translator in the Stewart prison? A judge doing his job fairly would have asked the respondent to summarize the documents and accepted a “proffer;” or he could have had the documents read into the record by the interpreter.

For the purpose of a detained adjudication, I would have assumed that the documents were what the respondent said they were and acted accordingly. If the DHS wanted to challenge the decision, they could have the documents translated.  Just one of many problems in purporting to conduct “due process hearings:” in place where due process often can’t really be achieved.

Then, the “rubber stamp” BIA (a/k/a the “Falls Church Adjudication Center”) also “tanked” by not applying its own precedents which should have resulted in a finding that the Immigration Judge’s specious reasoning was “clearly erroneous.”

I heard a number of asylum cases from the DRC during my time on the bench in Arlington. I doubt that I denied any except for individuals who were aggravated felons, engaged in persecution of others, or had provided material support to a terrorist organization. Even those who failed to establish asylum eligibility often had valid claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture, given the prevalence of government sponsored or endorsed torture in the DRC. Most DRC asylum cases in Arlington were well-represented, well-documented, and either largely unopposed or not appealed by ICE.

Even without a lawyer, it appears that Bakala’s testimony was credible under the circumstances and that he suffered harm that should have warranted a grant of asylum on account of political opinion based on known country conditions. At one time in Arlington, a case like this with representation probably could have been granted largely by stipulation, with brief testimony, on a “short docket.”

That’s how cases can “move” on the Immigration Court’s crowded dockets without compromising due process or fundamental fairness. Instead, this Administration encourages a biased “haste makes waste” approach, issues statements of strong prejudgment against asylum seekers and their attorneys, motivates judges to cut corners, and enables judges to look for “any reason” to deny asylum and crank out final orders of removal. It’s a “cavalcade of worst practices!”

While some judges courageously resist and insist on “doing the right thing,” others choose or feel compelled to “go along to get along” with the Administration’s unethical (and incompetent) administration of these so-called “courts.” Indeed, today’s Immigration Judges are not even properly trained on how to correctly adjudicate and grant asylum under the generous standards mandated by the law, the Supreme Court, and even the BIA’s (seldom followed) precedent supposedly implementing generous standards following the Supreme Court’s admonishment. It’s an exercise in extreme intellectual dishonesty.

Allowing serious, “life or death” cases to be tried in places like Stewart, notorious for being the home of unsympathetic judges and an inherently coercive atmosphere, intentionally located in and out-of-the-way place where it is hard for attorneys to participate, is a stain on America.

The DOJ has abandoned any semblance of running its “wholly owned courts” in a fair and constitutional manner. Congress, ultimately responsible for creating and countenancing this mess, has long abdicated its duty to establish an independent system that complies with Due Process.

Article III Judges also have been largely complicit in allowing this pathetic imitation of a “court” system to continue operating in a fundamentally unfair and unreasonable manner and spewing forth skewed, unjust, often unlawful, and sometimes deadly results. It’s a national disgrace!

Sadly, the individuals being abused by the Immigration Court system are some of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. That’s what allows such systematic injustice to operate “largely below the radar screen.” However, the individuals who are participating in and enabling such outrageous contempt for the rule of law and human dignity, and thereby violating their oaths of Federal office, will not escape the judgment of history.

Fixing this unfair and intentionally broken system is well within our power as a country. It could be done for much less than $5.7 billion. Put an end to the “New American Gulag” and  the “theater of the absurd” masquerading as a “court” that operates within its bowels!

PWS

03-01-19

 

🤡U.S. CLOWN COURT: Where Justice & Logic Are A Bad Joke, & Those We Should Be Welcoming Are Instead Shown The Door!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-immigrant-client-won-a-judges-compassion-ice-still-dumped-him-on-the-border/2019/01/24/7802a800-1e9c-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

Attorney Marty Rosenbluth writes in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook Section:

Attorney  ’s client made a passionate case to the judge about our unjust system

This month, I went to court with José. He came to the United States without papers from Mexico when he was 15, in 1999. Now he has a wife, three kids and a job in construction in Raleigh, N.C. It all came apart when police pulled him over and arrested him for driving without a license. He soon landed in the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. He fought his deportation case alone for several months before his family finally called my law firm.

We first told him we couldn’t take his case because he had no chance of winning, so ethically we couldn’t take his money. Most people in deportation proceedings have few if any options to stay in the United States through the immigration courts. I urged him to take voluntary departure, which enables people to leave the country without getting a deportation order on their records, so it is easier to come back legally in the future. But he told me he was certain that, if he could just tell the court his story, the judge would see that letting him stay was right and just and fair. I told him that our immigration system had many rules and laws, but little or no justice.

In truth, I think José knew he had no chance, and he knew he’d have to leave. But he didn’t want to leave quietly. We agreed that I would accompany him — I wouldn’t say “help,” because he could have realized his plan without me, and I didn’t charge a penny — but he would address the judge directly. One of the most important things I do as an attorney is to just be present. Since the immigration laws are so defective, and the judges often play by their own rules (routine bond requests are usually denied, and this Georgia court has one of the lowest approval rates for asylum cases in the country), and the detention/deportation centers are designed to break people’s spirits, often there is not much else that can be done. Based on what transpired, I’m glad I went.

José’s whole family came to support him — his wife and his kids and a friend. When we sat down at the bench, I told the judge that José would be speaking for himself. In immigration courts, migrants usually just answer questions, so the judge asked me if I was requesting to withdraw. I said I wasn’t: I was staying at the table, but José was going to do all the talking. And the judge, to his credit, heard him out.

The judge explained the law and what José would have to prove in order to win. Before hiring us, José had submitted an application, on his own, for “cancellation of removal.” There are four elements: He had to prove that he had been living here for more than 10 years, that he was a person of good moral character and that he hadn’t broken any laws that would bar him under the statutes from applying. José could show all of these things. But the fourth criterion is the hardest. José would have to prove that if he were deported, it would cause an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a spouse, parent or child who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Usually it means you have a child with cancer, or a spouse with a disability that makes them unable to work or support a family — something on that scale. If you can convince the court merely that your family would be made homeless or that your children would subsist on food stamps, that is not considered sufficient. That is just the usual hardship that deportees’ families experience.

Without missing a beat, José said to the judge, “I have the first three, your honor, but I do not have the fourth.” Turning around to look at his family, with obvious pride, he told the judge: “This is my family. These are my children. Everything I do, I do for them. But thankfully they are all healthy, which for the moment seems for some reason to be bad.” Truly, logic has no place in immigration court.

The judge said that, based on this testimony, he would have to deny his application for cancellation of removal. Still, the judge offered José voluntary departure and explained, as I had, that it would make it easier for him to return.

I had met with José’s wife, Maria, too, and explained “VD,” which is a safer option than exiting the nation through the usual deportation machinery. People who are deported to Mexico from Stewart and many other detention centers are just dumped on the border, where gangs await them. (People deported to other countries are flown.) They are often robbed, kidnapped, raped or killed. Those who take VD, on the other hand, don’t get to leave jail, but they fly back on a regular commercial flight.

The problem with voluntary departure, though, is the cost: You have to buy your own fare, and it is very expensive, currently around $1,250. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will accept only a “Y” class ticket, or a full-cost coach fare, which can often cost more than first class. José thanked the judge and declined. “The tickets cost a lot of money, and my family will need the money after I leave.”

Maria interjected, crying. “Take the voluntary,” she said. “Take the voluntary!” My client began crying, too, followed by his kids.

I decided to take a chance. I asked the judge if José could talk to his wife over the barrier. Any direct communication and especially physical contact is strictly forbidden in this courtroom. To my surprise, he agreed. So Maria came forward, and she and José started hugging and kissing and crying. The bailiff moved to intervene, but I just shook my head and mouthed the word “Please.”

The couple talked for a few minutes, and then José sat back down and offered that he would take voluntary departure. But he’d gotten to hug his 6-, 8- and 12-year-old children across the barrier. Imagine that. Humanity in what passes for a court. This is not usually how immigration cases go. The judge gave José 30 days to buy his ticket before he would lose the “privilege” of taking VD.

In the end, José sat there smiling. And proud. He was still smiling as his family left the courtroom. And smiling when he gave me a hug. He’d known all along he wouldn’t win, but he wanted to be able to call out the injustice. And the judge, who has low rates of approval for just about anything, heard him out. (Only 31 of 347 judges denied asylum claims at a higher rate, according to the Transitional Records Access Clearinghouse.) It wasn’t a victory, exactly. José wouldn’t be staying with his family. But speaking a truth, to a hostile power, is still a kind of achievement.

But it was a discordant one for such a ruthless corner of the law. And eventually the logic of our immigration system superseded his brave act.

This past week, according to a friend of his who called me to share the news, ICE came to his cell early one morning and said it would fly him to Mexico City; he wouldn’t even have to pay for his ticket. Then, that afternoon, officials came and handcuffed him, brought him to a room to wait with other detainees for several hours and deposited him on a bus. Not to the airport, as they had promised. They drove him to the border and dumped him out in Matamoros. I am looking into his legal options, because apparently no act of courage goes unpunished.

***************************************

Thanks Marty, for giving us insight into the “parody of justice” that goes on daily in our Immigration Courts at the direction of a Department of “Justice” that long ago lost both its way and purpose and must be wrested from control of a major dysfunctional court system that it is so ethically and functionally unable to administer in anything approaching a fair and efficient manner.

I give the Immigration Judge credit for taking time to listen and allowing Jose to speak in court. In the toxic age of Trump, Sessions, Whitaker, and likely also Barr, Immigration Judges are pressured to prejudge cases and cut corners by denying claims without listening to the evidence to keep up with artificial “deportation quotas” imposed by Sessions and to keep up “productivity” which has replaced “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process” as the mantra of today’s “Clown Courts.”

On the other hand, there are alternatives available. The BIA precedents on what constitutes “exceptional and extremely hardship” are intentionally vague and subject to interpretation. How do I know? They were issued while I was serving as BIA Chair (one over my dissent).

They were supposed to be part of a group of cases, sometimes knows as the “basket of pain,” defining the term in a number of different contexts. But, after Ashcroft’s “Saturday Night Massacre” at the BIA “took out” those judges, including me, who sometimes ruled in favor of respondent’s positions, the project was abandoned. My remaining colleagues were afraid that ruling on anything so controversial, and particularly granting anything to a respondent, could be “career threatening,” probably with good reason. So, Immigration Judges were left to their own devices. Many of the BIA panels on the other hand, took a pretty hard line, all, of course, in unpublished decisions.

Coming to the Arlington Immigration Court from the BIA, I actually underwent some “culture shock.” In an early cancellation case, I was thinking that the respondents, although great folks who were doing good things for America and their citizen family, probably wouldn’t “make the cut” under the standards that my last BIA panel had been applying. But, when the Assistant Chief Counsel got up to make a closing, after I had given respondents’ counsel a rather “hard time,” I was surprised to hear an impassioned, well-reasoned, and well-supported plea joining counsel’s request for a finding of “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and granting the case. “It’s Recinas, not Andazola,” as we came to say in Arlington, after the names of the BIA precedents that appeared to reach conflicting conclusions.

Some Immigration Judges would have found that deprivation of the support of the “primary breadwinner” is “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and granted Jose cancellation of removal. And, some ICE Assistant Chief Counsel would have waived appeal. Just shows what a “crapshoot” justice has become in the Immigration Courts.

BS (“Before Sessions”) at the Arlington Immigration Court, the Assistant Chief Counsel would probably have offered “prosecutorial discretion” or “PD” to Jose. And, I would have encouraged Marty to take that offer and “live to fight another day.” I would have given Jose and his family my “bad things will happen if you screw up again in any way speech,'” “administratively closed” the case, and taken it off my docket. The court and both counsel would have saved time and Jose and his family could have gone on living their lives and contributing to America pending good behavior and an eventual legalization program by Congress.

Not a perfect solution to be sure. But, a fundamentally just one that allowed me, ICE, and the private bar to move on and deal with other higher priority cases that really needed my judicial attention.

Trump, Sessions, Nielsen and their White Nationalist Gang have stripped the Immigration Courts of whatever little sense of justice and judicial control remained. They intentionally have turned a struggling system into a totally dysfunctional and fundamentally unjust and unconstitutional one.

We can only hope that at some point the Article III Courts will have seen enough and will put this totally bankrupt system into “receivership;” or that some future Congress and a more competent and honest Administration will create an independent Immigration Court focused, as it should be, on fairness and Due Process. Until then, justice and logic will continue to be a bad joke in the “U.S. Clown Courts.” 🤡

PWS

01-28-19

THE HILL: Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) Points Finger @ Trump For Bogus Border Crisis!

https://apple.news/AJe1kxmmyRdi0l-QX8e70xQ

By Brett Samuels in The Hill:

Dem Senator: Trump administration’s policies ‘caused anxiety at the border’

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) on Monday blamed the Trump administration for causing “anxiety” at the southern border a day after border agents fired tear gas in response to migrants attempting to breach the border.

“There’s a better way to handle this. The United States, the Trump policies has caused anxiety at the border,” Cardin said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“There’s an orderly process that should have been used,” he added. “Should we fix our immigration system? Absolutely. But this administration has made no effort to fix our immigration system.”

President Trump has repeatedly blamed Congress and Democrats, in particular, for failing to pass legislation hardening the country’s immigration laws. The White House and lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement on a host of immigration issues, though Congress has provided some funding for border security.

Cardin said Monday that the Trump administration has enacted policies that have exacerbated the problem at the border with the so-called caravan of Central American migrants, citing the White House’s move to curb immigrants’ ability to claim asylum and the previous policy of separating families who illegally cross the border.

“So they’re making the circumstances worse, and here we look at children being subject to tear-gassing,” Cardin said. “That’s the United States causing that. That’s outrageous.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Sunday shut down the busy San Ysidro port of entry near San Diego as hundreds of migrants approached. Tensions flared further when dozens of migrants broke away from a larger group to try and breach the border.

CBP said in a statement that officers fired tear gas into the crowd after attempted illegal crossings and after some migrants threw rocks at border agents.

Trump on Monday morning called on Mexico to deport the migrants back to their home countries and threatened to permanently close the southern border. The president has for weeks painted the group of migrants as an imminent security threat, prompting fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

*****************************************

“There’s an orderly process that should have been used.” Yup! But, Trump refuses to use it and make it work! And, it could have been done for less money and fewer resources than the estimated $200 million military boondoggle at the border.

I also hope Sen. Cardin will urge Rep. Cummings (D-MD) and his colleagues in the House to exercise some “oversight” involving the senior Border Patrol officials who publicly proclaimed that most of those arriving at the border, who have been neither interviewed nor screened because of intentional delays by the US Government, are “economic refugees” not “real refugees.”

I tend to doubt that these loud-mouthed law enforcement officials, who have allowed themselves to become political puppets of the Trump White House, have any idea of what makes someone a “real refugee” under the law. Fact is, that in some Immigration Courts away from the Southern Border, the Immigration Judges continue to be fair and knowledgeable (NOT places like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Stewart). Those Immigration Judges take the necessary hours to fairly and impartially hear asylum cases (apparently largely disregarding artificial “quotas”). And, as a result, some properly documented domestic violence, family based, religious based, and political opposition to gang cases continue to be granted to applicants. Shows what happens when rather than prejudging cases like Trump, Sessions, DHS Senior Officials, and, sadly, some Immigration Judges, have done, asylum applicants from the Northern Triangle aren’t hustled through the “assembly line” and are given a fair chance to be represented and to gather the documentation necessary to overcome Sessions’s badly warped misconstruction of country conditions and intentionally misleading dicta in Matter of A-B-.

So, how can these Border Patrol folks tell by “eyeballing” thousands of individuals from the other side of the border whether their claims are “bona fide” or not? That, even after Trump’s and Sessions’s best efforts to “game” the system, the majority of arrivals from Central America still manage to pass “credible fear” examinations from the USCIS Asylum Office suggests that these Border Patrol officials are blowing (dangerous) “hot air” into an already volatile situation. That’s totally irresponsible  Time for some accountability all up and down the line for those carrying out Trump’s misguided immigration policies with no visible resistance to actions that at best strain, and quite possibly violate, our established asylum laws and procedures!

PWS

11-26-18

KILLERS ON THE LOOSE: CATHERINE SHOICHET @ CNN EXPOSES HOW IN THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” UNDER TRUMP & SESISONS ICE LITERALLY GETS AWAY WITH MURDER!

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/us/ice-detention-stewart-georgia/?utm_content=chapter_01

Catherine Shoichet reports for CNN;

Miguel Montilla was in the law library when the banging started.

Over and over he heard it – the sound of a man screaming as he pounded the wall of the cell next door.

When a guard came by, Montilla listened. The man in Cell 102 said he was suffering from psychosis.

“I hear voices talking to me,” he said. “And they’re bothering the shit out of me.”

Montilla climbed on a toilet and spoke through a vent. He wanted to offer some words of comfort to a fellow detainee – to tell him things were going to get better.

“Hey, man. You OK, man? Calm down. Don’t worry about it. You’re gonna be out of here soon.”

But things got worse for the man in Cell 102.

Two weeks later, Montilla heard a jarring noise again – the sound of a man ramming into the wall of his cell.

Boom.

This time, there would be no words of comfort.

Jeancarlo Alfonso Jimenez Joseph, the 27-year-old who’d been locked inside Cell 102 for 18 days, hadn’t just banged into the wall of his cell. He’d tied one end of a white bed sheet around a sprinkler head and the other end around his neck.

The night he died in May 2017, Jimenez was one of more than two dozen people in solitary at the Stewart Detention Center, a hulking complex just outside Lumpkin, Georgia, that can house nearly 2,000 immigrants.

He was the fourth detainee to die in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2017 and the 170th since the agency began in 2003.

. . . .

*************************************

Read Catherine’s entire article at the link.

Yes, prior Administrations are also to blame for this miscarriage of justice. But, the information on the dangerousness and lack of justification for most immigration detention was well-developed and readily available when Trump took over. Instead of dong what a rational Administration might have done, curtailing detention with an eye to phasing it out altogether except in unusual circumstances involving dangerous criminals, Sessions and Trump decided to “double down” on what they knew was a deadly and unnecessary practice.

PWS

08-24-18

GOOD NEWS FROM THE U.S. IMMIGRATION COURT IN ARLINGTON, VA BY TAL @ CNN: U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE JOHN MILO BRYANT SHOWS CONGRESS, PUBLIC, PRESS HOW IMMIGRATION COURT COULD & SHOULD WORK IF JEFF SESSIONS & THE DOJ WERE REMOVED FROM THE PICTURE & THE JUDGES WERE INDEPENDENT RATHER THAN BEING UNETHICALLY TOLD BY SESSIONS THAT THEY ARE “PARTNERS WITH DHS!”

The Wonderful Tal Kopan of CNN

Judge Roger Harris, Me, Judge Thomas Snow, & Judge John Milo Bryant (“The Non-Conformist”) head out to lunch on my last day at the Arlington Immigration Court, June 30, 2016

http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/28/politics/immigration-court-hearings/index.html

‘Just be a kid, OK?’: Inside children’s immigration hearings

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

As each immigrant child took their seat in his courtroom for their hearing, Judge John M. Bryant started the same way.

“How are you doing today?” he’d ask.

“Muy bien,” most would answer.

In a span of about 45 minutes, Bryant — an immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia — checked in on the cases of 16 immigrants under the age of 20, all with attorneys and some with parents.

The day was known as a “master calendar hearing” — a swift introduction in court and the beginning of court proceedings for immigrants facing deportation.

The children had largely been in the country for some time, each fighting in court for the right to stay.

But though the immigration courts have long dealt with immigrant children, even those barely school age or younger, their turn through the unique, stand-alone immigration courts is getting new attention as the government’s “zero tolerance” border policy has sent thousands more children into the system without their parents.

The hearings were observed by six Democratic members of Congress: Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland; Rep. Don Beyer, whose Virginia district includes the court; Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico; and Reps. Pete Aguilar, Nanette Diaz Barragán and Norma Torres, all of California.

At a news conference afterward, Beyer called the session “One of the best-case scenarios of a master calendar hearing, a sympathetic judge with kids with lawyers.”

The lawmakers said they had wanted to come to the court to witness it for themselves, because they fear that around the country there are too many courtrooms that are the opposite.

“We know that in vast numbers of cases, there is not proper representation,” Hoyer said, adding that some kids are “not old enough to spell their own names, let alone represent themselves in court.”

In each case, the attorneys described waiting for applications filed with the government, and all were quickly given court dates into 2019 to come back for another check-in. One, a boy named José who had just finished ninth grade, was there for his second check-in and for his full asylum hearing received a court date of May 11, 2021 — likely to be just as he is finishing high school in the US.

The youngest was a 6-year-old boy, Rodolfo, who was there with his attorney and father, though Rodolfo’s case was being heard by itself. As he did with most of the children, Bryant asked Rodolfo if he was in school, translated by an interpreter via headphones provided to every immigrant facing the court.

“Hoy?” Rodolfo asked, confused — “Today?”

Bryant cheerfully prompted Rodolfo about what grade he had finished — kindergarten — and his teacher’s name — Ms. Dani. Bryant said he still remembered his own kindergarten teacher, Ms. Sweeney, from many years prior. “Hasta luego,” Bryant told Rodolfo, giving him a next court date of May 30, 2019.

While all the children in Bryant’s courtroom on this afternoon had attorneys, the Arlington Immigration Court is not typical of the country, where closer to 1-in-3 children are represented in court. Bryant was also generous with the continuances requested by attorneys as they waited to hear from the government on applications for other visas for the children, despite uniform opposition by the government attorney in court.

“Mr. Wagner, your turn,” Bryant joked at one point to the government attorney present, who dutifully recited the government’s opposition to granting continuances solely on the basis of waiting to hear back on a visa application. Bryant than immediately picked a day on his calendar for the immigrant and attorney to return.

One attorney for a 12-year-old girl, Rosemary, who was there with her mother, said they had applied for a Special Immigrant Juvenile visa, which is for minors who have been abused, abandoned or neglected by a parent. Bryant asked the attorney if the application was before a “sweet or sour judge.”

“I think it’s going to be a problem. It may have to be appealed,” the attorney replied.

The judge granted them a court date on February 28 of next year.

“Have a nice summer,” he said to the girl. “Just be a kid, OK?”

******************************************

“The lawmakers said they had wanted to come to the court to witness it for themselves, because they fear that around the country there are too many courtrooms that are the opposite.” And, with very good reason!

No trace of the Jeff Sessions’s paranoia, xenophobia, bias, child abuse, and de-humanization of migrants here. It’s like one would expect a “real” U.S. Court to be run! Sadly, that’s not what’s happening in the rest of the country. Just ask folks in Charlotte, Atlanta, Stewart, Ga., or Houston how they are treated by Immigration Judges. It’s ugly, abusive, well documented, highly inappropriate, and needs to end!

Even more outrageously, rather than building on and replicating successful judicial models like Arlington, Sessions has actually adopted some of the worst imaginable “judicial” practices, encouraged bias, and has actually endorsed and empowered the actions of some of the most clearly biased and anti-immigrant, anti-asylum Immigraton Judges in the system. It’s a simply unacceptable waste of taxpayer money and abuse of our legal system by someone incapable of fulfilling his oath of office.

Imagine, with judges actually in control, lawyers for the respondents, time to prepare and file applications, empathy, courtesy, knowledge, kindness, concern for fairness, efficiency, and giving ICE’s obstructionist “rote objections” and other dilatory tactics encouraged and enabled by this Administration exactly the short shrift they so richly deserve, the U.S. Immigration Courts could potentially fulfill their original vision of “becoming the world’s best tribunals, guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”

And, ICE could be once again required to function in the same highly-professional, courteous, collegial, respectful, and helpful manner that they did in Arlington during the last Administration. It’s disgraceful that rudeness and unfairness have become the norm under Trump. Things like that used to get even Government lawyers fired, disbarred, or disciplined. Now they appear to win kudos.

And, having dockets run by experienced judicial professionals like Judge Bryant with the help of professional staff responsible to him and his colleagues would promote fairness, quality, and efficiency over the “Amateur Night at the Bijou” atmosphere created by a biased, politicized, and totally incompetent Department of Justice and carried out by agency bureaucrats who aren’t judges themselves and are not qualified to administer a major court system.

Why not design a system “built for success” rather one that is built for failure and constant crisis? A well-functioning court system where “Due Process and Quality Are Job One” and which serves as a “level playing field” would actually help DHS Enforcement as well as the immigrants whose lives depend upon it. Fairness and Due Process are good for everyone. It’s also what our Constitution requires! Play the game fairly and professionally and let the chips fall where they may, rather than trying to “game the system” to tilt everything toward enforcement. 

But, it’s not going to happen until either 1) Congress creates an independent U.S. Immigration Court, or 2) the Article III Courts finally step up to the plate, put an end to this travesty, remove the DOJ from its totally improper and unethical supervisory role, and place the Immigration Courts under a court-appointed “Special Master” to manage them with the goal of Due Process and judicial efficiency until Congress reorganizes them outside of the Executive Branch! Otherwise, the Article IIIs will have to do the job that Sessions won’t let the Immigration Courts perform!

Compare Judge Bryant’s professional performance with the “judicial meat processing plant/Due Process Denial Factory” being operated by U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby on the Southern Border as described by Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post in my post from yesterday:

http://immigrationcourtside.com/2018/06/28/karen-tumulty-washpost-assembly-line-justice-is-already-the-norm-in-u-s-district-courts-at-the-border-as-go-along-to-get-along-u-s-magistrate-convicts-bewilder/

Who is the “real” judge here? It doesn’t take a “rocket scientist” to answer that one! Just some judges with the backbone, courage, and integrity not to “go along to get along” with Sessions’s assault on the integrity and independence of our justice system.

PWS

06-30-18